Spring

The weather man says this delicious Spring weather that we have been enjoying is going to come to a close for a while. Did the groundhog see his shadow? I don't know. I decided to bring Spring inside if it won't stay around outside. These tulips make me smile.

Happy Birthday Mario Andretti!

Yesterday I decided to make a cake. It had been at least 3 years since I had made such an attempt, but I was confident that it wasn't going to be all that hard. It's from a mix. You add like two things and put it in the oven and you're done. My wife stared on in disbelief as I began to open the batter. She reminded me that we had company coming over in a half hour. I replied with my complete confidence that I would be able to make it, bake it, frost it, and eat it, and clean it with plenty of time to spare before we needed to entertain my guest. Well, my wife being the sweet and kind woman that she is expressed her doubt, but said that if I really thought I could, I should give it a swing. Now there's spousal support! Naively optimistic I pre-heated the oven and began to mix the ingredients...
Reality strikes:
The instructions casually inform me that to mix the cake it would take 2 minutes in a blender. Oh yeah, we don't have a blender. Alternative: 450 strokes by hand. Melanie points out that this is NOT a good time to use a whisk. Ok, so I pull out her Pampered chef mini-whipper. Dumb idea. A spatula, or more acurately, a Mix 'N Scraper. 450 strokes, by hand. 3 strokes a second = 150 seconds. Two and a half minutes. Not bad if your an olympic weight lifter, iron chef, my dad, or not a scrawny pencil neck nerd. After about thirty seconds I'm only 39 strokes through, (it would have taken me seven minutes at that pace) Melanie informs me that my strokes are getting "wimpy". She steps in, beats the batter like it had been bad, and hands it back to me to finish up with a few token strokes. While I'm trying to give the batter the most manly beating I can to redeem myself, Melanie asks if the glass pan would be alright. Still hoping, I reply that I was envisioning a two layer cake with chocolate frosting. 20 minutes to go. I'm not sure why Melanie is rolling her eyes while she shows me that in addition to oiling the 9-inch round pans, I've got to flour them as well. She does it for me as I look on.
Ok, the easy part. Put it in the oven. How long? 35 minutes. Dang. Well, maybe the company will come late. I put it in the oven and begin to clean up. Realizing that I had forgotten when I put it into the oven; Melanie reassures me that it has it has 23 minutes left. My gorgeous wife hints to me that if I want frosting, now would be the time to make it. So how does one make frosting anyways? Apparently you need cream cheese, which we don't have. Principle of cooking #1. Always check that you have the ingredients first. Can I run to the store? Nope, 10 minutes before the company gets here. Panic! It turns out that there is a pretty good recipe online for making frosting with sour cream. Now, I can't imagine that being even remotely edible. Imagining sour cream heaped on top of a cake as if it were a taco salad makes me gag. But just for the record it is fairly passable. It's nothing I would serve a General Authority, but it at least colors the cake. Knowing that frosting can be hard to make, I negotiate with Melanie that if she makes it, I'll do the dishes. She accepts. 5 minutes to go. Melanie whips out the frosting in no time and I'm lagging with the dishes. Fortunately the company arrives late and she is able to remove the finished cake from the oven, cut off the rounded top and let them cool before they knock.
What now?
Now for the tricky part. We've got a half done cake on the counter that needs to get frosted while we're playing a board game at the same time. I'm struck with the idea to play a game they've never played before. That equates to long turns and plenty of time to slip away and finish the cake. It turns out that the Pierces are pretty bright people, and Melanie and I individually are taking more time on our turns than they are together. But this cake needs to get frosted! I manage to sneak away on Melanie's turns to put our chocolate frosting between the cake as an icing and layer them. The next time I sneak away I find my cake resembling the San Francisco earthquake.

