Hi!

Things have been a little quiet over here lately, but don’t worry we are definitely still up to random shenanigans!

Steve and I retreated to a cabin outside of Asheville (on the top of a mountain) for the Thanksgiving holiday this year. While we love our families, we realized that we have never really taken a vacation that didn’t involve visiting someone! Thus, a total retreat with just us and the dogs was exactly what the doctor ordered after this difficult semester.

We decided to drive up on Wednesday morning and it was only a 4 hr drive from Raleigh (it was so different having a short trip for once!). Once we made it to Weaverville (just 10 min north of Asheville) we left my car at the bottom of the mountain and the owners were kind enough to drive us up the mountain to our cabin. They definitely were not kidding about needing 4 wheel drive!

The view was worth all the trouble though. It was simply breathtaking. We spent SO much time just looking. Not doing anything, just looking out and feeling peaceful 🙂

The inside of the cabin was pretty small, we had a bedroom, bathroom, and 1/2 a kitchen, and you could walk outside to get to the living room with a TV and couches. It couldn’t have been more perfect for us! We spent most of our time outside with the dogs and we made some pretty incredible meals using only an electric burner and a grill. Including our Thanksgiving dinner, Thanksgiving Turkey Burger!

This was so good, so imma go ahead and share the recipe:

Thanksgiving in a Burger

Ingredients:

• 1 lb ground turkey
• 0.25 cup chopped onion
• 0.25 cup dried cranberries
• 2-3 sprigs fresh rosemary, chopped
• ~0.5 cup bread crumbs (add enough so turkey is not super sticky)
• 2-3 sprigs fresh sage, chopped
• brie
• turkey gravy (homemade would be awesome but we just used the cheap instant stuff)
• buns

Directions:

It’s always a good idea to preheat your grill before you start so go ahead and do that, or oven or skillet or sidewalk, whatever you’re gonna use to cook the burgers.

Next, mix the turkey, onion, cranberries, bread crumbs, rosemary, and sage together in a bowl. Salt and pepper to taste and form into patties. Cook the patties until the burgers are cooked through then add a few slices (or a lot of slices because cheese) of brie and let it melt.

While the brie is melting, pour the instant gravy into the pot and add half of the water called for on the package. Cook according to package instructions and let thicken. <- This is gonna seem super salty, but it balances nicely with the whole burger deal.

BURGERS ASSEMBLE!! (at this point you can either attempt to call the Avengers or just assemble the burgers)

These were awesome and we regretfully only made 4. All of which were eaten within several hours of each other.

The dogs tried their best to get some, but were denied turkey this year

-Look at those bat ears!!!

After stuffing ourselves we went back to the usual activities and sat, drank wine, and looked at mountains…

See ya later with Thanksgiving Part 2!

For all the students out there, we’ve almost made it! The end of the semester is nigh! The only things between us and fleeting freedom is exams, exams, class projects, group projects, and exams <–note the sarcasm here, I’m not actually excited about any of these things

It’s the week of US Thanksgiving (aka The week where everyone seriously questions our sanity as we give thanks and then go kill each other for a TV that’s $50 off). I suppose Thanksgiving week is shorter.

Steven, the dogs and I are foregoing any long drives this year in favor of retreating to a cabin outside Asheville.

Tell me you aren’t relaxed looking at those views. But these are what we’ll be able to see from our cabin!

We are SO excited to get away from everything to completely unwind for a few days.

On a side note, Steve and I had a rather intense round of darts this past weekend and I foresee a rematch in the near future

We’ll be sure to post some pics of the Biltmore house dressed up for Christmas and of the mountain views and of the crazy bat (Luna) enjoying the mountain views

Have a safe and happy week!

 

It’s been a pretty long time since I posted. I kinda withdrew from social media after my ACL surgery. I guess part of me didn’t really want to remember that part of my life but that’s kinda stupid. Part of the reason I wanted to start this blog was to help me remember what my life was like during a particular time and that should include the bad parts too. You learn a lot from the tough times in your life, plus, there are still a lot of good memories during the tough times that I’d like to hold on to.

So, yeah. It’s been kinda rough lately. Recovery from surgery was longer and harder than expected. The ligament attachment to my tibia is non-standard since I had a nail in the way from when I broke it in 2000 so they put in some staples in a different place than they usually would. Unfortunately that leaves a big knot on the side of my knee that hurts like a bitch if it gets pushed on or bothered too much.

I’m trying to get back to my life and feel a lot of pressure to perform well and get research results quickly (by the way the results I’m getting make no sense) because I was out for so long that I keep over doing it an oscillating between feeling pretty great and then hurting real bad for a week or so and not being able to do much which is incredibly frustrating. Then, typically when my knee is already hurting, my neurotic 72 pound dog will get spooked by something and dart past me while body checking me right in the knee or see another dog that she apparently wants to kill in the most brutal way possible and lung on her leash almost pulling me over.

So that’s a quick vent of my frustrations. There have been some good times too though, some of which you’ve already heard about from Amanda while I was M.I.A. We went to a pumpkin patch and went apple picking at a farm about an hour outside of town. Amanda made a delicious apple pie. We did awesome zombie makeup for Halloween.

And Indy thought she was people while sitting on the couch which was very entertaining

And we saw a big collection of M.C. Escher’s artwork at the museum. I’m quite sure that there were some other things I wanted to jot down too but my memory sucks which is why I shouldn’t take long breaks from posting!

Oh, I’ve also been speculating on a very entertaining theory with lots of compelling evidence that Jar Jar Binks is a Sith lord who was working in conjunction with Palpatine. Here’s a write up I found that does a great job explaining it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/3qvj6w/theory_jar_jar_binks_was_a_trained_force_user/

Anyway, I’ve also been spending long hours in the lab for the last week. I’m collecting a whole lot of data and finishing up a big experiment that will hopefully shed some light on what’s going on with my research project once I get everything plotted and analyzed. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

 

So if you haven’t noticed yet, 

a new menu has popped up riiiight about there..

See it? It’s the one entitled, Highlight Reel or for those that can’t read, it’s the one on the far right.

We’ve decided that writing a long post with pictures about every day is actually a lot and we don’t take that many pictures.  This results in the blog not getting updated on a schedule and stuff like that.

SO

Enter Highlight Reel. It’s a place where we jot down a sentence, or two, about each day. Maybe even include a picture if we actually did something exciting (not likely, we are poor grad students and exciting things cost money).  This is mostly for us since we have the attention span and short term memory ability of a goldfish and we’d like to actually remember what we did or did not do.

Anywho, it’s definitely still super new so expect the page to look different every time you go there for a little while

TTYL