4th of July- An Extended Weekend

For the first time in "like ever" Luke has been able to leave town for the 4th of July! We went down to see his parents in Boise. Sure he visited interns while he was down there but that also means he golfed. Dude has been golfing SO much more. While in the southern Idaho area, We visited Luke's cousin Stephanie. She's a hair wizard! 

She showed me how to cut Luke's hair! The dexterity requires is insane! She taught me some tricks and we'll see how it goes with Luke next week!

Mike and the boys came to hang out too! Literally!

On our way back we stopped at aunt Kerry's. All focus was lost when I caught sight of KITTENS!!!!! Luke and I are both TOTES allergic, but KITTENS!!!!!

The kittens were sooooo not thrilled with me but I just couldn't resist! Thanks Kerry and Connor for catching them! And Connor for the tasty home grown raspberries!

I also inherited a Christmas cactus that descends from Luke's Great Grandma on the Nickodemus side! My mom had one, I need to get cuttings from from my great grandma and I'm honored to be part of such a neat tradition! Thank you Aunt Becky!

We found two products I can get behind at Whole Foods. This yellow pmwgranite tea was great! Also these Coco-roons are great! This flavor tasted just like brownie bites!

We also played around with festive fruit infused party beverages! Yum!

Luke's wish for this trip was fireworks.  And not the kind that chillax in the street. Neola and I enjoyed sitting back and enjoying the skyline FULL of fireworks being shot into the air all over Boise from their back patio. We only saw one fire. I've learned that Idahoans love fireworks. 

Can you see the skyline fireworks?

Wilson Luke. 

Some of Luke's work. 

Neola is becoming quite the knitter! She is now knitting in the round, purling, and reading stitches! Loved our relax and knit time!

It was a great trip! (And under photographed, sorry.)

Strawberry Quinoa Salad

We've been experimenting with quinoa this year. I've found that as two individuals who do not especially enjoy pasta salad but do enjoy all of the ingredients quinoa has made a good pasta salad base substitute. 

This morning for breakfast I tried a strawberry quinoa salad variety. 

Ingredients

1/2 cup cooked quinoa

1/2 cup diced strawberries

1/4 cup crumbled goat cheese

1 sprig of fresh mint chopped finely

1 tsp honey

1/4 cup Kefir (lactose fee probiotic shake, I used plain, vanilla would be tasty too.)

Stir together and eat! It tasted great immediately. I imagine it would also taste good after marinating for a while. This would also be a tasty desert.

The verdict: I loved it. Luke did not. He thinks it's the goat cheese or the texture. 

I may try again with a lemon juice and honey dressing. 

A Perfect Storm, Mom, Cancer Awareness, and a Baking Day at School

This week is Health Awareness week. We've been having different "dress up" days. Yesterday was dress in the colors of your favorite healthy food. I wore red pants, a white undershirt, and a green sweater. We work a lot on re-stating questions in responses, and making "I think" science statements with lots of evidence to show reasoning. SO the bell work prompt was to tell me what healthy food I was and why. It was fun! Tomorrow is wear your "Cancer Awareness" ribbon color. I'm going to wear the maroon color for Multiple Myeloma. The kind of cancer Mom had. 

My friend Patti, who worked with my mom, at the school I grew up in and she taught at for 14 years just posted a picture of her name on the new building being built at the school. Someone wrote "Wherever you go, whatever you do, don't forget, Pinedale is YOU!" It is me. It was my mom. It is my family even though we're separated by a great distance I regularly think of things I learned there from my mom and all the incredible mentor teachers I have met there on my journey as a student, graduate and now a teacher.

Incidentally we're talking about Cell Cycles this week and yeast is a GREAT example so we're heading down to the "Home Ec" lab to bake some bread with yeast. The way my mom taught me. 

Yeast is a great example of living organisms. My mom would always talk to me about how "its alive" and talk about nurturing the yeasties when would bake.

As I'm preparing to take my "tools" to school, I thought of how my mom would cook with her students. One thing they always remember when I get in touch with them later. Whether it was math, science, or even the skills to write directions cooking is a great way to show how applicable skills are. 

