The kids are alright

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Oliver is at the age where he is doing a lot of new things. However, before I get into him, I wanted to acknowledge that Evie has a few new tricks up her sleeve as well!

The biggest new one is that she can zip up her own coat. She is very proud of this, usually exclaiming, “Guess who zipped up her own coat!” She still has issues now and again, but she got it down pretty quick and doesn’t have too much trouble. The other thing is that she figured out how to open the fridge. I guess this was more just her getting big enough to be able to handle the door. Anyway, so far she’s only used this power for good, mostly putting her half-finished glass of milk in the fridge after a meal. No helping herself, at least, not yet.

As far as Oliver, he did get both teeth in. He signs “more” and does “so big!” very consistently. He also does “all done” and “bye bye” occasionally, and claps for himself practically non-stop. He says “ma ma, “da da” and “Nala”, but it’s not always clear if he means what he’s saying or not. Certainly sometimes he does, but other times he’s just saying it to make the sounds. He definitely says “ba” to mean ball, but he doesn’t say it every time you give him a ball. He also pulls himself up to stand, and he must let go sometimes, because he gets into some compromising positions. This morning he stood up next to a kitchen chair in order to get his hands into the trash can.

He loves taking baths more than anything, so he gets pretty excited when he hears the water and we’re trying to teach him the sign for bath. Sara taught him a new thing, where he puts his finger out and then you touch his finger with your finger and say, “E.T. phone home.” He thinks that’s hilarious.

Evie, touching Oliver’s finger: “E.F. Fo Fum!”

Zenni Optical

/ Shane / 3 Comments

I mentioned before that I was considering getting some new glasses. Well, I have them, and I’m so ridiculously happy with the company I got them from, that I feel like shouting it from the mountain tops. Since I don’t have any mountains handy, I’ll do the next best thing.

The company is called Zenni Optical, and it is so ridiculously cheap that you will be sure there is a hidden gimmick somewhere. That’s why I didn’t want to blog about it until I actually got the glasses and checked them out. In fact, I would have been skeptical myself, except that my sister-in-law had tried it out with a test pair.

Me: “But how can they be so cheap? There must be something wrong with them.”
Sara: “The better question is, why are the other ones so expensive?”

This is a good point. There is absolutely no reason in this day and age why a little pair of frames should cost > $100, to say nothing of the lenses, etc.! But I never really questioned it before, because that’s the way it always was.

I purchased 3 pairs of glasses, 2 regular and 1 pair of sunglasses. For frames, lenses, anti-glare, anti-scratch coating, tinting on the sunglasses, absolutely everything, it cost me a grand total of $40. That’s including shipping and handling! The very cheapest glasses start at $7 (that’s frames and lenses).

The amazing thing is that the cheapness opens up a lot of avenues. I was nervous about trying out something totally different. But for that price, why not? I’ll just buy a second pair I can fall back on. Heck, I’ll buy 3 more pairs, in case the first two break! And for sunglasses, usually I just put tinted lenses in an old pair of frames. But for that price I can get real sunglasses for the first time in my entire life!

There are a few downsides. The biggest one is that you can’t actually try on the glasses. They have a “virtual frame-fit” feature that lets you upload a picture and “try on” the glasses, but it’s kind of lame. I would recommend trying on some real frames somewhere first, and then looking for similar ones on the webpage. You have to get an eye exam anyway, so you might as well look while you are there. You do have to measure your pupillary distance, which was pretty easy with their directions, but you probably can’t do it yourself. You could have your eye doctor do it for you, but Sara did mine and it was fine. You also have to wait for the shipping, which took me exactly 2 weeks. So it’s probably not good for an emergency pair (but then again, at that price, just order a couple of spares!)

There are probably other downsides too.

Sara: “You know they’re probably made by child labor, right?”
Me: “So are the other ones that they sell for $100.”

I am totally happy with them. They seem to be as good quality as any other frames I’ve ordered. My prescription was correct. I was able to get a little adventurous. I would recommend Zenni Optical to anybody (and I guess that’s what I’m doing right now).

When I put on my new glasses for the first time, Oliver took one look at me and just burst out crying. So I’m going to put him down for a “dislike”. Can you blame him?

Superbowl Champions

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Superbowl XLV is in the books, and the Green Bay Packers are officially the world champions!

The sun is brighter, the air is sweeter, traffic was lighter, and there were even Bears fans complaining on the radio. Life is good!

What a game it was. I don’t even know if I could say that I enjoyed the game, because it was so nerve wracking. In retrospect, now that everything is said and done and the Packers won it all, I can say that the last 6 weeks or so were about as fun of a ride to the Superbowl as anybody could ever want.

Having to beat the Giants and then the Bears the last two weeks of the season to squeak into the playoffs. Coming in as a 6th seed and beating both Philly and Atlanta on the road. Beating the Bears AGAIN in the NFC championship game. And finally winning the whole shebang, and putting up awesome numbers against a very good Steelers team.

The game itself was a nail-bitter for me. After all the injuries this season (15 guys on IR! Many of them starters!), then to see Woodson and Driver leave the game, along with Shields and Collins (who both ended upcoming back), was almost too much to bear. I told Sara, “Thank god this is the last game of the season…I couldn’t take another one.” Watching the Packers jump out to a 21-3 lead and then slowly squander it away through dropped pass after dropped pass. Just writing this paragraph is raising my blood pressure.

Evie caught my excitement and was pretty excited:

Evie: “Go Packers! I’m so excited I let some drool out of my mouth!”

I might have been a little overly enthusiastic myself, especially in terms of high-fiving:

Evie: “Ow, you  hurt my hands!”

