shameless

i know very little about heidi montag, except for these things:
1. she got her "start" on one of those mtv reality shows a few years ago - "the hills" maybe?
2. she is married to a guy named spencer who has a gross beard, and they claim to be christians.
3. she is completely shameless - she posed in playboy, is trying to launch a singing career, went on "i'm a celebrity get me out of here" with blago's wife, and basically makes it her mission to be in as many tabloids as possible.
4. i find her to be one of the most annoying people alive. which is saying a lot since i'm pretty sure i remember writing a rant about paris hilton a year or two ago - if you're worse than paris, you know it's bad.

thus, i was very excited when i saw this headline on msn: "anderson cooper disses heidi and her talent". glorious. thank you, anderson cooper, for saying that. i know very little about anderson cooper other than that he has a blog (and apparently a show) on cnn, and that in pictures, he's usually posing with malnourished children in africa. i haven't looked up the video for this spot yet, but from what msn reported, i wholeheartedly agree with him. read it. you'll agree, too. particularly if you look through the pictures to the left of the article - just click the little pink "next" button. trust me on this.

_____

unrelatedly, we've had a busy week! we were at the rockies game with mike, maura, and kinley all evening on wednesday - as in, i left for work at 7:25am, and we got home at 10:25pm. it was fun, though. we spent an evening (maybe two?) stripping caulk out of the main bathroom so that we could get it re-caulked in time for scott's parents and sister to arrive next week. we got in a few bike rides, too. in fact, last night we biked over to a mall about a mile from our house to go to sears to pick up caulk, and look around. the mall's having its official grand opening this weekend, and it looks really nice - lots of little restaurants and shops and fountains. (it's an outdoor mall.) and a movie theater! we're hoping if we go there this weekend we'll get some coupons or vouchers. *fingerscrossed* i did get the tub caulked last night - hoorah! started at 9:30pm, finished at 10:30. we splurged and went for the "titanium silicone" caulk that was $1.50 more per tube in hopes that its super-duper-ness will mean that it holds better.

penne with pork tenderloin and summer squash in white wine

oh my, i just made a very tasty dinner. so good, in fact, that i feel the need to preserve my impromptu recipe for posterity.

penne with pork tenderloin and summer squash in a white wine sauce
(i need a better name for this)

8oz penne pasta

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 boneless pork chop, diced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
splash low-sodium soy sauce
salt, pepper, italian seasoning
(probably also good with a dash of crushed red pepper here - didn't think of that til just now!)

1 yellow squash, sliced
1 zucchini, sliced
5 cherry tomatoes, quartered
3 green onions, chopped

white wine
splash lemon juice
fresh basil, sliced
parmesan cheese

boil penne. dice pork chop, saute in olive oil with chopped garlic. splash soy sauce on cooking pork chop, season with salt, pepper, italian seasoning blend. when 50% cooked, add squash and zucchini to pan. cook until beginning to soften. add white wine (until bottom of pan is covered, plus a little extra) and a splash of lemon juice. continue cooking until squash and zucchini are cooked almost through. add cherry tomatoes and green onions. drain pasta, add to pan with pork/veggies/sauce. serve, top with shredded parmesan. enjoy!

i was actually planning on making something similar yesterday, but with swiss chard that i got at the berry farm's farmer's market instead of summer squash. apparently chard is very perishable, though, because in the 48 hours that it was hanging out in my fridge at home, it totally wilted, so i ended up tossing it. we made sweet and sour chicken instead. alas and alack.

(for dessert, i highly recommend leftover ice cream cake from maggie moo's that you took to small group and thought would get eaten up, but ended up with 6 pieces to take home. don't worry, we did work out tonight.)

i just want to enjoy the sunshine

my house is the place where phone service goes to die, i think. we tried all of the jacks in the house last night (which is a lot - at least one in almost every room), and alas, none of them picked up a line, so we get to pay qwest $85 to come fix the problem. hoorah! they're coming this afternoon, and i really really hope it's an easy fix.

i'm debating what to do tonight, still. scott's going off to a fantasy football draft party with the guys. the guy who's hosting it's wife is inviting the wives over to hang out and play games ... but i'd already told myself i would stay home and start stripping caulk in the main bath. i'm torn, though, because it would be fun to hang out, but it could also be nice to hang out by myself at home - and more productive, for sure. but there's not really so much of a time crunch on doing the caulking that not starting tonight would throw our timeline completely off ... we'll see. i meant to do the caulking before my parents got here in june (sorry, guys), so my next goal is to have it done before scott's parents get here a few days before labor day weekend. which is less than two weeks away, now. crazy - where did this summer go?!

i'm also going berry picking with the girls bright and early tomorrow morning. as in, meeting at 7:30 to leave early. it should be fun, though. berry picking and browsing around the farm's organic farmer's market is totally one of my favorite parts of summer. they put together bags of fresh produce with a recipes - like a bagged kit for pasta sauce, or salsa, or tomatillo salsa. i got the bag for tomatillo salsa last year, and it was amazing - i really hope they have it again this weekend. it made a ton of salsa, though, to the extent where after two weeks we made nachos for dinner solely because we wanted to get rid of the tomatillo salsa before it went bad.

