Lots a pics

Ok, here are the pics that I had promised in the previous post.
This was a lemon cake I made courtesy of Martha Stewart for Easter dinner. Unfortunately, in the process of making a lemon syrup, the acid corroded my wire whisk. I then used the metal whisk in my lemon curd, which not only further corroded the whisk, it also left a very very very strong metallic taste in the curd! When did I discoer all this? Only once the curd was mostly thickened. So what did I do, throw it away and start from scratch? Of course not! I just used it anyway and hoped that the lemony taste of the cake would mask the iron-y taste of the curd. Was it successful? Well, I wouldn't really serve this to anyone else, but it is quite satisfying.
I don't get too gushy online about how wonderful Hubii is. But I thought that he deserved this one. I was having a hectic/ tough week at school so Hubii made me a delicious dinner of Mushroom Stroganoff. He also did something else super nice, and I said I would gush about it on facebook... but I forgot. I am truly fail at gushy facebook wife.

Smile Chef Hubii

This is just a cute supper I thought I would share. As close to breakfast for dinner that Hubii will agree to.
Say Happy 33rd birthday Hubii. Enjoy your cake. Unfortunately, it was from a box. This is what grad school does to you: It robs your soul.

It also pays for fun presents (really it does, at least untill I lose my 3.5 GPA)

So, at uni they stick all the grad students who don't have research profs (and some who do) into this one nasty dusty room. I thought I would try to brighten mine desk up a little with this cute mug that an old coworker made and that potted plant. Unfortunately, the mug was brought to its untimely end by an errant cricket ball. No I am not back in India but I am surrounded by Indian Grad students (whoda thunk it?) Some grad students were throwing around the ball and it strayed too close to my desk. Also, spring break was not kind on my plant. It's still alive, but probably on its last legs, roots, something.

When we went to Michigan we, we visited Hubii's Aunt MaryAnne. She gave us some paper lilies that did pretty well. They smelled quite strong though. Good thing that I like it, mostly.

So Pretty: they sparkle. If you click on the photo you will see it.

This is Hubii across the table from me at the Swanky restaurant that we went to for our 3rd anniversary dinner. I remember I got seared duck and... seared duck is pretty raw. I like to think of myself as a wordly foodie, so I chewed my way through a fair bit of it before my jaw and tongue begged for mercy. It was like eating a whole chunk of sashimi without soy sauce or wasabi and with the toughness of raw chicken. Anyways, we had them cook it a little more and it was delicious.
Here we are in front of a pendulum clock from the when Union Station was really a train station.
This is Winnie the poo. "What?" you say. Well this was a food bank event they had at the Union Station. It was a canned/ packaged foods scultpure contest.

This is a six pack. Very meta.
This is a Christmas pic that didn't make it into christmas photos. These cakes were baked by an elder at our church. He is one of the younger elders I think, maybe in his thirties. But he definitely doesn't look like a cake baker. He is bald and big and with a burly beard, he looks more like a hells angel in a suit. But these cakes tasted better than they looked.
The funny thing is, we asked him how we should cut the tree cake and he got confused. He said that he usually just drops them off and leaves. But they were delicious.

Hello My Name is Fuancime Wolfe

Hello all. Now that I woke James up an hour before he needed to be up this Saturday morning, I had time to upload all the photos I have taken recently. We will work chronologically backwards because I have more to say about things that are current.
First, yesterday was amazing! I thought it was just going to be a free dinner courtesy of one of Hubii's students who backed out last minute on a conference. Her name is really Francine and I have no idea how you can misspell it the way they did. Dinner was alright. As I was licking the last bits of my cherry cheesecake I wondered how long and boring the the keynote speaker would be.
I was soo off. The speaker's name is Dr. Carol Browning, who is a CS/ Math professor at Drury University. Which is pretty cool by itself, but she also worked at NASA Jet Propulsion Labs from 1987-1995. And she had some awesome stories. She talked about how the failure of Galileo led to the ubiquitous presence of smart phone. Galileo failed to open completely because some spines of its web became tangled and the next mission, Cassini, had the mandate of no moving parts. They had to find a way to create memory without magnetic tapes. They started to work with state of the art technology called solid state memory and the rest is history, as reported by twitter.
She had a lot of great stories. But I thought I would share this adorable video made from images from the Cassini mission. Sorry I wasn't sure how to embed an online video in my blog.
Dr. Browning's speech was very interesting and I was quite satisfied with it but then they said 'WAIT! We have one more thing for you. And now I will embed a video for your viewing pleasure.



I apologize for the poor quality of my cheap mobile phone video and for my childish exclamations. It was just sooo cool. I know... I am a 12 year old.

Buying a home

So Hubii and I have been trying to buy a house. We are trying to buy it in Platte City. buuuttt.... ugh, I hate buying houses. I should know, I have never bought one and there's a reason for it. How do I know that this exorbitantly priced town home is worth the money I am going to pay for it? I know I should look at comps but the only comp my real estate agent will give me are for the other town homes in this complex. I feel like I am pulling teeth getting comps from her. Sigh. This is majorly stressful. I don't want to be the cause of a housing crisis.
I just got some more comps from my agent. It seems that there are none. How do people justify selling this house at the same price as a year ago if they haven't sold it in a year. grrr....

Just so I am not the worst blogger out there

Hello,
I haven't posted in 3 months now. I have been very lame. I thought I would go back and put up pics that I missed but I can't. I have missed too much. We just have to go on from here. Sorry, the last 3 months will have to remain a mystery for you.
I am at school right now, taking a too long break. I am now a graduate student at the University of Kansas in the Mechanical engineering. Yesterday Hubii and I went to a pancake dinner for Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day or Fat Tuesday. Yummy. Today one of Hubii's classes is cancelled for the all school Ash Wednesday service. School is busy, but I like it.
:)
There, I posted. Now I can be less lame.

