Broncos game

For chris's birthday i surprised him with 2 tickets for the broncos-jets game. The surprise part was no small feat, because i actually bought the tickets in august and somehow managed to hold onto them without telling him about it for 2 months. Then we've waited another 6 weeks for the date to arrive - so this game has been much anticipated.

The big day arrived, and we were both really excited but the weather was not cooperating with us. It was rainy and very cold outside. We got all suited up in our broncos jerseys:



And then we took the jersey off and went to the game. (we were a little bit afraid of being cursed at by rude jets fans.)

We bundled up and headed over to the game, but everything we were wearing was soaked by the end of the first quarter. It was cooold! We didn't buy any of the hot chocolate or hot soup the vendors were selling, even though it sounded good, probably mostly because neither one of us wanted to go through the process of taking off our gloves, digging out our wallets, and actually using our cold fingers to count out the cash. But i, for one, would have definitely paid good money for the use of a hot dryer, the bathrooms only had paper towels! All i wanted to do was stick my gloves under them and let them dry.

But on to the game. Neither the weather nor the angry jets fans could ruin our good time. There were lots of obnoxious people around us. They yelled at the broncos, the refs, coach shanahan, the jets, and later even at the ball. We were really disappointed to hear them booing at injured bronco players. This will make it a bit more difficult for us to root for the jets! There were plenty of broncos fans there, though - we were pretty surprised to see so many jerseys, hats and coats.

It always helps you enjoy a game if your team is winning. So we had a good time as the broncos scored first and stayed ahead throughout the game. They played better than I've seen them play all season. The game did seem to go on forever, though, as there were lots of stoppages where the refs stood and discussed the penalty or lack thereof for a long time. (Maybe its like that all the time, i just don't go to games very often.) Also, there were a lot of broncos injuries. Towards the end of the third quarter i think play stopped between 4 or 5 plays in a row for an injured man on the field. I told chris they might need him to suit up! He didn't look very enthusiastic.

We stayed all the way to the end of the game. I was afraid if we left, the broncos would lose! We thought we might beat the rush by staying, as most of the stadium seemed to empty out at the beginning of the fourth quarter. The funny thing is that when we were leaving, almost all we saw were bronco fans! There was a lot of cheering as we went down the escalator - it was almost like being in colorado! By the time we left, the rain had all but stopped.

Unfortunately, i didn't get any pics with the new telephoto lens tonight. I didn't want to get out the camera in the rain, especially since i had a different lens on and would have had to change it. It seemed like a Bad Idea. But we did get some shots with the waterproof camera.


(actually, that first one is from the good camera, just got it out briefly before the game.)






Final Score:



One of the best parts of the day was finally arriving at home and getting out of our wet clothes! I thought i would never warm up again. I did have some help from a wonderful hot bath, one of life's biggest joys, in my opinion. Then we ate another thanksgiving dinner, haven't gotten sick of it yet!

I got it!

I got my new lens today - a canon 70-300 4-5.6 IS! See photo on the zoo post. It is a telephoto lens, huge and heavy and hard to hold it still but i love it. I'm really looking forward to some nice zooming opportunities! This way i can finally capture my neighbors through their windows. I got the lens at a circuit city closing sale. It was a little bit cheaper with the 20% off than the price i had seen on amazon so i went for it!

I took some of the first photos of curt and katie:





They flew back in today from their trip to michigan, and met us for lunch at Fred's, one of our favorite restaurants. They have tons of photos of dogs on the walls from many customers. We knew curt and katie would love it, not just because of the tasty food and cozy atmosphere but because they are dog lovers like us.

Some pics from the subway on the way home:





It is really hard to hold that big lens still enough!
Tonight the empire state building is our wedding colors, which we thought was very thoughtful of them. I took a picture but it didn't capture the colors well enough so i'll either try another pic later on or see if i can fix it in photoshop.
We're hoping the lens will come in handy at the broncos game tomorrow. I'm sure from our seats i won't exactly be able to capture the looks on the players' faces but hopefully we can seem a little closer to the action!

thanksgiving!