The frosting, not being icing, is too thin and slippery. The cakes are rounded in the middle and the top layer keeps sliding off the bottom. This is when I get the best idea I've ever had for cake "building". A civil engineer would be able to tell you that the bottom layer is handling the compressive pressure of the top layer just find. What is happening here is that the coupling between the layers is unable to take the shear load. So if YOU were building a tower that had shear pressure problems what would you do? The same as me. I pull out two bamboo skewers and stick them down into the cake from top to bottom. Shear problem solved! The cake layers stay on top of each other. However, the most labor intensive problem is still in frosting it, and the Pierces are only getting faster at the game. I try to sneak away again to frost the cake. I dump the frosting all over the top of the cake, but am quickly called back to take my turn. Forgetting that a whole bunch of frosting is now oozing all over my cake I run over, take my turn and return to find the cake completely frosted. Principle of cooking #2. Gravity is really really good at frosting a cake. Like a chocolate waterfall, my cake has been frosted in it's entirety by the wall of chocolate oozing from the top down the sides. Where it not for the lake of chocolate frosting that is now drowning the cake along the sides I'd say it were perfect. Here's a look. If you look closely you can see the shear supports. The nose is a left over chocolate from Valentine's Day.



Happy Birthay Mario Andretti!
Somewhat proud of this cake that I supposedly made (except for mixing it, putting it in the oven, taking it out of the oven on time, stacking it, and making the frosting, you know, the easy parts) I decide that we need to celebrate something. I don't know anyone with a birthday on February 28th. This is unsurprising as I know a total of 3 birthdays by heart. My own, my twin brother's and my wife's. December 26th, December 26th, and August 12th. No Februarys. Fortunately Wikipedia DOES know people with Febuary 28th birthdays. After some deliberation we settle on Mario Andretti. Check his webpage out at Wikipedia, or his own personal website. For those of you who are unaware, and that included me, Mario Andretti is one of the best race car drivers in the world and is one of the two drivers to win in NASCAR, Formula One, IndyCar, AND World Sportscar Championship. We sang him Happy Birthday, blew out the candles in his honor, and wished him a happy 68th birthday.


Happy Birthday! I was obviously freaking everyone out by now, so we cut the cake and ate it. It was delicious.

Mere words of Praise

Mere words of praise cannot describe the meal that my beautiful wife made for me tonight.


Olive cheese bread, pasta penne with homemade tomato sauce and an exquisite blue-cheese cranberry,candied almond, vinaigrette, sunflower seed, and avocado goodness salad. What can I say, she's amazing. Her cooking triumph this week then has certainly towered over my own. I again attempted to make curry. I've got this great curry recipe book, all of the spices, an Indian friend at work to help, and lots of enthusiasm with very little experience to pitch at it. Even with all that help, it needs a lot of work. Actually my curry is quit good, but it always tastes exactly the same. It doesn't matter what spices I use, how I cook it, or even if I burn the onions or not, it always tastes the same. Finally I just gave up and got Melanie's Mom to take us to a real Indian restaurant. Yum Yum!

In other news I've decided on my grad adviser for my masters. I've talked with Dr. Warnick of the BYU CS department. If he ever gets my letter of recommendation done so I can actually get accepted into the program, then I'll land in his lab. It will be work in decision and control, a fascinating field that up to now has been dominated by the electrical engineering world. We're hoping computer science has something to bring to it. I'm excited because it means that I'll be getting the math background that I really want and need to survive in what I hope will be a top tier PhD program in a couple years. Here's hoping.

Recap

I feel like it is time to fill you all in on our lives. Although it hasn't been terribly long since we made a post here, we are so busy lately that it feels like a lot has been going on this month.
First of all, I forgot to post a very fun highlight of Christmas break. Mitchell and I made a day trip to Palo Alto to see Grandma Peterson. We had such a wonderful time! She took us out to a big lunch at the Cheesecake Factory in downtown Palo Alto then on a tour of Stanford campus. It is such a beautiful campus! It's no secret where Grandma wants us to go to grad school! :) Here is a picture of us in the main quad area.



After the tour of Stanford Grandma took us home for a special treat that she had prepared for us...no it wasn't dessert! She had sorted through many of the pictures she has of her and Grandpa Peterson when they were younger and when their kids were young. She told us the whole story of how she and grandpa met and fell in love, dated and were married. She told us about trips in their first car and their jobs and so many fun and wonderful experiences from her life. It was such a special afternoon! Thanks Grandma! We can't wait to visit again and get more of the story!

