Happy Holidays

Kimberly and I are on a bit of a holiday over these holidays. We're hanging out with my family, eating too much food and bewildered at all the snow here in Boston.

We'll get back to some posting when we get back to Iowa. One of my New Year's Resolutions will be to post more regularly, so we'll see if that lasts past January 15th, like my gym membership.

Hope you're having a nice holiday, and keeping warm, wherever you might be.

I'll leave you with this picture of Kimberly and our niece 1900 to warm your heart. Not even the Grinch can make you sad after seeing this picture.

One down, seven to go...

Well, it's over. Done. Finito. Phew...

The semester is finally done. It's official. My grades are submitted (all 50 of them). The portfolios have been read, the finals reviewed, the math double-checked (thank you Excel). I've been done with my own work since Thursday, and so this means I'm actually DONE!

Want to know my dream plans for the break? My secret aspirations?

I ordered 5 books from Amazon and none of them are school related. Whoopie!! Thousands of pages of relaxation. Now if only they arrive soon.

Of course, I have two new preps next semester that I need to lesson plan for, and three crazy-hard classes of my own that I need to start studying for before classes begin (yes, we PhD students start studying BEFORE classes start, that's just how geeky we are). So the break won't be all rest. But, that's okay, any break at all is welcome right about now.

See you in a few days, I'm sure I'll have to stop reading at some point!

A Point for the Middle

For the most part, I haven't been too nice to the Middle on these here interwebs. It's not that I don't like it here, it's just that I like to complain, a remnant of my east coast upbringing that I don't think will ever abandon me, no matter how hard Kimberly wishes. Despite the terrible drivers, extreme weather, and difficulty finding things we have become accustomed to having (like feeling in our extremities), we are settling in with our very nice, terribly coiffed (like I can really say anything about anyone's hair), very Christian, Midwestern brothers and sisters.

So, I come here today not to fault the Middle, but to praise it, for there is something here in Iowa which I could not find in Portland: a dingy, cheap, sketchy, wonderful Italian grocery store.

You may remember a while back when we discovered that there was some notoriety for Italians in Capital City. Well, I finally made it to their neighborhood (on the recommendation of a friend in Portland who is originally from Iowa) and found the wonderful Graziano Brothers market in South Des Moines.

Grazianos was great - cinder block building, no windows, haphazard parking lot - and was packed pretty tight with basic Italian staples. There were 20 different kinds of canned tomatoes, 10 different kinds of roasted peppers, 50 types of dry pasta, lots of fresh pasta (including ravioli and tortellini), fresh pizza dough, parmigiana cheese, panettone, and pretty much anything else you could want from your Italian specialty market. They had fresh bread that wasn't sliced on Wonder. Most importantly, they had a deli with home-made sausage, bulk olives, and fresh cut meats, including wonderful prosciutto and salami.

Of course, you can get all these things in Portland. Except that the prosciutto will cost you $30 a pound. At Grazianos, just $15. And in Portland, the chances of the counter help speaking Italian to the customers is low. Here, there were actual Italians, and the were being their typical Italian selves (cutting in line, throwing the elbow, etc). I still don't know how they get here, but apparently they're here. And I 'm not going to complain.

The next step is to find out if there's any good pizza down in that neighborhood. Making my own dough is fine, but can get old. And don't even get me started on the local 'pizza' places (if they didn't serve wings, there would be no reason to go there). There's an Italian Festival over the summer, where I'm sure they'll have pizza, fried dough (but they'll probably call it funnel cake), and sausage subs (here in Iowa, they call them Guinea Grinders, which no one finds interesting or offensive in the slightest way).

While I might have to wait for the ground to thaw before I can check out the festival or the pizza, I know that tonight I can have some prosciutto and good bread.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

So, this snow thing. It's going to stop soon, right?

No?

It's snowing again today. At the moment, it's a balmy 12 degrees out (Fahrenheit) and I'm watching out my office window as the snow piles up again across campus. This makes the third dumping of snow this week. And, while it sure is nice to have all that ugly gray snow covered up by the pretty white stuff, I'm awfully tired of slipping and sliding and landing on my ass. Not fun!

Send us your warm thoughts and hot cocoa dreams...

(Finals this next week too- the end is in sight!)

Things I'll Miss About Oregon: Volume 12 [Sitka Spruce]

When we got married a few years back, we spent our 'honeymoon' on the Oregon Coast in the nice little town of Manzanita. To get out to the Coast, you head west from Portland on Highway 26, up and over the Coast Range, until you hit Canon Beach and Highway 101. Right when you come down from the Coast Range, you hit a flat spot in the road. It's along this flat spot that you will find the World's Largest Sitka Spruce tree.

