My Husband the Chef!

Nearly everyone who knows Jeremy knows he LOVES food! But it's not just eating food that he loves. He loves watching TV shows about food, reading about food, cooking food, talking about food, basically we loves everything about food. Of course, this is a quality about him that I love because it means he often...well pretty much always, does the cooking. It is AWESOME! He's quite the gourmet chef too. He makes a mean brisket in the crock-pot. Last week I enjoyed his lasagna everyday for lunch at work. And this week his grand plan was to make home made chile verde!

This is Jeremy starting his Chile Verde Adventure.



The recipe called for lots of chile's and tomatillo's to be broiled so he thought he'd get it started before church, hence the outfit.



Once his creation was complete it said to let it simmer for 3 hours on the stove, so we thought we'd just let it cook during church.



BIG MISTAKE!!! Apparently, we let it simmer a little too long. It was very disappointing. We tried the meat and it tasted really good, it was just the sauce that was fried to the pan. This made it even more depressing because we knew it could have been really good. The good news was that we had gone to Costco the night before just as it was closing so we grabbed a take and bake pizza for $5 so we didn't have to starve Sunday night!

It's like riding a bike...

Have you ever heard or said the phrase, "it's easy, it's just like riding a bike?" I think it's people that haven't ridden a bike in awhile that say things like that. There is nothing easy about riding a bike. Sure, it was easy when you were like 10 and weighed maybe 70 pounds and were completely clueless about physics and the amount of pain that can be caused by you flying down a hill on a bike, hitting a rock, and then being introduced to the ground. I think that everyone who uses that phrase should immediately have to get on a bike and try riding it, and not just down the side walk. It is quite difficult to keep your no longer 70 pound frame upright and following a straight line, especially when you are terrified about falling and killing yourself. I recently had all of these thoughts rush through my mind as I broke out my mountain bike this spring. We finally went and bought Jeremy a bike so that we could go riding together. I only went out once last year because we were dating and he didn't have a bike which meant I didn't have the time. I was a little nervous to see if Jer could actually ride a bike, but then I remembered he is a boy and boys are some how always good at things like this. We took the bikes out to Draper to ride a portion of the Bonneville Shoreline Trail above the Draper Temple. We had a great time! At first, I thought I was going to die because I wasn't that good at controlling my bike, and I was really tired and out of shape. But after we kept plugging through the ride got better and my body adjusted. Here are some pictures from our first ride of the season.





After our successful first trip we decided to head up Parley's Canyons and ride the Alexander Creek Trail. This is one of my favorite trails but I have never completed it because it gets really steep. We didn't finish it this time either because it was getting dark and we were tired but we had a great time. For some reason every time I am on this trail I think I am going to be attacked by a moose, cougar or beaver. This is not a popular trail so you rarely see anyone else and I am convinced that there are wild animals watching me through the trees. Luckily, we didn't run into any of them on this trip!

Famous Quotes by Denae

I have just been added as an author and had to do it myself because Denae said she added me but in reality she did not. So as my first post on this blog I want to try and add some of Denae's famous quotes so you can see what I get to hear on a daily basis.

Here is what she said today about me faxing in my GMAT scores first thing in the morning.
Denae: "You better do that first thing in the morning because the early worm catches the birds"
Me: "Wow!?!?!?!? I don't think that's right though."

Hopefully I can keep adding to this post. Thank you and goodnight.

Let's Hear It For New York!!!

We were able to take some time off work and away from our failing water system to go to New York City and Boston. We had a great time. We ate a ton of good food, saw a Yankee's game, Jersey Boys, had a backstage tour of Jersey Boys, watched the Boston Marathon, learned some U.S. History on the Freedom Trail and did a lot of walking!




We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to have lunch at this great pizza place. The pizza was amazing!



I'm still working on converting Jer to my love of Apple.



Jersey Boys was like being at a concert, the music was amazing!



One of Jer's favorite stops was lunch at Sylvia's in Harlem before the Yankee's game. They have good old fashioned soul food. He got the fried chicken and I got the ribs, and with mashed potatoes and mac and cheese for sides how can you go wrong?






Jer love's his Yankee's. It was pouring rain and freezing so I wore just about every article of clothing I brought to try and keep warm during the game. We got to see C.C. Sabathia pitch and they won!









I have to admit, I learned that I know very little about U.S. History on this trip. We ended up buying a little book so that I could play tour guide and we could actually know the significance of the things were seeing.




On of my favorite parts of the trip was watching the Boston Marathon. They basically shut the city down and everyone comes out and cheers on the runners. We were right near the finish line and the streets were just packed with people. People were hanging out of building windows cheering on the runners. One of the best parts was when we saw this group of army soldiers running in full gear. Anyone who knows me knows I am a sucker for sappy sports stories but this was really inspirational. When they came running by in full gear everyone was going nuts trying to urge them to the finish. It was really awesome. We couldn't get many good pictures from the marathon because everyone kept running but just trust me when I say it was awesome.