This month has flown by because we are so busy right now! Mitchell is now 3 weeks in to his last semester at BYU!!! ...or so we thought until last night when he decided to pursue a Master's degree here while waiting for me to graduate. It is a great opportunity because his professor is confident that Mitchell will be able to complete the Master's program in just one year! The plan is for him to start this May and finish in August of 2010 just in time to go straight on to his PhD program. Mitchell is a very hard worker and I have no doubt that he will succeed at whatever he puts his effort into.

I am more busy this semester than ever before it seems! This is my last semester of classes and clinicals in the nursing program! Wahoo! Fall 2009 semester is my capstone semester and I will complete a senior project and about 220 hours working in a hospital. Then I graduate!! My clinicals this semester are in the ICU at a brand new hospital in Murray and I am really loving it! I never thought the ICU would be my niche in nursing but I could really see myself there long term! I love that it is challenging and makes me dig deep into the stores of knowledge that I have acquired over the years. My critical thinking skills are really being pushed to the limit but I am seeing improvement too! I also love that we only have 2 patients in the ICU as opposed to the 8-10 that a nurse can have on a regular medical/surgical floor. It is nice to be able to spend more time with each patient and understand more about them. I also got my first job as a real nurse! I will still be working at the nursing home I have been at as an aide since June, but starting February 2nd I will be an LPN!! Oh yay, I feel more grown up all the time. Does it sound like our lives are just consumed by school and work? Well, that's the life of a full-time student. We love it though!!

I am looking forward to an amazing opportunity this May though. Last semester during finals week one of the nursing faculty at BYU emailed me and asked if I would be interested in hearing about a special opportunity. I said sure and went to talk to her in her office. She asked me to go to Peru for the month of May and basically run a health clinic that a charity organization set up there. BYU College of Nursing has never done anything like this before but they are sending me and one other nursing student to Peru for a month to get this clinic up and running. I don't know many details yet but we are going to have quite an adventure! This experience will count for my global nursing requirement and will really be a great insight into nursing in quite a different setting than I am used to. Here is the link to the humanitarian organization's website. http://www.sxhu.org/

Well, life is great! We are so blessed in many ways, thank you for your support!

When life happens

We had to laugh yesterday when this happened. I was in the bedroom getting ready for bed and Mitchell went into the living room to get the Book of Mormon off the shelf to read. All of a sudden I heard a loud crash and another crash and another crash! Of course I rushed out to see what had happened and I found this...


We laughed and decided that the Book of Mormon must truly be the keystone!

Post Christmas Fun

Mitchell's birthday was December 26th and we celebrated by playing games, going to a delicious dinner at Tahoe Joe's, German chocolate cake with lemon filling, and presents! We hope it was a special and fun birthday! Happy 24th!

My mom and I had a fun outing together too! We went to the California Museum for Women, History and the Arts. It was neat! The exhibits highlighted significant contributors to history who were from California. One of our favorite exhibits was of Theodore Geisel...aka Dr. Seuss! We then went shopping at the mall. Mom got a great new outfit! We also went to lunch and enjoyed yummy soup and sandwiches at Panera Bread. It was definitely a highlight of the 2 week vacation!

Holiday Recap!

Obviously we had a busy and eventful vacation because we have had no time to update our blog until now. In fact, even now life is busy! Here's a quick recap of our Christmas holiday. After finals Mitchell and I headed out to Sacramento, CA. We enjoyed a wonderful Christmas and New Years and countless hours of game playing and movie watching. Not pictured were some temple trips, a rock climbing afternoon and lots of yummy (and fattening) holiday food! What a welcome and fun break from school life!

We went bowling with my parents, siblings uncle and cousins. It was a fun family home evening!


We also went shooting with some friends and family and had a great time!! Mitchell turned out to be a great shot with the shotgun aiming at clay targets that were launched in the air. My favorite is to shoot the 9mm handguns we had. Fun times!