BTW

The exciting news from the last month:

Dana got invited to go to Papua New Guinea with his professor and some other BYU people to catch bugs for two weeks! The whole trip is paid for by BYU, which makes it possible for Dana to go. He's super excitied to be going. This trip will be really good on his resume and applications to grad school.

It's been a while (Delicious borsch)

Well, let's play catch-up on the last month:

We took finals and finished up classes without much trouble. My only "hard" final was my Russian 202 final. I studied some and ended up with a B in the class, the worst of all my Russian classes, but it's good enough for me. The brit lit final was just another test, noncomprehensive. pretty great. For folklore, our final was to show up with a "traditional family food item" and talk about it. I brough bunny buns because they're tasty good. For those of you who don't know, buny buns are just an orange roll my mom would make us for Easter. This is what they look like. I apologize for them not being right side up... the picture won't load any other way?

Then for my creative writing class, we read each other our poetry and ate "lovely food items." The food item was a required part of our final. We also had to write an essay. We all decided that our poetry professor would be sorry she asked for essays from poetry students...

Will graduated and so Courtney's family came up and my parents came out for the ceremony. It was very nice, it made me sad that I wasn't graduating yet. But the end is in sight. That at least is comforting. While my parents were here, Dana went on a feild trip to southern Utah with his reptile class and caught lizards and snakes. He had a lot of fun and brought home some new six legged pets for us. Maybe if I ever get a hold of his pictures I can post some of those on here.

Since his return we have been spending the time going to work and staying up late watching movies and playing video games and not doing homework. It's pretty exciting. We also finally had time to take our car to the shop. It was gone all weekend, but now the car runs really well.

A few nights ago, we decided to try making borsch from a recipe Dana got from a member in Ukraine while he was on his mission. We followed the recipe as exactly as we could (it's in Russian... and metric, so that makes it an adventure) and it turned out really well. I learned some things that I didn't know before.

1. one beet goes a long way.

2. a ham bone in the soup stock makes a big difference.

Here are the pictures of our delcious borsch adventure.

From left to right: 1. Softening the beet, onion and carrots all together. As you can see the beet kind of turned everything that pretty purpley color.

2. Our ham bone. We bought a pork roast with the bone inside and saved most of the roast for Sunday dinner. The little pieces of pork in the soup were delicious.

3. The finished borsch which you eat with a dolop of sour cream on it. It cooked in a 3 lieter pot and we had LOTS of leftovers. The recipe says that the soup is better after a few days, tho. Good thing the soup is tasty.

And then there was a snail.

This post is mostly to see how this works... I have Picasa to manage my photos, and one of the buttons is to "Blog This!" Even though I know how to add them in the blog, I thought I'd see how it worked this way. Apperently it works like this.

So, I hope you like the snail. I think he looks pretty. I took this picture on the cliffwalk in Newport, RI.

Dana and I are enjoying conference. And this morning we tried to make blini, a Russian style crepe ... thing ... you can fill them with meat or fruit. We ate ours (once they started turning out as blini and not as undercooked, wrinkled lumps) with pie filling and yogurt. Tasty good.

Speaking of homework...

I am taking an American Folklore class. It's more than Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, we just finished a unit on food folklore in America.

Anyway, now we're studying family folklore and I just finished reading the chapter in my book on family expressions.

Here is an excerpt as an example:

" 'My shoes are too big!': This expression started when my brother came in drunk one night, and my mother asked him why he was walking funny. It's an excuse for anything now."

Basically, theyre expressions that sprout from one (usually humorous) incident. I was trying to think of some from my family, here's what I came up with.

1)Mom told us younger kids stories of when John was little and he liked to disassemble things, like tape recorders. Mom would have to put the tape recorder up on the top shelf. When John wanted it, he would say, "Quarter down?" I remember hearing that used in refrence to something we wanted, but probably shouldn't get.

2)After we moved to Rhode Island, we came back to California for a visit. Emily was with us for the day, part of which was spent at the LA temple. Mom and Dad were doing a session, and Will, Dave, Emily and I were left in the rental car with all its new bells and whistles. We had a bag of goldfish, which Emily cached in the center console, and dubbed it the "watery grave". Now every center console is the watery grave.

