unlinked media

Building a Better Sauce

James — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 03:39:27 +0000

I have learned much about cooking in the past month. I have read more and more cookbooks that deal with how to cook not just books of recipes. One of my culinary desires was to to create my own barbecue sauce. So after doing some reading I set out to make some sauce last Saturday.

It started with getting some bottles to hold my sauce, so I went and picked up three squeeze bottles. Then I came home and started mixing. My first sauce had I was looking for a good rich flavor, not too, not too sweet. It ended with a slightly overpowering cumin flavor, and a little more spicy than I wanted but had some good flavor. I had copied down the ingredients so I can replicate the sauce but without the cumin.

Then came sauce two, this one was my sweet sauce. Sweetened with molasses, brown sugar, honey, and maple syrup. I will probably make a few tweaks on it during the next try, but it was really good.

The third and final sauce was my spicy sauce, this was a vinegar and molasses based sauce with a decent kick, I wanted it a tad spicier but I tasted it when I was reducing it a little, and the heat (temperature) made the flavor hotter (flavor) than it was after it was chilled, so again I have some tweaks to make.

Then I had two friends over to try my sauces that evening, it was a byom BBQ so we had steaks and some burgers. Both of them like the flavors of them but I'm not quite sold on them yet, so I will continue to tweak, but I'm glad they enjoyed it. Let me know if you want to try my sauces, let me know, I'll see what I can do.

A Jack of all Trades, a Master of None

James — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 03:43:16 +0000

There are so many things at which I have learned how to do none of which do I feel I have mastered. I've wanted to write a post similar to this for some time and call it "stuff you didn't know I could do" or "Random Facts about Me", but I'm settling with the current title.

My current "trade" is teaching to which I have two years of on the job training and no more. I really enjoy it and have been told I am a natural teacher.

Other trades that I have been involved in...
I was a car prep at Enterprise Rent-a-Car and did a whole lot more than that.
I worked the grill and fryers at McDonald's and as well as helped assemble the burgers. (Anyone who knows me well, know I hate McDonald's.
I have worked as a Janitor in high school cleaning classrooms and bathrooms.

Those are the employed things I have done in my love. The longest of those jobs that I had was Enterprise where I work for 2 and 1/2 years. The shortest was McDonald's where I was there for 3 to 4 months.

How ever this is not the end of my know-how. Lets move on to my volunteer service.
I spent 3 high school summers working at Camp Ironwood, A Christian Camp in the Mojave Desert. During which time I:
Dug many ditches
Trimmed Shrubs,
Ran a cash register
Ran errands
Learn How to Edit Videos
Learn How to drive stick
Ran Plumbing
Did Inventory
Counted to 1000
Touched an Electric Fence
Counsel as Camp Counselor
Did Dishes in the Dish Palace
Take apart a Transmission
And did anything else they asked me to do.
I also learned a lot of other things too.

Now there are even more things to which I have learned how to do, that I don't necessarily remember where I learned them they go as follows:
How to frame a wall
Run and attach Electrical wire
Laid Tile
Laid Carpet.

There are things which I have been taught at home.
How to mow a lawn
How to take an engine out of a car (it never got put back)
Rebuild a lawn mower
Cross-stitch
Bake (real baking from scratch)
Cook
Bar-B-Que
Paint

Other Completely Random Things
I can solve a Rubik cube in 2 minutes
I can make a scorpion wire sculpture
I cam make a handful of origami
I make some awesome paper airplanes
I design website
I've played baseball, soccer, and basketball.
I've played the trumpet and tuba.
I've flown a plane,
I've acted in dramatic productions
I've been a puppeteer
I've preached in church
I've won debates in competition.

I'm not even sure this list is extensive or complete.
But I Don't want to get to the end of this post and say, look at all the things that I have done in my short life, I want to look at this list and say, "Thank You, God, for giving me a healthy life, where I have been given an opportunity to have learned and have been involved in so many things. As I don't know how many more days that I may have on this earth, teach me to use these things I have learned and to use them for your honor and will. May the talents you have given to me not be buried, but let them be multiplied and used to help others."

A Return of the Blog (Sort of)

James — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 03:50:28 +0000

One of my reasons that I stopped blogging is that I wanted to start designing website. Well the site I had been working on for the last 8 months is almost done which is giving me some time to start working in my own site. So this has been 2 hours of design sorry you can't comment quite yet. still working on all that stuff.

Why I’m not a Blogger!

James — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:47:02 +0000

Welcome to 2010 and as I promised a blog post. A few months ago I began to realize that I am not a blogger, although I still have a few who faithfully check to see if I post I will no longer promise to blog often. I am not getting rid of my unlinked media site but I will in no way try to keep it up to date with content. I will share most of the reasoning behind it and leave it at that.

I feel I am too concise. I have never been a wordy writer. If I can explain something in a sentence I'll do it in a sentence. I don't like long explanations.
To me blogging was a fad. A friend of mine started a blog about the same time that I did, and for a while we were the only two people I knew who had them it made checking other peoples post really easy. Since then at least a dozen or two people that I know have set up blogs, some post daily, while others only once. For a while it felt cool being a trend-setter, but it didn't make me want to blog more often, in fact it became a hassle to read everyone else's blogs and then comment on them, and the more I stopped reading them the less I posted.
Web Designer. Part of what interested me in blogging was the hacking of the themes and the personalization that I was able to get out of it. And then helping others do the same thing. My wife, brother, Tim. I began to focus more on the themes and less on the content. In the past 3 months I have undertaken a new project of building a website from scratch for Bethel. I spend a lot of my free time working on that, (in fact if I wasn't blogging right now I'd be working on it. I wish I could send you all the link to give you the sneak peek but it's far from done and I can't show it off to the masses quite yet. I foresee that project taking another 3 or 4 months depending on how much free time I have to work on it, but when it is done I'll send word and the link. On a side note if you are someone I know personally and are wanting more control over you blog and less restrictions let me know and I discuss options that I can offer you.
My Life is not an Open Book. Some blogger share way too much information in their blog posts. I am not a person who feels it is necessary to do that. I could fill my blog with funny stories that might happen throughout my day but those stories would generally be of students from my class. And with as plugged in as my students are to the internet it could be pretty easy for one of them to find out that I was talking about one of them, which is something that I feel would not be beneficial. So I don't publish stories of my students.
Because.

The list is not extensive, but those are my reasons. I hope I don't crush the feelings of the faithful unlinkedmedians. I hope you have a Happy New Year.

- hold nothing back

New Post Coming Soon

James — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:52:55 +0000

I am working up a new post entitled "Why I am not a Blogger". Post release date is scheduled for early 2010. I hope you will look forward to reading it.

It’s Up To You!

James — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:18:49 +0000

So I've been working on my blog and I found a theme that I want to use. the one your looking at. however I have come upon a problem. None of my other themes that I used in prior times, had a place for a tagline and if it did it looked nasty so I would delete it. The theme I'm using now does have a good place for a taglines to go that I like, however I don't know what my tagline should be. So it's up to you. I would like you, the readers to create a tagline for my blog. All you have to do is leave a comment with your best idea or ideas (feel free to leave as many as you want). I'll choose a tagline that is well liked by the readers and myself.

Summer is near its end

James — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 16:38:55 +0000

It has been a fast summer. I'm not sure where to begin. It's been a while since I've posted anything at all and a lot has happened I doubt I'll be able to recall everything. Nor is everything that has happened worth recalling. As you may gave noticed if you visit my sight on a regular basis that the look has had a slight makeover. I am not completely finished tweeking with it because I need to spend several hours working on that and I'm not sure when I'll have time for that. Well maybe tomorrow after all it is Labor Day and I have the day off so maybe tomorrow will be a great day to work in it but I'm not making any promises.
I apologize to anybody who takes the time daily, weekly, or even monthly to check my site to see if I have posted. Becuase I have gotten away from my own habbit of looking at all your blogs. I will generally write more often when I'm reading what other people write.
Summer was fun. I work at bethel for eight week inthe summer school program working from eight to noon. The half days were really nice. Renae did not work during the summer so our afternoons were free to hang out and enjoy each others company. Near the end of July we took a week for vacation to Deleware with Renae's parents to go visit Renae's sister Rebekah and her husband Matt. The time away was very enjoyable. We went to the Deleware State Fair and to Washington DC and to Rehoboth Beach. We spent some time relaxing at their house and just spending time with everyone. After we came back for Delewarr Renae went to Oregon to go to my cousin Leroy's wedding. She spent the week with my family andcame back to southern California with Ruth and Daniel. Daniel then spent the weekend with us, we spent that Monday down in san Diego and were able to go make it to a padre game.
Two weeks ago my truck was broken into in our parking garage at the apartment complex the passenger door lock was broken and our gps was taken. It could have been a lot worse the door lock is about fifty bucks to replace and I could switch it out myself do I dint have to pay someone else to do it; and the gps was given to us. The truck was still there and nothing else was taken so we are thankful.
Two weeks ago in-service started here at bethel and school started last Monday. I am once again teaching fifth grade and yearbook but I am now teaching an intro to computers class. The yearbook class and the intro to computer class are 0 period classes this year. That means class starts at 7:05 and goes until 7:50. That's the hour before school starts. Yearbook meets three days a week and the computer class meets twice. So Monday through Friday at bethel from 7:00 to nearly 4:00. But I do enjoy it. My fifth grade class now has sixteen students nine girls and seven boys. Judging by the first week they are hard workers and great learners. I am looking forward to a great school year with them. Yesterday Renae and I spent the afternoon with her parents they came down and visited us they also brought dinner too. We had barbequed hamburgers and baked beans and fruit salad. I had made some snickerdoodle cookies earlier in afternoon so we ate them for desserts.
Tomorrow is labor day if you have the day off, enjoy it. If you have to work, I'm sorry that you do. I hope eveyone has a great day.