Overall, what a good year for football! I won my survival league, I finished the regular season in 1st place in my fantasy league, and even though I only ended up in 3rd after the playoffs, it still payed out. And now, the Superbowl of course. You cannot beat the trifecta of football wins!

In fact, I can only thing of two football related things to complain about:

  1. Due to some setting on either my Tivo or my digital converter box, the score board is off the side of my tv, making it impossible to see the score or the game clock. The score isn’t a big deal, but not knowing how much time is on the clock at the end of the game is a very bad thing!
  2. The Packers have a sore lack of a theme song of some sort. There are plenty of songs out there, generally of the one off, super-cheesy (no pun intended) variety. But I’m talking an official, Packers’ authorized chant or song, similar to Fly Eagles Fly, Bear Down Chicago Bears, or even J-E-T-S-Jets-Jets-Jets. Preferably something old and classic. Some kind of rallying cry that every Packers fan everywhere would know. The closest we come are the ultra-generic, “du-duh-duh-ch du-duh-duh-ch GO PACK GO” and playing “I want to bang on the drum all day“, which is used by several other football teams. You’d think a team with this much history and tradition would have picked up some sort of unique fight song somewhere along the way!

One more funny quote during the game:

Sara: “Don’t have another [diet caffeine free] pop. You’ll be up peeing all night.”

Am I really that old?

Quote Monday Totally Freaks Out

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Evie: “…and when they did the zero, all of the kids were totally freaking out!”

Evie: “She dances. In her way.”

Sara: “Grandma Kathy set her wedding date.”
Evie, whispering wistfully: “Then, on that day, daddy will finally have a step-father!”

Me: “Then I can finally realize my dream of only talking to people through a computer.”
Sara: “You would die [if you couldn’t talk to people].”
Me:  “I will have you to talk to.”
Sara: “It might be at my hands.”

Evie: “Oh my brother, is he hurt? Does he need to go to the hospital?”
Sara: “No, I don’t think he needs to go to the hospital.”
Evie: “When will he need to go to the hospital?”
Sara: “Hopefully, never.”
Evie: “Sometimes wishes never come true.”

Cold Brewed Coffee

/ Shane / 6 Comments

It’s the first Friday of February, and that means a new First Friday Food post!

The Reason:

My mom and grandma have a Toddy, which is a cold-brewing system for coffee. They swear by this thing, and it intrigued me. Basically you make a concentrated coffee syrup, which you can reconstitute with water at a later date to make coffee.

Upon investigation, cold brewing coffee is a pretty popuplar thing. According to what I saw on the Internet, there are two main advantages of doing this: you can use just as much as you need, instead of making a pot and throwing away the leftovers, and it actually has different properties than regular coffee, specifically, it tastes smoother, and less acidic.

I also discovered online that you can make this pretty easily without buying any sort of equipment. So we decided to give it a go.

The Journey:

Step 1 was to buy the coffee. To make this work, you need coarse grounds. This meant buying beans and using the coffee grinder at the store, which kind of terrified me. However, I managed to not make too much of a fool of myself. We went with the rich and bold dark roast from Trader Joe’s.

The way this works is that you soak the grounds in cold water for about 12 hours. This is what makes the concentrated syrup, and also why it tastes different than traditional, hot-brewed coffee.

After the coffee has been sitting, you need to strain out the grounds. A commercial system like the Toddy comes with filters, but we had to invent our own setup.

Next up is to filter the concentrated coffee through a regular coffee filter. Having something to hold up the filter is key, because this is a long slow process, and you are NOT going to be able to hold it the entire time. One tip we learned after making this once was to do a first pass on the grounds with just a close-knit, mesh strainer. This gets 99% of the grounds out, so the rest will go through the coffee filter faster.

The next part is to just put it through the filter.

This will take a LONG time (we’re talking hours), so you just pour some in and then go away for a while. At first it will go through the filter faster, but as you go along, the filter gets a build-up on it, which makes it go slower.

EDIT: Using cheese cloth instead of paper filters improves this time from around 2 hours, to around 1 minute!

The Verdict:

Awesome.

It certainly does taste different than regular, hot-brewed coffee. If you were comparing cold-brewed to hot-brewed straight up, then it would just be a matter of personal preference. For me, the hot stuff tastes just as good, though different. However, the cold stuff has other advantages.

By far the biggest advantage has to do with the options it provides you: the coffee concentrate is fantastic for coffee flavored drinks. After we figured this out, we never used it for regular coffee. At the very least, we made it with hot milk instead of water. This gives you a café au lait that is the equivalent of anything you’d get at a shop. You can make delicious iced coffee drinks. You also have the ability to control the amount of coffee flavoring you want, so it allows you to make really strong coffee too. In short, making regular old coffee with the concentrate is really only the beginning, and probably the least of what you’d want to do with it.

Once Sara tasted cold-brewed coffee made with milk, she never wanted coffee any other way.

There are also advantages for the casual coffee drinker, such as being able to make one cup here or there when you want it. It is certainly faster and cheaper than making an entire pot and then throwing away half of it.

The Recipe:

There’s not really a recipe per say. Put coarse ground coffee in a pot of cold water in the fridge overnight, and then filter it. The 1st time we did it, we used 5 cups of water to 1/2 lb coffee. The second time we used 10 cups water for the same amount of coffee. All that happened was that we had weaker concentrate, so we had to use twice as much to make a cup. In other words, stick to the 5 cups of water. This is especially true since the hard part is putting it through the filter. With the 10 cups of water, it took ~2 hours to go through coffee filter. So don’t waste the time with all the extra filtering, stick to the 5 cups of water.

I don’t have a precise measurement on how much of the concentrate to use with a cup. It depends on the type of coffee, the concentration of water, etc. I would say, in general, you need about a double finger’s width of coffee in a large coffee mug. More or less to taste.