nordhues.net

I rarely publicly complain. I mean, if there is a product or service that has disappointed me, I tend to just go with it, or, exercising my power of choice, chose something different. But Tuesday, that changed. I went grocery shopping, did my normal breakfast food routine and grabbed some milk and my beloved maple and brown sugar instant oatmeal. I love maple and brown sugar instant oatmeal. It’s filling, it’s satisfying, it’s quick, it’s predictable, and I’m RARELY out of reach of a packet or two. I used to keep an extra box of it in my drawer at work in case I didn’t quite get out the door on time in the mornings. And, hotels usually keep it in stock for their continental breakfasts. Win!

Anyway. Get up for breakfast Wednesday morning. Happy to have something warm and cozy to start my day. Go to take a bite and, alarmingly, something has happened! The flavor is different! The flavor is terrible! I’m no longer happy and satisfied! I go to the box, sure enough, it’s the right thing, but then, horror of horrors, I notice that they’ve got a “new great taste!” and “25% less sugar!” and I am moved enough to COMMENT. Yes, folks, I did. I complained to Quaker Oats. You can mess with my running shoes. You can change my toothbrushes or toothpaste. You can tweak the scent of my deoderant. But, by golly, you canNOT mess with my oatmeal.

Hello! We’re back! After three weeks away, Jeff and I are finally together in NC. For the first two weeks, Jeff was in Indonesia for work while I visited home in Nebraska, then the last week, Jeff joined me and had a real week off – phone was off and emails unanswered. We got back last night and were so exhausted that we slept for 11 hours! Jeff took today off too, which is a blessing, because three weeks away gets disorienting – it’s super nice to have a day to muster up some semblance of normalcy.

So, many apologies for the week off of blogging, and I’ll be coming back again very soon with a recap on our trips!

Being in Nebraska in August means two things: allergies and corn. Holy moly I’ve forgotten how much liquid a human being can produce when accosted by sneaky floaty things in the air. Which made me start to wonder why liquid comes out of the very same facial openings we so desperately try to keep dry lest we suffer death by drowning. Because I had a few moments where death by overwhelming snot seemed possible. Anyway. I do seem to be feeling better and no longer making everyone else feel sorry for me.

Last Tuesday we did the yearly ‘put up corn until we can no longer see straight’ with my mom’s friend Cornelia. We love Cornelia. She’s a fiery Romanian whose energy and passion make her stories very very entertaining. And she called shucking, ‘shacking’, and tongs, ‘thongs’ and was recently introduced to the definition of a wedgie from the blog of yours truly. There were a lot of laughs.

Mom and Cornelia shared 12 dozen ears of corn.

So we started out on the deck ‘shacking’ the corn. Please pardon my appearance. I was a little late getting out of bed and had to air dry my hair intead of fussing.

Once the corn is shucked, we go inside to rinse off the ears and get any extra corn silk off.

And then, the messy part. Mom, using ‘thongs’, boils the corn for four minutes and then pulls them out into ice cold water to stop the cooking process. Once the corn has sat for a few minutes, Cornelia and I remove all the kernels with an electric knife and bag them up into baggies by the pound.

The kernel removal contraption is pretty redneck. You take a piece of wood and pound a nail through it. Then you stick the corn cob on the nail and voila! an extra hand. Placed over a bowl, you have yourself a bonafide corn putting up machine.

At the end of the day, we had 44 pounds of corn ready for the freezer. By about mid-February they’ll still be enjoying the fruits of our labor. And, with Nebraska sweet corn, there’s nothing better than eating it all year long.

Hello! It’s a very busy week here in Nordhuesland so I thought I’d just check in and say hi. The two of us are on the road again, far away from any semblance of a normal routine. I have posts waiting in the wings and will get a chance to get them up for your viewing pleasure next week. Until then, I’ll be galavanting around middle America for a few days and thinking of my husband in far off exotic places. Hope all is well!

We had a very surprising, very lovely evening last night. Remember Jeff’s trip to England in May? He’s now in the reviewing stage of the pieces he went to detail, so the English gentleman he visited arrived last night to make sure that all is going in the proper direction. This English gentleman, who happens to be a ‘Sir’, brought an Irish gentleman who happens to be of the Guinness family, namesake of the very famous beer. Last night Jeff and I stopped by the hotel, hoping to get a bottle of wine in their rooms before they arrived. We were too late, they had already arrived. I looked and smelled terrible, Jeff had been finishing furniture all day, and we certainly weren’t fit to welcome a Sir and a Guinness to America. Nevertheless, they came down, we introduced ourselves and expected to leave. Instead, we ended up drinking the bottle of wine in the lobby and going out to dinner. Both gentlemen are fantastically warm, interesting, and interested. And once I got over how sweaty I looked, I had a great time.

