21.12.10

Hodgepodge Update

Happy holidays to everyone. May your days in the wet cold be filled with warmth, merriment, butter, and sugar... and maybe a little bacon. I've got a lot going on lately, as indicated by my lack of blogging. If I have a lot to blog about, then I have little time to blog about it. Here is the quick update. My beautiful wife, Shelese, is 14 weeks pregnant (yay!), had planned to go to Kansas (Shelese's home-state) for Christmas, wife put on bed rest, bored out of our minds, watched more movies in the last three days than is probably healthy (could have blogged during movies, I know... but I was doing something productive, I promise), started a DIY project to hand-make a wooden spoon (the productive thing I was doing during the movies), and the usual kitchen activity.

So here is the wifey at about three months pregnant. The only way we knew she was pregnant was, the pregnancy test of course, and her nearly constant nausea and off-the-wall taste preferences. She found so many foods that she usually loves very off-putting, e.g. avocados and mushrooms.


One month later and you can see the shirt is pretty much maxed-out on space in the belly region. Stay tuned for more pics.


Here is a pic of our little squirmy at 14 weeks. Photogenic no? We are so excited to meet the little offspring! So here is the deal though; we're dealing with an incompetent cervix. That is the clinical term, and no, her cervix did not take an aptitude test and fail to be deemed, "incompetent." It's a bit short and the doctor wants to do a cerclage (I'll let you look that up if you don't know what that is... this is a food blog for goodness sake). The doctor tells us, "not to freak out" and that, "he'll fix it." And we believe him. He's a fascinating guy! His reputation is that he is one of the best high risk OBs in the nation and you get that feeling when he's with you. Pretty quiet, no-nonsense, constantly yawning because he delivers every baby and is up late with patients every night. Long story short, all should be well after the procedure, however, Shelese has been ordered to modified bed rest for the R E M A I N D E R OF THE P R E G N A N C Y! That's six months!!! She started bed rest last weekend so I started a new project that I'll explain later. No matter, we would do anything for our little squirming baby.


Here is our other baby.


This is our genius doctor. Notice the fanny pack and too-short scrubs. 


Okay, switching gears again, keep up please. Here is my project. Thanks to my good friend, Jord, I had the pleasure of reading Mark Frauenfelder's, Made By Hand, his proclaimed story of, "Searching for meaning in a throwaway world." In short, the book is his personal account of doing things for yourself in a modern world. Mark explains the journey that took him from Los Angeles to the Cook Islands back to Los Angeles and his Do It Yourself (DIY) exploration of keeping chickens and bees, modifying his espresso machine, and carving wooden spoons among many other DIY projects. Inspired, I set out on my first DIY project of the year. Ran to the Depot of the Home and picked up some basic wood carving tools and a piece of poplar and this is what I had in a few hours.


Boz was quality control.


I'll post a picture of the finished project soon. On another note, this was dinner tonight. I roasted a chicken according to the Zuni method and served it on top of a potato, leek, and raclette cheese hash brown, carmelized Brussels Sprouts, and left-over mushroom cream sauce from the Stroganoff from a few weeks back.



Thanks for reading and happy happy holidays to all of you!