I'm Married! Now I have to change my name.

One important thing for me to do after I got married was to change my name. I'm taking on Andy's name because we were united in marriage and I'd like to show that. To change my name I have to show our marriage certificate around to different places. The Social Security card office, DMV, bank, work, stuff like that. After a disastrous attempt to go to the Social Security office, I decided to get my name changed on my driver's license and bank accounts before I mail my information to Social Security. So we spent our Saturday afternoon getting my name changed.

I believed the name changing stuff should go pretty easy, just show them your marriage certificate, fill out a form and your A-OK. Problem with us is that our marriage certificate doesn't look quite official. This is probably the biggest issue we've experienced due to getting married in a rural, Indiana county. Our marriage certificate is a hand-written, fill in the blanks, 1/2 sheet of paper. The seal that was embossed on to the paper is barely visible. But, it's our certificate and we'll do with what we have.

Unfortunately the fellow at the DMV didn't think so positively about our certificate. He at first thought we handed him our commemorative, fancy-looking certificate and didn't want to take it. I assured him that it was the real certificate and pointed out the embossed seal. He checked with his supervisor who looked over the certificate, pointed out the seal again and noted that our certificate didn't have a "date filed" line. Despite this grievous miscarriage of filing a marriage certificate, the supervisor told the DMV person to accept it, that it's just fine.

After this, our DMV friend proceeded to point out all the areas where he found fault with our marriage certificate. "They did a really bad job," he said, "you should order another one, and make sure it has the date filed on there. Wow, they just did a really bad job, it's just so cookie-cutter. The didn't even put 3-4 things on here that we look for. I mean, they did a bad job on this." After which he tossed the certificate back to me and I had to pretend to be happy when he took my picture for my new driver's license. Once we're back at the booth and finishing up paperwork, the DMV worker continues. "You know who has really nice marriage certificate? Dakota County. They do a good job."

This is what I wanted to reply, "You know what the problem with that is? I didn't get married in Dakota County. I wanted to get married in a small town in Indiana which doesn't have the same pompous expectations in official documents as you do."

I, of course, didn't say that. Mostly because I'd like to think I'm too nice, but probably more because I don't have the guts. I got my revenge when he asked for payment, I gave him my credit card. He said that the county prefers if you pay with cash or check, and I didn't have either. If I did, I wouldn't have given it to him anyway! So there!

Anyway, I think I got the short stick when it comes to DMV folks to deal with. But I'm not sad about my marriage certificate anymore. I'm proud that I got married in a unique place that still hand-writes out official documents. To get the marriage application I didn't have to take a number and wait 15 minutes. Plus, the people at the Fountain County court house were much more pleasant people than those at the Hennepin County DMV.

Harvesting Pumpkins

This past weekend was the last weekend the Midtown Farmer's Market would be open, so Andy and I thought we'd swing by and see what we could see. We rode our bikes over since it was a wonderful day. Once there we saw lots of delightful foods available, so we made some purchases and we rode home with 2 pumpkins, a bunch of potatoes, pork chops, carrots and lettuce.

This is what Andy did with his pumpkin. He got lots of compliments from trick or treaters.

I used a bigger knife on my pumpkin.

Earlier this fall I decided I wanted to make something with pumpkin from a real pumpkin, not out of can. So today was the day and I made a pumpkin pie! It was an interesting experience, especially since our cheap blender sucks and a food processor would have worked a million times better for pureeing the pumpkin stuff.

But first I had cut open the pumpkin, which was a task. The directions in the old version of The Joy of Cooking instruct you to "hack" the pumpkin into 4 inch pieces. Hack I did. Next I roasted the hacked up pieces for a good while. Then I scraped off the soft flesh and then "processed" it so it wouldn't be stringy. This is me scraping my roasted pumpkin pieces.

After the frustrating experience with the blender, everything else worked out pretty well. The pumpkin pie turned out great! Though I wouldn't recommend listening to how The Joy of Cooking tells you to check how it's done, sticking a knife in the center would work much better.

This is what I came up with today after an afternoon spent hacking, scraping, whisking and baking. On the bottom is the pumpkin pie, above that is extra puree for pumpkin muffins and on top pumpkin seeds to be roasted later.

But you can't eat pumpkin pie without whipped cream! We didn't have any cool whip on hand, but I had leftover heavy whipping cream from the pie, so I whipped up some whip cream. It's fast, easy and delicious!

Here's the finished product (with a bite missing)!

Overall, my making a pumpkin pie from a real pumpkin experience was a lot of fun and I got to try out some new things. I learned more about baking and took the first tentative step to cooking with winter squash. Also, I learned that it's helpful to have the right tools in the kitchen. Sometimes improvising with what you have works well, like using coffee filters to strain the pumpkin puree instead of cheesecloth. But other times, a blender just doesn't do the trick.

