1 Year Later

1 Year Anniversary

Happy 1 year anniversary to us. On December 29th we celebrated one year of marriage. What the heck are you suppose to do for your first wedding anniversary? Don't ask us, it was challenging to come up with something. We decided against anniversary presents, except that I insisted Patrick get me flowers. Patrick has some deep confusion and anxiety about getting a woman flowers. He doesn't understand why he should buy a frivolous decoration that will die in a matter of days. He has admitted to me that this stems from his mother's beliefs on flowers. Don't worry, Sally, I get it. So, we compromised. I got to pick out flowers that were still alive and in soil (still living). The flowers just happen to have glitter all over them and almost a month later I still find specks of sparkles on my husband's cheeks.

That night we made curry for dinner and ate our wedding cake for dessert. The top tier of our wedding cake was masterfully preserved. It then sat in my parents' freezer for months, until the freezer door was left open and there was a catastrophic meltdown. Then we reclaimed the cake brick and stored it in our freezer, until anniversary day. We had forgotten what flavor cake the top tier was. When we cut into it, we saw that it was poppy seed cake with raspberry filling. I know a lot of wedding cakes fall victim to freezer burn and most just don't make it at all, but our cake was delicious! It was worth the wait.  

After the food, we watched a comedy show. Patrick had set up a projector in our room and somehow engineered it to project on our ceiling so we could just lay in bed and watch the show. Oh, the luxury.

What Jessie has to say about marriage after a year: It's pretty great to have someone to be with me all the time. That is by far the best part about year one-- the constant companionship. I've moved 3 times since being married, which is 3/4 of all the moves in my entire life. We made more money together than single. We spent more money together than single. There are more things to clean... and half the time it's not my stuff. This year Patrick helped me stop a bad habit. This year I cleaned up his projectile vomit. Ultimately, I feel like a more well rounded, balanced, selfless person after being married for one year.

What Patrick has to say about marriage after a year: "I ran out of things to fix a lot faster than I thought I would. We should buy a house." He is currently organizing the cords behind the TV and organizing the kitchen cupboards. He doesn't really feel like writing right now, but he did manage to say "Sometimes it's fun and we go to a water parks and sometimes it's boring and we have nothing to do on a Saturday night." But he wishes to convey that it was more positive than negative.

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"The Menu"

Food. For the past year, I've been creating and perfecting "the menu." The menu is a spreadsheet in google docs that has every meal we've made and a link to the recipe. This part is pretty much my cookbook. From that list, I pick through it each week and decide what sounds good. I have separate tabs for each week of the "term." I'm currently using term segments because Patrick is in school. I don't know what will happen when we lose track of the school schedule, though. Each week tab has a week calendar for lunches and dinners. From there I fill in the blanks. Once I've decided what we are eating for the week I look through the ingredients the recipes need and the ingredients we have in our kitchen. I love this system and now if I ever don't want to create a week's menu, I have 52 weeks I can choose from to just replicate.

This week was an expansion week. I tried 2 new recipes. The first one was mochi ice cream balls. I love mochi ice cream because its delicious ice cream surrounded in this chewy sweet dough. All the recipes I looked up told me how simple and fast it was to make the mochi balls. They were wrong. I'm refusing to share the recipe with you. But here is a picture of how it turned out.

It looks like half thawed chicken breasts.

A few days later, we had some friends over and I made Chicken and Gnocchi Soup. This is a soup option at Olive Garden. If Olive Garden serves it, well then so should I. This one actually turned out just the way I'd hoped it would. It made the cut to stay on the menu. This is a link to the recipe: Chicken and Gnocchi Soup. The recipe calls for frozen gnocchis, but I made my own gnocchis from this recipes: Homemade Gnocchis.

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Wedding Announcement

Speaking of marriage and stuff...Kevan is engaged to Krislyn. They are getting married on May 24th, 2014. I actually don't remember if I already announced this on the blog or not, but I'm too lazy to check right now. I'm pretty sure everyone and there cat already knows about the engagement anyway, but here it is publicly documented. They really should just wait until December 29th so all of us siblings can have the same wedding anniversary, but I guess those love birds can't wait that long. Congrats.

Not their actual engagement.

 

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Computadora

I want you all to meet the newest member of our family-- Baby Ace. It's actually an HP Sleekbook, but we originally thought we were going to get an Acer laptop. Technically we should call the computer baby HP, but I like baby Ace much better. 

I shopped relentlessly for the perfect computer for me. You may ask, "why the new computer?" Well my MacBook died. Actually just the screen stopped working, but that kind of makes it hard to use. When I took it into the Apple Store to get it fixed, they called it "vintage." My 5 year old Macbook had become obsolete and the Apple store no longer carries parts for that model. Defeat. It was more economical to buy a new computer than to fix my old one. 

A funny thing happens when you are purchasing a big ticket item, YOU LEARN SO MUCH! I found out about specs. I didn't even know what specs were or meant before this whole process, but now I'm basically an expert. We ended up getting a refurbished laptop from Best Buy. I'm thrilled with it. Apparently, Patrick is thrilled with it too because he uses it all the time.

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The Job Search

Patrick graduates in March. That means the job search has begun. He hasn't technically applied anywhere, but hopefully this week. We have decided to search for jobs within the scope of the Willamette Valley-- most likely Portland. Related to Patrick's graduation, he is working on his senior project and studying for the FE exam (fundamental engineering exam). His senior project is to build a human powered flour mill. Basically that means a stationary bike that grinds wheat into flour. He pulled a vacuum out of the dumpster today because it had a part he might be able to use for his project.

I'll keep you posted on the career hunt.