Im obviously not the blogger in this family.

Turns out, Phil is a much more reliable, if not much more entertaining blogger than I am. Who knew???
I guess it works like this. He gets to write the stories and random facts that keep people coming back to our blog, and i get to keep those people informed on what is actually happening in our lives.  So what is going on exactly?... Well we're both working, and that about sums it up.  Being back on my feet for 8 hours a day pretty much takes care of my energy level for the other 6 or maybe 8 hours that I am awake,  and well,  you all already know what Phil has been doing with his free time.  Really though we haven't been doing a lot of anything. We've gone to a couple movies (at $1.50 a ticket for only slightly dated titles!), to the art museum, and visited less than a handful of new restaurants.  I go to the farmers market once or twice in a week which is always exciting, there's so much beautiful produce it takes me at least 30 minutes to get in and out again with two peppers and a tomato.

As our car is slowly but surely falling apart, Phil has taken it upon himself to do what he can to keep it safely running for as long as possible. His Saturday afternoon was spent changing the break pads and recharging our, long dead, air conditioner.  Mind you it was an afternoon of scattered thunderstorms, so part of my afternoon was spent standing over him with an umbrella while he worked on the car in the rain. The result of our team efforts... the breaks work!!! the air conditioner worked long enough to get us nice and chilly on the way to a rainy night game at the Durham Bulls Stadium, but decided not to work anymore on the hot morning drive to church the next day. But really... it's nice having no air conditioning in your car in North Carolina, it's like a visit to the sauna every time you go somewhere...every time you go anywhere.

Yesterday (Sunday) I made a Strawberry Rhubarb Pie, one that looks similar to this one here --------------------------------------->
but minus the blue and black berries, and up a few notches on the delicious scale.... in hind sight i should have just taken a picture of my own pie.
If you live in Minneapolis you should be able to find this very same, super delicious pie (the one that i made) at Lucia's. If for some reason they have changed their recipe its a crying shame.
SO in order to make this pie I was forced to go to Whole Foods, because apparently rhubarb doesn't grow so well in the South and is not as readily available as in the northerner parts of the country. Another crying shame, because my rhubarb had to travel all the way from Washington! It was still delicious, but its the principle of the thing. By the way, if you live in Raleigh, don't go to Whole Foods on a Sunday afternoon, I could barely get around people with my rhubarb stalks!

I learned two things from my pie yesterday. 1- just because some little trick works in the work place doesn't mean it will work the same way at home with non-industrial products. aka the plastic wrap that holds up to oven temperatures at work is not the same as the plastic wrap that you have at home which will indecently begin to melt around your baking beans in your pie shell immediately upon encountering the heat of the oven. 2- it is less than safe to travel in a car with a hot fruit pie on your lap, as the acceleration of your car from 0 to 35mph is apparently, to your pie, more like a ride on Wild Thing, than a  taking a Sunday afternoon drive.

Those two lessons were learned with no harm done to the pie or to me, thank goodness.


I found a recipe for doughnut muffins today! I would have made them right then and their if it weren't for the 4 loaves of quick bread that i had already produced. Phil wanted to have something to take to his "Welcome to the New Lab" celebration, so i made banana bread and zucchini bread. His request, but that leaves the two of us a lot of bread!
I plan on making the doughnut muffins sometime in the near future, as there are not many breakfast treats that i enjoy more than a good cake doughnut. I'll pass on the recipe if they turn out as good as the recipe says they will.

Enjoy the work-week folks!

~Christie

More opportunities to fail

I recently started volunteering at a local rescue mission helping out in the kitchen. Something that I've done in the past with youth groups or a Saturday morning serving event in High School, but I never really once gave it a second thought as far as something to sign up for and start doing on my own.  That is until two months ago when Phil and I moved to Raleigh. Without many friends or activities to distract us we were both quickly convicted of the fact that our faith was rather lifeless. 
James 2:20 But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?

Today was my 2nd shift and as I was walking to the front door there was a lady with a walker making her way to the front door from the other end of the sidewalk. She got to the stair just before me and as I thought to myself that I should probably ask her if I could carry her walker up the stairs for her, she folded it up, turned it to the side and proceeded up the stairs with one hand on the railing and one hand on the walker. My second thought was then "well she looks like she's got it under control" and I skipped up the stairs and turned around to hold the door for her. When she finally reached me at the door, I was not greeted with a weary but grateful thank you, but rather a harsh and bitterly sarcastic "Thanks for helping me...(insert the name of the Lord)". Immediately all the good will that I had carried with me up to that doorstep, ready to do anything they asked of me in that kitchen, was shattered. The fact that perhaps this lady was perpetually snarky, or that she was just in a particularly bad mood at that moment did not matter. I had come to that place to serve in the name of Christ, and before I had even made it through the door I had failed to even offer relief to her. 
I was rendered completely and utterly ashamed and speechless by her remark, and all I could do was slowly walk past her, not to mention all the other witnesses, toward the table where the volunteer name tags and sign-in sheet are located, sign my name, and adorn the tag that said to everyone who would look at me that I was there to help. 


