Happy Birthday, Paul!

A very happy birthday to my beer brewing, camera wearing, breakfast cook extraordinaire...

 keeping it light, slow burn, take it as it comes, makes each day more awesome...

husband/partner/teammate/lover/friend!

I love you, Pauly!

Photo Tidbits

Weekend breakfasts from Chef Paul are the best.

Waiting for a train

Paul's first (homebrew) beer release party

First dinner party with Penn (and Griz). 

Ant swarm

Giving yogurt making another go, this time with the proper equipment. So long heating pad in a flour tin!

Hola Arepa - our top pic for Midtown Farmers' Market breakfasts.  Getting in the habit of riding our bikes to the market!

Attempt at a Guinness World Record

Here is the crew.  Our goal?  To join thousands of other hula hoopers and make a new Guinness World Record for most people hula hooping in one place.

The hosts and organizers: Booya!

If you didn't already own a hula hoop, you could get hooked up for $5.

We brought our own.  They have fancy color tape on them.

Ever wonder how thousands of hula hoopers can be counted?  The answer is to divide them into groups of 50 with a spotter for each group.  The group locations were sprayed on the grass.

We had a lot of time to practice.

Things got crazy.

There were other fun things happening at Loring Park that day.

In case you were not aware, it is endlessly entertaining to watch people hula hoop.  Everybody has their own style and majority of people look pretty comical.  There were fancy hoop dancers, there were subtle swayers, there were people who did goofy things with their hands to keep them out of the way and then there was this girl.  She put her all into making that hoop go around.  I would describe her style as a mashup between headbanging, Elvis Presley hip shaking and a merry-go-round. Miss Minnesota liked her, too.

Sadly, we did not have nearly enough people to break the record, but we did do a round of simultaneous hooping.

I held my camera up high over my head and took some pictures while hooping to see what I could capture.  I mostly captured the tops of trees.  Oops.

Thanks to Paul for carrying the hoops so I could take pictures.

Thanks to my mom for bringing an extra hoop so Paul could hoop, too.

Thanks to Jessy for being the ringleader.

And, thanks to Nice Ride for the heads up on fun events like this around town. Their motto is a great one: Grab Summer by the Handlebars!  Hula hooping in the park on a sunny Sunday morning while a band plays definitely feels like summer!

Blueberries and the Beating Sun

When I was growing up, I had mixed feelings about blueberry picking.  There were wild blueberries in the forests around our cabin and most years we went berry picking a few times.  Wild blueberry season coincides with the worst of the horse-fly season and generally was paired with the super strong, hot July sun.  In addition to that, the area where we picked was also filled with mosquitoes and sometimes wild blackberry bushes with their menacing thorns.  Wild blueberry bushes are low to the ground and the berries are very small, which meant you really have to work at it to get any sort of volume.

The upside is that wild blueberries were free and delicious.  And, the experience generally involved a big group of family and friends, which meant singing and stories and jokes.  Plus, if we picked enough, we got to have pancakes with wild blueberries.  Delicious!  When you mix all of that together in a pot, I am not totally sure if those were good times or miserable times.  I'm going to choose to remember them as good times!

Compared with wild blueberry picking, the type of blueberry picking Jamie and I did today was easy as pie. The berries were big and growing on tall bushes in neat rows. The very kind hosts at Blueberry Fields of Stillwater came around with cups of water for the pickers and had a bathroom on site.  Way more amenities than the buggy forest!

The challenge today was the weather.  We got there as early as we could and still the full sun was a lot to bear when paired with the 90-some degree temperatures.  I picked for 2 hours before I felt like I had to stop. I came away with just over 4 pounds of precious berries.  I haven't decided what I will make with my limited quantity, but for now, they are a delicious snack.

For the record, the cool bath I took when I got home was heavenly.  I am feeling so grateful for air conditioning!  It is currently 99 degrees F here with a feels like temp of 104, which makes our 80 degree house feel like a total luxury.

Big Stone Sculpture Park and Mini Golf: Part Deux

Today was a completely summery summer day, with temperatures in low 90s and barely a cloud in the sky.  Holly, Lydia, Magnus and I donned our sunhats, sunglasses and sunscreen and took off for a super secret surprise day (Holly gets mad props for agreeing to be surprised by my plan - It is hard to let go of the need for knowledge and control!).  Holly packed us a fabulous picnic and I surprised them with a day at Big Stone Sculpture Park and Mini Golf.   

Since I had been to Big Stone before, I was pretty confident they would love all of the art and the animals.  I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.