All about the pictures

This post is from a letter I sent to Steven last June.  It should be dated 6/17/12. (I always include a dinosaur joke whenever I write Steve a letter, just to explain some things later on...)

Why you should always preheat your oven: Spiders are, as always, the bane of my existence.  They're everywhere.  Apparently a daddy-long-legs was making a web in the top of our oven, we stuck in some potatoes and a corn dog to heat up and then ... 

Sooooo grosss!  We didn't eat any of it.  There were pieces of it's web all over.  Nasty little critter.  Ew.

On a nicer note Brian has a girlfriend!!  Her name is Brecken.  She is pretty cool and is shaping Brian up (just look at him wearing his Sunday clothes all the way to the end of Sunday)!  

They came to our house to play cards and brought us strawberries and angel food cake!

For Father's day we got Dad a new temple bag because his other one broke.  We also sent him a card from Walmart that had this picture on it:

Dad didn't have his glasses on so he thought we were sword fighting.  But I explained that we're cooking chicken with a lighter.  We're really good at BBQ-ing is what the card said.  

Memorial Day '12

Just another catch up post ... this time from Memorial Day. 

On Memorial Day we went hiking to Battle Creek Falls.  Here are some pics.  As you can see it was pretty busy because it was a pretty easy hike, just a short drive away (barely outside of north Orem) and it ended at a waterfall!

Brian, Brian, Me (Yeah, I'm the only one that even knows what's going on.) Jason, Garrett, Will

At the top! It was pretty scary.  Nick didn't climb out onto the rock with us. (Brian, Jason, Me)

At the bottom! (Top row: Brian, Garrett, Will, Jason Bottom row: Me, Nick, Brian)

Mother's Day

I just found this post saved as a draft that we meant to post FOREVER ago.  Oops.  Here is is not even a whole year late.

Our Moms are great.  We love them a lot.  And since nothing says we love you like gifts ;) here's what we got them.

For Mama Baird:

Over the years Mom has collected and framed our baby and school pictures and they've been hanging on the wall in order.  But just as the collection was completed with Steven's graduation picture, the parents moved and the new house doesn't have a wall that would fit the 20 by 4 collection of 5X7s + frames.  So a few times ago when we came to visit, in the middle of the night we scanned all of the pictures onto Nick laptop.  On photoshop we shrunk them all down into a college that was a mere 4 ft long.  Such odd dimensions called for a DIY frame, luckily there's a Pinterest for that.  Now that it's finished we can once again solve all the inter-sibling arguments over subjects like "who had the biggest nose at age seven?" which I know is a relief to everyone.  

For Mama Cowley:
Nothing says you are amazing like a mug that says "you are amazing."  

So we ordered this mug except for instead of a picture of cute little minority children we inserted this picture... just to ensure Mom that we really can take care of ourselves.

We had the hardest time trying to light a fire in the pot so we finally just decided to photoshop one.  My favorite is Nick.  Yes, that is a corndog.

Onions and Flour

 So once upon a time I got married to Nicholas.  Life was great but he was used to eating healthy-ish and we had no money.  So I began a quest to find cheap, good food.  It appears one cannot simply buy this food at Walmart.  One must nurture it from an infancy of basic ingredients like flour and onions.  And now that it’s summer and I’m only taking six credits I have the necessary time to accomplish my quest. Also I found this blog that I love budgetbytes.blogspot.com So basically lately I’ve been cooking a lot.  It’s probably just a phase I’m going through that will pass.  Poor Nick when we’re back to eating mac and cheese.

Last Saturday night I made this potato, onion, veggie soup in the crock pot to cook overnight for Sunday.  Our whole house smelled so strongly of onions for two days! We put cheese and bacon on top! Nick loves bacon.  Everyone loves bacon. (recipe)

I made these pepperoni rolls to take in our lunches to school.  They’re just rolls with cheese and pepperoni inside but they’re super good.  They’re really popular in West Virginia where Nick served his mission. (They really have more pepperoni than it looks like in the picture)

Yesterday I made pizza. We received a pizza stone for our wedding and it makes the crust so nice.  I’d used all our pepperoni so we used chicken.  BBQ chicken and chicken, bacon, ranch. Mmmmmmm.  

Brian and I made these peanut butter oatmeal chocolate bars.  They were tasty and don’t even have any added sugar.  (recipe)

And finally today we made these delicious meatballs with teriyaki sauce we also made (recipe). We ate it with fancy chopsticks Nick got in China.  They were even made in China. 

