Venting

So it's 3:30pm on Friday afternoon. I get to go leave work in exactly one hour. The way this last hour has been, the weekend can't come soon enough. Seth just happens to be taking a nap right now and I'm really pissed off and I need to gripe to somebody so you all get to listen.

As many of you know, I'm an x-ray technician. I work in the R & D department so I get to help build and test all the new x-ray equipment before it goes out to regular production. So about an hour ago I was working really hard trying to make the rest of the day go by fast. The thing I was working on was a radiator-like machine called a heat exchanger. This particular heat exchanger weighs about 70 lbs. It's not easy to handle.

This heat exchanger runs on oil, so when I first build it, I have to fill it up with oil and make sure there's no air bubbles in it. That's because when it gets hooked up to an x-ray tube if there's bubbles in the system, it'll make the x-rays look bad. It'll make the doctors think you have a big tumor. The oil filling process is not fun. There's long hoses flying everywhere and I have to man-handle the heat exchanger to rotate it and shake it to get all the bubbles out. It's not a pleasant experience on a normal day and today was worse.

There are 2 oil connections. One is for the oil to go in, one is for the oil to go out. I got the "oil in" hose connected and was in the process of connecting the other hose when the stupid connector got stuck open and began gushing oil everywhere. ARGH! I finally got the damn thing shut off but not soon enough. The heat exchanger and cart it was sitting on were covered in oil as was the floor. My clothes were somehow spared, but at that point it wouldn't have made any difference. I wanted to scream really bad words and smash everything on the floor.

So, I've spent at least the last half hour trying to clean up the huge mess. I was hot and sweaty and tired and pissed and then I got paint thinner on my jeans and I just want to go home. I finally got the heat exchanger filled up all the way which was no easy feat. For some reason (I wonder why...) today it felt like it weighed 500 pounds and things just weren't working. I decided I'll finish it on Monday when I've had time to forget this unpleasant afternoon.

I need a vacation.

Today's Special: May 31-June 6th

Ok so I missed last week. Big deal. I took a short break from planning. Now I'm all refreshed and ready to get back into the saddle of domestic goddessness. In case you're wondering I did make a couple meals last week. I ended up making Chicken Pineapple Stir-fry, which was pretty good. It was a new recipe. Then I also made some of that Mrs. Grass Homestyle Beef Vegetable soup (I added ground beef and a few extra noodles). I have to say I was surprised at how good it was. I actually really liked it. Other than those two things, I didn't make anything. Although I did order a couple pizzas. Does that count?

But aren't you proud of me? I'm totally posting this like 2 days early! I had to because I'm doing my grocery shopping tonight or tomorrow morning. Probably tonight. I'm sure Seth will think it's the funnest date ever :D



Sunday: Grapefruit Marmalade Marinated Salmon with rice pilaf and asparagus

(The recipe actually used orange marmalade but I have grapefruit that I want to try. This is new.)


Monday: Creamy Spinach Mushroom Pasta (New recipe, see below.)


Tuesday: Skillet Turkey, Broccoli, and Bulgar (New recipe, see below.)

Wednesday: Leftovers

Thursday: Hawaiian Haystacks This is a Hanson family thing. I thought it sounded weird the first time I had it, but it was pretty good. I like to use brown rice.


Weekend: Vegetarian Meatloaf with mashed potatoes and steamed carrots (this is a tried and true recipe... I actually really like it!)

Creamy Spinach Mushroom Pasta

1 tablespoon Olive oil
2 Garlic cloves, thinly sliced
4 ounces Mushrooms, cleaned and sliced
8 ounces Fresh fettuccine (or other fresh pasta)
4 cups fresh spinach
1/3 cup (about 3 ounces) Light garlic and herb spreadable cheese
¼ cup Low-fat milk
¼ teaspoon Salt
Fresh ground pepper to taste

Directions:
Cook pasta according to package directions. When done, reserve ¼ cup of water, drain the rest, and set pasta aside.
Meanwhile, heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute, until just soft and fragrant. Add mushrooms, stir, cover, and cook for about 3-4 minutes, until mushrooms are soft.
Add spinach to the skillet and stir until just wilted. Reduce the heat to low and mix in the garlic and herb cheese and milk.
Turn off the heat and add the pasta to the skillet and toss until well-mixed. If pasta dish seems dry, add reserved pasta water, 1 tablespoon at a time, until creamy. Season with ¼ teaspoon of salt and fresh ground pepper to taste.

