Yum Yum day!!

Happy Tday everyone!!!!  We are spending the day walking around town with Hannah, cookin up some food (we're providing mashed potatoes, popovers, and brussel sprouts!), then having our orphan Thanksgiving dinner this evening at Jamie's...Should be delicious!!  

A few things:

- Alabama lost to Texas A&M - we were sad, but we're still #2 - let's hope we stomp Auburn and Georgia in the SEC finals!!

- It was Dan's Bday on Tuesday!!  We celebrated by spending the day in Birmingham - it was great fun as the pictures will reveal...

- We just booked our hotel in New Orleans in February for the ASLO conference!!!  Yeah!!!!  Dan presents a poster on his Iceland stuff and I just tag along for the ride...Can't wait for our first trip to the Big Easy for a whole week!!  We'll likely drive down and leave Hannah at home under the care of our very loving friends...

- that's all for now, have a wonderful turkey day!!!

Some pictures from the last few weeks..

xo

Been waitin'...

It's been over a month since the last post...and as that last post hinted, the month of October was a big one!  A lot of fretting and working paid off for us here in T-Town...

For one, this finally happened:

Yeah!!!  A five year epic journey finally ended with my thesis defense in Moscow, ID.  I took a week off from cool Alabama Fall weather and entered the entirely different Fall realm that is the inner Pacific Northwest.  I was greeted by so many vibrantly colored leaves that smacked me right in the retina.  Happiness!!  It was quite a mixed bag being back in Moscow.  I figured I'd be nothing but elated, but it turns out there was a lot of bittersweetness mixed in as well.  Memories from grad school proper came flooding back...

Remember when...

We had a (read: many) late Thursday nights of Long Island Iced Teas at the Ale House?  

Fresh pesto rolls from the Co-op?  

Buying sticks of grilled chicken from the Saturday Farmer's Market?  

Walking Hannah through the calm neighborhoods of Moscow?  

Trudging up the 6th street hill after a long day in the lab/office??

The smell of the fresh cedar chips walking by Line St and 6th st??

sigh....

Then came the corrections to my memories and new realizations...

Was the Student Rec Center really THAT close to our office?

Is it usually that quiet around campus after 1pm in the afternoon?

Was there always this bone chilling wind running through Moscow?

The Red Door is now Gnosh!
They painted those balconies green!
It's time for winter wheat planting in the Palouse!

more sighs...

Overall it was just a wonderful trip.  I got the defense out of the way half way through the trip and got to relax with Kristin and the kids for most of the rest of the trip.  The kids are HUGE...I can't believe I didn't take any pictures of them, and my overall lack of pictures of the whole trip.  But I guess that is a testament to my fretting and then my uber relaxation due to the main point of the trip...

sigh and pause.....

So now, after my big hurdle, there is Dan's great accomplishment of finishing comprehensive exams.  Not all the results are in, but we are pretty darn sure he passed.  He got to check out the Neil Young-Alabama Shakes show at the Amphitheater as well - a mini comps break the day before his last set of questions.. This week he'll have his 2ish hour oral exam where he gets to sit in a room and have his committee pummel him with questions that will demand succinct answers until his brain is the consistency of baby food...

and let us not forget...

Hannah's big October consisted of getting a vomit-inducing hot spot on her face.  Hot spots are common in dogs - in starts with a scratch or bite that the dog continues to scratch at, it gets infected, then in a matter of hours it grows...it went from the size of a quarter one morning to a baseball later that evening when we got back to work.  She wore the cone of shame for a while and also got a visit to the vet where he gave her a shot of cortisol to dry up the nastiness and then a shot of antibiotics followed by a 10 day bottle of antibiotic pills...I also tended to her wound twice a day with some warm water and apple cider vinegar and blow dried the area to speed up the healing process...Playing Florence Nightingale helped me feel like I was doing something to help her heal.  She was in pretty miserable spirits for a bit,  but that maybe due to the embarrassment of the cone of shame (borrowed from and doctored up by Jamie see pictures later)...

