Jordan & Emily

Happenings of our lives

I decided that this post needs to be split in half. At the beginning of February (end of January) I got to go visit my sister, Nicole and her husband, Nate and their baby, Katie. I also got to see Justin and Julie. I keep telling people that I killed two birds with one stone, but I’m not sure that’s the right phrase to use…

Anyway, Jordan and I drove to St Louis Friday night. There was a snow storm that came in that night, and it was really coming down hard, so hard in fact that Jordan got out of work early. So, it took us a while to get to St. Louis. Here’s a picture of the snow when I was driving to pick Jordan up:

Try not to think too hard about how I got that picture. So, it started snowing even harder when we were driving, but we eventually made it. We stopped for dinner at Cracker Barrel. Can you believe Jordan had never eaten there!?! That is pretty much a crime in my family. My dad loves Cracker Barrel, when we go on trips, he pulls out the Cracker Barrel map and we try and go there.

After we ate dinner we drove the rest of the way to our hotel. We spent the night and Jordan dropped me off at the airport the next morning. Surprisingly, my flight from St Louis to Philadelphia was not  delayed. The flight was pretty uneventful, but there are pictures. I’ve flown a lot, but I’m always amazed by it. I love breaking through the clouds and being above them, it’s amazing. I got some pretty cool pictures of the main part of Philadelphia. My flight to State College was delayed because all the lights on the airplane were broken, I guess that’s a bad thing. Apparently when that happens they have to replace all the batteries that power the lights on the plane, which takes over an hour. So I eventually got to State College and Nicole and Nate picked me up.

I can’t really describe it, but somehow when I haven’t seen family or good friends for a long time, I forget that time apart when I see them . I mean, the last time I saw Nicole she was pregnant, but now she had a baby, but it felt like I had just seen her. Does that make sense to anyone?

It was so fun to meet my newest niece, I just had to take lots of pictures…

Click on the picture to go to the gallery.

Emily and I on the 16th of January, after camping, went driving on the Glade Top Trail. It was a surprise to me. I hadn’t heard of it before but Emily found it. We only went on part of it and it was so incredibly foggy the whole time, we couldn’t see much but the fog itself made for some really pretty sights and pictures. We’ll have to go back soon and take more pictures when the fog isn’t bad. Emily really wanted to find the watershed divide but because of the fog we couldn’t find it.  It didn’t take us very long.  We’d recommend it to anyone.  The whole road was a dirt road but our ‘97 Mercury Mystique handled it just fine. The map below shows the loop we did; the actual “trail” starts on the east side a bit higher than where we actually started and ends on the south side of the loop on highway 125.

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Glade Top Trail

Well, we’re really bad at remembering what we do when we don’t take pictures, oops. Anyway, we’ve been hanging out a lot with some friends from our ward Casadee and John. They love playing games as much as we do, and they’re really fun to play with.  On January 2, we played the new game that my parents gave us for Christmas called Say Anything. It was a really fun game, it would be even more fun with more people.

We also played their game called Scene It: Squabble, the girls won, and so we played again, and then we won again.

We also hung out with them on Jan 16 and played a new game we bought for ourselves for Christmas called Blokus. It’s  kind of like tetris with 4 people. I really like it, but Jordan doesn’t so much. Although it did agree that playing with 4 people is a lot more fun than playing with two. After we played that we played Mexican Train with Dominoes, I’d never played it before, and it was a lot of fun, but it took a really long time.

Thanks guys for hanging out with us and playing games with us. We look forward to playing more games in the future.

Sun Dried Tomato and Basil
2 packages of cream cheese
2 c of cheddar cheese crumbles (just buy a block and pulse them in the food processor a bit)
1-1.5 c grated hard italian cheese (Parmesan, Romano, Asiago)
6-8 ounces sun dried tomatoes (I bought oil packed and drained them)
8-12 basil leaves or a 1 T of dried basil

Blend together the cream cheese, cheddar, and Parmesan. Use a food processor (we just have a little one, and it’s perfect for this) to chop the sun dried tomatoes, tear the basil leaves and drop in the food processor, pulse until desired size. (If using dried basil, add directly to cheese mixture). Add to cheese mixture, add additional Parmesan until desired consistency. Line a round bowl with plastic wrap and press mixture into the plastic wrap, this will make the ball round. Refrigerate until ready to eat.