I've never felt like such a blatant hypocrite, I cannot, at the moment, think of another time in my (be it brief thus far) adult life that I have been so ashamed of myself. Now, I know I have a tendency to be a little dramatic, but stick with me here. This situation can be looked at in two ways. 1) I made a clear mistake in the name of ministry and failed to lend a helping hand and the lady was bold enough to call me out on it.  2) I did what almost anyone would have done and therefore her reaction to me was rude and uncalled for.
I choose the first scenario because...well because that's how I felt right then and there and this is the lesson that I learned. As a follower of Christ I have been called to see people and situations in a different light. Being a Christian almost always requires a reaction to a situation that is contrary to what the majority of society would do. All too often, I fail, we fail. 
SO 
 Here's to more opportunities to show love to our neighbors. Here's to being criticized for being over dramatic about opportunities to minister. Here's to learning valuable lessons from each inevitable human, failure. Here's to simply possessing the ability to love others better than ourselves, because He loved us more than His own life.  

John 13:35  By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. 

~Christie 

as an official citizen of North Carolina.

I would just like to say that I am quite impressed with my husband for keeping the blog ball rolling when I obviously dropped it and ran the other way.  I have my reasons... however lame and inexcusable fatigue and apathy are for reasons not to type out a few sentences here and there. But whatever, I'll post a blog when I'm good and ready to post a blog.

Tomorrow is day Four at the Carolina Country Club.
I started on Wednesday morning and I am loving it.  The amount of pastries and baked goods needing to be produced and garnished and plated and plattered, and then prepared again for the next day is quite a challenge. I'm going to be learning a lot about artisan breads, and more upscale/ precise dessert platting than I have had experience with in the past.

Fun Fact: our 93' Toyota Camry is approximately worth $1800 dollars, any guesses on how much work needs to be done on it? ...
yep $1640 that leaves us driving around on $160 of trust. Trust that those remaining bells and whistles are going to keep it together and get us were we need to go. So far so good.

TGIF
~Christie

new job starts tomorrow!

Tomorrow morning at 7:30 am (not 2:30 am, not 4am, we're talking truly function-able, livable hours here), I will start my new position as Baker for a very large Country Club in Raleigh, NC. Yay for work! Yay Yay for work that doesn't start in the middle of the night!
More info to come, for now it's sleep time.

~Christie

Happy 4th of July Eve!

Happy 4th of July Eve!
How come only Christmas and New Years get Eves?

Phil and I went to the beach today.
The fact that we now live in North Carolina, and therefore a mere 2 hour drive east would find us at the Atlantic coastline, should not cause one to draw the assumption that us saying "we went to the beach" means we made that drive, any more than one should assume that because we previously lived in Illinois means that we subsequently spent a lot of time in Chicago.
We basically moved here from Minnesota, and to us, especially Phil who has yet to even lay eyes on an ocean, going to the beach means we went to a lake.
Why did we go to a lake when the "real" beach is so much within reach? you may ask.
Well... honestly it was a crap-shoot on whether or not our car would get us back home or not.
And who wants to celebrate freedom on the side of the freeway, or worse...?
Fortunately for us the beach was very nice, and despite the $6 parking fee and the vast enourmousness of this lake, it was much like the familiar beaches of the far north.

Now we both have a lovely fire engine glow about us. Well... mostly just me, because we all know that after a full day of sun, I end up looking like I narrowly escaped a forest fire, and Phil just looks more exotic. I am a lucky girl :)

Now we are off to get my bronzed and chizzled Phil fitted for a tux.

Wishing everyone a fabulous and safe holiday weekend!
~Chrisite

Im a Chef not a Computer Programer / picture of downtown

I have a hard time spending too much time on the computer, no matter what it is that I'm working on or looking at. Even Facebook stalking wears away at my brain after about an hour or so and I just have to walk away and do something non-technological.
Like today for instance when from 9 am to 1:30 pm my face was glued to this little glowing screen as I went through ALL (well I have to be honest here I didn't even touch the wedding folder) of our pictures, re-naming and re-filing whenever necessary. After four hours of screen oogling, I had to go outside and walk around.
I realize this makes me some kind of light weight, and I'm o.k. with that. I respect and appreciate the ability of some people (my husband included) to work on a computer throughout their entire work day. Someone has got to be able to do it or honestly the world as we now know it would probably fall apart.  Now what I really don't understand is how those people who work on their computers all day in the office, can come home and "unwind" by checking their email and surfing the web (again my husband included).  On the other hand, it completely makes sense when I get home from 8 hours on my feet in the kitchen and I decide that we need to bring a homemade dessert to small group, and thus proceed to unwind from my day by making a fresh pan of brownies... Touché...  
We have now arrived at the point in this post where I share a picture with you that I took this evening on a night time picture taking extravaganza with my wonderful husband.
Goodnight,
Christie