A Moo Point: Another catch-up!

It's been a while since I last updated, and since Easter Sunday always reminds me of family gatherings, I thought I'd update now to virtually gather with my family (we'll physically gather with John's family later today - which means they get a loaf of my fresh sourdough bread!)

Still been cooking a lot and trying new things in the kitchen. What you see above is some Quinoa Corn Chowder. I quinoa, and I like corn chowder, but this didn't come out exactly how I would have liked. I have some things I'm going to experiment with the next time I make it, though, so hopefully it'll come out better.

I've still been going on my photowalks, though without quite as much enthusiasm as last year. I'm hoping the change in the weather will help perk things up, though. You'll see some photos scattered throughout this entry, some from photowalks and some not. They're just some of my favorites from the last month.

One thing I don't have a picture of is my new TV! I've been talking about upgrading "my" TV (we call the TV in the living room "mine" and the one in the poker room "john's" because that's who watches them the most) to an HDTV for a couple months now, and John happened to find a flyer in the mail for H.H. Gregg where they had a "one weekend only, limited quantity available, one per family" sale on a Samsung 32" HDTV for $350. That was the size I wanted and right in my price range, but I wanted to shop around first, so we stopped at Best Buy first (which happens to be right next door to the H.H. Gregg), they didn't have anything that came close to that price, so I found a salesman, showed him the flyer, and asked if he could compete. He offered me the choice of two TVs for the same price. I settled on an LG for various reasons, and have been really happy with it ever since. It just looks fantastic in the living room. Now I just need to go shopping for a better TV stand, since the one I have now is really deep to accomodate the larger TV, and the new TV is so skinny!

I recently celebrated my 10 year anniversary of working at FirstEnergy - can you believe it? Which means I graduated from OU a little over 10 years ago, too. Unfortunately, 10 years at FE doesn't mean I get any more vacation - but it does mean I get to choose something from a catalog of various items. I'm currently leaning towards a double-burner griddle, becaue we make a lot of pancakes, so I figure that'll be useful.

I don't know the man in the photo above, but he happened to be walking in front of me with his family (there's a sledding hill just off to the right of the photo that you can't see), and the family veered off (to the picnic tables? their car? I don't know) and the father was left alone tugging the sled, and it just reminded me of just a classic moment for fathers - always left with the more physical tasks while the rest of the family is off bonding somewhere.

Speaking of work (which I was before I got sidetracked by the father pulling the sled), I think I'm going to start walking to it daily pretty soon. Ya know the road that you take to get from White Pond to my house? The one right after the train tracks? That's Frank Road. And it's been in pretty poor shape for a while and they're going to fix it up, which is going to require closing it, and I'm not going to drive to work if I have to drive really far out of my way to get there, so I'm going to start walking.

The real bummer of the story, though, is for the people that live on Frank. Those houses are worth between $20K and $60K. Over the last year or so, they've had to deal with the fact that the people in the more expensive houses on White Pond didn't want traffic on their road anymore, so all traffic has been diverted to go on Frank now. So they've had to deal with their road suddenly being a pretty major road and all the hassle and noise that comes with that. Despite the fact that my road has now been turned into a Dead End with virutally no traffic, I think the whole thing is stupid. Anyway, back to the people on Frank - not only do they have this additional traffic, and now have to deal with construction on their road, but the city is also assessing them to actually PAY for part of this construction! Each house on Frank (remember, worth $20-60K) has to pay $5-10K. It really frustrates me on their behalf.

Ok, back to food, because that's a much happier topic. Back in early March, I made these - homemade pierogies. They took forEVER (and that was even cheating using wonton wrappers instead of making my own dough), but were well worth it. I think next time I'll make them on a weekend, though, because making them on a work night meant I pretty much had no time to relax at all that night. I still have a bunch in my freezer, though - they're great for last-minute meals.

In other exciting news, I auctioned off one of my photos at work to beneft Harvest for Hunger. An 8x12 of this photo of the Lock 3 Amphitheatre in downtown Akron, mounted to be ready-to-hang went for $35. Not too shabby, huh? It was an exciting first venture into selling my photography, and I'm slowly working on setting up a "shop" on iffles.com to perhaps sell more. I'm just not interested in the marketing/promotion side of things, so I'm not expecting to get tons of sales, but if I sell one or two things a year, well, hooray for that.

Oh man, that vegetarian paella that you see above is one of the best things I've made all year. I'm drooling just looking at it. And that's a slice of John's bread-machine bread in the background. We still haven't bought a single loaf of bread since sometime in December. It's fantastic.

Our next door neighbors apparently have a dog again. In the amount of time they've been living there, they've had 3 different dogs that have come and gone. I'm not sure if they foster them or if they just can't seem to commit to one, or what? But between the dogs, the kids, and him working on his truck all the time, I kinda wish that my office window didn't overlook their driveway and backyard because I like working with my windows open in the Spring and it's distracting to have to hear all the various noises coming from their place.

A lot of my gutters fell off the house over the winter, so one big project this Spring is going to be replacing them. That's something we're paying someone to do. Another project that we're attempting ourselves (and by "we", I mean "John") is fixing the upstairs toilet. It's been a long process that all started with the fact that it seemed to run way too long, and sometimes not stop running until the next time it was flushed. Things were replaced one at a time, and then completely rehauled until the running has finally stopped - but now it doesn't always flush everything down. We're thinking, at this point, to just replace the entire toilet. We've probably spent the same amount of money in trying little things than if we had just done that to begin with. Oh well. I'm hoping we get that done before mom & dad come to visit in a few weeks. I'm sure they'd appreciate it, too.