Some Miscellaneous Stuff

Well, life has been going well this month. For that I am glad. It is a lot less crazy than January was. In January I had to ramp up the ward choir again, buy a new car, move to a new office (and I have a LOT of stuff in my office, I must be a pack rat or something), I had a job interview that required some hefty preparation, and was swamped at work. So February is nice, I feel like I got my head above water.

As for my office, I am not sure if I am a pack rat or not. I still have stuff in boxes because I might have to move out again to get new carpet in the office (the carpet is old and literally ripped in a couple places). Well, in the last week I have had to go through the boxes maybe four times to get stuff or help someone who was asking for something. So even though I have a lot, maybe much of it actually IS necessary. I'll never know for sure how much of it, though.

Well, I called this the miscellaneous entry because I found a few fun pictures and just thought I'd say something on each one.

The top picture is a conference room at work. In it is people, my co-workers. These people are sampling chili. We had our 3rd annual Chili Cookoff this year. I kind of organized it three years ago because I wanted a chili cookoff. We have had it the Friday before the super bowl, so we call it the Chili Bowl. Because we are all a bunch of engineers, I thought I'd make the scoring as confusing as possible. It was great fun to put it together and participate this year. The office is larger than ever, and over 60 people came to try chili! Not only that, there were 22 kinds of chili. We had little food service ramekins (portion cups, see second picture) and eveyone had 22 of them stacked on three plates. It was really a great event this year.

The above picture is in our bathroom. I got in my stocking for Christmas - (thank's Joanna!) - some little "pills", and when you put them in water and the capsule dissolves you have some foam shape. Well, she got me some airplane shapes! After I had "expanded" them all with hot water, I came home a few days later from work and found them hanging in the bathroom, just for me! It was a surprise, and it was cool. She had put thread through all of them and hung them from suction hooks. First they were in the shower, we moved them because we kept knocking them down. So there it is, Joanna is fun and creative, and nice. Each night one of us fills the humidifier in the tub. She quickly grabbed it from me and said, "I'll fill it tonight!" because she wanted me to see them when I showered in the morning and for it to be a surprise.

Last but not least, this is dinner. Dinner from some night a couple weeks ago. Wild rice, zucchini, and chicken. Joanna cooks health meals for me. I usually get the bad food at work unfortunately. Anyhow, we usually reheat our leftovers in the microwave, and will put plastic wrap over the dish to keep from drying out the chicken. Well, I set the microwave long so the food got really hot. The plastic wrap was a giant bubble in the microwave. When it turned off the hot air in the bubble cooled and shrunk - severly shrunk! The plastic wrap actually formed to the food. It reminds me of that vacuum packing infomercial. I thought it was pretty amazing so I took a picture. Just so you know, the food was tasty, hot, and still moist!