Things I've done since Carrie's post

Helped with a surprise party, been name Fairy Godmother to an awesome little one, applied for random jobs, gone to a pathetic state sponsored job fair, applied for grants for a project I'm doing on substance use in pregnancy, gone through a training and gotten a hospital i.d. for the project, worked on another research project, applied for more jobs, worked on a veterans habitat for humanity build, went to another fun birthday party, found the mediocre deli, got a little lost, helped a good friend get her house ready for renters while she's out of the country, practiced banjo, got expensive repairs done on my car, shoveled snow, finished winterizing the house, went to two Thanksgiving dinners, ate leftovers, worked on grants, applied for jobs, went to the rheumatologist, goofed off, did mysterious things, wrote and read emails, kept applying for my unemployment, wrote a very long run-on fragment sentence.

Cool things about my job

Most days work is pretty routine, but the past 2 weeks I've got to do some pretty cool things...

On October 21st, I hung out with Katie Hnida (blonde in the middle), the first woman to play and score in a Division I football game.  She came to campus to talk about sexual assault.

On October 27th, my class helped out with a Halloween party for children from a local after school program.

On November 2nd, I went with another one of my classes to the Greater Boston Food Bank where we helped sort 6,198 pounds of food which will provide 4,760 meals.

Today, I went with my class to the Naval War College in Newport, RI to tour the USS Buckeley.

All in a days work!

looking for jim

Well B&B fans, it seems Kristina's madcap travel adventures were not quite completed for 2011.   Currently I'm sitting in a swanky new Hilton Garden Inn in the fab suburb of Maple Grove MN.  My Uncle Jerry passed away on the 20th from Alzheimer's and so the bulk of the remaining Wolff clan gathered together these past few days to bid our farewell, reminisce, reconnect a wee bit and set aside short and long standing feuds and grudges.

The last three days have involved a trip to Boston which included an evening watching three lovely ladies get fancy new hairdoos at Che Itzak & Ned's, two semi-bumpy airplane rides to exotic places like Milwaukee, many restaurant meals and blowing out the lights in my first hotel room (turned out to be a busted computer cord after all and the hotel maintenance guy gave it a big tug to prove it was busted - ahem).  It's been harder to find a replacement cord than I expected but I'm working on it and the hotel has provided one for me for now.  

The ceremony for Jerry was short, small and sweet - complete with a thoughtful video with many pictures to tug at one's hearts and induce appropriate levels of happy thoughts and sadness.  After we (yes, once again - partially due to birth order - I was chosen to be a pall bearer) loaded Jerry into the hearse we had the appropriate roll/ham sandwich with church coffee snack and headed out to Ft. Snelling cemetery for Jerry's final trip.  Erika and I played some pretty great sad songs on the way but at one point she didn't switch the ipods quickly enough (we were sharing them) and a more dance-y song came on.  As Jerry liked to have a good time, we figured it was appropriate to enjoy the music.  My cousin Kelly didn't quite see the dance moves at that time but did see us boogieing another time and said it made her think of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ-CDE_r_wg 

Yeah that's right, I've been driving around the suburbs in a Kia Soul (not by choice) - at least it's a pretty dark grey blue.

There are many awkward, tense and funny moments that have happened the last few days and as you may guess, quite a number of amazing quotes - many of which were fueled by multiple adult beverages but to capture the family a bit, I thought I'd mention one of the more memorable instances.


We were gathered at my Aunt Jean and Uncle Craig's house for dinner and as I was walking back into the dining / family room I heard my aunts (Jean, Connie & Mary who are the sisters of Jerry,  Jim and my Dad), uncles, cousin's and a family friend talk about whether or not they wished to be cremated or buried.  I learned important family facts like that our grandparents now have a monument instead of simple flat headstones, which was mentioned because a couple aunts did a 'cemetery tour' today.  They then were debating whether or not it was ok to break with Wolff family tradition of burial and go for cremation - people were talking about where they wanted their ashes distributed and in the midst of this one person noted they wanted to be in a sarcophagus.  Suddenly my Aunt Jean burst out - "I need to find Jim; I need to see if he's here."


