Canoe Trip

Mara and I heard of a deal where Thousand Hills State Park was giving half priced canoe rentals if you were there before Noon. We figured we'd fight the Sunday crowds and try it out. Turns out, since we live in the heart of the bible belt, no one goes on the lake before mid-afternoon.

We pretty much had the 573 acre lake to ourselves!

I took a 360º panorama of "Lake Syring". If you click on it you can check out the full resolution photo. We were only allowed to upload 1/2 of the actual picture size (it's a full 360º!). You'll be hard pressed to find another boat/swimmer/kayak in the picture, and you can see 90% of it in the full photo. It was eerie...



We canoed for about 2.5 hours, and it cost us about $10 with sodas! 2 poor students can't ask for much more than that! We didn't take the dogs out because we were not sure of their boats, but there would be PLENTY of room for them! Can't wait to maybe try it out again this weekend, it's supposed to be mid-80's and lots of sunshine.

Oh, and we went off the beaten path (go figure) and I found some poison oak/ivy/sumac. I am pretty much immune to the poison leaves in IA & WI, but apparently not MO. So on top of my tick bites, I have some nice, itchy hives. Looks like more anti-histamines and calamine lotion for me! Woo-Hoo!

One week down...

I survived the first week, relatively unscathed. The one casuality is my cell phone...while it is still functional, I no longer have a screen. Which wouldn't really matter if I actually remembered numbers and didn't rely on my trusty address book (in the phone, of course!) and I can no longer text, although I figured out how to forward my text messages to Mike without seeing the screen. Other than a crappy phone, I had a great week!
Classes are, as expected, crammed with a ton of information, some I'm vaguely familiar with, some I'm not. I have 6 classes this quarter, with labs for all of them. Generally I will be at school from 7am-5pm with an hour for lunch, the hours are pretty much what I'm used to but definitely more brain power required! My first exam is already next Wednesday, September 5, in Biochemistry. So far, I have been studying at home, inside and outside (even in the hammock,with my coffee!)for at least a few hours everyday. Hopefully I'll stay on top of things!

Don't get me wrong, studying does take up a lot of my time, but we've found some time for fun as well, but that is for another post!

Linus' Crack Run

Our friend Pete first coined the phrase "crack run" to refer to his dog, Fala's frantic running for apparently no reason. Linus has done these quite a bit in the past, but since he has not been familiar with the layout of our house in Kirksville, he's been hesitent.
So we decided to set up to "encourage" him to freak out (now you know why Linus is the way he is...). With Mara in the living room & Me running the camera in the bedroom, we got a good perspecive of his first real crack run in Kirksville.

Grandpa Genes

Mara and I both have carpentry in our blood. Grandpa Bacon whittled and made awesome carvings and a bookshelf we still use. Grandpa Hansen made amazing cabinets,and he's made a rocking chair for each great-grandchild . Grandpa Syring made about 1000 letter holders and gave them to about everyone he knew.
Now Mara and I don't have the practice, nor the patience, that our Grandfathers had. Nor do we have the tools they had. We probably don't have the design skills they possess. And our workbench has been downgraded to a fold out card table. Pretty crappy, I know.
I was looking through a magazine and saw a picture of a neat butcher block. The idea was pretty much a box with enough bamboo sticks to support knives




Now we don't have $125 to spend on a "European pine" and bamboo block of wood, so we decided to put our genes to the test....















We went to Home Depot and found a REALLY cool scrap piece of poplar wood for about $3. We then bought enough L brackets to frame a house, and a small can of polyurethane.
The brackets we got were a little shorter than we needed, so Mara came up with an AWESOME design that really looks slick. By overlapping the wood on one end we could use the brackets and still have a solid perimeter:








The outside of the block with Mara's design of joining the wood with alternating colors.



















This block could survive a nuke...











Next we needed enough skewers to fill the damn thing. The dollar store yielded nothing but a 6' dog leash for Linus, and a trip to Wal-Mart gave us 200 sticks; about enough to fill 1/5 of the block. Hy-Vee yielded the rest of the roughly 1000 bamboo skewers it took to fill the block enough to support our heavy knives.
Here is our final product...

This was the test knife. A 7" Santoku knife that is about the heaviest we own.

And then we added the rest of our knives...

We were REALLY happy with the way it turned out. I knew we had those genes for a reason!

My fingers are a little sore from breaking all of those bamboo skewers. I sliced myself pretty good with one.

So 1 trip to Home Depot's scrap yard, 12 L brackets, 1000 bamboo skewers, and 1 band-aid later, we have a new home for our favorite kitchen utensils!

Tick Watch Update

Well we got the dogs into the vet and they gave them Frontline, which is an oil that you put on their shoulder blades and it causes ticks that bite them to die, and they should fall off within the next 24-28 hours. In the meantime the puppies will be sleeping in the garage to avoid a tick infested bed.

For me it's been a different story. Yesterday my legs felt like they were on FIRE! Turns out I had quite a few tick bites. It's been a nightly dose of benadryl and calamine lotion for me to avoid cratching my legs like a crack addict. Here is a snapshot of the tiny welts on my feet:







You may have to click on the picture to see the bites, they are REALLY small, but there are hundreds of them!






It's pretty much like that all the way up my calf as well. Mara was "lucky" and only has about 10-20 bites on each leg. I think my freaking out about it made the ticks bite me more...:)