The Singles Ward

This past Friday night Jer and I were introduced to a whole new under ground world within the Church. It was crazy! We were asked to come help prepare refreshments and take money for a singles dance. So we show up and start asking questions about how many people were going to show up and they said there are usually about 500 people! WHAT! We had never heard of a singles dance getting 500 people so we were a bit shocked. Then one of the volunteers said they have these dances every 4th Friday of the month. Again, we had never heard of this. So finally Jer said, "We were in a YSA ward and we never heard of these," to which the response was, "take off the Y, this is a 30+ singles dance and the average age is 45-65". Insert jaw drop and big eyes now. The average age is 45-65, say what?

We were assigned to take money at one of the doors so Jer went to man our station while I finished up in the kitchen. I was about to head over to our door when one of the ladies said, "wait, don't forget your badge". "Badge?" I said. "So everyone will know you are unavailable". Oh boy. So I get my badge and grab Jer's and start over for our post. As I round the corner, I see this woman standing at the table Jer is at and hear, "So are you like in one of the singles wards?" Really. This lady is hitting on Jer and he has been without his protective hands off badge for 5 minutes? I knew we were in for an interesting evening...



My badge said Priesthood Advisor Companion.

Here are some of the highlights from the evening (keep in mind that all of the people listed below are probably older than our parents):

1. Creepy 50 something guy telling us he had been divorced many times.
2. Crazy lady from above story forcing Jer to write down the website for these dances to pass on the information to our +30 year old friends. It's www.slc-sa.org if you are interested.
3. The woman who came to our table to get a mint and told us she was dancing with some guy who said, "I don't know what it is that you ate but it does not smell good." And she was actually fine with being told this, she said she was just happy he told her so she knew and we both tried to tell her that no one should talk to her that rudely but she didn't really care.
4. The woman who told us we looked like high schoolers and are too young to be married and should get divorced, experience single life for awhile longer and then get married.
5. The woman who told us to never get divorced, even though dancing is really fun it's not worth the pain of divorce. Thank you for that sound advice!
6. The woman who got her bracelet stuck to her dress and I had to perform surgery to remove the stupid thing.
7. The man who said we needed to chaperone him and his date more because she was getting to affectionate with him.
8. The woman who was with the man listed above that asked if she could have a mint and then creepy man asking if they could share the same mint.

Those are just some of the highlights from the evening. Needless to say our eyes were opened and we had a very enjoyable evening.

Water WARS!!!

I like water, I really do.

I like swimming in it



I like hiking in it



I even like playing in the rain every now and then



And as just about everyone knows I believe that hydration is the key to success in life so I definitely like drinking it. But recently I've been getting the feeling that water has it out for me. I don't know what I did, but it must have been bad. After we had our flood we jetted over to NYC and Boston for a little vacation where it proceeded to be the warmest it's been all year in Utah and freezing cold rain wherever we went. But I was willing to just accept that as bad luck and move on. However, today I returned to work and then came home to meet the pipe engineer that our insurance company sent over to investigate why our pipe burst. I took him back to the closet and he snapped a few pictures, reached down and grabbed the pipe to try and get a better pic and...



The pipe just burst AGAIN right there in front of me. It started spraying water like crazy and I started screaming, the pipe man started screaming, there was much screaming. He jumped forward and grabbed for the pipe and ran and turned off the water. I don't know what the deal is but I'm going to assume that I offended the almighty water spirit somewhere and this is my punishment. So now our pipe has been fixed AGAIN and we are now looking in to the cost of replacing all the pipes in this place.

It's raining, it's pouring, destroying our flooring...

This is how my Tuesday night/Wednesday morning went. The Jazz played in and won an incredibly important and intense game, during which I vowed to name my first born D-Will in honor of his performance. It was a great game and we were really mad we decided not to get tickets. I even managed to stay awake for all of the overtime which is nothing short of a miracle. Because of the game we went to bed much later than normal and I was really tired. Around 2:30 I woke up because Jeremy was climbing out of bed and saying something. And that's when I heard it....the sound of rushing water.

I bolted out of bed to help search for the source. That's when we discovered that there was no water to be found, the sound was coming from inside the wall. It sounded like there was water gushing through the wall though. We turned off the water to our place and the noise stopped. I called the emergency line that was listed by the HOA and got a hold of someone who informed me there was nothing he could do about getting into the units below us so we just had to wait until morning.

Once morning came we discovered that the shared wall between our bathroom and bedroom closet had a pipe burst inside of it. The water had gone straight down through the wall and successfully flooded the two units below us and the bottom unit on the backside of the building. Our condo didn't receive too much damage, just some wet walls that needed to be dried out by fans. The other units did not fair nearly as well.









The two units directly below us received the most damage and will need to have a lot of dry wall work done in the closets, bathrooms, hallways and master bedrooms. The unit on the back side just needed to have the carpet ripped up, drying and then will need to be put back together. We only had to rip off some of the baseboards in our place in order for the fans to be able to dry the walls properly. It looks like our insurance is going to cover our unit, but they are investigating to determine if they think we are liable for the other units. I'm sure if they decide we aren't liable they won't pay for those units to be fixed and we will become to most popular people in the complex!

On a brighter note, Jeremy and I will be heading to New York City on Wednesday so we hope to have most of this taken care of by then so we can relax and enjoy ourselves!