This was the second year that chris and i just cooked at home. Last year, i worked the night before, and came home in the morning and slept for a few hours. Then we cooked all day, ate dinner with our friend curt who joined us, and i had to go back to work at 9 or 10 that night. It was such a bummer! I was only at work for a few hours that night, i'm sure i was home by midnight or 1. This year was great, I didn't have to work, which was a bonus. I miss my family, i haven't had thanksgiving with them for years. But we have fun cooking together, and the results are delicious! On the menu:

Herb and parm rolls
Green bean casserole
Mamaw's sweet potato souffle
Slow cooker mashed potatoes
Gravy
Cranberries (fresh - yum!)
Stuffing
Turkey!
Dessert - vanilla pumpkin pie with whipped cream

I got most of the recipes from allrecipes.com, but have modified some of them a bit. This year i sort of made up the turkey recipe from a few different recipes, and it came out delicious! So moist. I'll have to write it down so i remember what to do next year. I decided that this year, i'm thankful for the dishwasher! We didn't have one last year. Chris reminded me that he did all the dishes while i went to work. It is much better this year.

I hope everyone had a wonderful thanksgiving, i know i did!

The whole spread:
(Can you believe all this food, just for two people? We're going to have leftovers for weeks!! Yay!)





Chris is an expert carver



Lilly anxiously hoping chris will drop something (poor dog, her parents NEVER feed her or give her treats)



Post turkey coma, 7pm

weekly homebrew update

I love talking about homebrewing! This week we brewed Coffee Porter Stout. (Or was it Coffee Stout Porter?) We need a good name for it, although I'm sure chris has a great idea. We bottled Tongue Splitta:



A hoppy beer.

A little note about brewing: It is really not that complicated. The first step involves boiling water with malt extract and hops. That concoction is called wort. The wort gets put into a bucket with yeast, and we leave it there about a week for what's called primary fermentation. After a week in primary fermentation, we move it to a glass carboy for secondary fermentation. This helps with clarification of the brew, and lets the yeast work its magic a bit longer in the beer. The final step is mixing a sugar (we use honey) in with the beer and then bottling it. The sugar is for carbonation. One of the fun gadgets is the bottle capper. Chris is the best at capping!





There was a little bit of confusion - We always have two beers in secondary fermentation, and we bottle the one that has been in the longest. We almost always put the carboy that contains the newer beer in the back so that it is easier to take the one in front and bottle it. This time, we picked up the one in front and bottled it, assuming we had put the newer one in back the previous week. (Hope this makes sense.) Then, when i went to move the back one to the front, i found the label we had put on the barack obama presidenti-ale (the most recent one to be put into secondary) so i started to worry that we had accidentally bottled the presidenti-ale! I'm not worried about the missed time in secondary, but i want to drink the beer that i see on the label. :) I was really bummed about NOT KNOWING - then chris remembered that we did put the newer carboy in the back because it was a bit of a pain. So, crisis averted, we were 95% sure that we bottled the right one.

I still have to make a label for the spiced ale, it is in bottles but unlabeled - i hate to leave them without labels. (i think we'll call it rudolph's tasty treat. Chris's idea!) I am almost done with the presidenti-ale label. Today, we put a bottle of Not From a Cow Cream Ale in the fridge, ready for tasting tomorrow! I can't wait!

yum

A counter full of groceries like this can only mean one thing...



