Completely Unrelated Topics

1. Wedding pictures. Here and here. Enjoy.

2. I'm applying for a moonlighting job at Kaiser. I have about 20 pages of application to fill out in order to get privileges there. The most challenging is the page where they want my 10-year address history. I suppose I will eventually reach a point in my life where I will live in the same place for more than a few years. Currently we've been in this place for over a year. I think that is a record for me! But in 10 years, I have lived 11 different places, not counting the year I travelled throughout the west. I cannot remember 11 different addresses. So I started searching... old emails got me the last 2 or 3 addresses. But I couldn't find anything prior to 2005. Then it came to me! amazon.com! Luckily I have been ordering from them since 1998 and they have the addresses from my last 10 years worth of orders. Again I wonder how we ever lived life prior to the internet.

3. I made pizza tonight, but still have some work to do on creating the perfect pizza dough. It was looking good until I pressed it out into the pizza shape, and realized it was stuck to the work surface. So I tried again, and ended up with some very very thin portions, but decided to forge ahead. Onions, tomatoes, cheese. Looked good, but I couldn't figure out how to transfer it from the counter where I had prepared it, to the oven where I needed to cook it. I managed to man-handle it in, where it is now cooking. And smells nice, and I'm sure it will taste nice. It is just not pretty. I will continue to work on this. Anyone have hints?

Peru!

Finally we have photos!

Adam and I will be posting our travel adventures on our new blog. That way we don't have to repeat effort in writing posts, creating on-line photo albums, etc. It's an experiment, we'll see how it works. We'll still keep our own blogs as well, because I don't think Adam's readers will be all that interested in my knitting, and my readers? Well, I think they all read Adam's blog anyway so it probably doesn't matter.

"But," you may be complaining. "How am I going to remember to check ALL THESE BLOGS?" Well my friend, it is time for you to get yourself set up with a feed reader. I myself am partial to google reader, but I do have an unhealthy attraction to google. There are probably better ones out there. I like google reader though, because it is web-based, so I can access my blog list from any computer -- the hospital for instance. Good to know I'm reading blogs when I should be concerned about the well-being of my patients, isn't it? Well, that is why I have interns. They do the work, I "supervise."

Enjoy our travel adventures. And once the weather cools off, I will get back to knitting. And on the cooking front, I have discovered that left over rice makes excellent (and easy!) rice pudding. I might even say it's better than Kozy Shack. And that's saying something.

Unpacking

I don't know why I never plan for the recovery phase of any vacation. I like to cram as much in as possible into my days off, and then come home exhausted, ready to start work the next day!

We got home this morning, after our two week wedding and honeymoon adventure. Faced with an empty fridge, boxes of wedding gifts, piles of mail and strangely about 2 dozen dead house flies, we set to work getting settled back in. First order of business was to sweep up the dead flies, because that was kind of gross. Grocery shopping, mail sorting and gift opening has been completed. I have yet to wash the Amazon off any of my clothes, but that's next up. Along with sorting through the 700 pictures we have of our adventure. And the (literally) 1000 pictures from our wedding. It's all a bit overwhelming, but I'm sure we'll be back in our routine in the next few days.

I promise there will be wedding pictures and Peru pictures for those who care, but we just need a bit more time to get it all organized. And figure out how to get the pictures off the new camera!

Honeymoon in Peru

Hello from Ollantaytambo, Peru! We´ve been here for 4 days now, and are making our way to the jungles of Iquitos tomorrow. It´s been lovely so far -- the first day was spent recovering from our 26 hours of travel (6 of which were spent trying to sleep in the Lima airport). After two days exploring the sites around Ollantaytambo, we hopped a train to Aquas Calientes, effectively "base camp" for Machu Picchu. This morning, bright and early at 6 am, with several hundred other people, we got in line for the bus to Machu Picchu where we rushed to the classic overlook and then waited... and waited... and waited for the fog to lift. Which it finally did. It looks just like the picutres, only more spectacular.

Tomorrow we are off to Cusco for the night before we fly off to Iquitos for our 3 day jungle adventure. We should return home Thursday, but they´ve changed our flight out of Iquitos Wednesday evening, leaving us only 90 minutes to get from domestic arrivals to check in for our international flight, then make our way through immigration control, pay our airport tax and navigate security. Who knows if we will make it... but we will get home eventually.

