Just a quick post in the middle of a busy few days. I checked the weather this afternoon on my favorite weather site to see just how cold it was going to be, and this is what I found:
Apparently it’s raining pigs in Table Grove, IL.
Oh, and to top it off, I put our zip code into wunderground, and it gave us Table Grove, which isn’t even where we live. Something fishy (or piggy?) is going on here.
Every few weeks I get to feeling adventurous in the kitchen, and I make something completely by the seat of my pants – no recipe, no plan, just start by chopping something and see where I end up. Most of the time, this results in mediocre food. Occasionally it results in something really awful. But every once in a while, the result is absolutely fantastic – a dish you might see in a great restaurant or on one of those over-the-top shows on the food network, like (my favorite) Iron Chef America.
Sunday night was one of those adventurous nights, and one of the rare ones where the result was marvelously good. Here’s what I did:
Started with a couple of boneless skinless chicken breasts, and a couple cloves of chopped garlic. I decided to add some Jane’s Krazy Mixed-Up Seasoned Salt to the garlic, and before I knew it the worcestershire sauce was out and I mashed it all into a rub. A splash of lemon juice completed the rub, which was applied liberally to the chicken.
I started some chicken stock on the back burner, and then coated a skillet with olive oil. I seared the chicken in the skillet, then put it into a baking dish with a bath of chicken stock. I wanted something else in it, and Marcia suggested nuts. She chopped a bunch of almonds, peanuts, and cashews and I put about 3/4 of the nuts in the baking dish with the chicken and stock. Into the oven at 350 degrees.
With some more chicken stock, I started some Fettucini noodles, and once the stock was boiling I tossed in the rest of the nuts. This permeated the noodles with both chicken flavor and nuttiness.
When the chicken finally came out of the oven (of course it needed to be basted several times with the stock in the pan to keep from becoming dry), I dished the pasta onto plates, put some oregano on the pasta, and a piece of chicken on top of the pasta bed. The whole thing then got one more spoonful of the baked chicken stock, and was covered in the chopped nuts that were in the bottom of the baking dish.
Moment of truth…
Delicious! This is definitely a course to keep and use for company at some point in the future.
Oh… last but not least… this delicious pasta/chicken dish was served with the new Cranberry Sierra Mist. What is it about cranberrys and poultry that make such a great combination?
I never really resolved for anyone else that my car runs well now. Thanks to my now husband was fiance. In the end the last thing fixed was a leak in the gas tank. Oddly enough after all the work I had done on it I believe I am getting worse gas mileage. Perhaps some failures under the hood make the engine run better, though I really have no desire to run out and brake anything.
Now I am done with the B&B. I miss all the new people, but at the same time it is great to be in the same town as my love. Less than a week back and I was asked to fill in at the university daycare for a week and a half. It was great, I love children. And it is often better when you can give them back at the end of the day. The next week was all wedding all day.
The wedding went very well with out anything too big to handle. There was one hitch with the boquet. I am not a big spender, especially on one-time-use things… And I spent a lot on that, only to have it look like a twelve-year-old boy could have thrown it together in a vase. Thank goodness for a wonderful mother-in-law, who is extremely talented, and took the flowers apart and added to it to make it what it is (can be seen in the photo in the last post).
Today I had an interview at the local university. My job starts tomorrow. The people I will work with seem friendly and I like the job discription.
I am now a married woman. I now have a full-time job. I am healthy.
I am happy!
Every once in a while, it’s good to go through the “My Documents” folder on your computer and just clean it out… you’d be amazed at how much cruft accumulates in there over time. I was doing that tonight, and I found a folder called, simply, “j.” I don’t remember where it came from, but in it I found a few very funny images that I must have saved from somewhere a long time ago. All of them have to do with the fundamental differences between men and women.
No, not THOSE kind of pictures.
Here’s one that shows how to control men, vs. how to control women:
No wonder women figure us men out so much faster than we can figure them out!
Oh, and the wedding is one week away! I’m excited.
Really.
So, someone’s comment spam bot found this blog and went nuts this morning. Thankfully, I already had comment moderation turned on, so none of the [mostly pornographic] spam made it into the comments, but I did NOT enjoy moderating and deleting it all.
So, I’ve installed a spam filter that should catch most of it without me having to deal with it, but as with all such filters, there’s always a chance of a false positive. So if you write a comment to this blog and it doesn’t appear on the site within 24 hours or so, let me know so I can fish it out of the spam trough.
Woah. Where did last week go? I can’t believe how busy that was…
So, answer time. For a refresher, the challenge was to insert appropriate spaces to turn this into intelligible Russian:
kolokolokolokola
Ammon von Lovell found three answers, but I’m only aware of two, so I’ll be curious what he found that I didn’t.