We had driven out to the Coast a bunch of times. I always contemplated, but never followed through on, stopping at the Sitka Spruce. Kimberly stopped once when she was like 12. On the way home from our honeymoon, I decided to pull into the parking lot. We spent about an hour just hanging out near the tree (it was a Wednesday and we were the only ones there), taking pictures, hiking around. It was pretty fun.

Sadly, on Sunday, the world's largest Sitka Spruce finally fell.

The tree was somewhere between 700 to 750 years old. 50 years ago, it was scarred by a lightning bolt. Then last year, during another storm, a giant chunk fell off, showing that the inside was rotting. The tree toppled this past weekend.

Kimberly in front of the Sitka Spruce. You can see the scar
from the lightning strike on the tree above.

No one really knew when the tree would fall because of the rotting wood. I think most people thought it would stay up a little longer than this.

Anyways, the Sitka Spruce is gone. It's kind of a sad day.

Kimberly pretending to be a hobbit under a
neighboring tree (this is not the Sitka Spruce)

Our First Snow of the Middle

A snowy creek in the woods behind our house.

When we woke up on Saturday morning, there was some strange noises coming from the bottom of the bed. At first, I though it was Miles chasing a rubber band or something. After a few minutes, I realized that something was tapping on the window.

Our backyard

When we rolled out of bed, we found the ground covered in snow and ice raining down from the skies. Kimberly was very excited. Though she has been in snow before, she's never been in an ice storm before. When we went for a walk later in the afternoon, Kimberly was completely enthralled with the icy trees and frozen forest. I have to admit that it's pretty beautiful when the trees are all covered in ice and everything kind of twinkles in the light. It's not as fun when the trees start losing limbs under the weight of the ice.


Some pics of the ice and snow here (obviously), some on Flickr (if you're interested).

Our apartment is right behind this tree. Ain't the building lovely.

High Class

When we were traveling in Italy, we did a lot of eating and drinking of wine. We tried our hardest to eat and drink whatever was the local specialty.

When we were in Siena, we found a nice little wine shop. The old man inside spoke no English, but he took a liking to us and was opening bottles for us to taste. We were able to determine that he and his family had a small vineyard where they were starting to produce their own wines. The quality was pretty good and the bottles pretty cheap, so we ended up drinking a decent amount of his wine while we were in Siena.

Since they had started making their own wines, they were converting their shop to sell their own wines and were trying to get rid of everything else. In the corner of the store was a 'Everything for 18 €uro' shelf, so I went to investigate while Kimberly and family talked to our new friend. I noticed that there were some pretty nice looking wines, including one of the Italian B wines (in Italy, they have Brunello, Barolo, and Barbaresco wines, which are all of high quality. They rank in a certain order, from most bestest to least best, but I can never remember that order; I just know they're all supposed to be pretty good). There was one that had a price tag on it for 7o €.

Not really understanding the situation, I confirmed with him that everything, and I stressed the everything, on the shelf was 18 €, even if marked with a different price. He said that, yes indeed, all the wine was 18 €.

Since I had never tasted one of the Italian B wines, and since this one seemed to be on sale at an amazingly reduced rate, I decided to spend the money (18€ = ~ $25) and try it out. Kimberly's mom and sister, who were traveling with us at the time, actually carried the wine back to the US for us. I am their debt for this task.

Anyways, last night we decided to open the bottle, since we were having some baked pasta. We figured a nice, Italian red would go perfect.

We opened the bottle and were blown away. The wine was pretty amazing.

After dinner, while savoring the rest of the bottle, we decided to do a little research on the bottle. It turns out the wine was definitely worth the 18€. We could have bought half a plane ticket with that bottle of wine.

Sometimes, you just stumble on a good deal. And fortunately for our taste buds, we jumped at the chance.

Shaky Hands make for Blurry Pictures. The label says:
Poggio all Oro
Brunello di Montalcino
Castello Banfi
Riserva 1995

This Is How They Roll in Iowa

It's miserable here today. It snowed about 1/2 an inch last nght and now freezing rain is falling from the sky. It's the perfect combination as the snow is forming a solid core of ice, making it impossible to leave the house.We'll post some pictures later on.

So to warm everyone up, I present this video. This girl actually has a radio show on the college station here, which I had listened to a few times before someone sent me this video.

There's so many fantastic parts to this video, I can't count them. Although my favorite is when she says "you make me hotter than a stick of hot glue; I'm gonna scrapbook everything we do." If that doesn't sum up the Middle, I don't know what does.

Please enjoy. I am.