Yesterday Jim's kids were talking about how he made his presence known to them after he died via flickering lights and messing with their tvs (just trust me on this one).  So I thought my aunt was going to turn on the tv.  Nope, she jumped up and went over to the fireplace and started shaking things - then she pulled down a vase and looked inside - "Nope, he's not in here."  Then we realized, she was looking for his ashes (she doesn't have all of them) which are kept in a small velvet bag.  She thought 'he' needed to be on the table, to join us in the conversation.  Suddenly Craig (her husband) jumped up to help her look for him - they were roaming all over the house - talking about where Jim was:  "Maybe he's upstairs,"  "I think we put him over here in the kitchen," "Jim, Jim Jim.."  "Oh wait, did we stick him in the junk drawer?"  All the while we were laughing and of course offering suggestions and noting that 'Jim' really wasn't there.  While Craig was running all over the house looking for Jim, Jean was poking around near us and then would have to stop momentarily to explain where she thought he was, why he was moved and what her plans were for 'Jim'. Apparently he is on his way up to their cabin on this tiny lake because she wanted to "spread his ashes across the lawn."  We didn't ask why he wasn't going to be scattered / dumped into the lake.


Soon she gave up looking and we started to move onto another subject when suddenly - a velvet bag was dropped onto the middle of the table.  "JIM!!" Jean yelled, as her hubbo stood there proudly having helped out his wife.  "Where was he?" she asked, "upstairs in our bedroom.. in the top drawer in the dresser" said Craig.  "Oh yeah," Jean said, "that's where we keep our treasures."  I noted I thought it was a little creepy to keep him in their room especially since you didn't know what part you had - "what if it was his big toe and backside?".  This promptly got Jean and my Aunt Connie to simultaneously go into detail as to how cremation worked - as I tried to stop them, Craig also jumped in to clarify things.  Of course I was finally able to tell them that I knew how it worked and that I was joking.  For the rest of the evening we all hung out with 'Jim'.






 

Things to Consider on Labor Day Weekend

Hello B&BS fans - here's a random list of 10 things that have crossed our minds this Labor Day Weekend.  These may or may not be inspired by actual events.

1.  You can never make too much jam and adding vanilla or cinnamon to jam makes it "infinitely better" but I guess only works if you like cinnamon or vanilla and are not allergic to either one or both.

2. Don't give your bank information to someone who is posing as someone from the Red Cross and tells you its' safer to give your information on paper than it is on-line because that's how they used to do it in the olden days.  This is especially true if you're at Downtown Crossing.

3.  When meeting a snake, remember it is impolite to look at its "package".  

4.  Wine is a drink.

5.  Beer tastes great after hauling and splitting wood all day. The jury is out on how it tastes after seeing certain snake parts.

6. One of us has a new understanding as to why people don't make tomato paste at home.

7. St. Anthony makes way more money at the end of the festival than the beginning; probably because the ending takes ten hours.

8.  The Food Network should not advertise Hamburger Helper.

9.  Hurricane's and tropical storms do strike people who live far away from the ocean and that doesn't make them bad people.

10. You can get your period after you make a baby - even if you make one at home in less than five hours. 

jam-mania

Howdy B&B readers!  Some of you may have heard that if you get a tattoo that you'll catch the 'bug' and want to get many more.  Well we're here to tell you that the same is true for making jam - once you start, you may not want to stop {pop culture reference: or like Pringles, once you pop you can't stop}.

     sidenote: Carrie would like to note that she doesn't have any tattoos.

While Kristina was visiting Boston last week, she reminded Carrie that she knew of a particular backyard of a house that is for sale and doesn't have occupants in it that had some blackberries which needed to fulfill their destiny of becoming jam.  Once she added the "free laundry at my house" enticement, Carrie decided to come up for a visit even though it would mean that we had about a 50 hour break from one another which sometimes pushes the bff-ness a bit.  Example:  K says to C "you should really drink more water, that's why you get headaches all the time."  C replies: "I don't get headaches all the time, just when I'm around you".  [B-Zanga!!]

