Disastrous!

I had an amazingly disastrous weekend last weekend, and I have to share it with you all, because it is so ridiculous, it's funny.

As a preface to the story, Ben was out of town all weekend with the PSMC board retreat, so I took in all this disaster on my own. Literal misfortune struck first when I got home from work on Friday, and there was a message from Visa saying that someone had helped themselves to my debit card number and went on a shopping spree at a Wal-mart in South Carolina, to the tune of over 500 dollars. So, they told me all the steps to take to fix that situation and I went on my merry way.

Come Saturday, my plans for the day were totally skewed for a variety of reasons, but this was no big deal and no big surprise. As I was grocery shopping on Saturday afternoon, I noticed that Hatch chiles were on sale at the store, and they are supposed to be a big, once-a-year kind of produce, so I figured I'd give them a try. Upon returning home, I read up on these chiles online, and it said that they are fantastic when roasted, (but that you should wear gloves when handling them and keep your hands away from your face). Needless to say, I did not wear the gloves, trusting myself to be "careful" and wash my hands a lot, which I did. Unfortunately, it turns out that the capsaicin in the chiles is more resilient than that. For the rest of the evening, I had burning sensations all over my hands and face.

I had gone out for supper for the evening (at a fantastic Brazilian steakhouse for a friend's birthday), and when I returned, things started to go swiftly south. When I got back at 9:45 PM and greeted the dogs who were thrilled to see me, there was a message on my answering machine from a member of my worship team saying she was sick and wouldn't be able to sing the next morning. This wouldn't be an issue, except that we had already only had 3 people on the team altogether for the week, one of whom has only been at the church for a month. So, after this person was out, it left me and the new guy. On top of that, it was Communion Sunday, and so we were doing a LOT of music! After calling a few people who I didn't feel terrible about calling so late on a Saturday night (and getting turned down by all of them), I figured I should just check my email, call it a night, and deal with it in the morning.

When I got to my laptop, which was sitting on the floor in the dark living room, I noticed that it felt funny, but I figured I must have gotten it greasy when I was using it in the kitchen, which I often do (I know, I know, totally not kosher). However, then I got suspicious, and turned on the lights, and discovered that one of the dogs had PEED on my laptop!!!!!!!! I was absolutely beside myself. When I calmed down, (and cleaned it off) it occurred to me that I probably shouldn't even try it until it had dried out altogether, so I just went to bed in hopes that the morning would treat me better. (But not before I had literally bleached and then soaped my hands, in hopes of finally ridding myself of all the spice on my hands.)

I got up Sunday morning and took the dogs for a walk (they were jerks to every other dog they met) ate breakfast, and then decided to try and fire up the old laptop (hoping it wouldn't literally fire up!) I pushed the power button with fear and trepidation and.....nothing happened. Tried again. Nothing. ANGUISH!!!! I could not believe that my laptop had gotten fried by dog pee!!! (I was mostly distraught at the thought of losing all my pictures and school files.) However, then I calmed myself, and thought that maybe, if I was "lucky", it had only ruined my (brand new!) battery. So I got my old battery (which only holds a charge for an hour or so), and tried it out, and sure enough, we were good to go. However, it was still frustrating that this was a $70 emptying of the bladder by the dogs.

Before church, I decided to try out my contacts which had been bothering my eyes the previous week, but I had let my eyes rest for a couple days, and figured I'd be good to go. I put in the first contact, and my eye nearly exploded into a bright red mess, as I realized that bleach is not enough to kill the spiciness of a pepper!!! So, not only did I have a blazing red eye with a contact searing in it, I had to stick my finger in my eye again to get it out! After quickly doing that, and putting in every eye drop in my cabinet, I headed off to church to do a duet for the entire service.

After this, things started to perk up a little. My eye didn't stay a burning mess all morning, our duets actually sounded pretty darn good, Ben showed me that my battery was not fried, but just really, really, really, dead and only needed to be charged a good, long while, and eventually the chile spiciness must have worn off :-) But for a while, I couldn't help but be amazed at how so many things were thwarting my plans for a calm, refreshing, relaxing weekend :-) Hope you all have a much better weekend!

Laughter and Tears

You may have noticed that I'm tired of the heat and hoping for fall, with my new background :-)

I have to post this video because I was literally crying, I was laughing so hard at this clip of Will Ferrell on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. (The fact that Jimmy cannot keep a straight face for the life of him is fantastic :-)) I know, I know, it takes a certain kind of humor to find this entertaining, but as it turns out, I am just such a person. :-) Hope you like it!

Would you like some salad with your protein?