*this post was typed on my iPhone so please let me know if I have any major mistakes so I can fix them.

-hold nothing back
-let God have control

Summer school

James — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:46:27 +0000

So 4 days into summer school. It's pretty fun I have 9 second and third grade students that i'm instructing in math and reading and some language as well. I only work from eight to non so it's a really quick and enjoyable day. The kids are fun and I'm learning how to balance struggling students with more brilliant ones. Especially becuase I have two classes together.
Renae And I are settling into our new place Tuesday we got our bookshelves set up and yesterday and today we are working on finishing cleaning our old place so I'm in for a busy afternoon. We I got to get back to the playground. I'm loving my iPhone.

-hold nothing back

Owner of an iPhone

James — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:53:12 +0000

So last night I was asked to go talked to pastor Matt. When I did he said he wanted to give me his first generation iPhone. I was excited and speechless. So I am now an iPhone user. In fact, I am writing this post on my iPhone since I don't currently have Internet at my new apartment.
Yes that's right we have moved to a new place, this time in costa Mesa. If you need my new address just e-mail me and I'll get it to you. We are saving a couple hundred bucks a month by getting a slightly smaller space but it's totally worth it. My Internet should be turned on later today.
Also more news, I am teaching summer school starting today. I have a class of 10 second and third graders that I am instructing in math and reading. The teaching only goes till noon so I will still have most of my summer's days to be with Renae. Well I hope this new tool may enable me to write more often but we will see.

Famous Dave’s Field Trip… and more

James — Wed, 13 May 2009 04:19:54 +0000

I know the what more important is the "and more" so I'll start there. About 8:45 this morning I was told I needed to call my father at home. In my mind I immediately knew what I was going to be told. My Grandmother was just recently diagnosed with Lung Cancer and had been under some chemo which helped. About a month ago her doctors told that there wasn't much more they could do, and gave her about a year. My parent had seen them on Saturday; they enjoyed the time. So I called my father and my dad told me that she had passed away last night in her sleep. They think the cause of death was a heart attack, however since she was a sleep the hospice nurse said she probably didn't feel a thing. I went and found Renae and relay the news, and then talked with Pastor Davidson who was very comforting.

This afternoon, I had planned to take my yearbook class to Famous Dave's in celebration of finishing the yearbook. None of my five students had ever been so we were in for a treat. The food was GREAT! the student's loved it. I had the 2 meat combo with the beef brisket and a hot sausage link, with the sides of potato wedges and mashed potatoes, along with the cornbread and corn that always come with it. Here is some pics. Not going to do a restaurant review here, sorry.

-hold nothing back

-praise God because He's active

Entirely Way Too Long

James — Fri, 08 May 2009 03:20:13 +0000

It has been a long time since the last time I blogged, especially since I said I was going to blog the day after my previous post. I guess I should make promises I cannot keep. I will admit I have been working on redoing Bethel's website. Although the final version still maybe upwards of a month away.

Iron Chef was fun. The secret ingredient was cocoa powder. The game plan ended up to make stuff shell noodles with a spinach, cream cheese, ricotta cheese, and cocoa powder for the main dish. It turn out pretty descent. Our appetizer was cocoa biscuits, nasty things... we didn't have baking powder and the girl helping out substituted it with baking soda nasty nasty nasty. For dessert we picked a winner going with a chocolate pizza... Topped with chocolate cream cheese, and chocolate chips and peanut butter chips, drizzled with chocolate. My group got second place.... oh well. if it weren't for the nastybiscuits...