3) John came home after playing Balderdash with some friends and started calling our cat, "Brotus." "Hey, Brotus!" he'd say. After a while, we started calling each other Brotus in greeting. The word actually means, "Something extra, thrown in for free" and I'm not sure that we can claim it as a "family expression", but I'm pretty sure there are less than five other families in the United States that know what the word means, much less use it in common conversation.

Alright, reader, now its your turn. I dare you to think of some family expressions in your home (or childhood home) and write them down. If you like, feel free to respond here with them, or on your own blog. Have fun!

Ruth

Stuck in the Middle

So, we had our last three day weekend of the semester. Now it is every day all week till the end of April.

We used the weekend to go and visit some friends of ours in Pheonix. Dana and I were sick the whole week before, so it was nice to get away from the very cold weather. But I think we scared Ryan and Kathrine with all our hacking and coughing. We also made friend with their dog, Dashel. It made me want a puppy.

For Valentines day Dana bought me an MP3 player. Its 2gb and red and small and I love it. :-). I bought Dana a lego set that he's been wanting. It has Kit Fisto in it. If you don't know who that is, I've put in a link to wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Fisto

Now it is an endless line of tests, quizes, and papers until the semester is over.

Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate, is coming to BYU for a reading. I'm skipping class to hear him speak. This will fall under the category of not letting my schooling getting in the way of my education.

This last weekend I made carmels. With a vanilla bean. They were delicious. And addictive. But they turned out surprisingly well. I dont have a lot of luck with candy. The last candy I made, divinity, instead of being light and whipped turned out gooey and messy. Dana is a real sport and eats everything I make, even when it turns out less than good.

Also, George Michael says hello.

Week the Second

Dana and I are thuroughly enjoying our three day weekend. Friday night we went out to dinner with Dana's old roomates, Prince (yes, we call him Prince. It's his middle name), Devin and Jordan. First we crashed the used music/media store by the mall, then we went to Outback Steakhouse and feasted. I ordered (among a main dish) their baked sweet potato with butter and brown sugar. Its a favorite. We finished off the night watching some episodes of "Flight of the Conchordes" and "It's Always Sunny in Philidelphia." Then the roomates voted that Dana get the wii out. They all played lego starwars and Super Mario World until 3 in the morning. I slept while they played, so by the time we went home, i was all rested up.

Saturday Morning Dana got up and helped clean the church with one of the sunday-school classes. I slept in until... 12. Then we ate "breakfast" and went to Costco for some shopping with Will and Courtney. After we came home I made some brownies. We got together with Catherine&Blake&Benson, Bethany&Ryan and Erin&John, some friend (and respective spouses/children) from Rhode Island. We had some good visiting, Hawiian haystacks, brownies and icecream, and Balderdash. It was an early night: we left at midnight.

Today we made it to church early (yeah!) and had a great lesson on Lehi's vision of the tree of life. Our teacher pointed out that the great and spacious building had no foundation, like none at all. We elaborated on what that meant about the Pride of the world. This is what I kind of decided: Pride, when you think about it, doesn't make a lot of sense. Thinking that you, just one person with limited skills and talents, know better, or can do more than our Heavenly Father is kind of a dumb concept. We may not always know why He wants us to do what we do, but if we have faith, and take into account that He probably knows better than we do, then we will be better off. We will certainly make more sound decisions this way.

For dinner I made chicken pot pie (yummy!) and now I'm going to make a new cake recipe I found.

I'll let you know later if it was delicious or not.

And the beat goes on...

Dana and I made it home from Washington without too many difficulties. We stopped in Twin Falls and saw the pretty, frozen Shoshone Falls with all the mist and icicles. We both got sick but are feeling better now.

We also made it through our first week of classes without dying! Dana goes to the Bean Museum everyday and I have a lot of English classes. I'm taking my last semester of Russian (yay!), second half of British Lit, American Folklore, and Writing Poetry.

Recent Favorite Movies: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Tomorrow Never Dies, Enchanted