Tonight, I made one of my favorite salads, which is particularly refreshing in Phoenix in the summer. As I was making it, I realized that it's really more protein than it is salad, (Ben's favorite kind of salad). I love to make it in the most effective method for consuming all salad ingredients: on a large platter. This way, you just layer everything on the platter, and since it's not deep, the heavy things don't sink to the bottom, so every bite has all the ingredients. See what you think!



Southwest Cobb Salad

1 bunch of salad greens
2 c. chicken, cubed
4 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
2 c. black beans, drained
1 c. shredded cheese
12 slices bacon, cooked and crumbled
2 avocados, peeled and diced
2 c. tomatoes, diced
2/3 c. ranch dressing
1/3 c. salsa

On a large platter, spread lettuce as the bottom layer. Layer chicken, eggs, beans, cheese, bacon, avocados, and tomatoes on the salad. Mix ranch and salsa and drizzle over the salad.

What goes up, must come down

After a CRAZY, busy 2 weeks traveling in Europe, we have returned, safe and sound. However, after forcibly altering our internal clocks to skip 9 hours of our lives, we are now painfully yanking those hours back to where they belong. While the trip was completely worth it, jet lag sucks. The first day back I was fine, but in the last day or two I've definitely been getting sleepy at seemingly random times.

So, to wrap up an excellent trip, here are some of the things we did and did not miss :-)

Fantastic things that we miss already:
-the food! (though there was junky food to be had, by and large we ate quite well)
-the sub-100 degree temperatures
-cool nights
-eating somewhere new every night
-lovely hotel owners-people who didn't guess that we were American (one French vendor thought we looked French!!)
-simple, cheap trains to get you to where you wanted to be, instead of flying everywhere-a walking culture, where sidewalks are often more full than streets
-Alps
-street food (crepes, calzones, falafel, etc.)
-"secret" tiny, friendly, towns in the Swiss Alps :-)
-not being on a schedule
-simple airline security (no shoe removal necessary!)
-meals that literally only involve bread, cheese, wine and fruit
-greenery!
-water!
-meals that consist solely of dessert-cow bells-stumbling upon seemingly random parades of tall puppet-like items (we dubbed this la plaza de las personas grandes)
Things we were happy to come home to: -our own dogs (lots of dogs in Europe, but not ours!)
-the same bed every night
-cooking
-free toilets (this should be a fundamental human right, people!)
-all the water we want at restaurants for FREE
-consistent internet connections
-understanding what people are saying (the French grandma serving continental breakfast scared me!)-using more than 5 sets of clothes
-dryness (as opposed to humidity)
-driving
-air conditioning (not an assumption in many places in Europe)
-spending a WHOLE lot less money!

[Steve/Darla/Ben, if I missed anything, please add it via the comments section.]

One of my goals during the trip was to learn 5 new words a day in the local language, so here is a sampling:

London:
peckish=hungry
jug of water=pitcher (I knew the meaning, it's just now how we use the word "jug" to refer to something on the table)
peg=clothespin
armill=bracelet
trolley=cart (a la grocery cart)

Paris:
soldes=sale
gratuite=free
tour=tower
vous ete ici=you are here
ou est Steve=where is Steve (he tended to wander off)

Gimmelwald, Switzerland:
bach=river or creek
bio=organic
suppe=soup
see=lake
feure=fire

Venice:
saldi=sale
ingresso=entrance
casino=small house
d'ove il Steve=where is Steve
panna montata=whipped cream (rhymes with Hannah Montana, and is super fun to say with an Italian accent)

Barcelona (Catalonian Spanish):
benvenguts=welcome
rebaixes=sale
donde esta Steve=where is Steve
sortida=exit
gofres=waffles

(By the way, we honestly didn't do that much actual shopping, it's just that the word "sale" was on every single store window we passed.)

Having completed our European Sampler Platter (which was definitely what it felt like), I would say that 3 nights was about an ideal amount of time for us to get a good feel for a place. When we were only in a place 2 nights, it definitely felt like we were barely running through the place. However, now, we can all say where we might want to spend more time, and/or see next time. Personally, I'd love to go back and spend a week in Paris, and I'd like to spend more time in Italy (though I think I've seen most of what I want to see in Venice). I loved the food and the sights in Paris, and would love to see more of the surrounding area. If I went back for any length of time, I'd probably take a cooking class there. In Italy, I LOVED the language! I'd love to learn it. It sounds so cool :-) And now, good bye, in all 5 languages we took a dip in:

Cheers!
Bon voyage!
Auf wiedersehen!
Arrivaderci!
Adios!

Great Gaudi!

[Note: Sorry for the delay on this post! We're home and now I finally have time to think and wrap up some loose ends.]