Lastly I grabbed flour sack towels to cover the rising dough. The aprons are in the same drawer. All of my mom's special aprons that I'm so lucky to have. And I get to wear them. Tomorrow. When I cook with my students and teach them many of the things that she taught me.

My heart hurts because I miss her,

because I fell so blessed,

because I'm so proud that I learned so much from her,

because I know she's proud,

and because my only regret is that we can't debrief about it all, laugh a little and build on each others lessons, over a cup of tea and a good long phone call. 

and ahhhhh. None of this was planned. None of this was on my brain until it hit me. Like a truck. Say a little prayer I can keep it together. 

Really Random Thursday- Science, Sewing and such

I report back to school August 6 and I'm starting to let myself plan for school! I got these cool art cards from MeganLee.etsy.com and I love them!

I've been working on a knit dissected frog to display in my class.

Here he is with his organs!

I've also working on an anatomically correct-ish heart.

I can't wait to put this one in my classroom too!

I disguised a frozen California Pizza Kitchen Sicilian pizza with a fistful of basil and it was tasty!
Luke got back from a weekend of climbing 14ers in Colorado. Turns out he's as bad at applying sunscreen as I am.
I finally changed my rotary cutter blade. I always wish I'd changed it like a month earlier.

I used it to cut binding,

when I finished binding the quilt I began big stitch quilting the center star,

and the border of my summer sampler quilt.

While I am VERY excited about the upcoming school year, I am absolutely starting to feel the pressure to get my projects done eek!
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WiP Wednesday 4/3

Wow, I can't believe it's Wednesday already! I've got a lot of "stuff" in the works!

 First is a bottle makeover ala Pinterest. For the original project see here!

 Luke is using parts from my dissembled Pallets to make me some mini raised beds for spinach and carrots.

 I started this quilt (Giant Star Quilt Tutorial by In Color Order), but it's on pause as I realized the white I was using was actually intended for my Summer Sampler and I better finish that one so I know how much white I have to allot to my giant star quilt!

 But before that, I had to fix this block that was just holding me up. The underneath fabric was showing through the triangles in the corner square. At first I thought I could handle it, but I think it was the subconscious reason I hadn't put the blocks together yet.

 So, the block got dismantled, fixed, and reassembled. 

 And now the blocks have been sashed and joined.

 Now I'm trying to do the math for the border (and the border to make the border fit properly.) Yaaaaay quilting math! (Students always wonder when they're actually going to use the math I teach them. "For when you decide to quilt" doesn't always carry a lot of weight with most of them. After doing our taxes (we live life on the edge and wait 'til the last minute) my brain votes to pick this project up in the morning.

 Grand Finale: We're working on finishing off these amazing scalloped potatoes!

I've been afraid of scalloped potatoes since '07 when I decided we would try to make them for the first time for a camp of 150 people. There are like three things wrong with that statement. Anyway, I re-attempted scalloped potatoes and they were AWE-some. The only reason finishing them is still a WIP is because we're both lactose intolerant and they have lots of CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE!

I'm linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced and WiP Wednesday!

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Doing Dallas

Early Friday morning Aunt Maggie, Aunt Lois and I hopped in the car and headed for Dallas!
When we got there the first thing we did was go straight to the Dallas Quilt Show or also known as Quilt Celebration 2013, hosted by the Dallas Quilters Guild. Our first order of business was to deliver Matt and Val's wedding quilt to Kathy Bradbury of Bear Paw Machine Quilters so that she could take the quilt home with her to long arm machine quilt it!

 Aunt maggie was so kind as to take pictures of the whole process! Let me tell you, It was kind of a relief to hand the quilt over to Kathy! Kind of like handing in a final essay or something! She has some great ideas and I cant wait to see what she does with it!

We did a general walk around the rest of the show but didn't stress about seeing everything, because we knew we'd be back Saturday. So we headed to the hotel which was across the street from Matt and Val's apartment to get Aunt Maggie, Aunt Lois and Pat checked in! (I got to have a sleep over at my sisters.)

 Check out the floor on that bathroom! I LOVE it! It will go in the floor on my dream house.

Valerie received a last minute assignment Friday afternoon/evening, so Matt, her husband, drove all of us ladies (my this time Cousin Pat had joined us) to a fantastic pizza place called Fireside Pies.