Serves 2

Skillet Turkey, Broccoli and Bulgar

2 teaspoons Olive oil
2 Garlic cloves, minced
½ pound Turkey breast, cut into bite-size pieces
1 cup Reduced-sodium chicken stock
½ cup Bulgar
¼ teaspoon Dried thyme
1 cup Broccoli florets
8 Cherry tomatoes
¼ teaspoon Salt
Freshly ground pepper to taste
2 tablespoons Fresh parsley, chopped

Directions: Heat 2 teaspoons olive oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat. Add garlic and sauté for 1-2 minutes, until fragrant. Then toss in turkey and cook for 2-3 minutes. Stir in chicken stock, Bulgar, and thyme. Top with broccoli and cherry tomatoes, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 7-10 minutes, or until turkey is cooked through and Bulgar is tender. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Sprinkle with parsley and serve.

Serves 2

The City of Trees

For Memorial Day Seth and I drove up to Boise. Who do we know in Boise? Well, a couple people actually, but specifically we went to see our new friends, Heidi and Paul.

Paul & Heidi

I met Heidi because of this blog actually. She's the one who leaves me deliciously long comments. What's not to like about that? Heidi knows Collette, Seth's wonderful older sister and has been friends with her since they went to Albertson's together (the college, not the grocery store). They are both phenomenal piano players. So anyway, Heidi began reading my blog because she loves everything "Hanson" and originally was interested in learning about Seth. Long story short, we've been emailing and calling each other for the past few months.

Isn't she cute?

We eventually decided it would be fun to meet in person so Seth and I found some free time over Memorial Day weekend to drive up to Boise. We got to Heidi and Paul's house just after noon on Saturday and immediately felt welcome. It seemed like we'd known Heidi and Paul for years. We all have so much in common with each other from liking Psychology, cooking, and gardening to fancy cheese and hiking.

Me & my new gooder friend

The first night in Boise Heidi and Paul had a BBQ. It was so much fun! Paul made us tuna steaks, brats, fruit salad and potato salad. It was so good! He's an aspiring chef like me! Seth and I invited Cory, one of Seth's old friends to the BBQ as well (don't worry, Heidi and Paul approved first). He lives in Boise too and we thought it'd be a good way for Seth to spend some time with him while we were in town. Heidi and Paul invited Grandpa Dave, an amazing 90 year old man who has been taking piano lessons from Heidi for the last couple years. That's right, he's 90. And he fit in perfectly with our group of 5 30ish year olds. Grandpa Dave is an artist and he has a great singing voice and is one of the most interesting people I've ever met. We all talked about everything from Star Trek to obscure scientists and philosophers. (Ok so they were telling jokes about scientists and philosophers and I had no idea who the people were so I just laughed really hard so it would look like I knew what was going on.) Later on Heidi gave us a short piano recital and she and Dave did a piano/singing performance of "What a Wonderful World." It was so cute. Oh and before I forget, we had the BBQ out on the patio and Paul's garden was amazing! Seth was sitting out in the yard on a bench earlier in the day and said he was pretending like he was in a mental institution and the yard was his sanctuary where he could just go and sit everyday. Anyway, it made us really want a house.



The next day we went walking around this shopping district by BSU (Heidi and Paul live like 2 blocks away from BSU). We looked in a couple stores and then who did we run into? Cory! It was kind of weird. Seth's other childhood buddy Nick was with him too, so we stopped and talked to them for a while before heading off to eat some Mexican food. After dinner we stopped off at this little icecream/candy store and got some chocolates for dessert. Then Heidi and Paul took us on a driving tour of Boise and we looked at all the cute houses. Boise is such a beautiful city. We really liked it there. That night we just hung out at the house and talked and ate fancy cheese and chocolates. It's a hard life, huh?


