Amesnjas

Summertime

jas — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:24:15 +0000

Yea, I know, it’s been a long time since I’ve updated anything here. The last picture post was Brian’s wedding. It’s not because we haven’t done anything worth posting, but rather that we’ve been doing too many things worth posting. Don’t believe me? Just look at the latest picture set (almost 100 pictures) on the homepage.

Pnut’s Visit - Our only visitor so far this summer.
BridgeRun - I didn’t get to run this year with my broken hand, but Amy and Pnut did.
Dodgeball - This is the best dodgeball picture of the season.
Yaritza’s Birthday - At Macaroni Grill.
Kaveh’s Birthday - At Kaveh and Zahra’s place.
Chegso Bowling Night - Amy helped coordinate this as the Chegso president.
Cast Removal - Finally…although physical therapy has taken a lot more time than I thought.
Mango Red Pepper Upside Down Cake - An original Amy idea.
Kenny Chesney Concert - With Brooks & Dunn, Leanne Rimes, Luke Bryan, & Gary Allan. Quite a show.
Kitchen Window Seat - We built a window seat in the kitchen for more storage and Amy sewed a pillow top as the finishing touch. Or maybe Abby is the finishing touch?
Cinco de Mayo Party - First party at our place since we finished the kitchen. Amy cooked a lot of great food, including an amazing tres leches cake.
Misael’s Graduation Party - Second party at our place the following weekend, and yes, Amy made another amazing cake.
Memorial Day trip to Vero Beach - Wes, Eyma, Amy & I squeezed into the “Echito” (Eyma’s Toyota Echo) for an impromptu trip to the beach and the river.

That’s the short-short version. There was probably even more than that going on, but I neglected to take pictures. Enjoy.

You’re not a lap cat?

jas — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:54:41 +0000

While Abby is probably my favoritist cat in the whole wide world, she’s not really the lovable, snuggly type. She’ll occasionally jump in her mom’s lap while we’re watching TV or come lay on top of her in bed. This usually only lasts for a few minutes at a time and when she feels like she’s been petted enough, she’s gone. She very rarely snuggles with me. Well, Amy’s been gone at a conference for school since Friday now and it’s obvious that Abby misses her as much as I do. Anytime I sit or lay down anywhere, she’s right there and if I’m not at the computer desk, she’s been jumping into my lap and waiting for me to pet her. That may not sound like a big deal, but for Abby, it’s pretty strange. Usually when I’m in here at the computer though, she’ll walk in, make sure I’m still here and then go back out into the living room. I thought that’s what she was up to a few minutes ago as I was working on my slides for SXSW. When I reached down to pet her though, she jumped right into my lap. I knew Amy wouldn’t believe it, so I snapped a couple pictures with the webcam:

I’m guessing she’ll go back to being spoiled, fiesty, princess Abby as soon as Ames gets back on Wednesday, but I’ll enjoy the lovable, hugable Abby while she lasts.

Confection Perfection

jas — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 17:45:32 +0000

For as long as I’ve known Amy, she’s loved to make great food. Within the last 4 years though, her interest in baking has exploded. With our friends here in Columbia, she has earned quite a reputation for her cakes and pastries. No matter what the occasion, if Amy and I are invited, you can be sure that some delicious dessert is coming along with us. Up until we started remodeling our kitchen she baked so many amazing desserts that it was hard to keep up with posting photos of them, let alone cataloging them. With that said, what follows is a quick and incomplete list of some of Amy’s coolest confections.

8/07 - Adriana’s Chocolate Roulade Cake
8/07 - Aidaris’ Fruit Topped Cake
7/07 - Eyma’s Hawiaan Shirt and Sandles Cake
6/07 - Pedro Josue’s Baby Blocks Cake
5/07 - Jenna’s Beach Themed Wedding Cupcakes
5/07 - Eirini’s Chocolate Fairy Cake
5/07 - Red Velvet Cake (Freelance Project)
3/07 - Eyma’s Modern Mango Cake
2/07 - Valentine’s Day Cookie Bouquets
12/06 - Christmas Fudge, Cookies, and Pecan Bars
10/06 - Gael’s Chocolate Tower Cake
8/06 - Aidaris’ Vanilla Birthday Cake
7/06 - Eyma’s Feliz Cumpleanos Ice Cream Cake
6/06 - Alina’s Ice Cream Birthday Cake
5/06 - Raspberry Heart Cookies
3/06 - Iron Chef Biscotti
6/05 - The Stott’s Tuxedo and Dress Wedding Cookies
(…we must have a close up of these somewhere)
2/04 - My Valentines Day Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Chicken Souvlaki

jas — Thu, 03 May 2007 02:01:05 +0000

Ames and I have been so busy that we haven’t posted anything here in a while. Everything’s OK though, just busy. Fortunately, she’s just finishing her semester, so we should start having fun stuff to post about again now that the summer is here. To kick that off, I thought I’d let you know what we had for dinner last weekend. Riveting, I know, but it was our first attempt at Greek food and was really tasty.

