Happy Halloween!

I cleaned the guts out of both of these pumpkins. Kent doesn't like doing it. We were happy with how they turned out. After we were done carving, we lit the candles and turned off the lights and listened to "The Monster Mash," "Thriller," and "Ghostbusters."

I hope you all had a fun Halloween night!

Feasting my eyes

(from http://fortheloveofcooking-recipes.blogspot.com/)

My newest (and currently most persistent) addiction:

http://www.foodgawker.com/

Beautiful pictures of food, taken from webpages and blogs all around the world, displayed here with links to the page it came from so you can click on the ones that make your mouth water. Which for me, is almost all of them.

Like the pumpkin milkshake,
homemade potstickers,
sage and apple pork chops,
chocolate roses,
vegetable chowder in a sourdough bread bowl,
homemade sorbet,
and on and on and on.

I seriously have to wear a bib when I open up this website. And I can scroll through those pictures with my face only inches away from the screen for hours. I want to taste everything on there!

Well, almost everything. Sometimes they'll get a wave of bizarre foods from other countries. But if that's what you see when you go to the site, don't give up on it! Either jump to the next ten pages or so, or just wait until the next day. It seems to go in waves of normal, American food one day and then foreign stuff the next. Not that there's anything wrong with foreign foods, they just don't make my mouth water as much.

I love this website. I have loved it for the past few months, and I don't get tired of it, because there's new food every day. And there are certain hormone-charged weeks of the month that I love it way more than any human should feel for a website. I call it the "eat myself to death week." I am learning to stay away from this website during those weeks.

And here's one last example, one of the many pictures that caught my eye on foodgawker.com today:
from http://www.kayotic.nl/blog/?p=1042

on reading Poe

My reading assignment tonight for one of my three English classes this semester was Edgar Allen Poe. I like to try to get my homework done while Kent is still at work, which requires a lot of motivation on my part to avoid the TV, blog world, and even the housework (which is at times more appealing than my homework).

I was mildly successful tonight, and I was sitting here at the kitchen table reading "A Tell-tale Heart" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." It was getting dark in my apartment as the sun went down, and it was very, very quiet with Kent gone. It's always windy here, and I could hear the wind howling around the building. And I realized these stories were perfect for Halloween. I was getting a little creeped out. Which, if you know me at all, is easy to do.

And then, when it was time for me to go pick Kent up from work I put on my shoes, turned off the lights, and opened the door to find a perfectly white pigeon sitting right on my doorstep between my two pumpkins.

A white pigeon! I have never even seen a normal pigeon in my four years in Rexburg, let along a white one. It didn't move at all; it just sat there on my doorstep, staring up at me. I have no idea what it was doing there. I guess I should have looked for a note or something attatched to it's foot. And instantly, I began to wonder what kind of omen Edgar Allen Poe would say this white bird was. At least it wasn't black and it didn't say "nevermore." But it sure startled me anyway.



Update: I just got a call from our next door neighbors wondering if we knew that there is a white pigeon hanging out in front of our door. Um, yeah. It's still there, almost four hours after I first saw it. What am I supposed do with a lost white pigeon?

Colorado Springs

And a possible change of plans

Kent was in Colorado yesterday, interviewing with Lockheed Martin about a database position for next year. He said the interview went really well, and the company is nice, too. It's pretty comparable to USAA, actually. So now we don't know if we'll be in San Antonio or in Colorado Springs when we graduate. The city looks nice, and I'm loving the idea of having mountains at least on one side of us. Plus it won't get quite as hot in Colorado as it does in Texas. Homes are more expensive there, but rent is cheaper. Colorado is a very liberal state. The city does have five Targets and a Costco. (Not that those having anything to do with being liberal--I'm just excited about the stores. Rexburg doesn't even have a Super WalMart.)

Or

?

San Antonio is much farther away, and the climate isn't as nice. But we're familiar with San Antonio; we have friends there, a good ward, we know the city pretty well, too, so it's going to be a tough decision to make. In the end, we'll go wherever the Lord wants us to. Isn't it great knowing that we don't have to make all these decisions all alone? That there's a plan for us and we can rely on the knowledge of Someone who knows everything.

I'll let you know what we do decide. We hear back from Lockheed Martin in two weeks, and USAA wants our decision by the end of November.

If you want to see more pictures, there's a photo gallery and information about the city here.

Why I'm smiling tonight

Nothing says "I'm married" quite like being all dressed up yourself and carrying a man's dress shirt, tie, dress pants, shoes, socks, two Taco Bell Volcano tacos and a dripping rootbeer across campus and up four flights of stairs to the computer lab.

I got a lot of fun "you're-such-a-sweet-little-wife" smiles from people on campus.

"I'm dreaming"... Bing Crosby and Gingersnaps

It's snowing here. And it makes me want to listen to Bing Crosby. And bake things. And pretty much do anything that isn't homework.

On Friday we went to Wingers with Amy, Jake, and Denver. It was there that I learned about my husband's all time favorite cookies. I had no idea that I had married a lover of gingersnaps. Apparently it is a family thing, and all the Andersen boys absolutely love this particular recipe of gingersnaps.

Because I was cold and the house seemed so cozy and I was even wearing socks (I hate socks) to fight off the cold yesterday, I stopped doing my mountains of homework long enough to make Kent some gingersnaps. They are good! But they have so much ginger in them, that as Kent said, "If you eat ten or eleven of them your throat kinda goes numb." They definitely are the spiciest cookies I've ever eaten. But they were good, and warm, and now I'm going to listen to "White Christmas." It won't matter if we skip Halloween, right?

Protect Marriage

It's not often that Kent tells me something I should blog about. But his parents called us the other day to tell us about a special meeting the Church members in California attended. It was about Proposition 8.

The LDS Church generally has stayed out of political matters. Every election year we are reminded to vote for whichever candidate we personally feel upholds our individual values. We are never, ever told "vote for so and so" or even "don't vote for so and so."

But that doesn't mean that the Church cannot get involved in politics. When something is so important to our faith and our beliefs and our freedom to practice our religion, we get involved. And we get very involved.

Because, as Americans, it is our privilege to let our voices be heard.

What is so painful about this matter is that the people's voices WERE heard, and California voted against the legalization of gay marriage. But then a handful of judges took it upon themselves to act against the interests of the majority. And now we have to speak again. And we have to speak louder.

So, although I don't live in California and I can't vote on this matter, I am getting involved. I am standing up for the protection of marriage between a man and a woman as it is the fundamental unit of society. I have donated money to the cause. I have blogged about this before. I'm blogging about it again. I'm going to participate in a call center organized by the Church up here at school (in Idaho!) to call voting members of California and let them know how important it is that we stand up for what we know is right.

Please stand with us, and do whatever you can to help our voices be heard. Marriage is sacred, and we need to protect it.

Photo Tag

Okay, so I kinda cheated a little. Heidi tagged me to pick the 4th photo in the 4th album on my computer, but I have pictures in different paths all over the place, and some don't have 4 albums and some don't even have four pictures, so I took it as more of an opportunity to post a picture I normally wouldn't post.

This picture is from September of 2005, probably. My family has always been involved in a celebration pageant for Constitution Day, and this is my costume. I'm sitting on the stairs because by the end of the night, the black shoes I wore were always killing me.