Last weekend

I had an action packed weekend. That's for sure! On Friday my sister came to visit and we went to K's sister's birthday party. It wasn't the most fun party ever, but it was something to do, and there was Italian Beef and plenty of desserts! We played catchphrase for awhile. That game is always fun.

On Saturday we went to the Garfield Conservatory Garden and pretended that it was summer! I got a lot of good pictures that day. There really are a lot of amazing plants out there. After that we went to dinner at Penang. We got 3 apetizers and 3 meals. We were so full afterward! I got this one pork chop dish that had the most tender pork chop! It was one of the chef's specials. But I can't remember the name of it for the life of me. We also had some skirt steak dish and a seafood yam pot. After dinner we went to the mall and K and my sister went shopping like they have never shopped before. Ok maybe not, but they had fun. I sat in a massage chair at Brookstone. At night we went to a dueling piano bar called Howl at the moon and we had a bucket of Hurricaine Rush (I think) We partied like it was 1997. So in other words, normally :P

Sunday we went to church. Everybody got lost or lost something except me. My sister got stuck in a one way traffic pattern. I couldn't find her for 30 minutes. She even bought a pay-as-you-go phone to call me! Kristin also lost her work cell phone. boo! After my sister headed back home K and I went to a superbowl party and ate pulled pork sandwiches. MMM MMM. Then the weekend ended. Fun times were to be had by all.

I beat K to it!

The Chicago Spire

My weekend was pretty laid back because I have some crazy sinus cold that just kicked in Saturday morning. I hope it goes away Monday, that would be great! Anyway, on Friday, I hung out at Kristin's house and just lounged around. We talked a lot. I dunno what we talked about though. The cold is making me delirious!

Saturday, I watched a lot of TV in the morning and learned a quick way to make puff pastry, how to brine a pork roast (soak in salt water) and that Donald Trump is building a 90 story building in Chicago. Of course, that will be ironically "trumped" by a 150 story building scheduled to be finished in 2009 in the north side of Chicago. This building will be the tallest in north America, and strangely it will look like a giant screw. After that I rode my bike 10.4 miles to the youth group leader thing I do at the church. That was a lot of fun! I wore earplugs for the first time and it was so peaceful and quiet. I found myself becoming overly comfortable while riding like this so I made it a point to remind myself that I have to maintain 100% attention and scan for potential hazards just like they taught me in class! Luckily my nose behaved for the whole bike ride! After the youth group I ordered fried rice and watched Donnie Darko with Kristin. I still don't completely understand what the director was trying to get at in the movie. But I think Donnie could travel through time or something. Or he was just super crazy!

On Sunday, Kristin and I made white bean and chicken chili, sweet potato chips, with some special cornbread muffins with green onions, sour cream, sharp cheddar, and creamed corn inside. They were very soft and moist. With a little tweaking they could be some fantastic snacks! My nose is driving me crazy today and I think the cold is worse, but what can I do but wait it out... well I guess I could take 6 Sudafed, 1 Claritin, 2 Tylenol, and one vitamin! That oughta fix it! wait.... nope, didn't help.

mmmhmm

On Thursday I made fried catfish for Kristin, her grandmother and her sister. They loved it. I cheated and used Zataran's cornmeal breading though instead of making it from scratch. Her grandmother also made some delicious traditional cornbread that contained only corn meal, oil, salt, and eggs. It reminded me of those corn cakes I tried to make once as a kid because I learned that George Washington loved em! I didn't like the corn cakes so much because they were very dense and had little flavor, but Kristin's grandmother's cornbread had plenty of flavor. I even put a little maple syrup on my piece.

Friday was a pretty awkward night. K's friend met a new girl about a month ago and they're already official. They call each other by nicknames regularly and cuddle more than any other couple I've seen. This made it kind of awkward because I find it annoying when people can't keep their hands off one another while in public. And they just met and they were cuddling like they knew one another for months. We played Apples to Apples entirely too long, and I suggested we stop playing that game and move to another once to everybody, but I was ignored. So I secretly begged K to intervene since it was her friend, but even that took awhile. The strawberry daiquiris were very good though. I only had a tiny bit because I was driving. Her friend is a good dude though so I hope he is happy with his new gf.

