12 Dates of Christmas Part II

5. Fancy hot chocolate and a movie. We happened to have some real cream in the fridge, and Michael put a bunch of it in his hot chocolate. The idea of that much cream grossed me out, but I tried a sip of his and I had to admit that it was delicious.

6. Is counting the ward Christmas party too much of a stretch? It definitely was a fun activity that we did together, soo...yeah, I'm counting it.

7. The best way to celebrate the end of finals is with a lazy at-home date. We shared an eggnog milkshake (with two straws for maximum romance) and played Scrabble. And we found that two people trying to drink from the same milkshake is surprisingly difficult (there was a lot of forehead-bumping involved). How do people in movies manage to make the two-straws thing so cute and romantic??

Michael wanted to take a picture of the turn when the average point value of his letters was less than 1 (not surprisingly with a few turns like that for him, I was the winner).

8. Christmas pancakes in bed. FYI, red and green sprinkles are all it takes to Christmas-ify ANYTHING. I made some with chocolate chips and some with cranberries, and the cranberry ones were pretty awesome and holiday-y.

9. Wrapping presents together. Don't worry, we had wrapped the ones to each other already.

10. On the drive down to Arkansas to see Michael's family, we stayed at a bed-and-breakfast on a farm in Kentucky to celebrate our anniversary. I will probably put up a picture post for it later, but we got to see a bunch of animals, milk goats, play with the farm dogs, eat a delicious country home dinner, and relax in our little suite with a view of the countryside. It was a pretty awesome anniversary present to ourselves.

11. Long walk and frozen custard in Michael's hometown. Since we had already celebrated our anniversary a few days early on the farm, Michael asked what we should do on the actual date of our anniversary. I said I just wanted to go on a long walk holding hands and get a special treat. It fit the bill nicely!

12. Out to lunch with a bunch of Michael's family at a local restaurant. Just barely got our 12 dates in in time for Christmas!

Christmas Decorations

Most of our Christmas decorations were homemade this year, so I thought it'd be fun to do a quick post about some of the stuff I made.

Most of our decor was on one side of the living room. I guess the nice thing about small apartments is that there really isn't tons of decorating to be done.

From Joanna and Michael

This is what I was most proud of. I printed out silhouettes of reindeer and Santa, traced them on cardstock, cut them out with an X-Acto knife, and strung them up. A fun alternative to plain Christmas lights or pine garland!

We festive-ified a little chalkboard with a sprig of pinecones and holly and turned it into an advent calendar. We also had a menorah for Hanukkah--I never bothered getting one when I was in college, but I figured that now that I have my own apartment and stuff, I should go ahead and get my own.

And our little Christmas tree! Michael's grandma sent this to him when he was on his mission. I made the star topper out of cardboard and gold spray paint, and I think it turned out pretty great! Craftzzz! Also, yes, Michael has a collection of pepper ornaments that were our main tree decorations this year. I thought it was hilarious to have a Tex-Mex Christmas tree.

Merry Christmas!

12 Dates of Christmas

Michael and I are doing a "12 Dates of Christmas" challenge by going on 12 dates between December 1st and Christmas. We're not being super strict about our definition of "date," but it does have to be something out-of-the-ordinary and fun that we do together (so driving to school together is out, but silly things like going to McDonald's and sharing a milkshake with two straws is in, as well as more typical dinner or event dates).

1. Taking Christmas card pictures
We really wanted some new photos of us as a couple, so Michael grabbed his nice camera, tripod, and flashes, and we headed off to nearby Homestead Park to take some pictures. Most of them turned out really well! Here's the one we're using on our Christmas cards:

2. Holiday Pops concert with the Columbus Sympony
Super, super fun. They had a full choir with them, and that was a blast too. It was held in the Ohio Theater downtown, which is one of those old-timey, super fancy and ornate, everything's-covered-in-gold-leaf theaters. The first half was more traditional orchestral (or choral + orchestral) Christmas music, like "For Unto Us a Child is Born" from Handel's Messiah, and the second half was mostly pops, like "Sleigh Ride." And since it was a pops concert, they had lots of cute things, like swing dancers coming out for "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," a reading of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" accompanied by the orchestra with adorable and talented little-kid dancers from the BalletMet interpreting the poem, and an appearance by Santa Claus at the end. Super cute, and a really nice mix of beautiful music, entertainment, and beloved kitsch.