In a week of bad surprises – the internet was down for two days and a half days, the car needs a new wheel bearing, I finally got hunted down and have to help plan the 10 year high school reunion – last night was redeeming.

Update – And surprise number four of the week – the car battery died on Jeff this evening! We shall consider this week a practice lesson in perseverance and staying joyful in adversity=).

In the tradition of our Rhode Island lovies, Saturday we threw a breakfast for dinner potluck. We invited everyone we know and, oddly, our church friends were the only ones who could come – our neighbors and Jeff’s co-workers couldn’t make it. But if they had, we would’ve been squarely half a dozen chairs too short. Here are the stats: there were 13 big persons, two little persons, 6 bottles of orange juice, four bottles of champagne (gotta have mimosas!), three batches of waffles, one pound of bacon, one breakfast casserole, one dozen eggs, two dozen and a half dozen biscuits, a dozen muffins, and lots of fruit. And we were only left with six waffles for leftovers. Ok, and maybe a bottle of champage.

We had a fantastic time!

The table center pieces:

And, apparently the prospect of a dozen people in our apartment was motivating enough for me to finally do something with the mantle. 11 months into our lease. My timing, if nothing else, is always perfect. The mantle before was a strange hodgepodge of random cards, pictures, books, and a sculpture. It made no sense and looked terrible.

So, I’ve been seeing a lot of places where fabric is displayed as wall art in wooden embroidery hoops. My favorite is this one at Purl Bee. Our first wedding anniversary, Jeff got me a HUGE box of scraps of old Rose Cumming fabric from his workplace. I’ve been carrying around these amazing scraps for several years and haven’t really known what to do with some of the larger patterns. There couldn’t have been a more perfect (and cheap!) solution — the fabric finally is getting the attention it deserves.

The mantle now looks much much better.

We love potlucks!

The first season of 24 started in 2001. In 2001 I was graduating from high school and moving to Colorado for college. In 2001 I was happy, free, and blissfully unaware of the existence of 24. In 2005, in the fourth season of 24, I graduated from college, got married and moved to Kansas where I was still blissfully unaware of the existence of 24. By the fifth season of 24, I began to notice an ominous undertone in the conversations of my friends and loved ones about this ’24′. It’s like a drug, I heard. If you start, you can’t stop, I heard. Five seasons to catch up on, better start now, I heard. My parents, normally immune to pop culture phenomenons, would disappear for weekends as they’d catch up on the back seasons, and unequivocally blocked all communication on the airing night of 24.

Jeff and I, recognizing the danger, stayed far far away. We got hooked to a few other shows here and there, but none involved 24 episodes and multiple seasons of history. Even at our weakest point, when all we wanted to do was escape reality, we would choose something else.

And then.

Last week, I have no idea what happened. None. Perhaps we became too far removed from the obsessive behavior we observed five years ago. Or maybe we thought we’d be above the pull. I don’t know. But, since we were all caught up on our shows, someone, I can’t remember which one, suggested 24 on Netflix. We watched one episode. Shrug. Whatever. No big deal. So we watched another episode to see what all the fuss was about. Yeah. Ok. Still, whatever. And, because it was a weekend, we watched one more episode. Well, crap. Addicted. Goner.

Our weekend became a single minded task to finish the dang season. Part of the draw is that it is only one day. So you feel like all of your hard work sitting in front of the screen needs to be rewarded by letting Jack Bauer finish out the day. Our brains were fried, our emotions were fraught, and it was the longest day of our lives. It was terrible. Awful.

We pinky swore that, barring some freak event that neither of us could leave the house for several days and we have nothing, I mean nothing, else to do, we would never ever even suggest watching season 2 of 24. Never. At the slightest suggestion or implication of weakness, the weak one must endure severe consequences of which we couldn’t agree upon at the time. But believe me, it’ll be severe.

So, just say no to 24. It’s hazardous to your health.

Jeff and I aren’t real sports enthusiasts. For Jeff, he’d rather be playing the sport (or building a chair), for me, I tend to find myself questioning the existential factors that make a person a sporting nut, and end up missing most of the game. However, we tend to put all disinterest aside for the sporting events themselves. Who can’t help but enjoy the heart-stopping food, the camaraderie, and, of course, the people watching? So when two dear friends recently moved away and gave us their Crawdads tickets, we added it to our list of summer must-do’s, and happily joined our friends Matt, Brie and their little man for some minor league fun this Saturday. And, naturally (or perhaps traditionally–remember the Pawtucket Red Sox game? I think I combusted that day), we went on the hottest and most humid day of the year.