Saturday was a pretty laid back day. We made 49ers flapjack dough the night before and let it ferment over night. When Kristin came back over the next day, we cooked them up and they tasted more sour than we remember from Walker Brothers, but they were great with syrup. We decided that we'd try not to let them sit over night at room temperature next time and see if the taste was more similar. After that we did our youth volunteering thing at Kristin's church. They had a special speaker who told her story about how she tried to kill herself and how she found God afterwards. It's sad that she felt so desperate to kill herself though, but I'm glad she is happier now.

For dinner I had a Work Burger from Crave. It is one of the better burgers out here. It comes with bacon, onions, mushrooms and cheddar cheese. They even cook the beef to -order, so if you like yours a little more pink, you can ask for it! We then watched Apocalypto. It was a pretty good movie, but yes, Mel Gibson is still the king of gory snuff films. There was a lot of blood. He sure loves his blood.

On Sunday Kristin and I hung out at her parents' house and went shopping at random stores. Her parents fed me brownies with walnuts and I ate too many. But boy oh boy were they good. At least Kristin is keeping me working out over the weekends. That makes me feel a little better. We also ate dinner at her parents' house. I had Lou Malnati's pizza and herb crusted tilapia. After all that I watched Queen with Kristin and took an online "personality strengths" test. Apparently my strengths are: Competition, Achiever, Focus, Strategic, and Significance. So basically, I'm gonna kick your butt at whatever I do every time by focusing on my strategy and it'll be a significant butt kicking. yeah that's right. :P We tried making flapjacks again just to experiment and we only let the dough rise for an hour before cooking it. It was a lot more self-adherent and dough-like, but the flavor was better. We still have to experiment more to get the recipe right! Maybe leaving the flapjacks in the refrigerator over night instead of at room temperature, or adding more butter to the recipe will help.

20

Well this is an obligatory post to make my 20th post. This weekend I'll be interviewing to be a youth group leader at a local church. It should be fun. I like working with kids, but middle school aged kids will be a challenge. I'm also going to be grilling with Kristin tonight and I'm bringing bratwurst! I love bratwurst, especially the ISU MEATS lab kind!!!!

Myspace

I really don't think I like Myspace. I held out subscribing to it for the longest time, but since one of my ex-roommates had great success picking up high school girls with it, I figured I'd give it a try. I mean, who doesn't want high school girl friends with all their high pitched screaming and blabbing on about how billy in class looked at them and they think he is so dreamy and how they wish billy would just dump his 2 timing girlfriend who is complete trash and has a skin rash problem and steals from the church offering and hates puppies?????

No but seriously, my friend did end up meeting a few high school girls, but I figured I'd give it a try just to meet normal people in the area, maybe with similar interests. Well I gave it a few months and to my dismay, nobody wanted to be my friend. (Well I didn't make any friend requests) The world is a tough place. I kept considering deleting it, but then my best friend Brian jumped on the bandwagon and I decided to keep it for now, but still not encourage anybody to use it. Then a couple more people started flowing in, my sister found me, even though I told her to stay away from evil Myspace. Then a couple other people. And now I just can't get rid of it, because some people like Kristin have private profiles, so I can't see them if they're not my friend :( (Mine's private too, I don't want anybody to find me) I still don't like Myspace, but I'm stuck now. How can I e-stalk my closest friends without it?

But yesterday I had the biggest dilemma yet. One of the high school aged girls from my parent's church back home made a friend request. And I don't even remember her name. Did I ever even talk to her? You see, my dilemma was, I made a pact with myself never to add anybody that I didn't talk to in real life at some point. But then again, I recognized this person, and the good Christian in me says to accept people into the fold and not to shun people off. But I don't want to have other people from my parent's church find my profile, and to be honest, I'm not too fond with some of the people my age that are left there. This will probably open a door that I wanted closed, but I still accepted the friend request, just to be nice. Being nice is so overrated.

I don't know why, but I just get this weird feeling about Myspace every time I use it. I really dislike it, but I want to use it minimally at the same time. I used to love Facebook because it was clean (Nobody was allowed to put those ugly backgrounds and animated flashy stuff on their profiles. My eyes were saved!) and only college students could join. But now they've opened the doors to everybody and I've already started getting weird friend requests. Thankfully, you still can't mess up the clean look of Facebook. Maybe I should just close my Myspace down. I mean Facebook is now open to everybody. It would sure make me feel a lot better, and then it'd be harder for people to find me once again.... Nah, I'm too lazy to do that.