The Mille Lacs band of Ojibwe welcomed ME!

Well well well, here we are again. This past week was a busy week, full of parties and fun activities. It reminds me of when I was the cool kid in school, never had a night free 'cause I was too busy livin' it up. Wait ... that was just in my dream. I've always been a home body that tends to get overbooked with Church groups and life. Still livin' it up in my own way!

To recount the events that transpired since last Wednesday.

Wednesday : Went to our monthly Bible Study and bouldering event at Climbing for Christ. This group is one that takes the Gospel to villages that are tucked away in mountains in various countries (including the Philippines, one of these years I'll go?) and also takes the Gospel to mountaineering hotspots (including Denali, one of these years I'll go?). Mountaineering isn't such a hot prospect here in Minnesota but winter camping, hiking, and ice climbing are. I haven't gone as much as I'd like but that's ok, Amanda is working on building a life and I don't want to drag her all across the state while she's baking away! At the study we talked about having a missions mindset and talked about how to handle hard times and how to help others handle hard times. As a nation we're going through some tough times right now. It's hitting close to home as well, we've had a few friends who have been laid off and now are unsure what the next steps are, even to the point of being able to keep their house, etc. How do we help them? The night was punctuated by the leaders 2.5 year old daughter looking at me twice and declaring "cutie pie". It was funny. We skipped the bouldering due to the prospect of late nights all week. Got home at a reasonable hour, around 9:30.

Thursday : For Christmas I gave Amanda tickets for two to a cooking class. She signed up for a hands on pasta making course. This course took place in the "Uptown" area of Minneapolis. Uptown is the fancy metro chic area, we're not fancy metro chic but every once in a while we like to pretend that we are. One downfall of fancy metro chic areas is that they tend to not have room to park, we ended up parking about 10 minutes away and made it to the class just in time to claim the first back row seats (which in hindsight weren't too bad). Central casting picked out an old italian grandpa guy to teach the course. It turns out that pasta is fairly easy to make. It also turns out that I'm curious if pasta making is like rice making, anyone can make it but it takes years to become a master? We whipped up a few ravioli's, some fettucini, some angle hair, and some tortellini's. Tasty stuff. We got home at around 10:00.

Friday : Party party party. After searching for a half hour for Godfathers Pizza we hung out with our Church home group. All four girls in the group are growing babies (thanks to a certain someone's water supply?). We watched a movie regarding babies (traditional party fare I assure you) and then watched a Christian comedian DVD. Good time and it hit home to some of the peops that the babies are coming, the babies are coming, we're under attack! We got home around midnight.

Saturday : We don't traditionally do our Valentine's day on February 14th. We're not too crazy about large crowds and don't believe expressions of love need to be tied solely to one day. We generally do something around V-Day, such as pasta making a couple of days ago. So, we didn't have explicit plans for Saturday. This doesn't mean we didn't fill it up with lots of running around though! First stop was at Turtle Bread to get some bread to go with our left-over fresh pasta. Second stop was at Al's Breakfast in Dinkytown. This is where things turned interesting. First : Dinkytown is a funny name, it's right next to the University of Minnesota, though I'll let you draw your own conclusion about why a section of Minneapolis that basically supports (and is supported by) the U is named "Dinkytown". Second : Al's Breakfast embodies dinkytown both in spirit and in stature. This little hot spot of breakfast food is literally a converted alleyway. We saw a few people standing outside waiting for their spot and figured the wait couldn't be that bad. Baby "Jack" (our nickname for our baby until we decide otherwise) could wait a little bit for food, right? Well, two hours later, with baby Jack arguing more and more, we finally got to one of the 14 stools. It was tasty enough. I can't really do it justice with my words, if you make it to Minneapolis and have time for breakfast we'll take you there, just so long as it's before the college kids wake up (so, anytime before about 10:00 am).

Saturday Part 2 : This is only part 2 because I don't want to use paragraphs correctly and I don't want all of Saturday to run into one giant sized "paragraph". We went from Al's to Midwest Mountaineering which is essentially a home-town REI. They are running their end of winter clearance. Side note - If this is the end of winter this means that Minneapolis winters are a piece of cake - End side note. I picked up some boots (rated to -25F) and a coat, both at half price. My closet is looking more and more like I'm a gear junkie (though I have a long way to go to be officially accepted to any true gear junkie meets). I now have summer hiking boats, winter hiking boots, ice climbing boots, two pairs of running shoes, works shoes, tennis shoes, beach shoes. That's more shoes than any one guy needs.

Saturday Part 3 : Booked it to Circuit City to see if I could find mega deals. None found. The end.
Sunday : Watched over kiddos at Church (we had nursery duty). Amanda has made it her mission this week to not get sick. For the last 5 months she's had a cold develop starting about wednesday after watching kids in the nursery. If what they say is true that you can only catch one strain of a cold virus once, she should be building up a number of free and clear years! We then headed north to the Grand Casino in Hinckley and were welcomed by the Mille Lacs band of Ojibwe. Gambling is not our forte, we only went there because when we were at the Ice Fest in November we won a free night stay in a jacuzzi room and a free dinner. They were also giving out free $5 gaming coupons at the Ice Fest. So, we hightailed it up to Hinckley with our coupons in tow. Got settled into our room, which was actually off-site from the casino, and then headed over to see if we could parlay the free $5 credit into some real hard cash money. We stepped into the casino and were greeted by smoke and old ladies. Yum. We hadn't counted on smoking at a casino, are we naive? Yuck Yuck Yuck. We got our cards, apparently with $10 just for signing up, another $5 from coupon meant that we each had $15 in house money (so long as we put in $1 of our own, aha, there's the catch!). The wait for the dinner was about an hour, so we found the tiny corner that was non-smoking and gambled for the second time in our lives (the first time being in Lake Tahoe on our honeymoon where we each put in a nickel, though we did spend $20 at the arcade on that trip). One dollar each of our money, $15 each of house money (not able to be cashed out until we actually "won" something). We translated that into $34 that we could cash out. Yippee, a 1600% return in 20 minutes (if you don't count the house money into the equation)! Final thought on the casino, I think we felt as culturally out of our comfort zone there as we did on our trip to Manila.

Monday : Relatively uneventful, drove by Taylors Falls on our way back home. I have this habit of doing one surprise addendum to our well-laid plans and this time it was a brief trek to Taylors Falls. We just went to the town, which is on the St. Croix river and I had been hoping to go to the "Rocky River Bakery". Unfortunately it seems that there is some unwritten rule about bakeries not being open for business on Monday. We had this problem at the "Moose is Loose" in Soldotna and we now have this problem at RRB in Taylors Falls. Next time.

Tuesday : No, just because we're back at work and back at home don't think that we're back to lounging. We have an outreach meeting tonight at Church. Tomorrow is rest day ... for now.