There she blows

For Christmas Eve I had planned on making a roast, which takes about 4 hours to cook in the crock pot. Easy enough right? You just sear it and put it in the crock pot for 4 hours, non of this slaving over the stove all day, I was going to keep it easy and stress free. Dinner would be at 6 so the roast had to be in the pot by 2pm. Well our day got away from us and we went to see a movie that was longer than expected so the roast was not in the pot by 2pm. In fact it was going to go in around 4pm. So Jeff came up with the idea that we would put it in the pressure cooker for 30 min to speed up the cook time and tenderize the meat. The only problem to this was that his parents pressure cooker had recently stopped working entirely properly (i.e. the weight thing on top that releases pressure had stopped doing it's job and was then lost) so Jeff came up with a way to manually let off the steam and pressure and all was going well. In fact our 30 min was just about up and everything was ready to go in the crock pot. That's when the explosion occurred, there was a very loud boom and then a loud hissing noise followed by rain. I ducked and covered until I was out of the room, only to turn around and see Old Faithful on the stove. There was a rubber release valve that blew and the pressure that was released cause the boom and the veritable rain storm of meat juice that was spraying onto the ceiling and raining down on everyone and everything.
Jeff promptly turned the burner off and the good news was that my roast was ready to go into the crock pot, which I put in promptly. We then began mopping the ceiling and the floor as everything was quite slippery. All in all everything turned out great. Dinner was fine and the kitchen (which was Jeff's mom's kitchen) was sparkling clean and ready for Santa.
The moral of the story. I know we all hear about horror stories of pressure cookers and our was actually quite humorous once we realized everyone still had their faces and there were no holes in the ceiling, but make sure yours has all it's working parts.

Disney

Jeff took me to Disney this year for my very first trip ever. He hadn't been since he was little and didn't remember a lot so it was a blast experiencing the whole thing together. The only this is we really didn't take the many pics cause we were too busy between Disney and California Adventure. We got the maps and rode every ride. We were there for 3 days which was plenty of time to leave us exhausted and smiling.
On one of the mornings that we were there we had a "Magic Morning" which lets you into the park an hour early and some of the sections of the park are open. So we rode splash mountain for I think the 3rd time and we had the ride all to ourselves.
I apologize that all the pics are of me. We actually had someone take a pic of Jeff and I standing in front of this very spot but somehow it didn't take and we didn't want to have to bug someone else. This is prime picture taking area and you kinda have to wait for the crowd to clear to get a pic. We went in October during Halloween Time and it really wasn't that crowded but our last day was Saturday and that's when we took all of the pics and Saturday was definitely more crowded.

I couldn't bring myself to buy a pair of ears because really when am I going to use them. But I did want a pic of myself in the ears.
Saturday evening we had ridden everything there was a took a break from Disney and took th bus out to Newport Beach. We got there right at sunset. We walked around for a while checked out the shops then took the bus back to Disney to ride Jeff's favorite ride for the 3rd time (Indiana Jones).
We actually lucked out from what I understand. The only ride that was closed at Disney while we were there was the story book land ride, from what I understand that wasn't bad at all. We had a blast and will probably go to Disney World next time.

Virginia

My trip to Virginia started in a special and unexpected way. It turns out that my flight was a make a wish flight, meaning that there was a little girl and her family that they were flying to Disney World on my flight. So at the gate in the airport they created Cinderella's castle and had the whole place decorated, she even had a cake and presents and this was at 7am. It was so cute and special I have never experienced anything like it before.

Once I got to Va things were very low key which was nice. I had a few extra vacation days this year and got a good deal so Jeff stayed behind in WA. and gave me the chance to spend time with my family. This is her new horse Brummy. He was getting his saddle fitted as he has outgrown his old one.

This is my adorable niece Stella and my new nephew Roy. These are my brother Russell's kids and his wife Chas is kinda cut off of the pic (sorry) but I was kinda just focusing on the kids.

While I was there my mom and I became tourists for the first time and we visited Monticello (Thomas Jefferson's home). It was perfect weather, a little cool which is nice when VA can be so hot. The home was amazing, he had incredible gardens, kitchens, and really unique and modern clocks for his time. It was just a really nice day and it has been a while since we've been able to spend time one on one like that so all in all it really didn't matter what we did, we just had fun hanging out. However I would recommend checking out Monticello if you ever get the chance.

Wedding Cake Surprise

Some friend's of mine were getting married and they had a very small budget for their wedding. They were just going to do bunt cakes for their wedding cake. I found out and told them that I would get together with my mother-in-law, who does wedding cakes and I would make their cake for them. Everyone should have a wedding cake and they didn't mind that I would be doing it for them with no real prior experience. So we came up with some suggestions as far as flavor combinations and luckily what they wanted as far as a cake goes was really simple.
So I made them a white lemon cake with blueberry filling. It matched their colors which were white, navy blue and green.
Other than the ribbon they just wanted dots on each layer. Which is fairly easy but hard to try and get the sizing and spacing even. This was really fun to do.