i think one of my favorite things about denver is its great mix of midwestern and west coast life. you get casual clothes and lots of sun, fun things like tomatillos which i never knew existed before we moved out here, but still have comfortable oaks and maples and pines in the backyard rather than exotic palm trees.

dirty rumor

i think someone put a dirty rumor into the shoe designing circles that american women all secretly want to be strippers. you think that sounds harsh? i disagree. there is no reason to call something a boot when it has this many holes in it. do you really think we won't notice that you're trying to sell us ugly shoes, shoe designers? i really don't think there's any excuse to show off my toenails and the callousy back of my heel, though. but hey, at least wannabe-strippers who have an affection for the victorian era now have a shoe to wear - that was very generous of shoe designers to want to provide for them. and the prehistoric era ... the native american era ... the 1920's ... even the roman empire!

i'm not usually so anti-trendy, but there are just some outstandingly bad options out there right now. yeesh.

phone home

so we finally caved and got a home phone line. cell service at our house has been patchy since we moved in over a year ago, but we both feel like it's gotten worse in the last few weeks - don't know why. anyway, we ordered it on sunday, it was supposed to be installed yesterday, so i stopped on my way home from work and picked up a phone at best buy, plugged it in to let it charge ... and we didn't so much have phone service. i wondered if maybe they just didn't install it yesterday since it was just an "estimated" start date, but when i called just now, the chick had a technician run a test on the line, and he said they got an error message, but they don't know if it's inside the house or outside. fingers crossed that it's outside. once this is all done with, though, it'll be so so nice to finally be able to talk to people without static - as long as they're local or call us, that is, since we're not paying for long distance.

fall is falling

whoops, it's been a while since i posted. two weekends ago we had my office's cubs tix for all 4 games in the cubs v. rockies series, and the cubs very miserably lost 3/4 games. i think between the disappointment of that and being overwhelmed by spending so much time around so many people, i didn't particularly feel like writing much of anything.

i've mostly recovered, though, and we spent this weekend camping with our sunday school class. it was very fun - we camped down near lake isabel in the san isabel forest, southwest of pueblo. we had a group site that would hold up to 60 people at night/120 during the day, and we only had 15 people, so we had plenty of room. it was a nice site, though - private (non-flush) toilets for our site, lots of big trees, plenty of fire pits and grills, big covered picnic area, and a nice creek that ran next to the site. plus, it was on a private road just for the 3 group sites, so there wasn't a ton of traffic running next to it. it was a good time - we cooked over the fire for dinners, and had a fun hike up to an abandoned mine and waterfall on saturday. a few people had trouble sleeping with the cold weather (lows in the low-40's both nights), but i think we've found a perfect system. from the bottom up: fleece blanket, foam sleeping pads, sleeping bags, quilt. oh, and i sleep with a fleece hat on - and our tent is a bit smaller than our friends, which keeps our body heat trapped a little better. it keeps us well insulated, cozy, and quite comfy.

last night when we got home, i noticed some leaves from our russian olives had fallen on the lawn, and it occurred to me that we're already past the middle of august. school is starting, nights are cool, labor day is three weeks away, we just finished our last summer vacation, and fall is just around the corner. i love fall, but it always makes me a little bit sad when summer is winding down. where is the year going?

our friends' kids

our friends keith and amy had their baby last night (natalie jean)! i was glad to hear the news, in part because i knew they were hoping to have her before next wednesday so that they wouldn't have to induce, and in part because i'll be able to remember her birthday (our anniversary)! also handy is that our friends abba and caleb's baby boy axel was born last month - on scott's birthday. kind of random that of the three non-national-holiday days of the year that are truly meaningful to us (our birthdays and wedding anniversary), two of them are now shared with good friends' kids.

we'll get to see both families at our friend andrew's wedding over labor day weekend, by which time natalie will be a month old, and axel will be two months old. crazy! (especially since they were originally due within a week of each other.)

anniversary recap

anniversary celebration was fun! i got home at 6 to find scott cooking up a storm in the kitchen - he had made me dinner! and not just any dinner, but the dinner that he made almost five years ago when he proposed - artichoke and curry appetizer, lobster tails, cream puffs. yummy. and he bought me a beautiful bouquet of flowers (which included a blue hydrangea - our wedding flower), AND he got us a nice bottle of wine! when scott told me earlier in the week that he had plans for us for dinner, i had had a fleeting thought that it'd be wonderful if he made me a fancy dinner, but realistically thought we'd likely be going out somewhere, so it was a perfect surprise. he said that he had thought about doing a restaurant, but he didn't think that really indicated any sacrifice or thought on his part. say it with me - awwwwww.