The best part was when they had a brass choir come out to the front of the stage for a song or two, and when they were done, they had to cook up some scheme to get someone to come out and mop up everything that got emptied from their spit valves during those songs (since there were about to be dancers on the same part of the stage). So they did this cutesy little sketch with a cleaning lady in a Christmas outfit with a Christmas-light-bedecked mop come out and be sassy to the conductor ("Ma'am, what are you doing out here? We're in the middle of a concert!" "I know, sonny, all of you musicians are in my way! Just tryin' to do my job! By the way, let me dust some imaginary dirt off your tux with my oversized feather duster and really ham it up for the audience!"). I just thought it was so funny that they came up with this little skit between songs to get someone to come mop up all the brass players' drool in the middle of the concert--it really did fit with the overall feel of the fun pops concert, but I just wonder how many people in the audience actually realized that the mopping skit had a real purpose? I, as a trombone player and producer of copious drool when playing said trombone, saw right through it!

3. Watching the First Presidency Christmas Devotional together. D'aaww. I think the decorations they have in the Conference Center for Christmas are so much better than what they have during General Conference.

4. Dinner at Pizzeria Uno. Man, that place is one of my new favorite chain restaurants. So many vegetarian choices! Plus, they email out awesome coupons all the time. Last night we had a buy-one-entree-get-one-free coupon, plus we came on a promotional "Insiders Club" day, so we got free appetizers, free punch, and a free goody bag with cookies, apples, and a gift card in it. What a deal! And, you know, the food was pretty dang good, too. Deep dish pizzas are wonderful.

I'll keep the blog updated with our next eight dates. We know that at least one of them will be our anniversary celebration (we're driving down to Arkansas for Christmas, and we're staying in a nice bed-and-breakfast on a farm halfway there for our anniversary), but that leaves 7 more to figure out between now and Christmas...

Halloween

I'll have it known that this post is going up less than one month after the event in question. Progress!

The ward missionary committee was in charge of the Halloween party this year (again, why did we get rid of activities committees? In wards that are spread thin, it just means no more activities ever, and in wards that aren't, it just means too many visiting teaching supervisors and super random committees being assigned to plan parties. Sigh.). I was in charge of planning games to entertain the kids.

I made a witch hat ring toss (with glow necklaces and bracelets to toss):

Mummy bowling:

Pin the wart on the witch:

The blindfolds and warts:

and a fishpond. The fish had paperclips on them, and the fishing pole had a little magnet on the end.

Also, I thought of cute little rhymes for the directions ("Grab a wart and a blindfold, and a friend to challenge if you dare. Don't just put that wart anywhere!") and matching prizes (Lifesaver rings for the ring toss, Tootsie Rolls for rolling the ball for mummy bowling...it was cute!). It was kind of frustrating to make, because I was full of awesome ideas but not full of free time. Seriously, why can't we have an activities committee and let all the people with tons of free time be on it??

Anyway. Our part turned out cute and the kids apparently really liked it since most of it was torn to shreds by the end of the party (that sounds cranky but that's not how I meant it; I really was glad that kids obviously enjoyed playing with the stuff).

We also managed to stay under budget by having a Halloween treat contest for the snacks. There was quite the spread--we filled up four long tables for our little ward with like 80 people in it. Pretty awesome. I made white chocolate pumpkin pie bites:

Not so pretty, but really, really tasty. They really tasted just like pumpkin pie. Michael and I both ate a lot of them.

As for our costumes, I just Googled "last-minute costumes" and this is what I came up with:

We're on "The Price Is Right!" Spending 15 minutes and $0 on our costumes was the right "price" for me.

Pumpkin Show!