Pat, Maggie, Lois

 Matt, Me

Aunt Maggie has Celiac which means she cannot have anything with Gleuten in in and Valerie (my sister) did her research for the trip! She found out that Fireside Pies has a Gluten free pizza crust (above) so Aunt Maggie could have pizza too! The rest of us had the regular crust but upon sampling them, there was hardly a difference! We all had more than enough pizza and ate some of the leftovers with dinner the following night!

Valerie joined us toward the end of our meal and tried each of our pizzas for her dinner! (That's the way to avoid entree envy if I ever saw one!) Then went to their apartment for some visiting time!

It was so nice to be re-united with my sister again! I have MISSED her! 

On Saturday morning the quilt show didn't start until 10:00 so Matt took us to Children's Medical Center, where he works, and showed us the Train Room!

It was so neat to have an official tour guide! The train room was thought up by one of the CEO's of the hospital and features many trains zipping around on the many tracks. In this section you can see the Dallas skyline. They change the scenes multiple times a year so that the children who unfortunately have frequent visits to the hospital can have some distractions. They even have a scavenger hunt! (Matt didn't tell us about that until after, for fear that we might want to spend all day looking for things!)

 After our train tour, Matt dropped us off at the front door of the quilt show. Now we didn't actually know the quilt show would be there until after our trip had been planned, but what a great coincidence!
I've been eyeing  long arm quilting machines and Aunt Maggie and I had a great time trying them out! I also found some fabric I'd been hunting for, my favorite thread, and a  walking foot to replace the one I broke last week or so.

 Another highlight of the show was that the Dallas K-9 search and rescue was there. Aunt Maggie participates in the California Search and rescue so that was pretty exciting for us to see!

Valerie had been able to get out of work earlier than she had originally thought that afternoon so she picked us up from the show and us girls went out for burgers! Once again all of her research was apparent because she found Village Burger Bar and they had just added Gluten Free hamburger buns as a menu option!

 Aunt Maggie said it was one of the best Gluten Free bun's she's ever tasted!

My Burger and fries were delicious too! These fries were some of the tastiest shoe string fries! So tasty in fact that they were half-way gone before I remembered to take a picture!

We went back to Matt and Val's apartment for more relaxing visiting and its at this point that you start to notice more and more of their apartment buildings charm! It's an old building and you see great signs of it everywhere! Start with the woodwork over the entry:

and beautiful scroll work on their mail boxes.

Then notice the OTIS elevator!! I couldn't think of what movie it was in....then I finally remembered just today! It was Kate & Leopold!

 Anyway, the elevator to get to their floor is this great Otis Elevator!

  Metal door gate and everything!

 There was a big storm Saturday night and Matt was actively tracking it on his iPad and out the window. 

We also played a round of this fun game they found called Tsuro. 

Then Val and I talked and talked until we both fell asleep on the couch!

Sunday morning we were dealing with side effects from the time change (and staying up too late) so we got a slow start.

Valerie and I grabbed some Starbucks coffee. (Yes they have Starbucks in Garden City, but it's in Target and that's just not quite the same.)

 I'm really glad, that I remembered to get a group picture! (Thank you Matt!) There are three generations in this picture!

From Left to Right: Aunt Maggie (My Dad's Sister), Valerie, Great Aunt Lois, Cousin Pat (Lois's Daughter, Maggie's Cousin), Me (Jessica)

The grand finale of our Dallas weekend was a trip to Lulu's Gluten Free Bakery. 

Whether you have Celiac or not, this place had confections fit for a queen!

And a queen she was! Aunt Maggie found lots of goodies to take with her!

  So did the rest of us!

 Aunt Lois had a cupcake,

Pat tried two different breads and took the rest home for Monday's breakfast (smart move!)

 and Valerie and I each got a different kind of quiche to share. Her favorite was the spinach and mine the tomato ham.

 I also got to meet these guys after seeing them through the window! They're poodles! I never would have guessed and they were SO SOFT! Their owner says they get groomed about once a month with the same length cut allover.

Aunt Lois, Aunt Maggie and I drove back to Olton Sunday afternoon. 

When we got here, Uncle Van had these two beautiful surprises waiting for us! Whata guy!