Having fun at Seaside, OR!

It was a windy day on the coast and we had as much fun as we could.

Army of Applesauce

Mott's can eat it! I've been making my own applesauce recently and here are the results of my latest effort. I feel that this beats out any pre-packaged applesauce any day. It's delicious, fresh, natural and comes in cute, reusable, single serving containers.

Also, I'm getting married in 1 week! I'm getting kind of nervous for it, there's a lot to make sure I do. It's a lot of attention. Andy and I are starting to pack for the trip to Indiana and our trip after to Portland, Oregon. It's going to be a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone who is going!

Today is my first big day of October, I will be running in a 5k as part of the Twin Cities Marathon. I couldn't do a marathon, the 5k seems hard enough. Andy and I have been training for the past 3 weeks though, so I'm in lots better shape. When I was putting lotion on last night, I found a muscle that I didn't have before! That's quite exciting. Here's hoping it doesn't rain too hard this morning!

Adventures in Canning

Hello!

Andy and I have spent a lot of time this summer picking food out of our garden and perusing the aisles of various farmers markets. Which means that we get a lot of fresh produce, very often. We have more peppers and tomatoes than we know what to do with. So what do we do with them? We can them!

So far we have made dill pickels, canned tomatoes and salsa! We've eaten some of the extra salsa and it was delicious! It's really exciting to have a supply of food if armageddon comes. Canning is exciting and easy once you get the basic steps down. Laura was nice enough to get us a wonderful canning book that explains the steps in basic language.

Here is a photo montage of our pickling and canning tomatoes efforts.

Consulting the canning literature while the pickling spices steep.

That's a lot of cucumbers! Turns out, it was too much cucumbers.

Andy looking pretty with our fresh dill flowers.

Canning tomatoes all shiny and clean! Ready to be skinned and chopped!

Andy filling jars and adjusting headspace.

Out and About

Andy and I have recently joined a club, the Twin Cities Bicycling Club. It's a lot of fun. So far we've only gone on 3 rides, but it's been a great time. The first ride was a bit slow, but the second ride we went on last weekend was perfect! We went on the same ride again today and I learned a good lesson about the speed at which I ride. The thing about this ride, is that the group is large and it tends to split up into a few groups going at different speeds. Last week we stayed in the back bunch at went between 14 - 16 mph. This week, Andy wanted to keep up with the first group going the fastest. I can't ride as fast as Andy, but I still tried. I was sort of able to keep up with the group as they did their warm up of 20 mph, after that I was toast.

After awhile Andy was dropped from the fast group and we maintained with the middle group. I was pretty tired though. Andy determined that I do pretty good until 17 mph, then I fall back. It'd be neat if I could keep up with the fast people at some point. Right now, I know what pace I can ride at and I will try and keep up to that. Usually when I ride I'm pretty poky, so I know I can pick up the tempo if I want.

Also today Andy and I visited the best bike shop in the Twin Cities, Freewheel Bike. I've thought Freewheel was a great shop and the place I felt most comfortable, but today really solidified that feeling. A couple years ago Pete (from Ireland) got me a gift card from Freewheel, which was really store credit. I didn't use all of it up, but kept my receipt which showed the $9.52 I had left over. Today I went to Freewheel to make some purchases and I remembered I had that receipt, but I wasn't sure if it'd still be valid. So after we shop around a bit and make our picks someone from Freewheel approaches us to check out and I show her my faded receipt from 2007. She recognized it was her handwriting that marked how much I had left and honored my $9.52! It was great, I couldn't believe either!

Freewheel is great for many reasons. They have awesome customer service, they're friendly. They know and love bikes without being pretentious about it. I'm the type of person that doesn't have a type of person, so I feel weird when I don't fit in somewhere, like many bike shops in the Twin Cities. But at Freewheel, I don't feel uncomfortable, I feel welcomed. Not to say other bike shops are bad, but that Freewheel is awesome.

Anyway, off of the bike topic. The garden is doing great. We've harvested all of our bush beans and our crazy pole beans have finally flowered. I made a delicious dinner last night with tomatoes, summer squash, carrots and thyme from our garden. It felt good to eat all that and know we grew it ourselves. Plus it was tasty.

BWCA Videos

I recently discovered that I can do time lapse videos on my camera, and I think that's pretty neat. So on our recent trip to the Boundary Waters I made use of this new discovery. Here are the results.

In this one you can really see the wind go across the lake. Tony and Dad are paddling.

Tony is taking his time getting into the lake.