Now it is November...Dan's Bday month, and a new month all around for the fam as a whole.  Now that most of the hard stuff is over we've vowed to be outside more, make more short weekend trips around the Southeast, get back in shape, do more cooking and gardening.  This first weekend back in town we've enjoyed the nice Fall weather with a nice 7 mile hike at Oak Mountain State Park followed by a fantastic early dinner at Little Donkey, which is soon soon coming to Tuscaloosa as well. Yippee!!  Hannah is absolutely tuckered out after the hike and it's so satisfying to see your dog so tired.  We spent Saturday watching a nail biter of a game between Bama and LSU (and in case you're wondering, the Bama win apparently clinches this race as well..) Whew!  We finally got a good game and thank goodness our quarterback finally manned up...

all for now!
pictures!!
xo

hi-o!!

whew...well it's been quite a while no??  Too long indeed...it's been busy here...

Dan has been gone on his Iceland sampling trip - but he'll be back Wed afternoon!  All has gone well for him - with great weather and successful field days...let's hope the return trip goes fine with all the samples!  The last 10 days without Dan has given me some quality time with my thesis and presentation.  It's less than a month away and I'm so excited for it to be over, but anxious about actually defending after all this time!! Regardless, it'll be all over after the hour presentation and Q&A with the public..then maybe another half hour to hour with just the committee alone to go over any corrections and edits...let it be known, 2pm PST on Oct 26th Chau will be walking on air.  Until then however, a raving lunatic....Dan is also taking his written exams that same week which means the whole household will be out of sorts in October.  Dan has a whole week of writing for 8 hours each day..sigh, I think we are both quite excited for November!

Pictures from the last month or so!

Recipes worth trying:

okra chili - made with deer meat and added about a cup of yellow corn meal to thicken it up and boost the flavor - I'm going to insist on doing this for all my future chilis!!  This one was delicious!!  I didn't have tomato paste - so I added some ketchup, and instead of a dark beer I added a can of frozen miller high life (don't judge me)...some frozen okra and tomatoes from the garden, and a cup of the pinto beans from below instead of kidney beans and bingo...dinner for days...

pinto bean masala - sounds odd but this is amazing with white rice, a few spoonfuls of jarred pasta sauce, and slices of mozzarella melted on top...best leftovers ever

pear cake/tart - the important thing is to underbake the thing, and dump as many pears as you can in it - don't mess with the pinwheel design...I think I used 6 pears for one of the tarts (I've made it twice in one week!)

xo

roll tide roll...

Here are some pictures of today's events - a brief walk to a new dorm on campus (we needed a reason to walk Hannah) and yard work!!

I went to Coweeta Thursday for the night - only 10 more trips up until the end!  Woo hoo!!  I love going to the field but the drive up there is killer - 5.5 hours to drive up, spend the night, wake up the next day and sample for 3 hours, then drive back to T-Town...the day spent in the lab washing rocks isn't the best either, but it does make you feel like you accomplished something for the month!  I also can't complain much about the rock supply that has transformed our backyard!!

Did you happen to see Alabama whoop up on Michigan (41 to something that we don't really care about)??  We streamed it online so we got to watch it in the comforts of our own home.  The week of hosting got us kinda tired so we abstained from the usual Alcove tailgating - maybe next weekend!

Dan is busy studying for comps, prepping a seminar lecture for Friday, and getting ready for his Sept 22nd trip out to Iceland - just a 10 day stint, but it will be a field and lab-packed trip!!  Lately we've been renting DVDs from the library (they're free!!).  Tonight is the original Alien - eeps!  But we have been revisiting old favs - Total Recall (The original) and Point Break to name a couple..  For some reason we've been in to the oldies - if only they had Willow and some Beverly Hills Cops...that'd be great...

all for now, Happy Labor Day!!

ct

Meat comas and food babies...

Whew!! 

It's almost the end of September - holy crap!!!  We've had a pretty eventful week that has been slam packed with food.  Delicious Southern food!  Jim visited this past week after recently returning from a year in Iceland field work.  He came by to check out how to setup the lab for bug picking now that he'll be in Montana with soooo many surber samples to pick through.  Thankfully he'll have an army of pickers and now he's seen the "machine" that is the Benstead picking lab.  