Why Greek food? Well, there’s this little place in West Columbia called “Nick’s House of Pizza” that we like to go to. They have really good pizza and calzones, but they also have a lot of traditional Greek fare. Every time we go there, one of us always orders the Souvlaki Chicken Dinner. It’s an awesome dish, with spicy chicken, Greek potatoes, pita bread, and Tzatziki sauce. The problem is that the restaurant is about 20 minutes away. Rather than driving all the way out to West Columbia when we have a hankerin’ for some Souvliaki, we figured we’d learn to make it at home.

To make things easier, we found highly-reviewed recipes for each part of our dinner on AllRecipes.com:

The greek potatoes were awesome and super easy with the directions given. The only downside to this dish is that it takes about 2 hours to bake. If/when we do these again, I think we’ll use red or new potatoes rather than the regular baking potatoes I accidentally picked up at the store.

For the Souvlaki, we obviously went with chicken rather than the pork which was recommended in the recipe, I’m sure the pork would have been good, but we were trying to make something similar to Nick’s, so chicken it was. As you might be able to tell from the picture above, we cut the chicken into strips and threaded them onto shish-kabobs, mixing in onion and red pepper chunks. MMMmmmm.

The Tzatziki sauce was good, but wasn’t quite Nick’s. Amy noted that she thought Tzatziki normally has cucumber in it, and sure enough, another recipe we found did include pureed cucumber…and mint, which we both agreed would be good additions for next time.

All in all it was a very successful dinner, and these are definitely recipes that will go into our regular rotation.

Book, Bike, & Dodgeball

jas — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 19:03:32 +0000

These first few weeks of 2007 have been a wild ride. A couple weeks ago I decided to leave my comfy-but-lonely full-time job with Erickson Marketing and take a new position at a local web development company downtown called Cyberwoven. Somehow my 2 week notice has flown by and I’ll be starting that job on Monday. But wait! There’s more.

My personal copies of my book arrived last night, and they are AWESOME! It’s still hard to believe that I wrote a book, so it’s strange for me to see my name on the cover. The title is “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” and it should be available for you all to buy sometime in March. I’m so excited!

Also, I bought a mountain bike! I’ve been telling Ames since before we moved here that I wanted to get into mountain biking. While I’ve had fun riding the nearby trails at Harbison State Forest, my rusty old Target bike just wasn’t cutting it, so I finally decided on a new one. It’s a 2007 Gary Fisher Piranha and the picture above is what it looked like after a 6 mile inaugural ride on Monday night.

Along with mountain biking, Amy and I have both been trying to find fun ways to fit more exercise into our weekly schedule. One way we’ve done this is by joining an intramural dodgeball team at USC. Our team name is “Not in the face, we’re models!”, and although we didn’t come up with the name, Amy and I designed very cool personalized jerseys for our team. We had our first match last night which consists of as many games as you can play in 35 minutes. Although we lost, we had a great time and are looking forward to our next match. Finally, we also signed up (along with a bunch of our friends) to participate in the Cooper River Bridge 10K in Charleston. I’m training to run the whole thing, and Amy is training to walk 5K and run 5K. This is a big challenge for both of us, but we’re looking forward to it.

As you can tell, it’s been a crazy but happy few weekends for us and we can only hope that the rest of 2007 will be as fun and exciting as it started out.

Snow Videos

jas — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 14:49:05 +0000

What do you get when it snows for about an hour at the home of 2 transplanted, native Floridians? A bunch of goofy pictures and videos! Although there’s no justifying this childlike behavior, we’ve only seen snow a couple times in our lives, so we had to make a snowman and snow angel. Enjoy the temporary insanity!

The initial snow report (2:07min - 3.3MB):

Jason making his first snow angel(1:01min - 1.6MB):

Amy making her first snowman(1:48min - 2.8MB):

(If you can’t see the videos, you may need to download Quicktime.)

San Francisco

jas — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 15:49:17 +0000

I keep putting off writing a post about our trip to California because there’s so much to say that I never feel like I have time to sit down and write it all out. Well, we were gone for 10 days and we’ve already been back for over 11, so I guess that means I need to write something, even if it isn’t a novel.

Rather than trying to give an itinerary of our trip, I’ll just give a brief explanation of the three photo sets and let the pictures do all the talking.

The Lake Tahoe Pictures

We arrived in San Francisco REALLY late on November 10th and drove our rental car up to Vacaville where my brother Jered and his wife Aimee are stationed. After a brief night of sleep, we spent the day Saturday driving up the mountains into the Truckee/Lake Tahoe area to see snow. We had a lot of fun throwing snowballs around at a rest stop, getting lost trying to find a wal-mart to buy snow chains, and showing off their new puppy, Buster.

