Yard work brings surprises

MMMMMMM......Morels!

First time I've ever found them at my house and they were huge. Since I'm the only one that will eat mushrooms at my house, it wasn't worth heating up the kitchen for 7 large Morels. So I bagged them up and gave them to my parents. Next year, if I find them again, Carey can have them.

Vacation, part 4

Alligator: That's "Mr. The Other White Meat" to you.

I'm going to paraphrase my good buddy Carey when it comes to Alligator Bites, "If it's made out of food, it's all good".

Most of our vacation activities were planned around food. There are just some places that require a trip down memory lane and sample some of the fine eating places that I once knew. Right after James and I were married we took a small trip down to Tulsa to visit some friends of ours. One of them, James Fowler introduced us to a wonderful Cajun style place called Jazmoz Bourbon Street Cafe. Good food and live entertainment, plus they have our favorite beer on tap, Shiner Bock.
Half price on appetizers was enough for me to try Alligator bites and as long as there is ketchup around Bailey will eat it.

While on vacation we did some shopping. Bailey got a new pair of sunglasses and James was busy teaching her the phrase "No autographs please".
I spotted this cheerleader outfit at Gordman's and well, I had to get it. Yes, folks that's Bailey in an OSU cheerleader outfit. Go Pokes!

Everyone is a critic

James thinks it looks like a cat. I think someone earned a time out last night.

Vacation, part3

What do you do with a 2 year old on a vacation? Take them to the Oklahoma Aquarium in Tulsa, OK and play the "Where in the world is Spongebob Squarepants & Friends" game. I wasn't sure if Bailey was going to like the aquarium or not but after seeing the first display of ocean life, she was hooked. We spent 2 hours wandering around finding most of the characters from "Spongebob Squarepants" and a few from "Finding Nemo".

The coolest feature of this aquarium is the shark tank. It's a tank that you can walk through and see sharks up close. Sorry about the quality of the next pictures but you can still get the feeling of what it was like.

On our way out we took this picture of Bailey on an alligator statue. Little did she or myself know that we would be having some later for dinner. That will be in the last installment of our vacation series "Vacation, part 4: Adventures in food".

Vacation, part 2

ME SEE ELMO? ME SEE ELMO? ELMO!! ME WANT TO SEE ELMO ONE MORE TIME, PLEASE!!...

That's pretty much what we heard the entire way home. We saw Elmo's Green Thumb on opening night and use it to our advantage all day long. "You have to eat everything on your plate" or "We are in a store, use your quiet voice" etc.... Was it unfair, yes but it was very effective.

Click on the image to see a bigger picture.

Here's the scoop on the show, Elmo has a sunflower plant named "Sunny" and he's raised it from a seed. Sunny has now out grown his flower pot and needs a new home. Big Bird suggests planting Sunny in his garden and goes off to get his shovel. Meanwhile, Abby Cadabby the fairy in training tells Elmo she can do a spell to help Sunny grow big. Abby bust the wrong rhyme out and ends up shrinking everyone in the middle of Big Bird's garden. Now Elmo and his crew search out a new home for Sunny singing "New Point of View" set to Patti LaBelle's "New Attitude". Along the way they meet beetles, butterflies, a gaint talking bee and join in at the labybug pinic while Abby tries to figure out how to reverse the spell. Then all of a sudden Abby remembers her wand is also a cell phone and sets out to call her mother for help but sadly she couldn't get any bars. James was also sad about the arena not having a bar either. Eventually Abby figures out the correct rhyme just as Elmo finds the perfect spot for Sunny. She waves the wand and everyone is big again. They dig the hole which causes them to sing and dance some more. It's now the end of the show and we manage to leave the building without buying a $10 balloon of Elmo's head with no one crying.

It wasn't as lame as I thought it would have been and Bailey really enjoyed the show. We were close enough to the stage that a few of the performers in costume would eventually come out to the crowd and meet the kids. Bailey shook hands with Gover and was in toddler heaven the rest of the night. Elmo never ventured into the crowd fearing a dog pile attack from 50 or so toddler age kids. I can see us doing this again for Bailey if Elmo Live ever comes to Kansas City, it's well worth the money for childern entertainment.

Vacation, part 1

We're back from vacation and we are both very tired.

In the weeks leading up to our vacation both of us were busy at work, working hard to get our desks ready for vacation so not much blogging was done prior to our trip.

But, now there's tons of stuff to blog about now so I will bring it to everyone in small doses in order for me not to run out of blog filler.

My back vs. the Super 8 motel bed

We left out on Tuesday morning with high hopes to arrive around lunch time. Well, we ending up hanging around town in order to switch out a CD in a computer game we got the night before. As the clerk was putting the disk in the game sleeve, he stuck the wrong game in there. That wasn't going to keep James happy in a 4 hour car trip with the wrong game so 2 hours later, we left out for Tulsa, OK. with a happy James playing Jewel Quest 3 till the laptop battery ran out. Good thing we have two additional kinds of back up entertainment for him, we still had an hour and a half left to go.

We arrived in Tulsa around 2:30ish and promptly started making calls to our friends letting them know that we had finally arrived, missed lunch time and was going to check into the motel room. Being on a budget we had to get something that wasn't going to cost a nightly fortune so we found a good rate at a Super 8 on the east side of town, clean and with access to the highway it said.

Here's our view from the motel window. Just over the grassy island is I-44 highway. I-44 is a major interstate running straight through Tulsa, with 6 lanes of traffic ALL NIGHT LONNNNNGGGG. One would think with all that semi-truck noise could drown out James's snoring but sadly, no it didn't. Myself being the type of sleeper who wants complete silence when sleeping learned to adjust when Bailey came but with the noise rumbling outside and right next to my ear, it was hard to sleep the 4 nights we were there. One can always expect motel beds to be bad but this was the worst the both of us have ever slept on. Our next day there we went and got some additional pillows but that didn't help. The thought of sleeping in the car sounded more comfortable than the bed and crossed both our minds a few times. I would have done it but on the night we came back from the Elmo live show we saw a Fox news crew setting up for a LIVE location shot in front of our motel. Our first thought was a dead body had been found but no crime scene tape or police was present so we headed off to our room to watch TV. Apparently the local Fox station was doing a story on recent car thefts at local motels and our was one of them. They actually caught the two criminals staying at the very same motel we were at the previous week. So if your into crime areas, hard beds and the sounds of 18-wheelers downshifting all night long, I highly recommend this motel for you.

This trip was a special for James. It was the first time he actually was in Tulsa for more than a day and I was able to show him the town I had lived in for a couple of years. He quickly noticed how many Daylight Doughnut shops there was in this town.


Daylight Doughnut is like the Krispy Kreme we have here in Johnson county but worse. There are 24 Daylight Doughnuts shops in Tulsa and only 1 Krispy Kreme shop. I grew up on Daylight Doughnuts and never even heard of Krispy Kreme till I started working at Penton Media (back in 1999 it was called Intertech) but since my folks lived 5 miles out of town, doughnuts were a rare treat for us. I didn't discover the yummy goodness of Daylights until I lived in Fort Scott, KS. I lived just a block away from one and that is where I learned of the cheese filled sausage roll. I had forgotten all about those awesome tasting rolls till the day we left Tulsa. James promptly yelled at me "Why didn't you take me here on the first day????" I now have something to get him back in the car for another vacation.