Kind of amazing

I came across this on someone's blog a little while ago, and since then have sent it to a few of my pregnant friends, who have all loved it! I thought I would post it up here because really, it is amazing. I can't move like this now ... and I'm not pregnant. I definitely thought that maybe she wasn't really pregnant in this video, but apparently it was featured in Sports Illustrated, who confirmed she really was 38 weeks at the time of filming. Enjoy!

Watermelon Gazpacho

Despite the fact that Lucy thinks that soup should only be hot, I completely disagree and have been known to enjoy many cold soups. A couple of months ago, I came across this amazing recipe for watermelon gazpacho. I was intrigued, and I must admit that it sounded amazing. There was a big watermelon in my CSA share last week, and another one this week, so I decided I finally had enough watermelon to make it! I altered the original recipe a bit (of course ... don't I always?) since I didn't have all the ingredients and also, I don't really like cilantro.

Ingredients

3 cups of seeded watermelon blended

2 cups of watermelon diced

2 medium tomatoes, seeded and diced

2 cups of seeded and peeled cucumber, diced (I didn't seed the cucumbers and somehow, I survived)

1 red bell pepper, diced

1 tsp minced ginger (totally forgot to put this in!)

1/2 a seeded and minced jalapeno, if you like spicy (I left this out, although I know it would have been tasty!)

handful of fresh cilantro leaves (I didn't use them)

juice from one lime (I also didn't use this ... forgot to get a lime!)

lime peel from one lime (ditto)

salt and pepper

Just mix everything together and chill in the fridge. Serves 4-5 ... or 1, over a course of many days. :)

So ... my watermelon gazpacho was pretty basic, since I didn't put in any of the fun stuff - I left out cilantro and jalapeno and forgot the ginger and lime stuff. Oh well. I did add some very finely diced onion, and I really felt like that intensified the flavor.

The verdict? AMAZING. I had a bowl of it right when I made it, then threw the rest in the fridge. Aaaand I just had another bowl. It is such a great, crisp, cool, refreshing summer treat! And OH so healthy. Plus it looks pretty! See?

I am really sorry I keep forgetting to take photos of my CSA shares. I suck. This week, I got ... a watermelon, peaches, tomatoes, potatoes, a cucumber, and some goat cheese. And this morning, Kyle and I went to the farmer's market and I picked up some onions, leeks, and more cucumbers. And - an entire chicken! It has been roasting in the slow cooker all day with some onion, potatoes, and fresh sage from my little herb garden. It smells AMAZING and it may not be done until around 10pm, but I will be eating delicious roasted chicken for the rest of the week!

Tomorrow, I am off to Holiday World with some of my SILs and their kids. I am so excited! I haven't been to an amusement park of any kind in YEARS, and this one has a huge water park. Yay for a day being a kid! I hope y'all have a wonderful rest of your weekend!

Hot spot

Aaaaand no, I don't mean a wireless hot spot. I wish! I'm talking about Oscar's hot spot. Seriously ... why is he having all of his veterinary emergencies while Matt is gone? Sad face. While Oscar was out frolicking about in Canada, having a blast being an outside dog, he must have gotten a bug bite or something. He started licking this spot on his tail overnight on Sunday ... and I guess it continued on quite a bit. I guess I wasn't realizing that he kept licking the same spot. Tuesday night when I got back to Bloomington, I took him out and realized that there was a huge chunk of his tail fur gone!!!!

Aaaagh. I totally freaked out. He had licked down to the skin on a good 2-3 inch section of his tail. I was horrified!!! It looked soooo sad. And every time I tried to look at it, he got growly. Clearly, the tail was hurting. Yesterday, I took him to the pet store and they gave me a spray - it has hydrocortisone and lidocaine and stuff. I sprayed it on his tail at the store, and I think it hurt him! I felt so bad. We got in the car to drive home from the store, and he crawled into my lap in the car. He is NOT a lap dog! He just curled up and rested his head on my arm and it was sooo sad. :(

So I made a vet appointment and took him there this morning - the vet made a scary face when she saw his tail and said it was a good thing I brought him in. He got a shot in his tail (sad face again!!!), and a prescription for benadryl, cephalexen (sp?), and an antibiotic ointment. Oy.

Apparently he will be loopy while he's on the benadryl (for the next 10 days!), so that should be interesting. In the meantime ... say a happy little thought that his tail fur grows back in okay!!! Because I really like it. It's cute and fluffy.

