Monday Funday

About four months ago, I invited a handful of girls over to my house for what I now call "Monday Funday." The whole idea is that on Monday nights we get together and cook or craft or both together. So far we've sectioned it off by months, but it's really not too rigid and basically we can do whatever anyone in the group wants.

For the month of September we started off with cooking and learned a few ethnic dishes: pancit and chicken adobo (me); a mexican dish from Guadalajara (Zoe); indian food (ayesha). Then we moved on to baking in October: coconut creme pie (Casey); cake balls (me); the Brown's carrot cake (Sarah); and pumpkin bread (Madison). Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of those awesome meals.

And then the crafting began in November/December: we made homemade laundry detergent (which I gave away as Christmas presents to my husband's extended family as stocking stuffers)

Then we spent 3 weeks trying to figure out how to make Christmas stockings. Casey led the way with her sewing machine and made some cool elf boot curved stockings (sorry no picture) but these are the ones I made for my family :)

And lastly we made these cardboard Christmas trees off of pinterest. And they were much harder to do than it looked. Again sorry no pictures.

Now that it's January, we've started up again with the cooking and this time I took pictures: 

Wild Rice Stuffed Acorn Squash

thanks to Larkin for introducing me to this tasty treat and sharing the recipe

Visit the link for precise measurements and directions 

Cut the squash in half and get all the seeds out. Season with butter, brown sugar, salt and pepper then roast them in the oven.

Sautee celery, onions, thyme, salt, and pepper

Mix with wild rice, dried cranberries, and pecan pieces

Divide equally among the halves and continue roasting in the oven

The final toasted product! Enjoy!

If I can keep up with this blogging business there will be more Monday Funday cooking adventures and crafting creations to come.

I'll keep you posted!

Running Blues

This morning my sister-in-law, Lakyn, and I went for a run around the neighborhood and it was brutal. I think we ran a solid 12-minute mile for the first mile, slowed it down a little more for a little bit and then I had to walk. We visited with a neighbor and then started up again. But I could only make it about 4 blocks and told Lakyn that that's all I had for today. We finished walking around the neighborhood and ended back at the house. A whopping total of 1.5 miles (I'm estimating, hopefully underestimating).

This is the start of my training for the November 2012 San Antonio rock'n'roll half-marathon that I'm planning to run with a friend. Good news is it can only get better from here.

I'll keep you posted.

Garden Love

I took these photos of the process of creating my garden with the intention of blogging about the process, so instead of a series of blogs you'll get the photo timeline version...kind of like the boxed dvd set of a TV series; no commercials, no waiting, just all at once satisfaction of knowing how it all happened :) Enjoy!

Starting seeds indoors to be ready to plant after the first frost (mid-late February):

I took a citizen gardener class with the Austin Sustainable Food Center and learned how to make these 4x4 planter boxes based off of Mel Bartholomew's book Square Foot Gardening. (March-ish)

And so it began: Here is our overgrown backyard

Building 4x4 beds, seven total for our backyard (day after and weekend after gardening class)

    

Then we lay overlapping cardboard boxes over the grass to solarize and kill it, preventing it from crowding into the garden (only moderately successful three months later).

We covered the cardboard with wood mulch, and it looked beautiful!!!

Obviously we filled the boxes with dirt and transplanted the seedlings following the square foot gardening model as best I could.

And lastly, I built trellises with string as the platform for the vining plants to climb.

That's all for now :) 

Hopefully I can get another blog post in (soon) about our recent harvests...very exciting!

I'll keep you posted.

Extreme Home Makeover

Lots has happened since my last post in September, i.e. we became home-owners! We have a wonderful home on the Austin eastside near MLK and Airport blvd. We love it! It kind of reminds me of the Kenwood neighborhood that I lived in near USC; lots of socioeconomic and racial diversity. Hopefully, I will be better about chronicling our adventures and attempts to love our neighbors in our east-side community in order to share it with you all through this blog (especially those of you who don't hear from us on a regular basis).

We were SUPER blessed to find such a great home, in just the right neighborhood, with such a huge space (mainly the huge living room to host lots of people and three bedrooms is nice for a family we hope to have soon). It fits us so well and we still think it is odd that it is ours, but it is. And for this, we are thankful.

We didn't start out crazy with the house projects, but we've been busy. We started small by painting our living room (blue-gray) and our kitchen (green tea). Austin and his step-dad built us a dining table (it just needs a final wax coat). And Austin put up a pot and pan rack, cookbook rack, and magnetic knife strip up for me for Christmas. These were the projects we started out with.

