Wedding, Donut, and IKEA

This may look like a typical Thursday morning.
However, it's an atypical Thursday morning.
Thursday mornings do not often find me with a hat on, hanging out with the Griffith sisters at Dynamo Donut + Coffee.
I wish they did, but they just don't.

You see, my friend KD got married that afternoon, and on that Thursday morning, we hijacked her from her hotel room in Oakland and took her out to San Fransisco for one beautiful thing:

Wedding Day Maple Glazed Bacon Apple Donuts!



I saw Dynamo Donuts on the Food Network, and after the initial reaction of disgust, I decided I must try a bacon donut. As we were telling KD about this donut experience, she thought it sounded a bit shady and that it was likely the donut would disagree with us, and we would all throw up at her sealing, which she was strongly against.

Because she's the bride, we respected her wishes and behaved properly, so don't worry about that. See how happy she is because we didn't throw up?



The next morning we found ourselves at Denny's ordering Pancake Puppies. Cute little balls of pancake? What's not to love?! I was digging into my 4th pancake pup, when I realized these are less pancake and more donut, and I had to stop. A girl should really only eat so many donuts in her lifetime, even if they are cute.



After the puppy massacre, we went to IKEA, where I found out I look good in gray,



I found a long lost friend (look! It's Kylie!)


and Tara and I discovered we would make lovely cooking show hosts.

I've never been to IKEA.
It sure is exhausting.

Chipot-Lame

It all started about a year and a half ago. I was in Fresno with a big group of people, and we needed to select a place to have lunch. Someone shouted, "Let's go to Chipotle!" and a murmur rippled through the group as most people agreed this was a fabulous idea. Naturally in my naivete, I needed an explanation. What is Chipotle?

"Oh, it's wonderful!" they would say.

"Best Mexican food ever!"

"It's kind of like Cafe Rio, but so much better!"

Wow. I've been to Cafe Rio, and I think it's good. I also happen to like things that are wonderful and in the "Best" class, so I had no qualms with going to Chipotle. So I went.

And was disappointed.

Not wonderful.

Not like Cafe Rio, and not the best ever.

That's okay, though, perhaps I ordered the wrong thing. That can happen sometimes.
So, when the occasion would arise, I would find myself at Chipotle giving it another try. I wanted to like it, but apparently I just wanted to make stupid decisions over and over again.

By now my opinion of Chipot-Lame is fairly well formed.

A few weeks ago there was an unnatural buzz surrounding my coworkers. News had reached our office that a new Chipotle was going in right in down town San Luis Obispo, and my coworkers were all lit up with the joy and prospect of it. Again I heard, "Oh it's fabulous," "Oh, I can't hardly believe our luck!" "I'm so excited!" "I'm going opening night!" "This is awesome!" "It's the best Mexican food ever!"

Sigh.

So, I took the bait.

I said, "Oh, Chipotle, huh? I've been there, and I didn't think it was that fabulous."

Everyone started gushing about how the restaurant must have had a bad day, and I ordered the wrong thing, and did I get the mild salsa? Consequently, a lunch order was placed, and I ordered the exact right thing and it wasn't anything to write home about. Nope, only to blog about.

Sure, it was fine and it was good, perhaps lacking in flavor, and I don't think it was bad, but I far prefer the vegetarian burrito at El Mariachi on Highway 41. Now that's a fabulous burrito.

Peanut Harvest

When you work full time you sometimes forget about your peanuts.

When I had planted my peanuts, I remembered reading something about harvesting in the fall and waiting until the plant was yellow. A couple weeks ago I kept thinking about my peanuts and how I should do some research on when to harvest. It is fall after all.

It was a nice thought.

More time goes by, and I decided to throw down some Internet research. Most of the websites I found said that your peanuts should be ready in about 130 days.
Perfect! This is easy! I don't have to determine yellowness, I just have to count.

So I did.
I was at 209 days. Hmm... 209.
I guess it was time for a peanut harvest.

Naturally I called the nieces and nephew over for some good gardening fun.






Well, I definitely anticipated more peanuts. A LOT MORE. For some reason, after my research on the topic, I thought I would yield more peanuts than I could handle. I had started dreaming about all the different things I could do with the peanuts. So, when I pulled them out of the ground, I was a little disappointed. It was no big thang. I wasn't over-run with peanuts. I don't know why some people scoffed at the peanut idea. They take practically no effort, they are fun to grow, you can forget about them, and everything turns out okay. It's basically a formula for my favorite kind of relationship.

The Steel Cut Oat Phenomenon

I simply can not get full on oatmeal. It has never happened, and I don't think it ever will.

Oatmeal has that "stick to you ribs" quality that is suppose to be so appealing.

Well, I suppose it sticks too well to my ribs, because it never makes it to my stomach to tell me that I've been fed.

Mother made steel cut oats the other day. She crock-potted them. I woke up and they were ready for me in all of their toasty warm glory. I dished myself up some of the steel cuts (my preferred oatmeal style) threw on the cut apples, dried cranberries and brown sugar and had a great breakfast. It was delicious.