Here are my two:
Kol okolo kolokola – The stake is near the bell
Kolokol oloko kola – The bell is near the stake (don’t you love Russian word order ambiguity?)
The source of this puzzle was the Wikipedia entry for Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. The page points out interesting linguistic constructs involving repetition in many languages.
Let’s hope this week affords more opportunities to blog than last… I still can’t believe how busy I was.
As an innkeeper for a Bed & Breakfast, I don’t get time for myself, unless I have a night with no guests. When that does happen, I acutally get a few hours for myself that next morning. When I have a free morning, I like to get on my bike and ride around this small town packed full of history.
In Nauvoo there are horse wagon rides that give tours of the town. I was out riding this morning before the wagon rides began and saw some horses waiting by the wagon. So, I stopped to see them. The men with the horses told me the horses names are Randy and Ben and that I am allowed to pet them. They were so gentle, and had beautiful eyes. It is no wonder to me that my Grandpa Lern Prickett loved them.
I began thinking how I last saw him November of 2000, right before I got on a plane. He passed away the following June, while I was on an LDS mission. I love my Grandpa and do miss him, but I know that he is still my grandpa, and will be forever.
Recently, several people who I knew during my time in Russia have found and begun reading this blog (Privet, guys!). So, it’s time for a little Russian language fun! Here’s a Russian language puzzle to try out:
The following Russian sentence has a number of words in it, but the spaces between them have been removed. Can you figure out where to put the spaces to make this a meaningful (and gramatically correct) sentence?
kolokolokolokola
If you come up with an answer (no cheating, the answer IS on the internet, so no looking it up!), feel free to comment. I’ll cite my original source when I post the official answer in a few days.
Enjoy!
I imagine the internet is going to see of lot of these “where I was on September 11” posts, so I might as well write one too. Really, I think my story is kind of unique and might be worth sharing.
I was a Mormon missionary in the former U.S.S.R from 2000-2002. My time was spent in areas reasonably close to the city of Moscow. From July 2001 until February 2002, I was in the wonderful and beautiful city of Minsk, which is the capital of the Republic of Belarus.
There are many different kinds of Mormon missionaries. The ones most familiar to most people are the guys in white shirts and ties, dark suits, with little black nametags that go from door to door proselyting. What many people don’t know is that there are also missionaries whose time is spent working on family history/geneology, some who work at church historical sites as tour guides or landscapers or any number of other things, some who work as humanitarian aid workers in places where there is significant need, and several others.
Most of my two year mission was spent as your standard nametag-wearing door-knocking proselyting missionary, but while in Belarus, I was a humanitarian aid missionary. One of the things that we did as humanitarian aid missionaries was travel around to schools, day cares, camps, hospitals, and other places where there were large groups of children, and put on puppet shows about the consequences of alchohol and tobacco use.
On September 11, 2001, we did a couple of these puppet shows at a facility of some sort just outside of Minsk. I don’t really remember if it was a hospital or a camp; it may have been a children’s sanitarium or other long-term recovery facility for sick children (This place was notorious for having rather rambunctions and ill-behaved children, so I’m not sure how sick they really were).
These puppet shows were scheduled for the afternoon and early evening. We met at our office with our driver, Joseph, and headed out to do our shows, which were uneventful. Arriving back at the office, I got into the elevator with one of the large prop boxes and headed up to the 7th floor to drop off the props at the office.
And then the world changed.
The elevator door opened on the 7th floor, and as the elevator was right across the hall from the office, the people in the office heard it open. My good friend Michael Trousdale, another humanitarian aid missionary, was in the office at the time. He ran out and began babbling about an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center. My first thoughts were of the July 28, 1945 accident at the Empire State Building, when a small plane crashed into the building causing minimal damage and killing 14 people – a tragedy to be sure, but not worthy of the kind of hysterics I was seeing from Michael.
Through some questining that seems rather heartless in retrospect, I discovered that it was not, in fact, a small plane, but rather two very large airliners. It was also not likely an accident as the 1945 incident was, but appeared that the two jets had been deliberately flown into the towers. I went into the office.
On the television in the office I saw the horrifying images that we have all seen one time too many. The first tower had already fallen. The office workers and missionaries in the office sat, horrified, staring at the television. Another missionary arrived soon with the other prop box, then two more missionaries and Joseph. This last group had barely arrived when the second tower collapsed and fell.
Being an expatriate at such times is an experience that’s difficult to describe. We’ve all seen news footage on television that is being taken from a local source in some other country. We hear the reporter speaking in a foriegn tongue we don’t understand, with a translator speaking over them and bringing us the news in our language. This was the same experience, except the local foriegn channel was CNN, and the unfamiliar language being dubbed and translated was English.