A few weekends ago, we went to the Circleville Pumpkin Show. It's a big annual event in a little town about 45 minutes south of Columbus. It was actually surprisingly crowded (the lone Circleville highway exit was completely overwhelmed, with a huge, backed-up line). Still, though, I thought it was really cute and fun.

The world's biggest pumpkin pie! Compare it with the little girl through the window to get an idea of how big it was. Also, now that I'm posting the picture, I'm just now noticing all the little fingerprints in the near edge...charming.

Pumpkin doughnut (easily the most delicious thing we ate that day, in my opinion)

Pumpkin fudge

Pumpkin ice cream (Michael says it's not his fault he wasn't smiling since I didn't tell him when I was actually taking the picture)

They churned said ice cream using a really noisy tractor motor. You can see the wooden buckets where it got churned on the right.

Pumpkin waffles

Pumpkin burger

Pumpkin dumpling (with some more pumpkin ice cream). Yeah, I know we seem like huge gluttons after all these food pictures. It was awesome, though.

The giant pumpkins! I think it's so funny when they get all slumpy. They look like giant water balloons.

The prettiest pumpkin. It's a third smaller than the biggest ones, but it is very orange and lovely. Look how bloopy the one next to it is! I know it's weird that I find amusement in the bloopiness of giant pumpkins.

An artiste, carving a scene into a giant pumpkin

Endless pumpkins and gourds...

If you grow pumpkins inside a metal mold, they'll take on that shape and get super freaky looking.

The tables of all the pumpkins and gourds went on forever.

I think these were supposed to be the most beautiful pumpkins? A bunch of them had ribbons and the one on top has a crown.

Anyway, it was really fun and I look forward to doing it again next year (although preferably on a weekday when things would be a bit less crowded).

A Waterfall in the City?

I had heard rumors of there being a waterfall somewhere in Columbus, so I did a little digging and found out it was only about 10 minutes from our house. It's not the biggest waterfall ever, but the little Hayden Run actually carved a pretty impressive gorge on its way to the Scioto River. There was a little parking lot, and then you follow the trail down a set of stairs and over a new-looking boardwalk through the gorge, until you end up at the pool at the base of the waterfall. Together with a picnic, it was a really fast and easy weeknight date.

Here's the link for any of my Columbus friends. As you can see from that website, if you go in the spring, the waterfall actually spans across the whole cliff at the top. Maybe a repeat trip is in order?

Various Accomplisments and Projects this summer

1. Built and upholstered a bench
2. sewed a fancy-pants table runner
3. ran a 5K and beat Michael
4. planned a ward service project at the Ronald McDonald House
5. wrote a CME article with Mom
6. took a summer class
7. resealed the kitchen table
8. went to Rochester with Michael's family
9. went to Capon Springs with my family
10. welcomed baby Jacob the RM home
11. went to a Chicago concert 
12. turned 23 

I wrote this list last month and forgot to ever actually publish it. Pretty much all of these things could easily be a blog post in their own right, but I am just not that responsible of a blogger. I am planning on eventually posting about the bench, just because I actually took in-progress pictures of it, and because it is awesome.

Magical Michael (Updated)

So, yesterday afternoon, as I was about to print off some tickets for an event we were about to go to, when my computer very suddenly died. Like, first my browser froze, so I tried to ctrl-alt-delete to close the browser...and then Windows froze, so I had to do a hard reset...and then Windows couldn't reboot, so my computer just kept trying to restart over and over again...it was toast. The only harbinger of this misfortunate was that last week, we discovered that there's a short in it somewhere (we noticed when I was using my computer and Michael came up and touched my arm and, unbeknownst to me, my skin was all electrified just from touching the case of the computer).

