Foilburgers for Julie

Ok this is for Julie.

Preheat your oven to 375°.












Assemble your vegetables.
I like potatoes, carrots and onions. Root vegetables work well. Sweet potatoes are ok (but take longer to cook)

(This ended up being too much potato...oh well)






Cut potatoes into chunks.












Cut your carrots. Just a side note here: Notice my grip on my knife? Very important to be comfortable with your knife work. Secondly, notice my fingers on my left hand are curled in and out of the way. Even if I cut myself the most I'm going to get is a little skin off my knuckle and not a whole finger.






Dice your onion.












Take 1/2 lb. Meat












Add seasonings to meat. (I use Tony Chachere's Cajun seasoning, fresh ground pepper, kosher salt, and Worchestershire sauce.)










Add meat and vegetables on top of your first sheet of foil.











Add butter to vegetables.























Crimp and fold your foil...


































































Here's the cool foldy video.


45~50 mins in the oven @ 375°












Be careful! These things get hot!



I put the juice in the dogs food bowl...you could make a gravy with it, but as AB says "That's another show."






All done!

God Bless Helen Thomas

Nice to know there is still one reporter still alive in Washington.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/23/thomas-chides-colleagues-torture/

La biblioteca es en mi casa

Well we've finally finished the library. With the exception of some minor hardware renovation everything is moved in and ready to go. In fact I'm writing this post from the new library.

Ok enough jabber. On to the pics.




We've got a nice comfy chair for reading.



We also used some old drawers from a chest to make bookshelves that run along the back wall underneath the windows. If we can find some more solid wood shelves we might mount them along parts of the wall to create some more book shelf space.



Here's my computer set up. It's a little cramped but I'm hoping to put some shelving up and get another flat screen monitor so make some more space. I'm running linux on the top box and XP on the second and linking them together using Synergy.

It was a lot of work but we're very happy with the end result.

Hanging with the Trent

Dooce ain't got nothing on us!

Summer Projects

We love our house. Well...it's kind of a love hate relationship. Our house was built in 1924 and you know old homes have character.

One of the things we never liked about our house was the color scheme in the guest bedroom. When we moved in it was painted a garish yellow. 3 years later was still painted a garish yellow. Not only that but apparently when it was painted yellow the people doing it had never heard of masking tape. Actually I think they were confused because the yellow they used was strangely similar to old making tape. And so this equals worst painting job ever.

So we finally bucked up and came up with a master plan for redo-ing part of the house. The first step was to re-paint the spare room and move the majority of the books into that room effectively making it the library.

Here's what we had to start with.

The best part was that windows were painted shut on top of everything else. Upon further inspection I discovered that the sills had some water damage. Which meant I needed to open up the windows to fix the issue.

Here you can see all the lovely colors that the room was before. Apparently no one bothered stripping the window sills before repainting.

Opening the windows. (Thanks to my neighbor Sunshine who helped us with this. She has a lot more experience when it comes to opening 80 year old windows.)

Priming and getting rid of the "Masking tape" yellow.

We decided to repaint with a Faux Brushed Suede color from Loews. We chose on "Prairie Moss"

Trent is checking out the first coat.

This project has been a lot of work and it's just the beginning. After this we are doing a lot of moving around and then will hopefully get around to re-painting the office and launch the official start of the Adventurer's Room!

Next post.... I'll show you the final results with the new color scheme.

For all the benchwarmers out there.

The other night we went to see a Redhawks baseball game. The Redhawks are our OKC minor league team who happen to be a farm team for the Rangers. Yes those Texas Rangers.

Anywho. I dropped off Amy near the front entrance to the ball park while I parked the car. The ballpark, which is a nice little park if you haven't seen it, has several statues of famous Oklahoma baseball players out front. She was meeting our party in front of the Mickey Mantle. She asked me which statue was his, and I remember it being the one in between the home plate and 3rd base entrances and told her where it was.

Later after the game she commented that the first statue (between the home and 1st entrances) was not Mickey Mantle as we has suspected but was the statue of a guy named "Joe Benchwarmer". At this point I was very confused. Who the hell was Joe Benchwarmer? Was this some 13th man of baseball? A tribute to the second stringer, triple-A, never-made-it-to-the-big-leagues, player?

Upon asking a few more questions she finally admitted. "Maybe it wasn't Joe, maybe it was Johnny." Johnny Benchwarmer? Then it hit me.

"Johnny Bench?" I asked incredulously.

"Sure, maybe that was it."























So basically in one misunderstanding, my wife reduced one of the greatest catchers ever to play the game of baseball, and one of my childhood baseball heroes*, to a second tier benchwarmer.
After I stopped cracking up and explained her mistake she looked at me and said "This is going in the blog, isn't it?"

Yup.

Now, dear readers, how do I explain to her who Yogi the Bear was named after?

* I actually had his 1982 baseball card. Along with the entire 1984 Detroit Tigers starting lineup. But I lost all my cards in a tragic, angst filled "I think my Mom threw away the cigar box they were in" event of my childhood. It's scarred me ever since.

Update

I know, I know I shouldn't go this long without posting SOMETHING.

A few people have been asking about my mom. She's staying in very good spirits. She has to drive from Texas City up to Kemah for radiation every day. But so far so good.

I promised some more pics from the Florida trip so here we go.

This Cat (Catalina) is for Trey, whose grandfather flew them back in WWII.

We had a great time (at least I did) at the Naval Air Museum at Pensacola NAS. It's easily one of the best air museums I've been to.

After we got back from Florida we took a side trip to the summer camp where I used to work, Worth Ranch. Needless to say it was a little waterlogged. To my surprise however, considering it was still late June, the camp was closed. (I'll leave my speculations for another post.)

I've never seen the Brazos so high though. Just as a comparison, i'll show you a staff photo from 2003 and a picture I took in June of this year.