Everything else is going well. I've been able to keep up with the giants more this year than previous years, I have been listening to games on the radio which in great. they are doingok, 14-13 today. Second place in their division.... That means everyone else in the division with the exception of the blue team is doing horrible. The giants are 6.0 games back and have a 3 games series in LA this weekend... BEAT LA!!! BEAT LA!!!! Sweep the series and we'll be only 3 games back. Which brings up an interesting topic. Manny... that's rightManny Ramirez suspended for 50 games for taking a banded substance. Now is the time for any team in the NL West to capitalize on the blue team losing their star player. LET'S GO GIANTS!!!!! LET'S GO GIANTS!!!!!

To Jay, This next Tuesday afternoon I'm heading with my yearbook class to Famous Dave's Restaurant in Long Beach. Totally looking forward to it.

To Everyone: Don't forget to wish your mom a "Happy Mother's Day" this Sunday!

-hold nothing back

here are some iron chef activity pics

Spring Festival and Iron Chef

James — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 16:50:26 +0000

Last night was Bethel Baptist School's Spring Festival 2009. It was a blast. We had a 30 ft. inflatable slide, a jump house, a splash zone, can knock down, ping pong ball toss, dunk tank, and a ton of food. I was asked to volunteer for the dunk tank, so why not... just 15 minutes... It was pretty fun. I had told my class all week to be saving up there money to get me wet. At least 8 of my students tried to dunk my and several went 4 and 5 times if not more. I did the first 15 minutes of the festival just to get it done with; but I had a blast. Once I was out of the water I was helping supervise the dunk tank. About 2 hours later there was an empty block so I jumped in it again for another 15 minutes. My students all came running back to dunk me. This time I didn't get dunked for like the first 10 minutes. still had fun though. One seventh or eight grader who had been trying to get people dunked all day, got up to try and get me in. I told him if he missed with all his throws I would jump in... so I had to jump in. after his third miss. By the end of the day, I was tired and exhausted. We went home; I forced myself to stay awake until the Giants had finished their games, beating the D-backs 5-1. And then Sleep.

Today is an event I have been looking forward to for nearly two months. Are youth group is having a "Iron Chef" style of event. We'll meet at the church around noon. Pastor Matt will let us know the secret ingredient, and then we have about 3 hours to go shopping, go to our designated kitchen and make 4 courses which each contain the secrete ingredient. After the time is up we meet back at the church and have potluck with the prepared dishes. Each dish is judged by everyone and the group with the most points wins. I will probably write tomorrow to let you all know how it went. Complete with picture I hope.

- hold nothing back

Three 3.0+ Earthquakes

James — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 04:17:34 +0000

Probably my first memory as a kids was an earthquake. The Loma Prieta Earthquake 10/17/1989, I was not even 4 years old yet. My mom was cooking dinner, my Dad was doing some work in a library, and my older sister and I were probably playing. And it shook hard. Nothing broke in our house but there was a lot of damage throughout the Bay Area. Earthquake have always facinated me. I think it's quite the sensation to fell the ground quaking beneath you.

Tonight there were three earthquakes magnitude 3.0, 3.8 and 4.0 just some 20 miles from our apartment. I felt the 3.8 and the 4.0 for sure; the 3.0 followed the 4.0 by only a minute so I may have felt that one too. It got me excited and I thought I should share with all of you.

Chicken Potato Soup

James — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 03:03:34 +0000

Thursday night I was in the mood for soup but not wanting to stew something for 3 hours to get it. I wanted a quick and easy soup. I looked at a couple recipes but nothing fit the bill. So I got my brain working. I looked around to see what I had... I had a large piece of chicken breast, thawed, two baked potatoes (left overs from Tuesday night's dinner), and a can of corn. Not a whole lot more. I figured I could make a soup with that so I tried. It probably took close to an hour to make, but not 3.