Carrie arrived on Friday evening and heard about Kristina's grand plans of finishing mowing the lawn, having friends over for dinner, finishing her porch windows, painting the rest of the porch and making jam - all between that evening and Monday morning.  Carrie made a great pitch to start with jam so Saturday morning after breakfast we checked out fruit opportunities at the local farmer's market (as there were no farms in the area that had what we were looking for and the result at the market was nil fyi unless we wanted the beautiful tomato fruit).  We then headed toward the free organic wild blackberries.  Here's our haul:

We picked roughly 12 pints of berries.  Feeling energized, we picked up a few more jars, lined them up and started to plan out what we were going to make.  I should have been concerned when Carrie pulled this out for consultation:

We decided to take stock of the jars we had to help us figure out what to make.  Here's what we had to fill:

Our first two batches were blackberrry jam.  We then branched out and using some leftover berries from last year made peach, blackberry, raspberry jam.  After that we decided to ease off on the blackberries and made peach pear ginger jam.  Finally, we thought we'd tackle the box of crabapples (which technically may or may not be considered wild.  If you saw the tree in my backyard you'd probably say "wild" or simply, "messed up").  Here's what we had to work with:

We thought that we'd need a whole bunch of crabapples but it turns out that we needed around five or six to make a crabapple blackberry jam / compote.  We're going to try and whip up a crabapple compote tomorrow before Carrie goes back to Boston but after two days / 12 hours of solid jam making, I think we aren't going to be making major batches (oh, there's also 2 cups of blackberries left too).  As of right now we have 74 jars of jam (a mix of 8 and 4 oz jars) and close to four dozen more jars to fill.  Here's a closing foto to see some of the end product - the crabapple blackberry is the one without the label.

FYI if someone tells you that your eyeglasses are dirty about five times and finally says "do you want me to clean those for you," it might be a good idea to clean them.  I'm thinking about how pear sage honey jam would taste (I have a lot of sage in my garden) and I think Carrie is just ready to get some sleep.  Yes, the kitchen is clean and ready to go and we're planning on having eggs, bacon [believe it or not pals, I'm actually eating and cooking this stuff once in a while even though the cooking smells turns my tum-tum a bit] and cheese biscuits to give us the energy to keep jamming tomorrow. 

ta-ta, toodle-oo, poopied-poo, jammiedy-jam-jam-in-your-jams to you! 

Lookin' for Gnomes in all the Wrong Places....

Searching for Hillary Clinton's Gnomes

Today the Banjos and Brastraps team took a trip to Lincoln, MA to take advantage of FREE summer weekdays at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.  Even though it was raining we walked the grounds outside to capture some of the art for the 2 of you who follow this blog.  Here's the link to the museum site if you feel like checking it out http://www.decordova.org/  One of the rules at the museum is as follows:

After learning this, we decided to make our first B&B videos for the blog -- here they are!

Here's our second attempt at providing you with some culture:

After we visited the museum we then literally went and checked out some new brastraps to add to our collections.  With the help of Marie the "bra fitting expert" the girls will be high and dry.

We then had a quick bite to eat at the PF Chang's bistro where KBW is certain that Max the waiter has never eaten anything spicy because his concern over the spiciness of her ginger beer and chang's chicken was unwarrented - let's just say she was adding lots of chili oil and paste to her dish while saying "this isn't spicy at all!".  Nice try Max!  We are going to try to recreate the ginger beer -- check back for that recipe.

Then for the highlight of the night we zoomed to Doyle's in JP for Tuesday Night Trivia.  With insightful answers like "Bull Run", "Bobby Fischer" and some comments from the team like "How many superbowls have we had?" and "Is Bangladesh a country or a city?" and a little bit of reenacting of a midnight oil video, the 9 person team of "Ineligible to win" came in 3rd place and beat our archrivals "trivia newton john".  With this win we now have two of the following trophies in our possession - sans beer:

We're off to be good citizens by donating some books, KBW is heading back to Maine today, CLC will be joining her soon for another Maine adventure -- until then: