This past weekend we took a quick trip to Auburn. Mostly to visit friends, but also to reminisce with the past. This was the first time we have been back in Auburn since we left a year ago.
We arrived at lunch at Kyle and Michelle's and ate at Mrs. Story's Dairy Bar - a one-room, order-at-the-window dive that's been in Opelika for decades. I'd often go with the girls at work on our lunch break to grab a chili dog and a cup of delicious ripple ice cream. I've been craving that combo for a little while, so we made those dreams come true on Saturday.
Next, we strolled around Toomer's Corner and made a drive around campus. Not much has changed in a year, which is surprising, because there was always some kind of construction going on while we were there. We did stop in for Toomer's lemonade, admired the lawn of Samford, and mourned the loss of the Toomer's oaks.
We also drove around Conway Acres - our old trailer park. Of course, with it being summer hardly anyone was there, but the guy who bought our trailer was standing out in the yard. I wanted to stop so bad and see how he changed it, but everyone vetoed me - saying I'd be upset because it wouldn't look like "our" home anymore. Which is true. It's weird to think someone just moves in and paints over your paint colors and orients the furniture differently than you did.
We met up with Gabe and Stephanie who recently bought a limo, so they were more than excited to take us all for a ride to Venditori's (used to be Provino's - our favorite Italian restaurant in the area) for dinner!
Sunday morning, we visited our "old City Church" (what I've dubbed it as since we now attend Christ City Church in B'ham). While most of our friends have moved on as well, it was nice to see those that are still there. It seemed a lot different - mostly a whole new congregation, but it was great to see that the church is molding and changing and not stuck being something they shouldn't be.
On our way back to Birmingham we met Gene and Marilyn and got to pick up Maggie to bring her home. We sent her with them a couple of weeks ago so that we could freely travel recently. She picked up right where she left off:
This week was the beginning of my summer break - before summer semester starts, that is. While I've done a lot of relaxing, it has also been rather productive. Here's how it's been going:
(some photos by Erika & Gussie!)
1. We started off last weekend with some of our optometry friends on a camping trip to Port St. Joe, FL. This was the first time I've camped since I was a child, and honestly I was a little afraid. For those of you that know me well, you know I love the indoors and bugs are not my friends, but I had a great time! We arrived after dark, pitched our tent, and had grilled hamburgers for dinner. The next day we relaxed on the beach until it rained, then we all loaded up and explored the town. Smores also happened. What's camping without smores, right? This was a continuation of Erika's birthday celebration, and she picked a great spot to unwind after finals!
2. On our way back from the beach we stopped in Luverne to visit with our mother's for Mother's Day. It was a quick stop and dinner, but we were so glad we could see them on their special day!
3. Throughout finals (and probably before) I was mulling over tons of ideas of things I'd rather be doing besides studying. Top on the list was baking sugar cookies and decorating them with royal icing. There are amazing ladies out there that do this and create works of art out of them. (Check out SweetSugarBelle, Sweetopia, and Bridget at Bake@350 for where I was going with all of this.) Of course I was inspired, and had been collecting all of the proper equipment to try my hand at it. I've done it a couple of times before - once for a family 4th of July gathering and, most recently, with Heidi and Kelsey for Easter cookies. But this time I was shooting for "perfection" because I decided to make these as gifts for two special graduates - Kayla from Alabama School of Fine Arts where she dances, and Kyle from Auburn School of Pharmacy. Most of the cookie designs were pulled from the ladies mentioned above, but a couple I made myself. Here's a little peek:
4. While home for Mother's Day Marilyn gave us some sweet peas from their garden. I shelled and cooked them last night for dinner. One of my fondest memories of childhood and my Memaw is going to her house to help with her garden. This involved buckets and buckets of peas, beans, corn, tomatoes, okra, and other delicious veggies. I probably complained at the time because my tired thumbs were green and purple from the hulls, but now I love it because it reminds me of simpler times when food came from your backyard, not... Chile.
5. Our Community Group has planned a fondue night for today, and I am SO excited! Jesse and I look forward to this with his family once a year, but now we get to share this with some great friends!
I'm late again. Not surprised the time, huh? Well not much has been happening around here this week, as the semester is coming to an end and I'm trying to be a good student and prep for finals (also not happening as much as it should). I'll have a month off from school, and I've pretty much "booked" all my weekends and have a long list of things I'd like to do with my free time! But before I get too excited about that, let's talk about this week:
1. One of the things I'd like to do while off is to bake and decorate sugar cookies. I follow several blogs on this and it looks so fun and pretty! So after wasting a large amount of my life mulling over these beauties, I ordered myself a variety of (cheap!) cookie cutters and have big plans for them over the break!
2. Our sweet tooth kicked in after dinner on Thursday, and instead of our usual Steel City Pops outing, we decided to try something else (gasp!): Edgewood Creamery. They had lots of flavors of ice cream, and after sampling a few, I selected Special Praline and Jesse got Chocolate Raspberry. They were both a-mazing! I believe they make there own waffle cones , which is exactly what I was craving.
3. Friday was the last day of class for Spring semester!!!
4. As I've mentioned before, we are involved with a Community Group through our church. Whenever we are digging into the Scripture for the week and trying to understand the meaning of it or what is going on at that time, a few people have study Bibles and are always like, "Well, this is a reference to Romans Job 2:4," for example, and we will turn there and it often brings clarity to what we are currently reading. So, we bought a study Bible and it arrived this week. It is HUGE, and we weren't sure how to use it at first with all of the numbers and letters sending you various places to look. But we got the hang of it, and I think it will be a great resource to help us understand the Bible better while we study.
5. A friend shared these videos with me, and they are quite hilarious. If you are a cat or dog owner, you can relate. Enjoy here and here!
1. First on the list this week is some SUPER good news for us to share with you. It should have it's own post, but for the sake of time (and preventing me from rambling) the update on Jesse's job status is in: they did NOT ask him to move to a site. He is here to stay in Birmingham for at least a few more years. This did come with news that he is moving out of his now, temporary, position into another position, which means more training, etc, but we are definitely praising the One Most High for working things out for us.
2. One of our exams this week was offered on two separate days (rare), and I chose to take it on the earlier day, leaving me with Thursday and Friday pretty much free from school. It was nice to wake up later, enjoy my coffee, and relax, without the next thing to study looming overhead. Which freed me up for number 3.
3. Jesus Culture with Kim Walker-Smith came to Birmingham last night! As soon as I heard the news on the radio we immediately decided to go. They have become a favorite band of ours. Their music is simple but they are so talented, especially Kim's voice. It was it Boutwell Auditorium, which is a bowl-shaped arena with a stage at one end. It took me back to the days of church group youth conferences. And it felt so good to be worshiping with a room of thousands of other believers. We did realize however, that we don't know many of their newer songs, but they were beautiful as usual. If you're not familiar (or even if you are) take a listen here , here, and here to some of my favorites.
4. Today we got to meet the incoming first year optometry students with a nice lunch and picnic dinner. They looked so young and innocent. They just don't know what they are about to get themselves into. But it was only a short time ago that I was there too. All of this hard work will pay off one day!
5. I did a Pinterest spoof a few weeks ago, but we finally found a spot for it this week and hung it on the wall. It is at the end of the hall and is a nice reminder which can be seen as we walk in the door.
Today is Earth Day, and today my car just happens to be loaded down with all of our recycling from the past... few months. I'm short on time, and wish I could elaborate more. For more information please read last year's post HERE (apparently I made an oops last year and messed up scheduling my post, so you may have missed it then), and enjoy the facts below:
Treat our Earth better to make it a happier place. We can all do our part! Again, see last year's post on our efforts to protect our environment and be more responsible with what we use and throw away. I honestly don't know how many of the above numbers are true... how many steel cans can power a TV for a certain amount of time, but what inspires me to recycle the most is thinking of the amount of trash that we, as Americans, produce each day! And all of that goes to the landfill. Once it's taken "away" from our homes we don't think about it anymore. But, the truth is that it still exists, and will for a very long time. Piles and piles of it - plastic, metals, etc. We are a society of convenience and disposable products, but there are many things that can be reused or at least recycled so that the materials can be used again. Think about your trash and your purchases - how long you can keep it or how many times you can use it before it becomes trash.
Me and Trisha Yearwood go way back. There was a time in my life when I wanted to be cowgirl. I loved going to the annual Crenshaw County Rodeo, and wanted a horse. There is even photographic evidence of me in full on cowgirl gear "riding" around the yard with my stick pony. Hat and all. Well, during this time I also had a mega-crush on Billy Ray Cyrus (I would have never broken his achy-breaky heart), and I watched a LOT of CMT (that's Country Music Television), especially the weekend morning countdowns. My all-time favorite country song (I'd go so far as to say even to this day) was Trisha's "She's in Love with the Boy." In case you've forgotten, please take a moment to reminisce:
(my favorite line 2:53 through 3:23)
So, why all of this country music talk? I had a pork loin that I thawed for a dinner this week, but I wasn't sure what to do with it (besides my go-to herb and bake). Then I decided I wanted to throw it in the crock pot and have a magically ready dinner waiting for us when we returned from school/work, so I looked for recipes and immediately came across "Trisha Yearwood's Crock Pot Pork Loin." I figured since Trisha didn't let me down back in 1995 she wouldn't let me down now.
Click HERE for my version of Trisha's Crock Pot Pork Loin (which you can print if you'd like).
It was fall-apart tender, and I enjoyed the gravy it made from the cooking liquid. Gravy is not something I cook very often, maybe because it's somewhat reserved for special meals like Thanksgiving, but it's so easy to whisk together (literally), especially at the end of this dish. The pork would be delicious without the gravy, but it definitely adds to it. The recipe calls for 2 1/2 to 3 lbs of pork loin, I used a package from Sam's Club which contains two 1 - 1 1/2 lb loins, and this recipe turned out just fine! I realize my picture is not all that beautiful. The recipe suggested skimming out the bits of pork from the liquids before turning it into gravy, but I just omitted that step (for the lack of a proper strainer) and continued on. Tasted great, looks a little weird. (Pardon that.)
I believe I remember hearing that Trisha had a cookbook at some point in the recent past, but I never looked into it. This dish was a success. One I'll add to the books to throw into our meal "rotation." So I may have to check out more of her recipes. Often, southern cooking is full of lots of bad things, but this one is pretty decent - no salt or butter. Just a few ingredients to make the pork flavor shine.
Thanks Trisha!
I should also mention that I rarely use the crock pot for meals, even though I love coming home to a fully cooked dinner that's ready to eat! (As in, today when I opened the door the smell of yummy pork smacked me in the face and I was a bit overjoyed for a few seconds because I had kind of forgotten that I had prepped it this morning... which took all of five minutes or less!) I know there are plenty of cookbooks out there just for crock-pot meals, but they give me the impression that throwing any meal into the crock pot turns out wonderfully delicious, and I just don't believe them. Do you have any crock-pot favorites? Share your recipe or a link to it in the comments section!
A quick round up of the High Five of this week before bedtime!
1. Our optometry class ordered our first round of equipment this week! A little closer to feeling like "real" doctors! Come July I will be rolling around a case full of diagnostic tools (most of which I probably won't know what to do with at that point)!
2. So I'm kind of cheesy and would like to make a "Bucket List." I have one in my mind, but I forget things. And as you know, I love to make lists, so I was on the hunt for a cute journal to write everything down in. Thanks to the wonderful world of Etsy, I found this one. Jesse and I plan to use it together. It has 4 separate sections, so we will both have an individual-based bucket list in separate sections, and then fill the other two up together. I also chose this style book because it is loose enough to fill with pictures and small memorabilia as we complete each item. So when we're old and gray we can look back on all of these awesome things we did together. (Aawww...)
3. Every now and then a new optometry club, called the Private Practice Club, meets on campus. I missed the first meeting, but thanks to my friends raving about the wealth of information they obtained, I attended the second meeting, and I am SO glad I did. The speaker was a very inspiring and successful optometrist and businessman who encouraged us to write out our vision of how we want to practice one day. He did this himself as he started his practice from scratch, making a mission statement for his office and all his decisions are made to fulfill this vision. He spoke quite the truth when he explained that right now as students is the time that the reasons we wanted to be here in the first place are most fresh on our minds, and it's now when we need to analyze our vision for ourselves and our future practices so that we never lose sight of our initial purposes and goals. So, I need to add that to my bucket list...or to-do list, I guess.
4. We enjoyed a fun game/dinner night last night with our friends Mike and Kelsey playing "Ticket to Ride" (which helped brush me up on a little geography). They have a vast game closet. They are awesome.
5. Wisteria is blooming! It is beautiful, and almost gone. Sometimes happiness is just that simple.