With the new year, we're finding ourselves deep in the middle of other, much larger DIY home projects:
1. We're putting in hardwood floors! We, mainly Austin and a mix and match group of friends depending on who was available any given day, pulled up the laminate, measured out and cut the boards, and nailed them in one by one. I'm sure there was a step or two that I skipped in that description. Right now we are hoping to have the living room and entryway nailed in, sanded, and sealed by Monday...wish us luck :)

    

2. We've started a compost pile! Right now its literally a pile. Austin will fence it in with some posts and chicken wire by the weekend (somewhere while he's working on our floors :). It's been interesting setting aside compostable things and taking it out to the pile. We just bought our first shovel and we've only been at it for a week, but this is going to be awesome!

3. We are going to garden! Really the hope is to invite our neighbors and friends to garden with us in our backyard as a sort of community garden...we'll see how that pans out. Our backyard is overgrown, but we have high hopes for the soil underneath the weeds, looks better than clay and looks dark and earthy (super technical gardening terms, I know).

I've started little egg cartons for seedlings and will transplant as they grow. I'm slowly working on clearing out the weeds and tilling the ground, so that come March it'll be ready for me to put our seedlings into the ground.

These are the happenings at the casa de Evers...all works in progress.

We'll keep you posted :)

Nightly Readings Aloud

My sweet husband is so helpful and without even knowing it. There are only a few months left until the end of the year and I am running out of time to accomplish my New Year Resolution. He didn't exactly plan to help me with it, he simply made a suggestion: "Let's read, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, together." And so we did. We spent the week ending our days with a few chapters here and there from the book. As we lay in bed, it was so fun to hear each other's voices and imagine the scenes of a story we both had read and seen many times before. Of course we read with voices as full of animation as possible, so that added to the entertainment.

I love having a husband who chose to enjoy nightly readings of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. We haven't picked up the next book of the series yet, but we may. Even if we don't, it was a super fun week and I'm two steps closer to my goal.

Other readings: Same Kind of Different as Me is still on the list; it's just been tabled for the moment. Also I'm supposed to be reading Follow Me to Freedom by John Perkins and Shane Claiborne, but that's been off to a slow start.

I'll keep you posted.

Victory and Defeat all in One

Last night, I finished reading, A Prayer for Owen Meany. Victory! I found a rhythm where I was enjoying the story and flowed through the last 100 or so pages over two nights. Unfortunately the end was not as enjoyable as reading the story and watching the characters develop. It was one of those endings where the characters and the dialogue literally explains everything for you. For example, near the end the conversations include statements like, "Now I know why my voice never changed," or "Remember watanhouet?" Those details were well described and carried on throughout the story that I knew and remembered them as it all came together in the end. All that to say, one book down...three to go (see previous post).

My defeat came in the fact Austin, began and finished his 1000+ page book (and another short 120ish page Ayn Rand book) in less time than it took for me to finish the remaining 300+ pages of my book. For Austin, reading is a healthy part of his life and without it, he feels imbalanced. And he especially loves to read before bed. I, on the other hand, have not incorporated a habit of leisure reading into my daily routine and before bed, i'm getting ready to go to bed...not trying to read a book. So from my perspective reading before bed, has been "unhealthy" because I should be sleeping, if not trying to sleep. That was a funny conversation. I'm glad that my husband realizes that we are different and it is absolutely ok that our outlooks on reading are different. The simple remedy has been to start reading earlier, haha.

On to the next book: Same Kind of Different as Me. I'm pretty excited about this one because quite a few people I know have read it and loved it and I'm looking forward to agreeing with them :).

I'll keep you posted.

New Year Resolution Update

I have always admired people, like my husband, who can read and read and read. Austin has been able to get into a rhythm of reading where he has read and aims to read up to 20 books in a year. Since we've been married, he's already read at least 6 books. That rhythm has been much harder for me to find.

Earlier at the start of this year, I made a resolution to aim to read a meager, 4 books. I made it official by proclaiming it during our Friday morning group with my co-workers and patients at the skilled nursing facility I work at. It is written and posted on the speech therapy door along with other resolutions from patients and staff alike. Now that we are half way through the year, I must admit that I am about three-quarters of the way through one book. (Entering into the year, I was half way through a book, but it had taken me so long to get through that book, that I had lost interest and I can't even remember if I got all the way through it...needless to say, I am not counting it as one of my four).

Currently, I am reading, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I started reading this book upon recommendation of a friend around the time of our wedding; I even brought it on our honeymoon. I've laughed out loud many times and have found the whimsical stories of mischief and boyhood very entertaining, but it has taken me about 3 months to get this far. Lately, I have had a much better rhythm of reading that involves a nightly 10-20 pages before falling asleep.

Austin also is reading right now, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas; a much larger and difficult read as compared to my novel which I'm told has similarities to the movie Simon Birch. We are currently "racing" to see who will finish first - Austin has 700ish pages remaining and I, 240ish. Obviously we both are hoping and assuming that I will win this race. Telling others and now telling you, has been a motivating factor for me to at least attempt to "keep up" if not move ahead.

More updates to come...apparently at this rate, once every 2 months