By the time I got to work, my stomach was growling. GROWLING I say!

Are you kidding me?

What's the deal?

Those steel cuts were suppose to last at least until mid-morning.

But they never do.

Sigh.

They never ever do.

Check Your Peanuts

Something is happening to my peanuts.

I was checking out the garden and gave my peanuts a good look-over. I noticed something peculiar.

What are those strange red roots?

I did some more investigating, and it appears those little red shoots grow out of the blossoms and head straight for the dirt below!

What is going on? It's so crazy! It is quite unexpected! And then it hit me like a ton of bricks:

This is an alien peanut plant.

But I guess that's what you get when you buy your raw peanuts from a health food store.

Saturday

Quinoa harvesting is very difficult. Or maybe I'm doing it wrong.

I have worked on it all week, and it still isn't ready for storage. How do the Peruvians do it?


In other news, I tried to teach my mother (again) how to attach something to an email, I'm on day 15 of the 30 Day Shred, I went to the library, attended an art show, won a game of Ticket to Ride, and cleaned my room.

So, you can see it was a successful day.

The Great Quinoa Harvest

A couple weeks ago I told myself that my quinoa was probably ready to harvest, and come the weekend I should attend to my garden.

Well, I didn't.

Weeks go by, and I see my quinoa leaning more and more, and a greater amount of leaves had fallen to the ground.

This morning I went out to take a look at things and found something horrible! Some sort of bug had infiltrated my quinoa! I almost cried.



It looks like a dust mite of sorts. (I don't have any idea really, I'm just guessing.)

However, I freaked out, and decided to save the remaining quinoa while I had the chance. So, in my pajamas, I began the Great Quinoa Harvest.

You can see I had pulled most of the quinoa off of the plant in the foreground. The red plant was the one with all the bugs. It's still in the garden. I haven't dealt with it yet.

I decided to put it all in a paper bag. I still need to remove the leaves, rinse the quinoa, and then spread it out to dry before storage. I don't know when I'm going to do that. Right now it remains in the bag on my porch for the night. There were little crickets and spidies in there, and they need some time to get the heck out of my quinoa!


However, my quinoa has beautiful autumnal color which causes an excitement to stir within my heart for the advent of scarf season.


In other related news, my peanut crop is doing quite well. I think. I'm not exactly sure when to harvest them. I'm pretty sure that it has been the appropriate amount of time, but I think I need to wait until the plant turns yellow.

I think.

I'm so proud of all the protein I'm growing in my garden this year.

July

I had captured some memories of July in photographic form and didn't post them in July. I'm not sure what the hold up was, but I figure I should at least try and keep up with my meticulous record keeping, so here it goes:

Early in July (around the 4th) I ate this cupcake. It was delicious.

A few days later the family went camping at Sunset State Beach on the Monterey Bay with my brother, his kid, his wife, and her parents. The point that I'm trying to reach is that I ate this:

It too, was delicious.

This campground was positioned between this

and this

Yeah! That's the ocean! I love the ocean. What I did not particularly like was the smell of that dead whale. Yes, look again, you will find a decaying whale in that picture. Miraculously, the smell didn't reach farther than 100 yards, so we never really smelled it except when we walked that stretch of the beach.

Seeing how we went to Sunset State Beach, it was natural that we should view a sunset or two.

This one hit me in the eye, and I haven't quite forgiven it yet.



Audrey and Paul walking on water.

Audrey's Grandparents.

Her Aunt, doing yoga on the beach.

I love the mother-daughter matching. I'm in full support of matching, but this was not always the case. I have vivid memories of pure hatred when Mom would make me wear matching clothes with her. I remember one Sunday sitting in Primary absolutely fuming because Mom and I were wearing similar dresses. Sorry, Mom, I don't think I meant to be a punk. If you want, we can go shopping and find matching shirts. It'll be great!


Marissa's Mom has some excellent braiding skills that she whipped out the last night.

Once we got back to Atascadero, I gave Audrey some broccoli to gnaw on,

and we checked out the garden!

Strawberries,

grapes,

purple peppers (green on the inside),


and my first carnation!


My cosmos went wild,


I found a peanut blossom,


and my quinoa is doing swimmingly!

Bonus points if you can find the spider.
The same day that we got back from camping, my other brother showed up! It was a weekend of brothers, and it was great! The day that Paul and Marissa were going to leave, Mom suddenly had a panic attack because we hadn't taken any pictures as a family. I had just rolled out of bed, and suddenly it was photo shoot time! Who doesn't like a good photo shoot?

I love that picture.

After the sibling shot, I was setting up the family photo.

Here we have Mom practicing, and Brandon bonding with Audrey.

This next picture really just captures the spirit of our home, so I had to post it:


And the real deal!


Oh man, I'm exhausted. You must be, too.
Go get some electrolytes or something.