We decided to just go to our thing with the tickets pulled up on my ipod and worry about the computer later. Then, when we got back, I had to leave pretty quickly to meet some friends for dinner and to watch the RS broadcast. So when I got back from that, I was expecting my computer to be as dead as it ever was, but it turned out Michael had been hard at work on it the whole time. He installed a new hard drive (because...that's a thing you can do to computers? and he just has extra hard drives lying around? I'm down with that.) and installed Linux on my laptop (to make it...work? or something?) and then he figured out how to get Vista back on it (the OS I actually know how to use! and the one that is compatible with my note-taking software!) and probably did a lot of other complicated stuff. All I know is that when I came home, he had taken over half the living room with my laptop, his laptop, and his desktop, all connected with interweaving wires and cords, and a few tool kits open and a pile of special screwdrivers and dissembled screws and assorted computer-y parts out. It looked like an awesome hacker den.

So now things seem to be working again, although we don't know how long it'll be until whatever problem is causing the short and the zebra stripes on the screen and the hard drive dying comes back and kills something non-replaceable. But for now, I can study again! And I can bloop around and procrastinate while pretending to study again! All thanks to my smart, full of magical-seeming knowledge husband!

Update: I also forgot to mention what a blessing the timing was with this. I had a big test on Friday, and since I use my computer to do 95% of my studying, and since I do half my studying the week before the test, having lost my computer and/or my files right before the test (or, horror of horrors, during the test) would have been completely and rightfully panic-inducing. It was so great that this happened on a weekend between blocks, when I had absolutely zero studying to do.

Update the second: Michael fiddled with things some more this morning and somehow, magically, got everything back to exactly how it was, on my original hard drive and everything! Before, my computer was missing some programs/add-ons and my browser settings were back to the default and stuff, but he fixed ALL THE THINGS. This has been a public service announcement letting everyone know that Michael is the best.

The Best Picture I Ever Took?

So, I'm not much of a pro photographer--I don't use external flashes on stands, I use a point-and-shoot because I don't know how to fiddle with aperture and focus and stuff, and I'm always more concerned with getting people to look happy than with getting the lighting just right. But I do like to take pictures of interesting things, and I like trying to make pictures look good. Today I was flipping through my pictures on my computer, looking for a picture of Michael and I for the ward directory, and I found this gem:

I took an animal husbandry class my last semester at BYU, and we went to see an alpaca farm one day. I just love everything about this photo--I love the different colors of the alpacas, I love that they're all doing their own thing (except for the one guy who's looking straight at me), I love the angular outline of the shed in the back, I love that you can look at the background and really see that we were out in the middle of nowhere in Utah. I especially love that furry bro on the left with his little mouf full of hay. So funny! I just think that the composition and subjects in this photo turned out particularly well, and I'm pretty fond of it.

Books Read This Summer

1. My Father's Tears by John Updike
2. Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett
3. Perfect Light Desserts by Nick Malgieri
4. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
5. Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
6. Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire (weeird)
7. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
8. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
9. The Wild Life of Our Bodies by Rob Dunn
10. Snuff by Terry Pratchett
11. Every Living Creature by James Herriott

I'm reasonably pleased by that list, especially considering that my summer was only nine weeks long and most of it wasn't a true break from school and work anyway (but it was a very excellent ~60% break).

Fitness test

I just did a fitness test at OSU, and I was very pleased to find that my VO2max (measure of aerobic fitness) is in the 80th percentile for my age and gender. Not bad!

I was also very amused at my results of the strength tests: I scored well above the 90th percentile for lower body strength (woohoo!), but for upper body strength, I didn't even crack the 10th percentile. Talk about lopsided. Clearly, I am a circus freak.

Gingerbread House

We just barely found a gingerbread house kit that one of us had gotten for Christmas...

We didn't really feel like leaving a gingerbread house on display for weeks in the middle of summer but we also didn't want to lose out on the fun of making it by eating everything straight out of the box, so we decided to make it as fast as we could and then immediately devour it. Isn't it beautiful? I'm sure you can tell that in the front yard, there's a scared ghost and a very well-decorated Christmas tree. Also, there were supposed to be gumdrops but I just ate them all. Also, the manufacturers were lazy about the nutrition facts, and instead of listing it for the different elements separately, they just listed the nutrition for 1/36 of the whole box. Silly.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Strawberries

Last week Michael and I went strawberry picking. I've always wanted to go—I've enjoyed the fresh-picked bounties of side-of-the-road farm stands many times, but I've never actually picked my own. Farm strawberries are always amazing: tender, bright red all the way through, gently warmed by the sun, bursting with juiciness and true strawberry flavor, and sweet sweet sweet. Basically all the things that grocery store strawberries are not. I can't get enough of them.

Such a wholesome view, right? When we arrived, an old lady greeted us, gave us some collecting baskets, and told us, "Make sure you try plenty! Gotta make sure they're delicious!" There was also a sign hanging up that said "Please eat as you go!" Fine by me! I was of course going to eat one or two before we weighed our baskets, but since you pay for what you harvest by the pound, I would have felt too guilty about more than that. Fortunately for us, we apparently got free rein to eat as many as we wanted.

And once we actually walked out to the rows of strawberry plants, the aroma was suddenly incredibly strong. It was sweet and fruity and oh-so-strawberry. It was seriously making me giddy before I picked a single berry. Have I mentioned how much I love farm strawberries?

Beautiful!

And then we just picked a bunch of berries, each of us on one side of the row of plants. I think pleasant is the best word for the morning. Really, really pleasant. It was sunny and in the low seventies, the smell was amazing, plus we were pretty much alone in our little sector of the field, so it was really fun to just chat and enjoy each other's company in the warm, strawberry-scented air, snacking as we went. We forgot to have someone take a picture of both of us with our loot, so...here's a picture of just Michael!

He would make a cute migrant worker.

Anyway, we ended up with five quarts of fresh strawberries for twelve bucks, which is an awesome deal compared to roadside stand/farmer's market prices but a pretty bad deal when you consider that we were basically migrant workers for an hour. It's an important part of the strawberry picking experience, though!

Yum. We probably ate about half of the berries out of hand over the next week (which is absolutely the best way to enjoy fresh berries), and then I made strawberry vanilla jam with one of the last quarts. It was my first experience with making jam or canning anything, so it was an adventure in and of itself. But the jars all sealed properly and there was enough left over after filling the prepared jars to keep a little half-full jar in the fridge...which meant that we got to try some right away, hooray! The flavor was awesome. Steeping the berries with sugar and vanilla beans before cooking them was absolutely inspired. The only thing that turned out funky was the texture (and this was probably a result of my own inexperience). Instead of being a homogenous, spreadable jam, it turned out more like a bunch of sliced strawberries in some delicious syrup. Oh well. It was still the bomb on toast.

 It'll be hard not to bust these open before the winter...

And then yesterday, when the remaining berries were on their last legs, I made a quick flummery, which I usually use as an ice cream topping (it was half strawberries and half blueberries, which is why it looks so purple). It was a great way to say goodbye to those amazing strawberries.

See you next year, strawberries!

Call Me Maybe

I just realized that I've been mixing up Carly Rae Jepsen (singer of the infamous "Call Me Maybe") with Christy Carlson Romano (former Disney Channel star). Sooo...every time I've ever heard that song (up until now), I've been envisioning the girl from Even Stevens singing it. In my defense, it wouldn't be that surprising if it was from Ren Stevens, considering it really does sound like those cheeseball wrote-it-in-five-minutes pop songs that got played on the Disney Channel during commercial breaks (you know, the ones sung by actors who were trying to make it really big by "crossing genres").

Medical Student Syndrome

My months of medical school hypochondriasis have finally paid off—at various points in this year's curriculum,  I had convinced myself (with varying degrees of certainty) that I might have tongue cancer, a MRSA infection on my arm, meningitis, a subarachnoid hemorrhage, and I can't even remember what else, but fortunately, I've been very wrong each time. But today I was going over a lecture about sleep disorders and realized that for the first time, I actually meet the all diagnostic criteria for something real! Apparently I have restless leg syndrome! Um, I do not plan on seeking treatment, considering it's never actually bothered me; I never even knew it was weird until I got married and Michael started making fun of the way I have to kick my legs sometimes at night, . I'm very pleased to find that even the paranoid, diagnostically blind medical student sometimes finds a nut!