View the Lake Tahoe Pictures »

The San Francisco Pictures

On Sunday we got up early in the morning again and headed to San Francisco. We wandered around the Fisherman’s Wharf and Ghirardelli Square area before we had to drop Amy off for her AICHE conference. Amy was at the conference from Monday-Wednesday and she took a few more pics while she was there as well. While Amy was at the conference I stayed at Jered and Aimee’s, went biking with Jered, visited my friend that works at Yahoo, and saw all things to see in Vacaville. On Thursday morning I went back to San Fran again to pick Ames up and we spent the whole day exploring. Over the course of the day, we checked out Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, The Cliff House and ate at an awesome little Pizza place. To finish off the day, we visited the MoMA before headed back to Vacaville. On Friday we took it easy, hung out in Vacaville, and visited the Jelly Belly Factory. And then on Satuday…

View the San Francisco Pictures »

The Napa Valley Pictures

…We went to Napa Valley. Ames and I aren’t big wine people, but we had an excellent time touring wineries and driving through the picturesque hills and valleys. If you ever get a chance to go, don’t stop for lunch until you get to V. Satuii. They have a huge selection of breads, cheeses, and gourmet lunch food, and lots of picnic tables.

View the Napa Valley Pictures »

Well, that was pretty much our trip. I left out a ton of detail, but it’s probably better that way. Enjoy the pictures.

New Living Room Fans

jas — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 23:03:16 +0000

When we decided to buy our house, one of the biggest deciding factors was the living room with it’s huge vaulted ceilings and tall windows. One of our least favorite parts of the living room though was the dated can lights that provided very little light because they were so high up. Vince suggested that we replace them with ceiling fans.

After a lot of thought and discussion about style and downrod length we finally decided to do it. We bought two 60 inch modern fans and two 4 foot downrods. We thought it was going to be a quick Saturday morning project, but the slope of the ceiling turned out to be too much for the hardware. After quite a bit of frustration, I went to a fan specialty store and bought a slope reducing metal cone adapter “thingy” (you’ll see it in the pictures) to put between the mounting box and the fan bracket. Even though that solution ended up working, the screws that came with the adapter were a little short, so I had to clear out the popcorn around the adapter and really push the bracket in order to attach the nuts to the bolts - all while standing about 20 feet up in the air on a ladder resting against the ceiling drywall.

Even with all the frustration and the fact that we didn’t completely finish them till about 10:30 last night, it was worth all the effort. Our new fans are as beautiful as they are functional. We’ll even be able to use them during the winter because the remote control allows you to switch the rotation direction to circulate the warm air. Click on the pictures below for larger versions:

Dragon Fruit

jas — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:18:41 +0000

The other day while Amy and I were shopping for produce in Publix we came across something we’d never seen before. It was a bright pink fruit that was about the shape of a mango but had petals like an artichoke. There was no sign, so we asked the produce manager what it was. His answer was “Dragon Fruit” and that it’s “kinda like an expensive kiwi”. We never found out what the price was and we weren’t going to take it to the register to find out, so we decided we’d try it some other time. When we came back to the store, they had them properly labeled: “Dragon Fruit $3.99/ea” That’s pretty expensive for a single fruit but we had to try it out. Here’s what the thing looks like:

And this is what it looked like on the inside:

And then apparently you’re supposed to scoop it out with a spoon and eat it like a melon:

Amy and I decided that it wasn’t as exciting as it looked and that it would probably make a better garnish than a snack. The fruit is actually from a cactus, so it mostly just tastes like water. It has a hint of sweetness but I think when people say “it’s like a kiwi” that really comes from the texture and look of the flesh with the little seeds inside. Anyway, now we can say we’ve tried a dragon fruit.

Here are a few other sites about these funky fruits:

Greenhouse Girl - The blog of a gardener in Yorkshire who paid £1.79 (~$3.35) for one. I guess we didn’t get ripped off too bad.
Pine Island Nursery - This nursery grows many varieties of dragon fruit. The differnces in color are really crazy.
Dragon Fruit Farm - Somebody visited a dragon fruit farm in Malaysia and took pictures of the trees on the trellises . Those are some crazy plants.
Wikipedia Entry on Dragon Fruit

Hummingbird Movie

jas — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 00:13:45 +0000

I guess the hummingbirds must be most active at the end of the Summer because they’ve been going crazy lately. We have a feeder suctioned to our kitchen window, so we’re seeing them all the time now. I guess you could say that our nectar brings all the birds to the yard. The other day when I got off of work (er, left the office for the day) there were two hummingbirds buzzing all over the place. I grabbed my camera and took this video. I thought Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee would make great background music for the video. This rendition was performed by the Mallet Ensemble at the UCF Percussion Studio. Go Knights! Sorry for the shaky hands.

(If you can’t see the video, you may need to download Quicktime.)

And here’s a few pictures too (click for larger versions):