On Monday morning Cory came over to the house again and we had a nice big breakfast, after which it was time for Seth and I to go back home. We took some pictures together with our new friends and then said goodbye. Heidi and Paul are the most amazing people. Seth and I are both glad to have met them and really enjoy having them as friends.



On our way home we ended up stopping at Shoshone Falls in Twin Falls. It's the Niagara of the West! Actually, Shoshone Falls are taller than Niagara, which I didn't believe at first but it's true. The Internets said so.

Round 2

It's raining. I can't do it by myself. I should have started 2 months ago, it's too late now. I need to clean the bathrooms. I just ate dinner. It's getting dark. I can't find my pants. I don't want to carry my keys. I'll have to start all over.

That last one. That last reason is the one real reason I knew I didn't want to run today. All of those other things were reasons my brain came up with to try and talk me out of it in a "it's not your fault" kind of way. I have a lot of will power, just not the kind that gets me to do things. My will power is great at talking me out of stuff.

So here I am, a mere what, 6 months later? Six months ago I ran my first 5k race. Six months ago I was on top of the world. Six months ago I told myself I'd keep running. Six months ago I quit.

It really is depressing. It's amazing to me how many excuses I can come up with. You know why I didn't keep running? I told myself it was too dangerous to run outside in the winter. There was too much snow. "But you could run inside," I thought. But I HATE the treadmill. I'll just do workout videos during the winter. But I didn't. And as the weeks went by I kept thinking I should run again before I waste my efforts, but then there was this nagging voice in my head telling me it was probably too late and I'd have to start over again. Looks like another self-fulfilling prophecy.

So here I am six months later. Seth sent me a text today daring me to guess what he'd just done. For some reason I immediately knew he'd gone running. Maybe it was because we'd driven past Brigham City the day before and Seth said, "Remember when we ran our 5k?" Yeah I remembered. I'd brought our running shoes with us on our trip to Idaho this weekend. Not to use for running... just to have in case we needed to do lots of walking or something. Seth unpacked the car when we got home and handed me the pairs of shoes to put away. I saw a certain look in his eye when he gave them to me. I felt a twinge of guilt and pretended not to notice.

After Seth told me he'd gone running, it immediately gave me a little nudge of motivation. I thought maybe I should go running when I got home. But on the way home it was raining. Ok it was barely sprinkling and by the time I got home it had stopped. Then I was hungry. So I made dinner. Then I wanted to watch my shows. So I did. It's definitely too late to go out now. I'll do Muscle Motion again. In fact by that time I'd given up on the idea of doing any sort of physical activity for the day. My plan was to watch more tv. Then Seth sent me another message suggesting maybe we sign up for another 5k. I cringed at the thought. I'd have to run again if we did that. But then something clicked in my brain. YOU'RE NEVER GOING TO START. YOU WILL NEVER RUN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO. YOU WILL NEVER START WORKING OUT AND YOU WILL ALWAYS BE OUT OF SHAPE.

For some reason that woke me up. I knew I needed to sign up for another race because otherwise, I would never accomplish my goals. It worked last time and I knew it would work again. So, before I even signed up for a race, I put my running clothes on and walked out the door.

As I began to walk down the street to warm-up, I thought, "Maybe it won't be that bad. Maybe I'll still be able to run good." But, after about a quarter mile of running, my chest and throat hurt too much to keep going. At that point I realized I was going to have to start all over. I would have to start at the very beginning. Run for 1 minute. Walk for 4. Upping my running gradually one week at a time. I'd finally procrastinated for so long that I'd made myself start all over.

At this point I should have been congratulating myself. You're finally doing it! You're running! You're outside and you're trying! Seth isn't here to cheer you on and you're still doing it! You're doing it all by yourself! Look at this beautiful place you live with the green grass and blooming flowers and towering mountain views! You did 40 minutes of physical activity! But all I could think was how much I'd lost. How far I'd fallen and how far I was going to have to go to get it all back. I told myself I'd never get back to this point and here I was. Sigh.