Great White North

I have returned to my native homeland from the great white north ... and I must say, I thought twice about, um, ever coming home. Not only did I fall in love with the beautiful orchards and vineyards, but I just had the best time with Jenny and Lucy. Lucy wrote a great post today about how it seems like we have always been friends - and not just "internet friends." She was right.

This is a really photo-heavy post - it was just too hard to narrow it down and keep it short. Deal with it! I arrived Friday afternoon, and Jenny arrived after dinner. Lucy and her husband gave us a nice tour of the area, and we went to an amazing ice cream place called Toute Sweet. The ice cream was amazing!!! It was like a Coldstone-type-place only the ice cream and mixins are all made in-house. Delish. We attempted to take a photo. It ummmm took awhile.

Ah, finally - a cute one! Ta da!
Lucy's hubs shows us a place called Balls Falls. Literally.
That night, Jenny and Lucy shacked up together, and Oscar jumped up because, well, he's been sleeping on the bed and that's just what he's used to. However, he's not used to there being more than one person in the bed!
So he had kind of a hard time finding a comfy place.
This only lasted a minute. Then he came out to sleep on the floor next to the couch, where I was sleeping (Lucy's hubs was sleeping on their crib mattress on the floor of the baby's room. What a man!).
Oscar even made a new, Canadian girlfriend! This is Nika. For the most part, they got along great. They had a couple of fights but quickly made up. :)
On Saturday, Lucy took us to a fast food place to get a good Canadian treat - poutine. This was something I had never heard of before, but turned out to be delish! Fries topped with brown gravy and cheese curds. Yes, you heard that right. No complaints here!

We walked around Niagara-on-the-Lake for awhile but it rained off and on, which was kind of a bummer. But that's okay! Let's move on to the next meal ... we went to this amazing Brazilian barbeque place right by Niagara Falls called Copacabana. Delish! It's one of those places where they keep bringing you meat. Hmm. That's what she said.

Here I am at the bar with Jenny, looking shiny. Note to concerned readers: Lindsay's hubs and I were the only ones who enjoyed a beer.
Jenny and Lucy. Look at that baby belly on L!
It was SERIOUSLY delicious. SERIOUSLY.
Here we are, post-meal. I think we looked better pre-dinner - afterwards we were all pretty stuffed. But had a great time eating and talking and enjoying the bachelor party going on behind us!
I cannot believe I'm sharing this photo with you - I almost wanted to post it on my blog as a joke, but then Lucy posted it on HER blog and now you know it's a fake. I did, indeed, ask the ladies working at the maternity store if I had to be pregnant to try on the fake belly. They said no ... so I did it to send to Matt as a little joke. The ladies at the maternity store thought I was crazy. But we had a pretty amazing laugh at it!
Here is Jenny with the belly - she will actually look like this in a few months!!!! Yay!
After the maternity store, we wandered over to Walmart so we could find a super cheap fake wedding band for L. And we parked in the expectant mothers spot! I had to take a photo of two of my favorite expectant mothers.
Look, it's L's hubs! On a roof! Gratuitous shirtless man photo.
Meanwhile, back at the farm ... Oscar had the most amazing weekend being an outside dog. Plus, ummm they have chickens!!!! Chickens! Oscar spent a lot of time RIGHT here. Watching them, and possibly plotting a way to get into the coop.
The humans enjoyed wandering around the beautiful garden and orchards.
Oooh, a fresh tomato! Um, I ate that one. It was delicious.
Late afternoon on Sunday, we wandered through the orchard to a pond for the pups to swim.
Seriously - can you believe this is L's back yard? I am tres jealous.

Canada = Oscar heaven
Canada also = friend heaven.
Already planning my next trip - but not until Baby Cramp is here!

Weekend adventure!

Greetings from Michigan, friends! I drove up to my parents' house yesterday (in a mess of storms and random tornado fronts and hiding out at gas stations) because TODAY I am heading up to the Great White North (i.e., the exotic foreign country of CANADA) to see Lucy!!!! We had a blast back in February when we first met and I absolutely cannot wait to check out her digs, have our dogs become BFFs (yes, Oscar is roadtripping with me! I brought his passport and everything!), and eat some tasty food. Yay!

And ... well what have we here? Jenny decided at the last minute to join us for the weekend, too! So excited to see her again, yay!!!! I guess we have a regular bloggy get-together scheduled.
Anyway - I am about to get on the road. I hope you all have a fabulous weekend, and I'll be back on Tuesday with photos and fun!

This is so funny I can't stand it.

Deployment in Review: Month SIX.