Now that the two layers are put together, I grabbed the flowers and was ready to do the fun part of arranging the flowers on each layer. I pretty much had the freedom to do whatever I wanted as far as flowers go so in order to stick with their colors I got the green spider mums, some smaller mums and then some white stock for contrast.





Well here it is fully assembled in my dining room. Transporting a cake is usually the most difficult part but this was a really small cake and we weren't going very far. I can totally see my imperfections when I look at the cake but it was really fun to do. It's kinda fun to discover new talents.

Squash on Steroids

Ok so I know I just blogged about squash and they are really not that interesting but I did just go out there and pick on Sunday. Today is Tuesday and none of those squash were even close to being that large. I am blown away at the sheer size and quantity of the squash this year. I have to say it has been a great growing season so far. I also have to disclaim that if any of you lived in WA last year you would know that we could barely convince our plants to produce even one squash so this year has been really fun. Anyways you won't be seeing anymore squash pics I promise but my tomatoes are just about to ripen and I can't guarantee that you won't see pics of those.

Squashzilla

Compared to last year our garden has been quite successful this year. However there is a good and a bad side to that. Jeff went out the other day and saw some squash that weren't quite ready, we went out yesterday and discovered a baseball bat size zucchini over night. Looks like I'm going to be making zucchini bread.
We are also growing tomatoes, lettuce, swisschard, and strawberries.
Also I'm really excited about our peach, and asian pear trees which are still really young but covered in fruit. We also have a plum tree which is huge and hasn't really produced plums in years however Jeff and I have been pruning it since we moved in and it is now covered in a fair amount of plums. I'm really excited to see that we got it to produce fruit again. Jeff's brother said that sometimes trees like that get really big, lazy and happy and so they just stop producing. Well looks like we shocked it into life.
These are our squash plants. They are huge! I made Remmy sit by them so you could have a point of reference of thier actual size and maybe understand now how we got such an enormous squash.

Red Hair and White Knuckles

Jeff and I got a motorcycle. It's a Kawasaki KLR 650 Dual Sport (meaning it's good both off road and on road). So we decided to take a motorcycle road trip to break it in. Although if any of you have ever ridden a motorcycle for any length of time I'm sure you know that it broke us in more than anything (sore hinny).






So once we were all packed and ready to go we headed over the mountain pass and our first stop was Leavenworth. This is a popular tourist and local attraction as it is a Bavarian themed village. They have a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in the winter that attracts thousands and in the summer there's lots of art festivals, hikes and October fest in the fall. I didn't really get any shots of the village this time as we've been here before and the couple I did get didn't really turn out well but this was a pretty cute and friendly mountain goat.

So Aplets and Cotlets are a pretty delicious treat that are quite popular in the Northwest. I'd never heard of them till I moved here. They are kind of a jelly type candy with nuts that are rolled in powdered sugar. Although I have come to know that to some it is an acquired taste and others just plain don't like them. The traditional flavors (as the name denotes) are apple and apricot, however they have a ton of different flavors and if you go to the factory which is where this picture was taken then you get to sample a tone of stuff for free. They even have new product sampling and you can take a survey and tell them what you think. It was a fun stop on our way to Winthrop. This factory is located in Cashmere, just outside of Leavenworth.

So we were almost to Winthrop when we saw this bridge and had to stop. There are a lot of these foot traffic bridges across the Columbia river and I tried to get Jeff to cross this one but try as I might he wouldn't do it. I guess I can't blame the guy as I wouldn't have done it either.






We stayed in this Shackteau, which is owned by Jeff's boss. It's right on the river and it's not fancy it's basically camping but we didn't have to set up a tent and there were sleeping pads inside which made for a comfortable night sleep. When we pulled up there was a whole family of deer sleeping under the awning.



This is the town of Winthrop which is an old west themed town, however this is actually a picture of my bad helmet hair and me locking the helmets on the bike.



Jeff had the camera as you can tell. So the background shows what this whole town basically looks like, all the restaurants and stores are all in this old west theme. The side walks are wooden and they even have some western saddles you can sit on at the ice cream shop. Somehow we didn't get as many pictures of the town as I thought but you get the idea, plus you can google it.




This guy was in front of one of the shops and we thought he was pretty cool. You can see the wooden plank sidewalk that lines the street and you get the idea that it's a pretty cool town.



There is a lodge called sunset lodge about 9 miles from town and this is the view from the lodge. This was about 7am and they were rounding up the horses for trail rides. Pretty amazing view. And just to clarify this is Eastern Washington.




So on our way home we drove over a different mountain pass, it was really cold, as you can tell there is still snow and it happened to rain on us just after this picture was taken but what an amazing site. The road was really twisty and steep going up over this pass, you kinda get the idea in the picture below.

This part of the highway was blocked because they were redoing the park that overlooks the highway, however the joy of being on a motorcycle is that you can simply drive around the gate at your own risk and get the pictures anyways, which is how we got the picture of the highway below. This was a pretty fun trip, although we were sorely unprepared in many ways (we know better know) we are already planning our next trip.