As the next infamous hour unfolded, I wasn’t sure how to react. My homeland had been attacked. Terrible things had happened in New York. NEW YORK! And Washington D.C. And Pennsylvania. Those places were all so close to home.
But home was so far away.
I’d been in Russia and Belarus for over a year. Those places really felt like home, and the tragedies on American soil felt like they had happened somewhere else to someone else. While I was shocked and horrified by what had happened, and felt the pain that all good people should feel when evil wins a battle in the eternal war, it seemed that emotionally, something was missing. To this day, I’m not sure what it was that I though I should have felt, but I felt a little guilty for not feeling it.
We felt that the event was over by around 9:15 p.m. All of the airplanes in America had been grounded, the three attacks had happened (I think we’d heard of the Pennsylvania crash as well, but I’m not sure of that), and it appeared no more could happen. As a rule as missionaries, we were to be home by 9:30 each evening, so we headed our seperate ways (nevermind that we also weren’t supposed to watch T.V…. Something about extenuating circumstances and all that….). I lived with my roomate, Matt Millett, about three blocks from the office, and we walked back to our apartment that night.
Belarus is not a country that’s particulary friendly to the United States. At least that’s true politically. The great experience of September 11, 2001 was my realization that national borders and cultural and language barriers are easily crossed and overcome by the fact that we’re all part of the great human family. Our faces were known in the neighboorhood where we lived – people knew who we were. They knew that Matt and I were Americans. As we walked home that night, political unfriendliness melted away as person after person stopped us on the sidewalk and told us of the pain they felt at what had happened to our country. They said how sorry they were. They said that no nation – not even America – deserved to be attacked like that. They said that we’re all brothers and one brother should never do that to another. They said that they hoped their would be a war on whoever did it, and they hoped Belarussians and Americans would fight together to stop it from ever happening again.
44 years of cold war and we really had no enemies among those wonderful people.
There is a certain heirarchy of leadership among missionaries. It helps keep things organized. District leaders supervise a handful (maybe 6-10) of missionaries. Zone leaders supervise a handful of districts. Presidents supervise a handful of zones, which constitute a “mission.” I was a zone leader at the time. Geographically, my zone was the entire country of Belarus. Not long after we got home, one of the president’s personal assistants called to make sure that we knew what had happened, and to give us some instructions. Interestingly, much of the news that he gave was actually not true. He told us that in addition to the attacks in New York and Washington, many other airplanes had crashed, and a couple had even been shot down. Of course, such speculation was very common in the days following, but it ultimately only served to lessen the severity of what actually happened: “Oh, only four airplanes crashed? I understood there were nine! Four is so much better than nine.”
The instructions he gave, on the other hand, came straight from the church leadership in Salt Lake City, and were good advice, I think. We were told to avoid conspicuously American places like the embassy or McDonald’s until further notice (McDonald’s was later taken off the forbidden list – unfortunately). We were to be more cautious in who we told that we were Americans (most Americans are mistaken for Germans when they speak Russian – some of us had developed good enough accents that people mostly thought we were from another part of the Russian speaking world).
Soon after that, came another phone call. This one from the American Embassy, with better information on what had happened, a list of emergency numbers in case anything should happen in Belarus, etc… They called me because I was the zone leader. I’m not sure how they knew that, as I had never told them. They asked me to relay that information to the other missionaries.
I called the district leaders and passed on the instructions we’d been given along with the best patch-together I could manage of the news I’d heard from Moscow and from the Embassy. Of course by doing this I just became another spreader of misinformation. Again, at least the instructions were good.
Over the next several days, the pattern of people approaching us on the street to offer their condolences continued. Other missionaries from around our mission shared similar experiences. I was further convinced that we had no enemies among those people – only their governments.
In retrospect, it’s easier to analyze what happened that day. As I conclude this post however, I’d like to share what I felt on that day, as I wrote it in my journal:
…We arrived at Sofia’s office after a puppet show, just in time to see the news broadcast of the World Trade Center attack. What an infamous day! We all huddled around the TV for about two hours watching the news. It was odd to watch it in Russian – it made it all so…foriegn. I don’t feel fear, but I’m apprehensive about the future of my beloved America. I have learned on my mission to appreciate America – her freedoms, her liberties, and her opportunities. God bless America.
And today, on September 11, 2006, I pray again, may God bless America.
I have a sad tale to cry. My car is dying, maybe.
This car stalls and rattles when driving slower than 30 m.p.h. There appears to be somthing wrong in one of the cylinders. This could be an easy cleaning job, or it could be a really expesive fix. If it is the latter, it would cost more to fix than the car would be worth in tip-top shape.
Also, this is my first car, so there is a slight emotional attachment. However, I think I could get over that, especially if I had the oportunity to disassemble it piece by piece.
Oh, and I have to have transportation to keep my job, minor detail.