As we flew into Barcelona from Venice, there were many architectural landmarks pocking the cityscape. Over the course of the next several days, we had a fantastic time discovering them. We also had a spectacular time enjoying the food of Barcelona, including excellent seafood and tapas bars.During our first evening in Barcelona, we rambled Las Ramblas, a wide street with a large market-type area in the center with everything from tacky tourist things to pet birds for sale to flowers. Off to one side is the famous Boqueria meat and produce market, where we saw lots of fresh seafood and meat, gorgeous fruit stands, and fantastic arrays of olives (see Ben trying to decide?), nuts and dried fruits as well. However, since both of these places are so famous, they are also QUITE crowded. (Our hotel was just a block or two from the Boqueria, but it was far enough away to be quiet.) Once we got to the end of the Ramblas, we were basically at Barcelona's harbor and we spent a bit of time examining the boats in slips, including the racing sailboats in town for a regatta.

The next two days were mainly spent taking in one of Barcelona's main draws, the Modernista architecture that Antoni Gaudi (among others) made famous in the early 1900's. Ben and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing how Gaudi apparently designed nary a straight line in his life, and took the majority of his inspiration from the waves and swirls of nature in things like the nautilus, bones, honeycombs, etc. Additionally, he was excellent at using new designs to serve a purpose that was what we would now call green or repurposing or recycling, etc. This was clear in his use of recycled glass for mosaics, and creating items that collected and reused rain water. Some of his creations that we saw included Casa Mila (La Pedrera), Casa Batllo, Park Guell (next pic), and the very famous (and very unfinished after 100 years of work) La Sagrada Familia cathedral. (Since we were in Barcelona and some of us are Olympics fiends, we did have to check out the site of the 1992 Olympics, which was pretty cool, though somewhat unused now.)Finally, we had an excellent time in Barcelona discovering the true meaning of tapas bars :-) On Sunday afternoon (when apparently nothing is open in Barcelona-seems to be true most afternoons, actually), we stumbled upon a small bar/restaurant that was open. We (and when I saw we, I mean Darla with her excellent Spanish) asked for a few plates of typical Spanish tapas. (Tapas are basically small portions of food on toothpicks, appetizer-style.) She brought us a plate of small toasted bread rounds with a bit of tomato sauce and a small square of egg/potato bake toothpicked on top, plus a plate of meat, a plate of cheese, a plate of sausages, a plate of fried fish pieces, a plate of baked sweet potatoes, and continued on until we'd told her at least 2 or 3 times we had plenty (see below). We were thrilled to discover that it was very inexpensive (1.67 euro per plate!) and that she essentially gave us a few on the house. She definitely seemed to be enjoying bringing us all kinds of new food :-) (We were all the only ones there in the middle of the afternoon :-)) One other evening we hopped back and forth between a couple of excellent tapas bars (in which you sit at/near the bar and pick however many tapas you like, and at the end they just count the toothpicks). We decided that we'd definitely have to try a tapas party when we got home :-)

Watery (and sticky) Venice

While Switzerland was a cool 17 degrees during most days, Venice is a hot, humid, sticky 25 degrees. That's in Celsius for all of you across the pond :-) I actually don't know the actual temperature that it's been in Venice, but I do know that yesterday my knee caps were sweating. I often exaggerate, but in this case, I truly am not. The front. of my knees. were. sweating. Disgusting!!! Definitely 3 shower a day weather, which I know some of you are familiar with :-)

Anyway, while the weather has been less than comfortable, we've had a great time checking out all the ins and outs of Venice. While Ben was initially disgusted with the scores and scores of tourists and Steve was initially taken aback at the amount of graffiti that plaster's Venice's walls, it has since become quite the enjoyable haunt. Particularly enjoyable when one has multiple gelato/ice cream stops per day :-) (You gotta do something to beat the heat!)

There are incredible numbers of tourists at St. Mark's Square (see Steve in the Doge's Palace), but when we meandered away from the major tourist areas, we got to see a bit of what Venice is like to the remaining locals. (We weren't terribly afraid of being lost because, hey, it's an island. You can't get too lost! :-)) Additionally, since most tourists only come to Venice for a day and don't stay overnight, it is WAY more fun and local at night. One night we sat and listened to the various small musical ensembles playing on the piazza and watched older couples dance :-)

Last night, we decided we'd pay the extra and eat at the ultra-touristy restaurants right on the Grand Canal. It was totally worth it. Not only was the food great and the view spectacular, but since we were right on the water, there was a marvelous breeze blowing off the water that helped dry us out for the rest of the evening (which entailed more gelato :-)) And tonight we celebrated Steve's birthday...by continuing to eat good food and observe/take part in different cultures in Europe :-)

A few more Swiss Alps pix

At the top of the Schilthorn mountain.

Gimmelwald.

A steep descent.

A true mountain lake.