It's no wonder I've talked myself out of running for so long. Who would want to with this brain throwing out guilt and belittling comments for a whole 2 miles? I know I'm not going to get very far with this attitude. So I'm using this post as a way to vent my frustrations. A way to get rid of all these negative feelings and to just start over. Again.

I can do it. I know I can. I've done it before. This time is going to be harder. I'm on my own. No Coach Seth around every night to make me get off the couch. It's all me. But I can do it. And I'm not going to quit this time.

Scofie

So last weekend we went on yet ANOTHER adventure. Can you believe it? We've been trying to take advantage of the times when we have an extra long weekend. Plus, camping season is only so long (unless you want to freeze your butt off in the snow! Psht, yeah right).

We'd been wanting to get up to Scofield Reservoir as the ice was coming off because the fishing is supposed to be really good around that time. Unfortunately, the ice was already gone when we got there, but we still did ok.

Seth and I drove down to Scofield on Friday afternoon and found a camping spot way up on top of one of the hills in the national forest area. It was a huge area way back off the road surrounded by quakies and covered in bright green grass.

Oh yeah, the last time we were out camping we realized we needed another table for cooking. We only had one small table that would fit the stove, but nothing else. So, we stopped off at Cabelas on the way down and picked up a Camp Kitchen! We got a flier in the mail saying they were on sale so it was a great time to get one. It fits in the tent really well and isn't as wide as our other table so it saves room. Plus it comes with these shelves that are awesome for organizing all the cooking stuff. I forgot to take a picture of it, but this is the one we got. It folds up into a carrying bag too, so it doesn't take up tons of room.

Seth in his ghillie coat at Cabelas

So now we can use our other table to eat at! And while we're on the cooking tangent, last time we went camping I made pancakes, but I'd bought some Krusteaz Wheat & Honey pancake mix that you just add water to. It worked alright, but I wasn't super impressed with the taste. This time when I went shopping for camping food I found that Bisquick Shake 'n Pour pancake mix that comes in a plastic jug so all you have to do is add water to it and shake it up. It was SO much cleaner and easier and I didn't have to wash any dishes! It still isn't as good as homemade pancakes, but I liked it better than the Krusteaz stuff, it was cheap, and much better for camping. I also liked it because then you have somewhere to store the extra batter. One jug was enough for two days worth of breakfast and it was less than $2.

Ok enough with the cooking stuff. Seth's parents just happened to be down in Huntington that weekend visiting Daddy Hanson's parents so we thought it'd be fun to meet up with them. Mama Hanson ended up staying at the house with Grandma who wasn't feeling too well, but Daddy Hanson, Grandpa and Seth's Aunt Leslie all came out and met us on the East side of the lake. They weren't able to stay for very long, but it was nice to see them anyway.

Seth and I fished by ourselves for another hour or two until our friends, Ramona and Gabe came. They were only able to come for the day, but we had a lot of fun. On the East side of the lake we all caught at least one fish which we all let go. They were pretty small, no more than 10" at the biggest. And we managed to get checked by the Fish and Wildlife Officers, AGAIN. Just about every time we go out fishing with Ramona and Gabe we get checked. I think they're magnets for those guys. We were all legit though so they went away after checking all our licenses.

Gabe showing us how big his fish was.

We fished on the East side until about 4:00 and then decided to head over to the West side to cook up some food on Ramona's new grill. It was a pretty fancy little thing. Seems Cabelas sucked them in on their way down too. Anyway, those guys were nice enough to cook up some hamburgers and brats for all of us after which we took a long walk around a point to fish in a more secluded spot. We all caught a bunch of small pan size trout including a few rainbows, tiger trout, and cutthroat hybrids. We kept a few of them this time around which Seth and I ate for breakfast the next morning with our pancakes.

We saw some cool stuff while fishing over in that spot. Twice, a huge military cargo plane flew really low right over us. I don't know what they were doing, probably some sort of training, but it looked pretty awesome. And on our walk back to the cars we saw a fox running after some geese. He ran away and hid as soon as he saw us, but once we got back to the cars he came out again. Seth had his binoculars so we took turns passing them around to watch it.