Turkey day is coming!
Ok, this shot didn't turn out exactly the way i had wanted it to, but it includes 1. canned pumpkin 2. cranberries 3. a whole turkey. All of which i only buy at one time of year.

curt and katie

Two of our best friends came to visit us from burlington this week. They drove down on sunday and left this morning to go home for thanksgiving. We had such a great time with them! Katie just got a camera like mine, and we were able to compare notes! Highlights of their brief stay: Great Jones (my favorite restaurant), homebrew tasting, Ellis Island (I didn't get to go, but I'll post some of katie's pics when I get them), photo shoot on the roof, happy hour, pizza, cupcakes, crocodiles, bagels, szmodis visit, mani/pedis, wedding talk... Just think how many highlights we'd have if they stayed a week! I loved having them here, and hopefully we'll get to see them again soon.

philly

On Saturday we drove down to Philadelphia for the day. This is one cool thing about being on the east coast. It is very easy to go somewhere totally different for the weekend or just for the day. Since moving here, we've driven to DC for the weekend, the NJ shore for one night (to stay with chris's aunt in her wonderful beach house), camping in VT for the weekend, now philly for the day, along with multiple trips to connecticut and the night spent on long island. We do miss the hiking and camping that were so readily available in colorado, but this is nice too!

Once we arrived in philly, stop #1 had to be for CHEESESTEAK. Yes, we all know and love them as philadelphia cheesesteak sandwiches, but once you get to philadelphia, they are just cheesesteaks, or maybe even steaks as i believe i saw them listed on the menu. We had to wait on the line for about 45 minutes, but it was worth it for our tasty lunch. I ate mine with american, but chris went the traditional route and had his with whiz. (That's cheese whiz.) And we couldn't eat in philadelphia without a couple cans of yuengling beer, from the oldest brewery in the united states.





Next stop: a dog park. This one was fun, there were a couple other dogs there that lilly played with briefly. There were also lots of tennis balls, always a bonus for a dog park.



We had wanted to wander around a little bit more and see some sights, but we did very little of that as it was super cold out and we had less time than we'd hoped. So we managed to hit a couple of brewpubs, and saw a bit of town as we walked around and later drove around, but we didn't get to go to the art museum and run up the steps and jump up and down at the top, a la Rocky. We had to save something for next time.

Dinner out

So last night we decided to go out to dinner. We haven't been eating out that much, not because we're cheap (although it is nice to save money) and not because we are such great cooks (well, chris is, but not me!) but because we are very indecisive. First we decided to check out the happy hour at the restaurant across the street from us. It is a mexican restaurant but doesn't get great food reviews, so we didn't plan to eat dinner there. All i wanted was a margarita on the rocks or maybe a dos XX on draft, and a quesadilla, maybe some chips and salsa. Their sign says 2-for-1 drinks 4-7 for happy hour, and I just assumed that meant all drinks. Unfortunately it was only for frozen margs and beer. Did I mention it was about 25 degrees out? And no draft beer, only bottled. So, we're already there, fine, I'll try a frozen marg. It was actually not too bad. And the quesadilla was pretty good. But for my second drink I just went ahead and had a bottled beer. I have a feeling we won't be going back there for awhile.

Then, we decided to just wander down second avenue and find a place that we wanted to eat. I feel like we walk up second avenue ALL THE TIME and constantly walk by places that we'd like to try. But we went all the way down the street without finding anyplace that looked appealing. I had to find a bathroom urgently (a marg and a beer along with many glasses of water - not conducive to wandering around in the cold looking for someplace to eat) so we finally decided to go into a diner. But after I used the restroom, I looked over the menu and decided that a bright diner was not the kind of place I wanted to eat dinner. So we finally went into yet another mexican place across the street - I had been there before and wasn't entirely impressed but we were tired of looking and decided to give it a try. We started to look over the menu (once again, no draft beer! argh!) and I noticed CASH ONLY. There are tons of places that are cash only but we still aren't that good about carrying cash. Usually one of us runs down the street to the atm but tonight we were a little fed up. Chris had a twenty. So we split one meal and didn't order any drinks. Here's a pic of our sad table:



You see water, chips, salsa (all free) and the meal we split. Luckily there was enough for both of us. The check:


Yes, that's right, probably the cheapest meal out we've ever had together - a grand total of $11.75. Suze Orman would be proud. My new rule is that I'm not eating anywhere without one or more of the following: 1) The recommendation of someone I trust 2) a good menupages.com review or 3) Sounds appealing in Zagat. I'm sure this rule will be broken by next week or so, when we're hungry, too tired to cook, and forget to bring Zagat.