Ingredients:

1 large piece of Chicken breast cut into bite size pieces (or 2 small ones)

2 Baked Potatoes. (peeled and sliced) (you can you not baked potatoes it will just take longer)

1 can of corn

1 tea salt

1 tea pepper

1/2 tea garlic powder

2 tbl butter

2 tbl flour (or 1 tbl corn starch)

1 1/2 cup milk

4 cup water

Directions:

Boil all of the chicken in a large skillet with 1 cup of the water. In a large pot add corn (including the juice from the can, all of it), the potatoes, the remaining 3 cups of water, and the seasoning (if you want add more seasoning I was wanting a soup light on the season, so I didn't add a lot). Let it come to a boil, reduce heat some but let it boil for a good 20 or so minutes. When the chicken is cooked add it to the pot, the water that the chicken cooked in add it too. Not we will make it creamy. Melt 2 tbl of butter in a sauce pan, add flour and milk to the butter. keep at medium heat stirring often until it thickens some. Once thickened, add the cream to the soup, stir in thoroughly, let it cook for another 5 to 10 and then let it cool for 10 to 15 minutes, and enjoy.

Variations:

Onions and carrots are to staples that are in most soup, but I didn't have in the house so I didn't put it in the soup. I you don't want to and the cream that's fine, or you can use a cream of (whatever) right out of the can in it's place. Spice to your heart's content... enjoy and let me know what you think.

Spring Break

James — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:20:12 +0000

So this week has been spring break. A chance to just relax before the last 8 weeks of school, yes it's coming to an end quickly. Monday Renae and I picked her brother Tim up from the airport, and then hung out with her parents for the evening and had coffee with ruth a little bit later that evening. Tuesday morning I got up and went in to Bethel to work on the new youth ministry room. I was going to hang a shelf but things weren't going quite right so after a few hours of frustration I went home and spent some time with Renae. Tuesday night Renae and I spent back at Bethel doing some work on the computer and helping Spencer work on his weddding invitations. Wednesday we ran errands and prepared for the Beach Blast that the youth group was having. Some plans changed we still had the activity but becuase it was so cold and windy we didn't stay the whole time. This morning I went back to Bethel and sucessfully finished hanging the shelf and set of speakers. This evening holds a quiet evening at home with my beautiful loving wife; I'm going to cook her dinner too. Tomorrow evening I have a youth leaders meeting, that i'm excited about. I'm not sure what I'll do tomorrow morning, we'll see.

On a side note this is post number 100. My first post, published on March 7, 2007. With is exactly 770 days ago. That was slightly before I purchased the domain. I have averaged a post about every week. that's not to bad. I'll have to try a bit harder to fill you in on some more stuff, we'll see. Maybe I'll put some more recipes up... hmm....

Have a great day.

hold nothing back.

Strawberry Chocolate Pizza

James — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:03:52 +0000

So this last Saturday Renae and I were going to a get together with several other young married couples from our church. It was going to be a potluck were everyone brought a separate course of the meal. I was given the responsibility of bringing the dessert. This is quite the challenge, I make some pretty good desserts if I can say so myself, but there was an expectation given that I was going to bring something amazing. So I put my thinking cap on and the dessert pizza crossed my mind. I've never made a dessert pizza before and so I went in search of a few recipes. Many of them looked the same, some added different things or another. I finally found a simple recipe that had what looked like interesting flavors from Diana's Desserts: a Strawberry Dessert Pizza. Here is her recipe:

For Crust:
1/2 pound (2 sticks/1 cup/8 oz/226 g) unsalted butter
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

For Topping:
8 oz. package cream cheese
1/4 cup strawberry puree (about 4 fresh very large strawberries pureed in a blender)
1 tablespoon honey
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
3 pints fresh strawberries (medium to large size strawberries)

Basically what you do is cream the butter with the sugar, (works best if the butter is already at room temperature). Then blend in the other ingredient saving the flour until last, to make the crust; make sure the batter is smooth. Refrigerate for about 20 minutes to let the batter thicken. Place the batter on a greased cookie sheet or pizza pan. Get your hands dirty and make it looks like a pizza crust. Not super thick but not cracker thin either. Place it in a pre-heated oven at 350 F for about 20 minutes the crust should be golden brownish. Now you have made a giant sugar cookie for the pizza crust.

Now the filling,put the cream cheese, pureed strawberries, sugar and honey and blend until smooth. Don't spread it on the crust until that has had time to cool off. Slice the strawberries to get them ready as well. Once the crust has cooled spread the filling all over the crust (evenly please), then cover with the sliced strawberries. Now this is were I veered from the reciped

I rarely follow the recipe to the "t". In fact improvisation in cooking like my favorite pasttime. I wanted some chocolate on my strawberry pizza so I found a recipe for a chocolate glaze in one of my at home cook books. It wanted 4 oz. of melted chocolate (melted with 3 tbls of butter), 1 1/2 cup of powdered sugar, and 2 tbls of hot water. Mixed until drizzling consistency. (If necessary add a little bit more hot water. (do this right before you are ready to use it other wise it will harden and not drizzle correctly).