and then my gift to scott was an anniversary book! let me elaborate: a few years ago, scott's dad suggested that we write down what we do to celebrate our anniversary every year so that we can remember down the line what we did. and one of our traditions on our anniversary date is that we sort of recap the last year and talk about what we did, and what our favorite memories were, etc. so i've been looking for a book that's set up to write down both of those, and while i did find a few options, most were super cheesy, or only set up for 10 years, or had fill-in-the-blank questions ... they just weren't perfect. not to mention that i have told scott that i expect at least 75 years of marriage out of him, since we got married young-ish and people are living longer these days. an anniversary memory book shouldn't stop at 25 years, or go to every five years at that point - every year is important! anyway, i decided to take matters into my own hands and make one! this week has been super slow at work, so i got to spend a fair bit of time playing with fonts and formats and printed out a few options for us so that we can decide on the final product together. just to show you how on the same page we are, scott said he'd had a thought of doing something similar, except more as a recap rather than something to continue doing going forward - but he didn't have the extra time to work on it. so he really liked my present! i'll get some pictures of it on here when we have the final product done.

stalking and celebrating

oh my, so i was catching up on my blog reading this morning, and in the last picture in one of the pioneer woman's blogs, her sister-in-law was wearing a hat that said "drummond ranches". since she had said just earlier in that same blog that drummond was their last name, i figured she was basically asking me to google it. (ahem.) i googled around, and found: a) a listing for drummond east ranch for sale for $6m - apparently they live nearish tulsa, which i assumed - although from the history section on the listing, it looks like that ranch is from a different branch of the family, b) this very interesting article that interviews her brother-in-law about day to day operations on their ranch (in which i learned that pw's husband's real name is ladd - ick), and c) that their family is the 77th largest land owner in the country.

fascinating. i don't know what the world did before google. i was reading an article online yesterday about school librarianship (which is my current dream job), and this one librarian was talking about how part of the new library job is to teach kids how to use computers in research, and how they have encyclopedias on cd-rom and every once in a while get to use the web for research. i was shocked. i mean, i get that there's some risque stuff on the web, but get some filtering software or something - nobody uses cd-rom encyclopedias anymore! with wiki, google, and online journals and newspapers and encyclopedias, there's no need to use something that's outdated the moment it's burned.

anyway, today's our 4-year wedding anniversary! yay! i told scott last week that he had permission to plan a date for us, which might sound controlling, but it wasn't meant to be - it was more like, "i know i'm a stickler on the budget, but it's our anniversary which is important so we should make the effort to do something, and i'm willing to plan something, but i feel like i plan everything and i know you like planning fun dates for us, so go for it if you want to and i promise not to interfere." anyway, scott's taking me out tonight, but i don't know what we're doing yet - he told me i need more surprises in my life. haha. yay for us! i've been working on a present for scott all week, but he gets to find out about it before everyone else in my life this time, so i'll post about it tomorrow. you can hold your horses. it's pretty fabulous, though, in my humble opinion.

(p.s. - scott really looks forward to things like birthdays and anniversaries, which i enjoy. i think it's super cute, though, because on, say, the day before his birthday, he'll say, "it's my birthday-eve, what are we going to do today?!" as though everyone of course celebrates the day before their birthday. two days ago, we woke up bright and early before work and the first words out of his mouth were, "happy anniversary eve-eve!" you know, as in the eve of the anniversary-eve? it makes me laugh.)

backpacking.

so i think i mentioned last week that we have no intentions of backpacking? wellllll, we might go anyway. at small group on sunday, the idea came up of going backpacking together as a group - the guys were all up for it, miranda basically backpacks professionally (she's an ecologist) and maura loves backpacking with an overly enthusiasic passion. i thought lianna would be my fellow holdout, but even she said that as long as the trail is easy enough and her husband would carry most of the gear, she'd be up for it. so the conversation basically turned into all of them convincing me. i don't necessarily want to not go, but here are my hesitations:

1. cost. we have no backpacking gear, so we'd have to rent a tent, packs, and a sleeping bag for scott (i think mine in its stuffsack should be fine). one of the guys said his rented sleeping bag for the guys' trip was $26, so this could add up. although i suppose there is a chance that other friends might have gear we could borrow - something to look into.
2. physical limitations. i'm in decent shape, yes, but i still request breaks while hiking at least twice as often as scott. i don't feel too embarassed because, well, he's my husband, but with a larger group of friends? i hate hate hate being the weak link. mike (who got enormous blisters and giant knots in his calf muscles on the guys' trip) kept talking about how overcoming your limits is half the fun of backpacking - i can kind of see that, but i think my limits are a lot closer than his are.

i think that's it. i'm sure i'll go and have a lot of fun, i just have a fair amount of trepidation at the moment.

food desert

what the what? is this for real? are there really no actual grocery stores in detroit?? 80% of detroit residents buy their food at convenience stores, liquor stores, and gas stations??? i had no idea that was even possible in america - it's almost like detroit is a tiny third-world nation in the midst of the usa. honestly. it almost makes me want to go there so that in another decade when detroit's been turned back into a prosperous city (or a giant farm, if that journalist has his way), i can say i saw it back when.

mmm, or i'll just go watch eight mile again.