Emily surprised me when I came home from work on Friday January 15th.  She had everything packed to go camping and wouldn’t tell me where we were going or what we were going to eat.  Well, we ended up camping at the Swan Creek area like we’ve done before.  It was really muddy but we found a spot to put up our tent.  Then Emily set up the stove and warmed up some delicious homemade french bread with spaghetti sauce, breaded chicken and aged New Zealand cheddar cheese I got from work.  It was delicious.  Then we played some games.  Then Emily brought out some creme brulee she had made previously (post on that to come).  Then to top it all off, we had smores.  It was fun.  We slept really well and woke up to the sound of rain on our tent.  That would have been fine under ordinary circumstances; however, the dirt road we drove on to get to the site was really muddy and we actually almost got stuck the night before so we quickly packed everything up and shoved it in the car and drove away.  We then went to Glade Top Trail (which was Emily’s surprise) but I’ll write a separate post about that.

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Jordan loves creme brulee and I just like the custard part. One day when I was driving home from work I heard an advertisement for something and it said creme brulee, so I decided to go home and make some.

I cut the recipe in half because we have small ramekins, but it was still more than enough to fill them.

Here’s the recipe:

Jordan’s favorite part of making creme brulee is torching them (honestly who doesn’t like this part?). We ate them and they were pretty tasty. We even at some that weekend when we went camping. Stay tuned for more on our camping trip.

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So we spent New Years Eve with Ryan and Heidi and then on New Years Day we spent it with them again. Ryan’s brother was moving, so Jordan went to help. On the bright side, we got to go to Ryan’s Parents house and got to see lots of cows.

I was so excited I took lots of pictures (we probably deleted half of them). The cows were so cute, and they loved the food. There were also horses and a pony that was pretty funny looking. I told Jordan that I need a pet cow, too bad they eats lots of food and smell bad.

The other really cool thing was that we saw a eagle in a tree while we were driving there. We even turned around so we could get a picture of it.

Click on the picture to go to the gallery.

So, in order to redeem myself for the ill fated Christmas Eve trip, Jordan and I went hiking in New Year’s Eve. We got a comment on our smugmug gallery about a specific waterfall that we had been too before. The guy wanted to know the latitude and longitude of the waterfall. We hadn’t been back to Pee’s Holler since Jordan got his new GPS, so we decided to go back so we could tell the guy about it. It is also nice because Jordan wants to put things like that on his new website.

So we drove to Hercules Glade and started hiking. You’ll notice that pretty much ever picture with Jordan has him looking at his GPS and setting a waypoint.

I really like going to places during different seasons. The last time we hiked Pee’s Holler, it was late summer and the leaves were all still on the trees. This time we went and the trees were mostly bare. It felt like a totally different place. Anyway, we had fun hiking and came back home and spent New Year’s Eve with Heidi and Ryan.

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Pees Holler

This Christmas was our first Christmas without our families. We were kind of sad thinking about it, but we’re glad that we got to spend it together.

We woke up on Christmas morning and it had snowed! It hadn’t snowed before Christmas, so we were pretty excited about it. We were talking about how we could hardly believe Christmas was almost here because it didn’t look like winter. So we woke up and ate cinnamon rolls and then opened presents.

If you look at the pictures, ignore the crazy hair and faces, I was pretty excited about the things Jordan got me. Jordan was excited too, even though he doesn’t look that excited in the pictures. Jordan got me a bunch of stuff for my Cricut and I got Jordan some movies and a digital picture frame for his desk at work.

We spent most of the day playing with our new presents. I made a bunch of cards with my Cricut and Jordan played his game. For dinner we had a ham that my work gave to us and some other holiday foods. We ate leftovers for a lot time afterward (we still have some ham that’s frozen) because there’s just the two of us.

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So, Jordan already posted about our hiking trip on Christmas Eve. I’ll talk about when we got home. So we decided to come home because it was cold, and raining, and I really don’t like hiking in the rain.

When we got home, we got warm and decided that we wanted to open one of each of our presents (actually Jordan decided this). Jordan knew what my sister had gotten me for Christmas and he wanted to watch it, so we did. I wanted to watch it too, but I could have waited a day.

So we watched Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, it was our second time seeing it, and I think it’s a pretty good movie. Maybe ask me again when I’ve read the book again.

So Jordan got Assassin’s Creed II, and while he played it I took pictures of our trees. Now on to Christmas…

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