Birthdays are fun

My birthday was a couple of weeks ago. Now I'm 30, which is supposed to be a big deal but wasn't really. I had to work on my birthday! Which sucked, I didn't think it would but I wished I could have been home. I did get a wonderful surprise for my birthday present! Chris planned a trip to Long Island, complete with a visit to Blue Point Brewery. We got to sample some tasty beers, and got to take a little tour of the brewery. (It was a small place so the tour was short and didn't involve any walking.) We spent the night out in a town called Bohemia. We also checked out a meadery and got to taste several meads. We went to the beach but it was cooooold. And Chris got me a waterproof camera! We wanted to try it out but didn't get in the water very much. We did try the hot tub but it wasn't hot. We put the camera underwater and took a few shots!



Here we are at the brewery:


Lilly also got me a present, she picked out a dog park that we could go to. We ended up going to a different park than she originally picked, but we liked it a lot!

Homebrew

I love brewing beer! It is a hobby chris and I picked up almost a year ago. The brewing process sometimes gets a bit tedious, but we're rewarded with delicious beer that we actually make ourselves using the simple beer ingredients: water, malt, hops, and yeast. And occasionally, a few extra additions.

We used to have a homebrew store in Burlington that we went to: http://vermonthomebrew.com/default.aspx

But now we order online from www.northernbrewer.com. We love this site and highly recommend it. We have made several of the kits and I'll try to review them all.

On Friday we were able to taste Duke Alt for the first time.
German for "old," this ale predates lagers and has remained a beloved institution in northern German cities like Hanover and Dusseldorf. It has since been adopted by brewers around the world. Carry on the tradition in your home brewery with this kit. Our Alt is a deep red-brown ale with a great balance between hop dryness and sweet malt.
I usually have a good time with the labels but I guess my creative juices were not flowing when I made this one:


I do have to say that the beer was delicious. I can't wait to drink more! I'm afraid this one will go fast.

This week we brewed The Innkeeper. I am really looking forward to it - here's the description:
Thirty six major awards. Four-time Brewers International Champion. Four-time CAMRA Beer of the Year. Simply put, the muse for this kit has won more awards than any other English beer, period. From very simple ingredients comes a wonderfully well- balanced dram. Spicy, herbal, and English biscuits. Flashes of clean citrus and chewy minerals blend into a complex finish that is refreshingly bitter and remarkably dry. The way a pint was meant to taste. Truly spot on!

Chris has an idea for the label, which I can't wait to see!!

Zoo Trip

Today I was post call. I was on call overnight last night but I was fortunate enough to sleep all night. So when I got home this morning at about 9:30, Chris and I decided to make the most of our day off together and took the long trip up to the zoo for free wednesdays! I think my favorite was seeing the animals in the dark, including bats and other creepy critters. We both took some pictures, me with my DSLR (Canon Rebel Xsi) and Chris with his camera, a Canon S2IS. I think my camera is better for the colors and the focus, but he definitely wins with the major zoom capabilities.
Me:





Chris:




Just wait till I get my telephoto lens - I'll be unstoppable!

Visit to DC

A couple of weeks ago, Chris and I drove down to Fairfax, VA in the DC area to visit my stepsister Tina and her family. We had a blast! I took some fun pictures of my nephew Tyler!


Here's Tyler just being cute. We were on our way to spend a rainy afternoon on the Mall.

One of the highlights of my weekend was definitely seeing Tyler on the merry go round. He had such a great time! He was grinning the whole time and waved at Chris and Tina every time we went around! And he definitely had the coolest animal to ride.

Greetings

I decided to make a blog.  I think I'll try to include photos because I have been enjoying photography lately.  We'll see how the blog takes shape!  Hopefully I'll keep up with it!  

Here's a picture of me taken by Chris (as I was taking a picture of him) on our roof, on the night of the election last week!