Med School

Ok, I just wanted to say how happy I am to be in med school. I can't believe the stuff we're learning. We spent a few days last week learning how vision works and how an incredibly complex system of neurons manages to translate photons into meaning. It is just incredible how complex we are. And today I was watching a lecture (every lecture is podcasted, woohoo!), and some of the stains of cerebellar neurons were just breathtakingly beautiful. Like, I almost got a little choked up looking at the pictures and thinking about what they mean. And you guys, I don't even really like neuro that much. But I just feel really grateful (a) that we as a human race get to know all this freaking awesome stuff and (b) that I get to dip my toes in the fountain of knowledge. So, so cool. And next week when I'm starting to freak out about our test and how unprepared I feel (side note: I ALWAYS feel woefully underprepared and full of doom and gloom the week before exams, and I'm pretty much always wrong. The last exam, I was seriously crying my eyes out the day before because I didn't know how I could pass the test, and I ended up pulling a 97. ANYWAY), I can look back at this post and remember how happy learning makes me. Also, this is one of the pictures that I thought was amazing:

Isn't that beautiful?

P.S. I was telling Michael about some of the stuff I'm learning, and I mentioned the word glutamatergic.
His response: "That's an awesome word. Is that like a liturgy about glutes? A butt sermon?"

Michael's Graduation

Last week, Michael and I flew out to Utah for his graduation. For those who didn't know, when we got engaged, he just had a few classes to finish up, and they had to be taken over two semesters, which would have been a realllly long long-distance engagement. Very very fortunately, he was able to work it out with his professors so that he could take the classes from a distance while living in Ohio with me. He had to work triple hard since he couldn't attend lectures or ask the TA questions (and his dad the physics professor was extremely helpful throughout both semesters), but he finally finished and I'm very proud of him!

April Fools!

I made a delicious breakfast for Michael this morning...

Look carefully...

The eggs are vanilla yogurt and canned apricot halves. Aren't they cute? The "fruit punch" is jello—I thought having the carton right there made it seem very convincing, though. Michael figured out the eggs pretty quick, but the "fruit punch" totally got him. The look on his face when he tried to take a drink was priceless!

And the best part was that even though there was nothing wrong with the muffins (really!), he still refused to touch them. I didn't even plan for that part of the joke! More muffins for me!

Classy...

I just installed art in our bathroom. Surely this means I am a classy grownup now, right?

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday, darling! Love you!!!!!

Those four candles were the only ones we had in the whole house, haha. Planning oversight or artistic genius? YOU DECIDE.

TSA in this great land of freedom and possibility

Ok. I think everyone knows how sucky the TSA is. Security theater, power-grubbing, power-abusing, pervy, coercive, drain of money and time for ZERO thwarted crimes...it's total baloney. I could go on for paragraphs about how angry the amount of power they've been given makes me. But I just wanted to share the take of an author who also hates them. The way they put it is hilarious.

It's important to note that if you're traveling and you're randomly or non-randomly selected to go through the body scanner, you're completely within your rights to refuse the scan. If you refuse, you'll receive something that walks the line between a pat-down and a grope from a female agent. So, would you rather run the risk that some dude in another room with his hands in his pants is analyzing your body for boner threats or allow a female stranger to boredly caress your bra's underwire? The choice is yours in this great land of freedom and possibility.

It's so sad it's aaaaalmost crossed over into funny.

Waffles for Dinner

A few nights ago, Michael made me waffles for dinner, and he was thoughtful enough to make one into the shape of Ohio. Awwww.













Ok, fine, so it was just chance that it looked so much like our great state, but still, pretty awesome.

My husband the punk

Today's conversation of the day:

Me (after tooting in front of Michael): Sorry I'm gross.
Michael (comfortingly): No, you're not.
Michael (two seconds later): You're not sorry at all!

What a punk.