I'm a few days late with this, but hopefully you don't mind. Cannot believe it's already been six months (and 26 weeks!) ... but also, I definitely can. At this point, it seems like Matt's been gone for forever. I don't like it! The good news? We should only have approximately four months to go. Thank goodness. I'm to the point where I think about him coming home nonstop ... which is probably not helping anything! On the one hand, it seems like four months is nothing and he should basically be home tomorrow. But on the other hand ... it's still four months. It's NOT tomorrow. Blah.

Not that much has happened this past month - since I'm on my summer schedule, things have been pretty relaxed. Work is pretty fun over the summer, but over the last couple of weeks, all I've done is make what is adding up to hundreds of phone calls to the parents of incoming freshman, trying to set up meetings over the summer. I have probably left about 60 some voicemails at this point. And guess how many people have called me back so far? ZERO. I am getting extremely frustrated ... but I guess people just don't want to think about school in the summer. Ugh!

Anyway. Over the past month, I have ...

-Spent the weekend at my parents' house and saw my Granddad and his lady friend Doris, who were in town for a visit. While at home, my mom helped me plant a pretty potted plant that is now on my patio. One month later ... it's still alive! Which is very impressive. I don't think I ever posted a photo of my pretty plant ... I'll do that soon.

-Saw my good friend Adrienne from grad school, who came into town with her mom to visit some of her cousins who live in Bloomington. It was great to see her and talk about the old times! Not only did we go to grad school together, but we also both moved to DC after school and worked together at the hospital. Lots of memories!

-Lisa came to visit! We had a great weekend of, well, watching a lot of Real Housewives (both the 3-part NY reunion and NJ!) and some bad movies and enjoying the Taste of Bloomington. Fun times were had by all!

-I discovered that I love eggplant ... and have made it about 800 times since that day. Seriously people - EGGPLANT IS DELICIOUS!!!

-I have NOT been good at posting my CSA share contents each week, but know that I am still getting amazing stuff and loving it! I will try to bring that back ... well, as soon as I can remember. This week, I received eggplant, zucchini (okay, enough with the zucchini already!), a cucumber, some tomatoes, green peppers, potatoes, and a jar of locally made pasta sauce. Delish!

-I also discovered that I LOVE BEETS! I have been getting them at the farmer's market and roasting them to throw in salads. Seriously delicious. I cannot believe I have always assumed they were icky!

-I got out my bike after years of having it in storage, only to discover that biking is hard! But it gets easier every time. And I was happy to hear from so many of you who agree with me ... I thought I was alone! :)

-My half marathon training has gone up a notch, and I am running longer distances than I EVER have before. From here on out, I won't run less than 4 miles, I believe. Even though I rarely feel like an accomplished runner, and it always feels incredibly difficult to me ... I keep thinking back on 1-2 years ago, when I really couldn't run. At all. Now, knowing that I can run FIVE MILES - even if I struggle to do so - well, that's a huge accomplishment!

-My amazing husband gifted me with a Garmin 110 - which is now helping my training each and every day!

-My mom and my grandma came to visit last weekend, and we had a great time just relaxing.

-My class started, and it has taken over my life like crazy!!! I spent the majority of this entire weekend doing reading and assignments for school. This is a big class with a ton of material to fit into a 6 week summer session - whew!

Well, I guess that's it for the month - hey, it looks like I was pretty busy after all! I never really think so until I write it all down in a blog post. :)

Coming up in the next month:

-I'm headed to Canada this weekend to hang out with Lucy!!! I haven't been to Canada in a long time. L, I'll be sure to pack my winter parka and snow boots. I am bringing Oscar along to pull my sled. Hehe.

-I'm going to go to Holiday World with some of my SILs, nieces and nephews, which should be fun! I haven't been to any sort of amusement/water park in a million years. Can't wait!

-I also can't wait to head up to northern Michigan, where I am going to spend a week with my parents at a lake house they rented on Bear Lake. It is pet-friendly, so Oscar is coming with me to frolic in the water. I am really looking forward to the relaxation, and I can't wait to spent some time "up north." It's been awhile!

And then, before I know it - the school year will start back up again and I'll be busy seeing all of my kids. The relaxed summer schedule is great, but to be honest - I much prefer the school year. I love seeing my kids and doing my job, and it's really hard to check in with my kids over the summer.

Anyway! This ended up being a much longer post than I was intending. Are you bored yet? Are you even still reading? If not, I don't blame you. Happy Monday, everyone - time for a workout!