Life of a Single Married Lady

I'm dedicating this post to all the things Wil and I have created over the last few months. To ease the minds of my relatives, "things we have created" does not include a baby. Gotta wait a little longer, guys. There are three categories of created things: food, crochet, cross-stitch. Here we go! FOOD For Halloween, Wil and I dressed up as Bob and Linda Belcher from Bob's Burgers. Kaiser was dressed as a Kaiser Roll, but due to some oversights he ended up looking like a zookeeper recently escaped from Jurassic Park. Oh well. Don't be fooled: this isn't us. Nailed it! The point of this is that Bob always has a burger of the day, and Wil made Demigorgonzola Sliders, which were incredible! Good job Wil. We also made turkey burgers topped with a fried egg and guacamole, and they were also delicious. I am now tempted to top a great many items with a fried egg and guacamole. Mountain Wil breaking in his apron. Turns out I do some stuff well (ju

On Saturday I rode my bike to the farmer's market with my shopping list and my $40, ready to buy food for the week. I mean, where better to eat all summer than from the farmer's market? Madison has the largest producers-only market in the country, and boy, is it big - 1 mile long circling the Capitol Building. Being Wisconsin, there are typically at least four stalls selling cheese, but there is so much more in the treasure chest of the market! Breads, jams and jellies, honey, syrup, meat, a ridiculous amount of amazing produce, exotic jerky, herbs, plants, flowers...if you visit us, make sure your timeframe includes a Saturday morning! This week I got some assorted vegetables and leafy greens, a baguette, and half a turkey. I intended to buy a whole chicken to roast in the crock pot and use all week, but three-quarters of the way around I hadn't found a chicken! So I settled for half a turkey (and found the chickens about three stalls later), which I still felt was impre

Here in Wisconsin, we've only had a few days of 70+ degree weather this year, and it's halfway through May! Yesterday, Maine broke its May snowfall records, and my mom sent me a picture of snow in Michigan last Sunday. Thankfully, this week looks like summer...maybe it'll stick around for good! In an effort to save money, eat healthier, and waste less food , I've begun to plan our meals out every week. I've tried this in the past and fallen off, but this time it's going to stick. We've been spending too much on food - both on groceries and at restaurants, coffee shops, etc. - and that's so easy to fix, I just need to make a better effort. I looked up best practices for saving money on food and proper meal planning, and found a very achievable goal: $100 per person per month, or $50 per week for us. We weren't spending too much more than that, but sometimes we'd have a bad month, and I don't want that to happen anymore. As an extra challen

I never gave a great introduction to our newest family member, Kaiser. Here are some things you may or may not know about our pup! His age is uncertain, but we have decreed that his birthday is the day before Thanksgiving and he'll be turning four in 2016 He is very strong and loves wrestling matches He has some new friends He absolutely adores soft things He is startled by nothing less than the city's jackhammers outside (or, of course, the air escaping an inflatable camp pad) He looks good in everything His main talent is destroying stuffed toys in 5 minutes or less, but only the ones we give him to destroy (which doesn't happen anymore for obvious reasons) He's a good scale against which to compare all the mail Wil gets when he's gone He's got the best nose this side of the Mississippi He's the greatest dog in the entire world and we love him so much! Welcome to the family,

As is my approximately yearly wont, I am re-reading the Harry Potter series. This tends to worry my husband, who doesn't quite understand why I might read a series (or any one book) over and over and over again, when there exist millions of other tomes worthy of my attention. However, the HP series is special. The books came out at such a time that book Harry and real-life Sam were within a couple of years of age, and they were exactly the genre that I simply adored (and still do) - fantasy, magic, hidden worlds, romance, all the good stuff. I remember praying for my letter to come via owl; I remember waiting in line Up North with Dad to get the 4th book at midnight, after which I read the entire 734 pages in about 24 hours; I remember reading either the 6th or 7th book with my best friend but about six hours behind, and wondering why she was crying. I still cry every time Harry goes into that forest at the end! I was originally going to write a post about the things that the

Two weeks ago I attended my sixth Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society: a time of seeing old friends, making new research contacts, and experiencing great advances in atmospheric science research. Thanks to the AMS meeting planners, it also means I get to take in culture! This year the AMS meeting was in New Orleans, LA, home of beignets and plantations and great music and food. Enjoy the pictures! Our conference center was right on the riverwalk, which made for pretty walking breaks. The Mississippi was really high because of flooding along the river in places like St. Louis, and river managers actually opened up some sort of river diversion for only the third time since 1930! It's amazing to look at the Mississippi River on one side of the riverwalk and look down  to the city (about 10ft below sea level) on the other side. Famed beignets of Cafe du Monde, drenched in powdered sugar and oh so delicious. Cafe du Monde! Not pictured: pigeons who real