So I had the pizza all ready to go, snapped a picture and took it to the get together. We had salad, bread, enchilada, and lasagna. all of which were amazingly delicious. After dinner we had a bible study and then it was time for the dessert. There were 10 people there and everyone enjoyed it, There was none left over for me to take home even. It tasted delicious. The crust was a little on the hard side as we cut it but we really didn't notice that once we started to eat it. It was an an awesome recipe, that I found; and I considering trying other stuff with it too.

Tweaking My Site…

James — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:40:39 +0000

Ok, so I decided that I wanted to tweak a few things about my site and I started work on a few minor things today. A picture will appear on the screen with the post. A cool feature I think, for all previous post there maybe some lag time before they get the facelift image or the will just get a default image. That was what I was working on when my site crashed this morning.

Also I have changed the way the comments appear. I had been using a plugin for the picture of you reader by the post, but was unhappy with the way things looked, so I began looking for the code to implement it on my own. I was using the the codex help at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Gravatars but that still left me hanging. I finally found a site that helped, Connor Wilson had the code just the way I needed it. So then I tweaked a few other things like moving the time and date down to the bottom, and made the picture bigger.

Ok so that's what I have done, now it's your turn, well sort of, if you do not have picture by you e-mail here is what you need to do. Go to gravatar.com and register and upload a picture. It's easy and there's no spam. Then when you comment the picture show up by you comment. So if you have not done that yet, I would greatly encourage you to go check it out.

Ooops I crashed my site

James — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:49:25 +0000

ok this is is a temporary flash back to an old theme while i fix the mistake I made on my other theme. did i mention i don't really like this theme so i hope it won't stay this way for long.

sorry

Field Trip

James — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:25:57 +0000

On Tuesday, March 24, the fifth and sixth grade classes went on a field trip to the California Science Center (CSC) in LA. (It's right next to the Memorial Stadium, home of the USC Trojans and I believe the 1980 Olympic Games. Correct me if I'm wrong.) It was a lot of fun. There were 30 total students and 8 adults. The CSC has hands on exhibits that help make science fun. They currently have a CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) exhibit based on the hit TV show. The are three crimes that have been committed and your group is assigned to one of them to try and solve it. It was exciting and the kids really got into it once they understood what they needed to do. There were other many other exhibit also: transportation, structural design, sound, the science of life, etc. It reminded me of San Francisco's Exploratorium (another hands on science learning museum).

We wandered the museum from 10 to about 12:20 then we went downstairs where they have a McDonald's, a Taco Bell Express, a pizza place called pizza π, and a Rose Garden Cafe (a soup, salad, and sandwich place). The lines were long but we finally were able to eat.

After lunch we let the kids explore the gift shop, for about half an hour and we headed out and back to Bethel just before 2:00. I definitely enjoyed the trip as did the kids. However when I got home I took a two hour nap. I really didn't think I was that tired but it has been a long few days. Here are some pictures from the trip. Renae has a post up about the trip too if you want to know more.

- hold nothing back

Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich

James — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 03:33:08 +0000

For as long as I can remember I can not stand eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Yes that is right I utterly dislike the classic PB&J. All of my family including Renae can attest to this. Growing up, for lunch at school I would just have a jelly sandwhich, until after a few years of that I could not eat it that anymore becuase it was just to bland. So I back away from jelly all together. Ham and cheese seemed to suit me much better as long as there was no mayo or mustard on it, but that's a different story since we are talking about PB&J. I honestly could not remeber that last time I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, until tonight when I got a suddent urge to eat a PB&J sandwich. I have no idea what brought it on. Renae was out hanging out with friends so there was not a need to cook a big meal, I thought about doing grilled cheese but I used the last of the cheese yesterday. Then the urge hit, "I must have PB&J." So I pull out our Peanut Butter (chunky) and Jelly (Strawberry) and made a sandwich. Honestly it was not that bad, slightly bland which I probably why I disliked it as a kid. Well Renae just came home and she brought some food back for me, awsome. I Love You, honey.

Oh on a side note my little sister, Ruth, decdied to move away from here wordpress.com site and go self-hosted. She is still running a wordpress installation. Her new web address is http://thehonestruth.com Yes, it's a play on word the honest truth, the honest ruth, pretty clever. Renae's cousin Jeremy thought of it. Make sure you go visited her site and give her some comment love.

-hold nothing back