Sorry, my gender roles are all backwards

I had another pretty busy weekend, lots accomplished, it was just all *girl* stuff.

Jess and I went on a hike on Saturday. There’s a national wildlife reserve up a bit north of us, and we got our camel backs put together (thanks, Sandlin!) and decided to check it out. It was all quite pretty, and we ended up wandering around a bit off the beaten path to check out some really neat vistas. They don’t call this area ‘hill county’ for nothing. I’ll try to put up some pictures later, but I’m pretty tired from everything else.

After we got back from the hike, I tried out an Alton Brown cooking experiment. I’d seen an episode on making pocket pies and had showed it to jessie, who agreed that it looked like the greatest thing since sliced bread So I cooked up a double-batch of pie crust and made a whole big bunch of pocket pies. Most of them were apple pies. It was my first time making apple pie filling, too. Turned out pretty good. I also made some Pizza pocket pies and a couple with chocolate inside. Then I baked some and pan-fried some more. They all turned out delicious, because it’s hard to go wrong with that much shortening and flower, but the baked ones were a lot more uniform. It also took a really long time, though I was cooking a double batch. I ended up with nearly 30 pies. We’ve still got a lot of them, they keep really well.

Then today, Jess and I switch genders. She went off and played some sports then came back to watch the big hockey game. I did some sewing.

Big thank you to Nana for teaching me how to use a sewing machine, I got a lot of use out of it today. We bought some curtains that we liked but that were the wrong size or configuration for our bedroom or bathroom. We were just going to get them altered, but the cost for the alterations was almost as much as it would have cost for us to just buy a new sewing machine. So we did. (Sew we did. Ha!)

Jess set it up and read through the manual, and then I did again today to learn a few extra skills, like threading bobbins and the like, and learning about all the completely bonkers stitches our machine can do. Then I did some measuring and put together some pretty nice stitches, if I do say so myself.

So yeah, pies and curtains for me, hockey and hiking for Jessie. I need to go, I dunno, build a deck, or something.

Micro news: The birds have returned to our backyard, with the inclusion of our new, covered bird feeder. We’re going through a lot of birdseed. I blame the squirrels, but they’re cute too. I’m going to try and work on the yard next weekend, I think it’s finally warm enough to start planting, and maybe even turning on the sprinklers. Exciting news at work, there is a new project starting up that I get to be a big part of. Not the technical lead guy, but one of the primary workers. I’ve worked my way through the first of my old music textbooks. I want to try a simple composition, either in SATB or piano style, and then go onto book 2.

-N