We Won!

I believe I've recently explained my love for free things. Anything that is free is immediately more enjoyable to me. I think the only thing I could love more than a free thing is a free thing that I won. The fact that it's free AND no one else gets it makes its coolness factor go way up to me.

As I walked in the door on Friday afternoon, Doug told me that KSL Radio was throwing a tailgate party just down the street from us that included $3 steak dinners. A $3 steak dinner isn't free, but it sure is close, so we left immediately. We found a parking lot full of people enjoying their cheap steak dinners, along with a number of free, delicious items (fresh scones, hot chocolate, apples with caramel dip and much more) Doug Wright (a talk radio show host from KSL who Doug and I listen to a lot) was there making announcements and giving out prizes. I entered our name half heartedly since there were so many entries.

So the evening went on, some people got little prizes like T shirts and such. They announced that they'd start the drawings for the big prizes- BYU football tickets for the game next day- and the first name they drew was Doug! It was so exciting! I was so sad that I didn't have my camera to get a picture of him up on stage with Doug Wright handing him his prize and making him give a Cougar cheer in front of everyone.

Unfortunately Doug has been sick all week and by the time we got home he knew he'd be too sick to use the tickets the next day... after checking to see if some friends/family wanted them (it was too late notice for everybody) we ended up selling them on Craigslist and going out to lunch with the money we got for them. A much more fun option, in my opinion (I'm still a little footballed out from... well... my life)

Thanks for lunch KSL!

A Real Oven

I've loved to cook since I was little. Whenever my mom was in the kitchen I'd be there beside her to learn what she was doing. When she wasn't in the kitchen I'd be reading her cook books cover to cover like a novel (a habit I still very much enjoy). When I learned of the existence of an Easy Bake Oven, I was thrilled. Cooking and toys all rolled into one. I begged for one for I don't know how many Christmases. My mom always told me I could just use her oven, but I was convinced that wasn't good enough. I wanted the Easy Bake oven with the tiny pans and just add water mixes.

So, after years of begging I finally got one for Christmas. I was thrilled. Until I tried to cook something. Turns out my mom was right. Our oven did in fact work better than this box that cooked cake batter with a light bulb. I think I used it a few times, but eventually realized the superiority of a real oven.

I had forgotten about this experience until about a month ago. Doug and I set a goal to start eating healthier. I'd been on the lookout for some good, healthy food for a while and came upon the Jenny Craig website's recipe collection. It's full of these delicious recipes that are low calorie/ low fat- and a bunch of them fall into the '30 min. meal' category.

So, with a new goal set and the recipes to put it into action, I set off. The only problem was the fact that this all started just as we moved into the basement apartment of our house.

We knew when we moved in that the oven in the basement apartment was broken, but we just hadn't had time to get it fixed. And then after enough time had passed we decided we'd put our oven fixing money towards a brand new, nicer oven. So then, of course, we had to wait for the upstairs renters to move out so we could move upstairs, take the old, working oven to the downstairs apartment and put the new oven upstairs in our new home.

So there I was, with so much cooking anticipation and no oven to cook in. I refused to be stopped.

We received a toaster oven for our wedding and everybody kept telling me that they're great to have because you can use them as a toaster AND an oven. I decided to try my hand at this toaster oven thing.

First I tried some chicken rolls... which I cooked in the toaster oven on what that dial said was well over 400 degrees... when they were still cold in the center after TWO HOURS I gave up and used the microwave...

Next came vegetable lasagna, which was also heated in the toaster oven for over an hour and then finished in the microwave.

Day after day I as I prepared mini pans of food to put into my mini oven that had about the heating power of a light bulb (actually, some days I wondered if it'd be faster if I just threw a chicken breast on one of our lamps...) I was reminded of that lesson I learned when I was little. Real ovens are a good thing.

I think I did finally figure out how to get the toaster oven to cook things. Here's the secret (at least this is the only way I could figure out how to make it work) Take the baking time for a normal oven and double it, and add about 50 degrees to the baking temperature. Now here's the real trick- if, after you double the baking time, the number is more than 15 minutes- the item will actually never finish cooking in a toaster oven.

This past Tuesday they delivered our new oven. I baked something in it that very day. I'm so excited to leave our toaster oven to it's normal use of making toast.

Moving. . . Again

Jessica and I are moving again! For the last month Jess and I have been fixing up and living in the basement apartment of our new house. Last night the couple that was living upstairs moved out. For the next two weeks we are going to have the entire house to ourselves. Beginning in November we will live upstairs and we will rent out the basement apartment to a nice newlywed couple.

We are SO excited to move upstairs. Don't get me wrong, the basement apartment is a ton better than the apartment we were living in for the first year of our marriage. Living in a real house is really awesome though.

We (especially Jessica) have been giddy thinking about paint colors and all the customizations and improvements we want to do. Here are some pictures:

This is a picture of the front of the house:

This is what you see as you walk in the front door:

This is the living room:

Another view of the living room:

Jessica pondering paint (in the kitchen/dining area):

Still pondering:

This is the bathroom:

This is the garage. We have lofty plans to put our cars in here:

This house has approximately 1000 closets, I have taken pictures of a select few of them for all you (closet) lovers out there:

So there it is. We are really excited. After spending a month in our basement apartment wondering what our house really looked like (since we had only seen the upstairs a few times) it was really exciting to open up the door between the house and the basement apartment. It was like we passed through a portal to another world. A world with magic machines that wash your dishes for you and enormous rooms with giant doors where snow and ice don't need to be constantly scraped from your car every morning.

We like our new world.

Basement Apartment: Before and After

We put up our baseboards yesterday! It's so exciting to start getting close to the final product. We're still not all the way there (I'm pretty sure the list of little projects we still have to do never actually gets any shorter... as we finish one we realize there is another to be done), but I figured I'd take pictures while I was thinking of it. These are of the Kitchen/Living area of the basement apartment.

Living Room Before

Living Room After


Kitchen Before
(this is exactly how it looked when we moved in. I do wonder why there were those pool noodles in the kitchen...)

Kitchen After

It's been so fun to have a house and actually get to choose what things will look like! I actually surprised myself yesterday. I had a coupon for the garden center at Home Depot and figured I should take advantage of it and get something to help make our yard look little nicer. I picked out two hydrangea bushes and spent the rest of the afternoon daydreaming about where I'd put them! I honestly think I thought of at least 25 difference scenarios, and we really don't have a very big yard. I really never thought of myself as a gardener, but maybe I just had to buy a plant to get myself started! Let's hope I still like it once I've been trying to keep those bushes alive for a while.

I'm so excited to move upstairs (where we plan on living a bit longer than we did in the basement!) and pick paint colors that we actually get to live with. I've been daydreaming about those colors for much longer than an afternoon and am so very very excited to get working on the real thing.