On our drive back home the next morning, we took a bit of a detour off the highway in order to get to Strawberry Reservoir. The road wasn't marked very well and we must have made a wrong turn somewhere, because we never did make it. We weren't lost, per se, just weren't exactly on the road we wanted to be on. We ended up coming down Diamond Fork Canyon which was beautiful. We stopped half way down and had a picnic by the river and then thought we'd better break out our fly rods before the trip was over.

It was the first time I'd fished with my fly rod since winter was over and guess what?! I caught a fish! The first fly fish of the year. That story is probably going into my Fishing Blog, so I won't go into details, but that fish made me the happiest of all the fish I caught all weekend. And he was by far the smallest.


So it was a great trip. The weather was perfect for the whole time, not even windy or anything. It was great getting to hang out with Ramona and Gabe again because we don't get to see them as much anymore. Plus we caught some fish. Something that hasn't happened for a few months.

Time Flies When You're Having Fun

The other day I got to wondering how long it'd been since I started this blog. And guess what? It just happened to be my one year blogiversary! (Isn't that the cutest word ever? I made it up myself.) So I thought I'd just do a quick post to acknowledge it.

Since last year a lot has happened. 70 posts worth to be exact. I originally started this as a way to write my life story. Although I do try to write things that would go into a typical life story, I've used this blog as a lot more than that. This has become a great outlet for me to express myself. I've used it as a sanity saver when times get a little slow and boring, and a way to tell everyone good news and fun stuff. It's my way of showing the world a side of me that not many people get to see at a glance. All of these things are a part of my life story. Writing about stupid things and cooking and adventures is all part of my Karen World. It all mushes together to make Me. And we all know there's much more to Me than just a sack full of memories. Or at least I hope you know that by now. And can you believe how my readership has grown?! I mean, I must be up to like 5 people! That's almost enough to get syndicated, right?

I hate the word "blog" but I can say that I've really enjoyed "blogging" much more than I thought I would. I wasn't really even sure exactly what a "blog" was when I started. I thought I'd write for a little while then get bored with it and quit, but looks like I was wrong. Thanks to everybody for reading this, it's part of what makes me like it so much. Getting comments and reading other people's blogs is one of my favorite things. So, if you have a blog, and you haven't commented on mine yet, I guarantee I'll start reading yours if you let me know you're there.

Thanks again everybody!

Love,
Karen

Today's Special May 17-23rd

So for those of you who didn't get a chance to vote on whether I keep my menu postings, TOO BAD! That survey was up since last week. If you haven't visited my glorious blog since then, you don't deserve to voice your opinion. At any rate, I received a lot of positive votes in lieu of my menus so I will continue to post them.

I get more and more behind on this meal planning thing every week! This week is extreme slacker week. We were out of town on Sunday and will be gone again this Saturday and Sunday. I'm boycotting the grocery store this week because I hate going and I spend too much on food. So, the meals I've planned are bare-bones, scrape the bottom of the barrel, cheap as dirt kind of things. But hopefully they won't make us throw up.

Sunday: Seth ate the last gyro from last week and I finished up the extra Greek pitas by dipping them in leftover yogurt sauce. We were tired from camping ok?

Monday: Southwest Vegetarian Bake - This was a new recipe which sounds not so good, but surprisingly was. I even reviewed it already if you follow the link. I changed it up a bit, which I also noted in my review.

Tuesday: Curried Lentils and Rice - This is also new. I don't think I've ever really made curry anything so I thought I'd try this. Plus, it sounds kind of healthy. I need to make sure all my Muscle Motion efforts are enhanced by my diet. UPDATE: See comments.

Wednesday: Tuna Casserole an old family favorite.

Thursday: Jo Mama's World Famous Spaghetti There's a container of this in my freezer already so all's I gotta do is throw it in the microwave!

Weekend: Heidi and Paul are going to show us the wonderful world of food in Boise! Wahoo!