Yay for sweat! Yay for baseball! Yay for Jeff and Teegan together and not sick on a weekend!

Matt and Brie’s tickets were for really great seats on third base, while ours were somewhere in the grandstands. So to sit together, we did the musical chairs with other ticket holders and got to spend the majority of the game behind the home team dugout. We had a great view.

The little man did really well for the heat, and Matt and Brie got to stay for nearly two hours.

And the mascot. A little too much like Jabba the Hut for me to appreciate.

But the resemblance, if overweight, is uncanny.

The Crawdads won 9-7  against a team nobody could figure out where they were from (anybody know where Delmarva is?) and made most of their points (runs?) in a very exciting 5th inning.

We had a great time and may very well have to do it again soon.

Although I’d like to believe I’m a fairly decent multi-tasker, I’m starting to seriously question my ability to do more than two things at once. Sure, I’m better at it than some (namely, my husband…try asking him a question while he’s doing a task…), but I don’t think I’m all that good at it. For example, I can’t hold a conversation while there’s a TV on, music playing, or other competing conversations in the same room. I simply can’t compartmentalize all the activity and block the proper ones out. Jeff also likes to make fun of me that I have to stop walking in order to zip up my coat (which I’ve practiced that one and have gotten pretty darn good at it). So, as it became clearer and clearer that this website business was going to take more of my mental power than originally thought, I realized that I was going to have to stop multi-tasking and start single-tasking.

Which means, the last project I completed were these tea towels for my mom’s birthday mid-June…=(

Which also means, this t-shirt-into-tank-top transformation didn’t get finished (and right in the middle of trying to solve the wavy neckline problem!)…

And this shirt-into-tank-top transformation didn’t even get started (click here for the super cool idea),

And, of course, I’ve finally found the perfect fabric for curtain in the second bedroom,

And, naturally, I have a bazillion ideas for this fabric which I bought simply because it was on sale and I can’t handle navy and mustard together…it makes me weak in the knees.

So, my fabric lovelies, you’ll have to be patient until I can turn all my attention on you, because right now my brain power is used up. Until then, know I’ll think of you fondly and wait for our time together with eager anticipation.

Who would have thought Jeff would be no stranger to 15 hour flights and sticky rice and noodles? This year it looks like he’ll be a three time visitor to the Southeast Asia area, and no doubt will be able to navigate the Singapore airport with ease.

He had a very different experience this latest trip as his normal Indonesia contact wasn’t able to be there. Which meant that to the average Indonesian, he was a single white man, alone, single…alone…very alone…lonely…

…and obviously in great want of a “friend”. “Friends” and single white men usually translate into dollar bills for the average Indonesian. In the three days that Jeff was actually there, he was propositioned twice – once by a man who gets a little pocket change for referring a “friend”, and by a woman who was an actual “friend”. In the case of the man’s suggestion, Jeff could’ve picked out any “friend” he chose to have waiting for him on his next trip. For about $15/day she would meet him at the airport, be around to get him food, wash his clothes, and whatever peripheral “activities” that might include. Jeff turned down the offer, explaining he had a wife back home. To which the man replied, “So do I.”

In the case of the woman’s proposition, it happened while Jeff was eating breakfast in his hotel and was so uncomfortable, he texted a co-worker to call the front desk of the hotel, had the hotel staff summon him to the phone, and then informed his new friend that he had to go. From then on, he didn’t leave his hotel room unless with someone else.

Saturday was a national holiday so he went to the mall with the one of the project managers. Shoulder to shoulder people, in a mall he said looked comparable to a nice, clean mall in the states. But, for an average Indonesian salary ($200-$400/mo) the prices were completely unattainable. He came home with this wonderful shirt for me that he got for about $23.

SO, think about this: if you make $400/mo, this $23 shirt would be 5% of your monthly income. The medium household income in America in 2008 was $52,000. 5% of that would be $216. Um, yeah. This shirt would be considered luxury.

Along that vein, to get a hamburger, fries and drink from McDonalds it costs $2 there. Following the same logic, the average American would have to pay $21 for a normal McDonalds meal. The project manager about choked when he learned that companies that make shirts like these in Indonesia or China or India, sell them for $50-$70 in America (depending on the company of course…). It’s SO interesting and is quite the insight into this global economy we live in.

So even though Jeff was actually in Indonesia for only three days, he had a much spicier experience than the first trip. But because it takes 44 hours of traveling (yes, my man timed it) and contact with hundreds of people, he seems to always bring home a bug. Which means, we get to spend his week home recuperating – three days of Jeff sick, three days of Teegan sick. Yay!

But now we’re all better and this week is called ‘get back on your horse’ week. Painful, but feels so much better than being sick or separated or stuck with a wedgie.