Sprinkled in between the work bouts we had gluttonous feeding frenzies and took in some Tuscaloosa (football memorabilia) sights...His first night in town we went to Nick's Filet House for a delicious steak dinner...next day we had a tasty spinach-mushroom-deer omlette, then a rib-rific dinner at Benstead's house (p.s. a pulled pork sandwich is AMAZING with a topping of kimchi - who knew!!?).  The next day we gorged on Carmelo Cafe's tasty Meat-and-two brunch (smoked gouda grits, fried catfish, crab-n-crayfish benedicts, and shrimp n grits to name a few of the dishes), not to be outdone by dinner we went over to Mr. Chen's Chinese restaurant with a big table to have a family style Sunday night dinner - the pictures do not do it justice.  The next day we sampled the new Mexican Joint we recently discovered, Lopez, and their tamales are outstanding...simply outstanding..  Dinner was another coma-inducing meal at Big Daddy's - a delicious Mediterranean place that is so low key and so so good - the chicken shwarma wrap with spicy pepper sauce and tahini is just drool inducing...Jim left the next day so we have to send him off with a bang with a huge breakfast at City Cafe (biscuits and sausage gravy can be the best thing ever there), and then a lunch time visit to Archibald's for BBQ.  We really wanted to sample the sliced pork, but once again we came too late for the pork and only had ribs available.  Still tasty, but simply not the same...

So, to say the least, Dan and I are now starting a detox program to reduce the amount of pork fat racing through our veins...holy schmoly we haven't gorged like that in a while..

Anyhow, Isaac is only giving us some cloud cover and a bit of wind right now...but rain is going to roll in soon so I hear...Thankfully, nothing like what the folks on the Gulf Coast have to deal with...yikes this does not look good...Let's hope he speeds up a bit and dissipates...

Here are some pics that include:  Dan's return home, Jim (aka "Junks") visits Alabama, and food..always food...

xo

p.s. oh!! I forgot to add!! Chau FINALLY defends her Master's work in October and I've set the date as Oct 26th!!  (Why and I talking in the third person?!)  I'll likely head up to Moscow on the 23rd and stay a week.  Let the freak out begin!!!  Ahhh!!!!

p.s.

I forgot to add - today my splurge purchase of Death Wish Coffee arrives in the mail today - perfect timing for Dan's return home!! 

200% more caffeine than the regular cuppa joe, I'm looking forward to a crazy buzz that will start my day.  I heard about it on NPR and just went for it...we'll report on its affects when we come down from the caffeine high tomorrow morning!!

This will be good for Dan so he can slowly work back into american coffee, which is far inferior to his Iceland coffee that he has been sipping on for the last summer...

I however, have been enjoying the coffee my mother sent - French coffee, Vietnamese coffee, it goes by many names, but delicious nonetheless...

YEAH!

hiya foks! It's D-Day...Dan Day!!

Yippee..right now Dan should be somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean!  He lands in Boston at noon, then hops onto a flight to Atlanta, then on yet another flight to Birmingham!  He should get in around 6pm tonight, but we've found that flights are rarely on time into Birmingham...sigh...add on top of that some storms and the airports on the East coast seem to be a complete cluster-f...Hopefully he gets in tonight and we don't have to travel to Atlanta to pick him up like last year!!

Here are a few pics!  Mostly of the garden really, which is slowing down big time.  

It's been a SUPER rainy August!  - great for the planties, but ack! the mosquitos (6 cases of West Nile in AL so far!)!!  Hannah and I limit our backyard time, but walks in the evening have been quite pleasant.  It's nice that the summer thunderstorms are back - I like waking up to them in the middle of the night and staring at the curtain of rain pounding the ground!  

Hannah does not appreciate the storms as much.  She did have to pee this morning at 4am - right when the storm was its fiercest!  I was surprised she actually wanted to go out, a bit hesitant at first, looking outside from the porch then looking at me asking 

"Really???  In this???"  

I didn't have much consolation since it was her deal to begin with (Maybe we should think about a pee before we go to bed instead of curling up for the night at 8pm???)  Anyhow...she soldiered on, doing that squinty thing with her eyes and shirking her shoulders like we do when forced out in the rain for a quick jaunt - why do we do that?  It's like we wish we were turtles and could pull our heads into our shell to keep from the rain - does this actually do anything? Maybe next time I'm caught in the rain I'll raise my head up high to embrace the rain a half millisecond sooner...

So a day of lab work, next week if machines are behaving I'll be working at the Gas Chromatograph shooting samples all day...I feel like I have about 300 of those samples to deal with...they run 6 min each, so that's about 30 hours in front of the GC...that won't be bad split up over the week...let's hope I have that number right.

Speaking of sample numbers..I finally crunched the number of water samples I have to push through the Ion Chromatograph - it'll be 10,000+ by the end of the Iceland project - holy moly!!  At least that's job security...

all for now, next time you get a blog Dan will be around - woo hoo for the reunited fam-diddly-amily!!