Graduation Party Adventure Part II

[Once upon a time I was a student and I was taking a Humanities class while taking a Bible and British Culture class.  For Humanities I wrote an essay comparing T.S. Eliot's poem "The Wasteland" to the Book of Ecclesiastes (which has always been a favorite).  Later in the semester we had an essay due in Bible that I realized the Humanities essay would work perfect for.  So I slightly tweaked it and turned it in again!  So following that same tradition I am reposting a part of a letter we sent to my brother Steven who is currently serving a mission in Dallas Texas.  This will probably happen a lot because I feel more obligated to write him than to post on this blog :)]

The skydiving was a ton of fun.  The two of us rode up together in the plane (we could only do two at a time).  I (Nick) was supposed to be the first one out so that Amanda could be a witness to any questionable language and/or behavior that my fear-induced panic generated.  She drew the short stick and had to go first, lucky her.  It ended up being for the best since we were both cooler than cucumbers when that door opened.  Seriously, we were so high in the sky, the height didn't really even register!  It was a ton of fun, but definitely not as fun as missionary work so you definitely didn't miss out on anything...

(Disclaimer: I was so scared on that plane ride.  Nick was totally okay (which was weird) because the plane was so old and about to fall apart and we spent 20 minutes flying up higher and higher to our DEATHS!  I was experiencing a lot of anxiety.  But I didn't die so we're all good now)




Scott and Brian went up first.

 Then us :)

Graduation Party Adventure Part 1

Scott (my brother) graduated!!!! From College Part 1! To learn more about Part 2 check out The Baird Affairs.  To start off his graduation party adventure Nick and I made banners and cooked meat.  

We then started our drive to Moab to convince Bailey that camping is fun.  We got there at ten and spent the next two (2!) hours driving around to all the BLM campsites trying to find somewhere to put a tent.  After we looked at the last one ("it's 3 miles down a dirt road with spots too small for campers so there's got to be an open spot, right?" wrong) we drove back down by Moab, pulled in the first campground we ran into and set up our tent in the first open spot.  (we didn't camp there in the first place because we thought it was $30 more expensive than a BLM site.  It turned out to be only $15 more expensive so not too bad).

But the ground was too hard to put stakes in so we had to be creative.  At 1:00 AM.  In the dark.  I'm pretty proud of what we accomplished.  We truly are our engineering parents' kids I guess.

This is the plastic wrap that was around the firewood we bought.  Scott gets the credit.

 Brian Nick and I slept on these two full size air mattresses.  As you can see one of them is deflated.  That happened about an hour after we went to bed (~3AM) so all of us had our heads and backs on the full mattress but our hips, legs, and feet on the hard, hard ground.  Comfy.

After a hearty American breakfast at Denny's we went hiking in Arches National Park.  It was free to get in :) hence the absurd campsite packed-ness the night before :(  ... not worth it.

I found a rock.

Nick and Brian are so tough!  They we're running around like boy scouts: climbing tall rocks, playing hide and seek, and, of couse, flexing their muscles a lot.

 Like a normal person, I was tired.

We'll have to go back to Arches sometime to hike more.  Next time we'll reserve a camping site, faithfully apply sunscreen, and go when it's not so hot.

But the best part of our trip is yet to come.  Stay tuned....!

Advice for Newlyweds (and Everyone Else Too)

For anyone out there that will be getting married soon, here is the most important advice anyone will give you:

BUY A GREAT KNIFE SET!!!

Due to indecision, procrastination, and a pinch of legitimate busy-ness we took forever to get around to it, but we finally got around to buying a real knife set! We had been using kitchen knives for all of our cutting needs, which, according to Amanda, is a bad idea with onions (just think about the saddest thing you have ever heard of and times it by 285.32 and that's the number of tears we are talking about).

Our new knife set is so sharp! Sometimes I cut things that don't actually need cutting, just because I can't get over how effortlessly these knives cut. I basically love our knives more than I love triple chocolate fudge brownies, fresh out of the oven, topped with vanilla ice cream :)

Amanda and I have a running competition; the first one to cut their finger while cooking wins. There have been no winners (losers?) so far. Stay tuned for further updates.

Feel free to visit me in the Emergency Room when I cut my finger off!