All Hail the Burrito!

So I know my blogs have become food-related (I swear I'm not being paid by the Food Network) but I have to tell you about this really smart (sarcasm) choice I made this past Saturday. One of my friends in my class and I were talking and she showed me this picture of a 5-lb burrito that she had demolished a few months earlier. And yes, that lit a fire under my stomach :) So this past Saturday, I attempted and utterly failed. I was proud of the attempt (as were the people I met there! Hahaha) but it was just WAAAY too much. I've made peace with it, and afterwards I was saying "I WILL be back to complete it in one sitting" but in the subsequent days I have decided that food challenges are not for me. You will not be seeing me starring on the next episode of Man vs Food, that's for sure... even though that was my inspiration... gotta love a show about glutiny!

How are all you guys?! I hope the end of the month is treating you well. I'm home now for JanTerm break, getting ready for the baby shower this weekend! My class ended really well (I was the intelligent person that saved the majority of their homework for the whole semester til the night before it was due... lots of lost sleep, but I'm making up for it :) ) and I gave a presentation on the Curse of Macbeth that went really well. Any questions, just let me know :) made the trek over here yesterday and have since been pulling together a bunch of loose ends and basically knocked out my to-do list. YAY! Now I have one big project left that's almost done, but it's kind of a surprise so sorry I can't give more details :) my house is good, my friends are good (Steph comes back next Thursday!) and I'm excited to start another semester at good 'ole Whitworth. Not too much to report here!

Well, that's it for now. Last two weeks have been filled with nothing too special so I'll leave it at that. I love you all and hope to hear from you soon!

Love,
Chels

The Queen of the Sheep

JanTerm is good. Class is good. Friends are good. All is good. The true meaning of this post was to show you how I catapulted myself into the life of a carnivore. I cooked red meat for the first time tonight, and DIDN'T die!
Shepherd's Pie is the name, and everything in my canned vegetable stores is the game. Not to mention the fresh stuff :) Sauteed some ground beef, corn, green beans, potato cubes, shitake mushrooms, spinach and tomato sauce (for gravy-like purposes... I also added some thyme, coriander and oregano) and then made some mashed potatoes with, well, potatos (with the peel of course... come on, what do you take me for?!), garlic and butter and milk and thyme and parsley and a dash of love. Put it in the oven and mark it with an E (you know, for "edible"... that's pretty much all I was going for) and you have a Shepherd's Pie!
As you can see, I detailed the process for my family to see my incredible eating skills... that and I had to call my dad before the mayham (to ask him how to cook red meat... not too proud...) before and he told me to take pictures :) My house called me the Shepherd Queen, so that was pretty exciting. It actually turned out amazing. AND I forgot the best part: I NEVER EVEN LOOKED AT A RECIPE! Booyah, my scientific curiosity and chemistry training finally became useful and, thanks to Winco, relatively inexpensive.

Anyway, been keeping fairly busy with things, but loving the relaxed-ness of this time of year. I hope you are all also enjoying this incredible time and I would love to hear from you all. I'm continually praying for you every night before I go to bed, just so you know, and love you all very much.

Cheers,

Julia Child

Chickens all around! I feel like Oprah...

Sooooo Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I can't believe it's 2010... I haven't written a single date right, I'll tell ya that. I think I'm in denial... ya know, kinda like a Holocaust deniar but a New Year deniar instead. A lot has happened since I spoke to you last (tons of adventure and debachery, I assure you :) ) but I'll try my best to update you without rambling or forgetting.

So over break I made use of my time by seeing friends, spending amazing quality time with family and traveling my butt off. I got to spend Christmas Eve with the Books (which is always amusing and energizing :) I love them all so much) and Christmas day with the Casebolts (such incredibly good, wonderful people. I love them all so much too!). After awesome Christmas festivities, enough food to warrant a two-week fast and a vacuum cleaner (thanks mom and dad! The general concensus of my housemates and I is that the vacuum sucks :) ) I trekked up to Lynden to spend some action-packed time with Steph and her family before she left for South Africa (which she is currently loving... not shocking, it's summer there... AND it's Africa...). We went to Boulevard park in Bellingham which was absolutely stunning (and they have a Woods Coffee Shop on the water where I basically bought my weight in Cream Cheese Brownie muffins... I guess that two-week fast was just a pipe dream). Here are some pictures:

And then we went and gave some Christmas gifts from my incredibly caring and giving Grandma Book to Coleson and his family. You should have seen the look in their eyes, it was wonderful! Coleson looks as you would expect a child with cancer to look and it broke my heart, but my heart was also happy to see him playfully engaging in a Nerf gun fight with his little brother :) Steph packed the schedule for me to see all her friends that have become my friends as well over the years and the most relaxing thing we did was make olliebolen. It's Dutch pasteries with apples and raisins that are dropped into oil and fried. Deliciously heart-clogging! Put some powdered sugar on that and voila! You might as well be wearing wooden shoes :) Steph's mom was born in Holland and she said it was a family tradition to make olliebolen right around New Years so we got to work:

I'm pretty sure Steph's mom was tired of me saying "olliebolen" in the stereotypical Dutch accent... I added lots of "yah!"'s and "onderbrokie" in there (onderbrokie is the only other word I know... it means underwear :) so I kept saying, "we're making olliebolen in our onderbrokie yah".... I know you're all imagining me saying it...). All in all it was an awesome trip and a great time.

I was only at Steph's for a day and a half and got home in the evening. The next day I hopped on the train and headed down to Portland to visit the Halls for New Years. I should have read ahead on Nostradamus' predictions, because I did NOT see the crazy adventure coming. The day I train into town is of course the day that Portland virtually shuts down due to 4 inches of snow (Spokane would be shaking its head if it had one...) But, in good ole me fashion (according to Kyle) I made friends on the train and we banded together, quite like a Band of Brothers would but not as intense or bloody (maybe damper for a little bit). Jen couldn't get to me so I braved the Max system with my train buddies ("Trainies" if you will) and was wandering around downtown Portland with these miscellaneous people for about two hours. I could go on for ages about the stories, but I'll only tell them when you ask specifically so I don't bore you. Needless to say, I love unplanned adventures. I'm pretty sure all my trainies were about ready to shoot me because I was having too much fun :) I then spent the next few days getting some wonderful quality time in with Jenna and Kyle, although it was mostly Jen that I saw. It has been so long since we had one-on-one time together like that, honestly it may have been years the way our lives are going, and those few days just reminded me once again how incredible and lovely of a sister I have and how thankful I am for her. She means so dang much to me, and I wouldn't take back that time we spent together for anything. I love you Jenna <3

Also during this little excursion, I got to feel the baby move and kick and basically throw a tantrum through my sisters cute little belly (which isn't so little anymore!) It was the most bizarre, strange and exhilarating experience I think I have ever had! I'm not going to lie to you, I cried... and we were at a movie that didn't warrant crying... I'm pretty sure some people may have been confused if they saw me. Then ma and pa came up and the Halls came up and we did New Years right by playing Pit with index cards and dressing up a Joey Harrington bobblehead.

The next day we watched the Ducks fight a vallient fight but sadly lose and then the Casebolts headed home. I had one day of packing and cramming in friends and than it was off to Spokane! I had quite the mobile break... not too break-ish if you ask me, but worth every minute :)

So now I'm back! Had some car trouble for the second time in the past few weeks, but I took Little Sally to the car doctor today and she hath been healed :) And I moved into my own room for the first time in two and a half years. It's crazy, I never realized how much stuff not that I had but Steph had. She was basically furnishing me! I had to start from scratch. But I had to move both of us out becaue our new roommate moved in tonight (her name is DJ and she seems incredibly nice and fun... so excited to have someone new around!) and I've been emailing Steph every day while she's gone giving her an earfull about how much crap she owns. But here are some pictures of my new room:

Now that I'm done moving in, I don't have to be a social recluse so I'm already planning my JanTerm adventures. Reconnecting with friends I haven't seen due to mismatched schedules, a roadtrip to Boise, ID to see a good friend and a to-do list that seems insurmountable will do the trick! My class, Belief in Wierd Things, is really cool and low key which is nice; nobody wants a hard class during JanTerm. The only thing that's missing is snow. We haven't gotten more than half an inch of ucky slush since I've been here. Not cool, Spokane, not cool.

Okay, this was an uber long wall post and I apologize, but if you made it this far I commend you! Hope you had as much fun reading it as I had experiencing it! I love you all and hope you had a wonderful holiday season! Let me know how it went, I would love to hear your crazy holiday stories as well :)

Peace out,

Chels