It's snowing

"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas..."
So incase you haven't been following my pictures on facebook I have put some on my blog.
This is what it looks like outside out home today. We haven't cleared our driveway because our car is sick. We think that it has a bad alternator but we will probably only find out on Thursday. Then I will no longer be house bound.

Here is a pic from the carriage ride that we took recently. We went for a tour of old homes of Weston. It was nice to look inside the old homes. Some were remodelled and look all modern. Some tried to stick with designs that were more true to the age when the home was built. For example one home that we visited had a kitchen that had a floor and walls of exposed red brick. It look pretty cool, but kinda cold for the winter. It also had an open hearth that you could just walk into. You could roast a pig in there probably (a small pig maybe a pig let).

Here is a picture of some cookies that the local catholic youth baked as a fundraiser. They were delicious (I suspect that there were some moms and grandmas lending a hand). We picked an assortment of cookies and treats for $5/lb. They were delicious.

And here is the picture of our town all dolled up for the coming of Christ (or seasonal tourists).

This is probably the only Christmas decorations we will do this year. It seems kinda pointless to me to put up a tree if we aren't gonna be home for most of Christmas or on Christmas day. We did decorate it with ornaments that James has collected over the years.


Here is picture we took while we were at Hubii's sister's place in Iowa. Her husband is showing everyone how he practices putting the baby in the car seat and buckling her in (he is practicing with a doll).

At college the Math club had a ginger bread house decorating contest. But they made it with gingerbread trains. And no one actually made a train.
There were three groups of students two of the groups made one entry each, the third group weren't really a group and submitted individual entries.



This group's entry came with a story about ants, human, aliens, and the fourth dimension.

This one collapsed shortly after the picture was taken

A jack of hearts



And the winner is....
Moustach man!

Just so you know this gingerbread is really bad. We hope that everyone is having a good time. It's really cold here (as you can tell from the snow). I will be doing my GRE soon and hope to apply to a couple of Uni's here for grad school. Hopefully I can get it all completed soon.
James will be done with school soon. His last class is today and next week is exam week. Then his break will be done and he can get some house work done ;)
I hope everyone takes this Christmas time to relax (easy for the housewife to say) and reflect on all the great gifts that we have received over this year.

Merry Christmas!!

Biometrics

If you have had any contact with INS or USCIS you will know what that word means. Shame. Shame and long lines. When you get an appointment for biometrics you have to go in and have the finger prints of all your fingers in all possible combinations scanned and put into a government database so that they can identify your body when the zombies attack.
It actually wasn't so bad, the Kansas City location was a lot less busy and the staff and officers were much more friendly than at the office in Atlanta.
But friends, let me tell you, if you think that your drivers license photo was bad you haven't seen a greencard photo. They look like mugshots. I got to look at my photo for my future card and let me tell you it wasn't pretty. First you feel like you are being booked having had your prints taken. Second they don't let you smile. What!!! What's wrong with a smile? Well the problem I hear is that smiles on photographs mess up facial recognition software. Well the jokes on them because my natural state is smiling!!

I haven't had enough pictures of Hubii on here so here's a picture of him after he drove home in the snow.

I feel kinda lucky that 20 minutes from Weston in Leavenworth is a tiny Korean grocery with a small restaurant on the side. I ordered the Jampong. It's not great but it's ok. I really shouldn't order sea food when I live 20 hours from the coast. I didn't order the Jajangmyeon because I was feeling very cold. But if I ever need a fix they have it on the menu. I feel like it's a mini blessing.
Last night I attempted to make Panna Cotta.
I served it on fudge sauce. The yellow lumps are from the gelatin not dissolving well. It was ok, but this was a first attempt so I was just happy that it gelled at all (although I don't think that not gelling was a possibility).
Here is a photo I took of a Walmart near Kansas City:
Why did I take a picture of a Walmart, well because the facade reminded me of another supermarket that was just down the street.
It looked even more a copy where we were because the "Whole Foods" was also in green. Unfortunately it was too far for my bitty mobile phone to snap so this is just off the interwebs. I am gonna go get dessert while Hubii finishes this post.

Wifii has gone to get some Panna Cotta for us to eat, so I need to finish up this post. I've been really busy with end-of-semester work. I gave three exams this week and now I have to grade them. But the semester will be over soon and then we can start the next semester. It is enjoyable to interact with students and learn new things, but this week has been tiring.

Very sore body

This weekend was chock-full of fun activities for me (not so fun/ work related activities for Hubii). At least it started out well. Below is a picture of Hubii with his apple compote stuffed crepes. He loves pancakes, waffles etc so we make them every Saturday (he has been making his own every weekend since graduate school days I think).

Hubii doesn't usually dress up just for crepes though. He had to go to work that Saturday for a parent and prospective student open house for the college. But it was only till 12 so he was home by lunch.
After that he spent the day grading homework and exams :( Hopefully, in future semesters, once he has his lesson plans and exams mostly done, he won't have to work over the weekends.
I had a much more enjoyable weekend. As some of you know I have been playing in the Leavenworth Soccer league this fall. For all this season I was playing with a team that for the first few weeks lost all the games (though not too badly) and for the rest of the games had to forfeit as we were short. Just before the final league they decided that we could be broken up and divided among the other teams. I was given to the team that needed an extra lady. Well we played 3 games this weekend one on Saturday and 2 on Sunday and in the end I was part of the winning team! I was super luck, especially as I had been on a team that was doing so poorly all season.


Hopefully I will play again in the spring. By them I hope to figure out how to dribble the ball.