And when we do, you will have our new travel blog to look forward to. It seemed kind of silly for us both to blog about every trip we take together, so now we are going to put all our travel pictures and commentary on one communal blog. We´ll let you know when it is ready for prime time (it may take us awhile to sort through the 400+ pictures we´ve taken thus far... with 5 more days to go).

It's Good Luck, Right?

All along we have been telling people: we don't need a tent for our outdoor wedding. It doesn't rain in Seattle in the August. But as the day gets closer, the weather reports are more and more confident that it will in fact be raining on August 9th. And we still don't have a tent. I'm sure we will figure something out. But those who are going to be at the wedding... be prepared to get wet. We'll keep hoping the weather forecast is wrong, but from I'm told, it is good luck to have rain on your wedding day. I'm just not sure they meant rain on your outdoor without anywhere to get out of the rain wedding day.

Anyway, I'm off to take Gilbert to his fish-sitter, and then pack pack pack. I've managed to get out of my afternoon clinic committments, so I'm taking an earlier flight to Seattle, which will give me some time to hang out with Mom and Kate before the craziness of the weekend begins.

Four Days and Counting

There's a lot left to do in those final hours before the wedding:

1. Assemble photo guest book and hope people figure out what we are trying to do with it.
2. Beg Marcy and Ben to man the guest book (promise cocktails) and hope it turns out as we hope it will.
3. Pack, and try to remember all important things. Like the wedding rings.
4. Pack separate suitcase for Peru, because with our tight schedule, we will be flying directly to Lima from Seattle and then returning to San Diego.
5. Figure out how stuff left in Seattle will make it back to San Diego.
6. Write wedding vows. And ceremony. Kind of put that off until the last minute...
7. Try to remember if we have paid all of our vendors.
8. Inform family members that we have decided to do the rehearsal at Gasworks Park.
9. Pray, beg, plead with the weather gods that it will not rain on Saturday. And hopefully will be a little warmer than the 65 degrees that the weather channel is currently predicting.
10. Relax, because regardless of the last minute details, and regardless of the weather (a little rain never killed anyone!) it will all be lovely and regardless of what happens, I get a two week vacation as of Thursday. And that's always something to look forward to.

Cooking in Bulk

I love to cook. I love spending the afternoon in the kitchen, chopping and slicing and mixing and baking. It is just so rare that I have that kind of time. But today I did, and since we were having Adam's family over for dinner, it seemed like a good time to do that. There had been a request for my chile rellenos, which I happily set to work making. It's an easy enough meal for 4, I figured it couldn't be that hard to scale it up for 8. Everything was going fine until I actually set to work with the frying. The first batch came out well, so I set to work on the second batch. A little smoky, but still looked like they were turning out ok. Then went to finish up the third batch, and was out of batter. Hmmm, do we just go with the ones I've made so far, or whip up some more batter? Since the batter only consisted of egg whites and flour, I decided to make more batter. Quickly, since I was working with a pan of hot oil. So I dumped the egg whites in the bowl of the Kitchen Aid, turned it to high and realized the oil on the stove behind me was burning. I pulled that off the burner, but suddenly a large puff of smoke started emanating from the burner. Luckily, I had removed the batteries from our smoke alarm last time I set something on fire in the kitchen and I didn't see any flames, so we were fine. I headed back to check on my egg whites and noted that nothing had happened. There were no peaks forming, just foamy egg whites. I had not bothered to rinse out the bowl before putting the new batch of egg whites in, and it seems the yolks from the last batch were prohibiting my egg whites from forming peaks. Sigh. At this point I'm on the verge of losing it, because once again my oil is on fire, I have a dozen chile rellenos getting cold, and I was supposed to be impressing people with my cooking prowess. Luckily, Adam's mom swept in to save the day. She rinsed out the bowl, put some new egg whites in to whip and within a few minutes, I had finished up the last of the chile rellenos. Without burning anything down.

I am told they were good, but I didn't think they were my best. Too much batter, not enough cheese. I did however make strawberry shortcake for dessert, and that was, as always, delicious.

Lesson learned. Chile rellenos are not meant to be made in bulk. Next time we cook for the family, we will be making hot dogs.