Fearless Warrior

This is our cat, Clio...she thinks she's the best thing ever. I've mentioned before that she is very bitchy, and I'm OK with that....we love her anyway.

Today she decided to take on a St. Bernard that was sniffing around in our back yard. Clio weighs 12 pounds, so while she isn't tiny...she really has nothing on the 200Lb behemoth lumbering around our garden and checking out our compost...
We have a little alleyway that is wooded running along the side of our house that our bedroom is on. We call it "The Jungle" 'cause Clio and Ladybird (roomies kitty), along with all the neighborhood hooligans (all of the kitten variety), just love playing around back there. Anyway, Josh heard a jingling noise coming in our window and peeked out and noticed the intruder, threw on some shoes and was about to head out to politely request that Mr. St. Bernard leave our garden alone when Clio decided to poof her tail and launch a head-on attack on the unsuspecting canine from The Jungle...needless to say he was out of our yard in about a second. I guess when a little black and white blur comes roaring out of the bushes at you with claws out and fangs bared, you have to respect the guts and assume it really can hurt you. I'm so impressed with our cat right now. She gets cheese tonight for sure.....Our cat rocks!

EFFING YAY!!!!

WE GOT THE FREAKIN' HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!

Sushi, Maki and More!

Wednesday's are my new favorite day of the week. There's this great little Sushi place not far from where we currently live that has a $1 track every Wednesday, all day. We went there last week and enjoyed ourselves, so decided to go ahead and try it out again this week...you know...to make sure they're consistently good. Totally. This is such a great restaurant! The place is crawling with regulars, and the owners and staff know most of the clientele by name (always a good sign at a Sushi place, you don't come back if they serve you a bad chunk of blowfish!). The service is really good, despite everyone running around a little frantically because of the sheer volume of people waiting for a spot at the bar. So...to any Portlanders reading this, go check out: Sushi Sushi on Foster at 83rd Ave. It's probably the best hole-in-the-wall place we've been to in quite a while, and I guarantee you won't get this kind of service anywhere else for this price!! Good selection of beers, too. I recommend TsingTao or Kirin for a nice clean finish.

Still waiting on the frickin' house. Boo!!

- J&K

Mondays Are...

Not so bad! I actually had a pretty uneventful and pleasant day! I rode part-way to school with Josh this morning and applied for a few crummy jobs at places I don't really want to work, then hopped the train out to Hillsboro and helped my brother Kory with some projects today. We did some mutual venting about how working for other people is dumb (I've been self-employed for several years, and I'm having trouble getting back into the groove of the corporate world...it sucks), and tried to come up with some new start-up businesses that would work for us. Anybody have a great business idea for me to exploit? Blah, blah...next.

Peder (Kory's partner/hubby) made a delectable assortment of Chinese nibbles for dinner including some very yummy egg rolls that I couldn't keep my hands off of, and I'm starting to pay the price!! We don't eat much in the way of fried foods, and my tummy is throwing a fit! (They were really, really tasty, Peder)

What goes better with Chinese food than a Chinese game? We played a quick hand of Mah Jong (the ACTUAL Mah Jong, not the matching game you often find online), before heading back into the city for our weekly Mah Jong night at our friends Joy and Bruce's house. Mondays are really special for us. Joy and Bruce are about the best friends anybody could ask for. They've done so much for us in the past few years, and we really enjoy the time we get to spend with them.

So....Yay!

Happy Monday!

Axis of Evil.....Defeated

After much hair-pulling, formatting and re-formatting, restoring and re-restoring...some sobbing, a little prayer and a bunch of screaming at innocent bystanders - I have crushed and defeated my opponent, the iPod. I have restored order to my iTunes library. My slightly SMALLER iTunes library, anyway. I'm still pretty pissed off about that. I keep finding more missing in little pockets, too. Bleh! Anyway, the point is that I have a beautifully arranged music folder that is now completely uniform and easy to navigate, and I successfully transfered most of my music to the tricky 40GB iMonster. We're friends again.

On a related topic:

I hate to admit it, but I'm really starting to enjoy Vista...it took me a year to really start appreciating this operating system. I'm a control freak, and Vista was constantly undermining my authority. I'm now resigned to enjoying it for what it is, which is pretty and flashy, put simply. Once you figure out how to 'take the power back' (it took me a few hours), it mostly runs like you're used to a PC running...it's getting more stable as the bugs are fixed to so I'm giving Vista an overall rating of '6' on a scale of 1-10. Not bad.

Unrelated topic:

Our house closing date has been pushed back, again, to the 13th....which is Tuesday. I'm really unhappy playing the waiting game with the damn foreclosing bank...anyone who reads this: Please think happy thoughts for us! We really need this to happen. Our neighborhood is scary and stabby(as in, broken-liquor-bottle-crackhead-stabby).

Sundays are OK.
- J&K

Saturdays are evil!!

iPods suck. I've been fighting with mine for a few days now....finally decided to just format and restore the damn thing. So...now I'm not so sure that was a good idea. I can't even get it to sync in iTunes now. I'm ripping my hair out. I KNOW computers....I UNDERSTAND hardware...but I don't get the iPod. I think it was designed to make me love it, then to rip out my heart and stomp on it with it's little Satan hooves and ruin my life (for a few days). It's sitting under a pile of dirty laundry in the corner of our bedroom now and it's staying there until I've calmed down and decided to forgive it for being evil. Oh....and it deleted 8 gigs of my music library from my hard drive...I cried. Saturdays are dumb.
Hugs!

- K&J

Hello!

OK...so, I've never done this before. I'm a total virgin. I mean, I've read a few blogs here and there...mostly my brothers'...but a few others. Anyway...I don't know why you would be interested in reading about my day to day life...but whatever pops your cork works for me. I kind of like the idea of you spying on me like this anyway...it gives me a kinda silly little thrill. So do it!!
My name is Kelsey. I live in Portland, Oregon (aka the Coolest City in America) with my husband Josh. I'm a guy. (Did I forget to tell you that??) We've been together for about 5 years and only want to kill each other a little every once in a while, so it's good. We have the coolest most bitchy cat I've ever met. Her name is Clio, she thinks she is a minor god and demands that kind of treatment. Whatever...she eats on the floor like every other cat I've owned and she still get's hucked out a window if she pisses one of us off in the middle of the night(I have a few stories to share about that later). I totally love her. Now...that said...I'm not a flaming, lap cat loving, limp-wristed, sassy-ass queen. I just happen to prefer the company of cats over dogs....which we will soon have also...an adorable and utterly retarded yellow lab named Butter....she's pretty cool though, I only sort-of hate her (she smells). She has the softest fur I've ever felt. You have to see/feel it to believe it. She belongs to my Ex, Jason....with whom we are buying a house. Creepy? Not really...Josh and Jason have been friends for a long time and Jason knows what he did. LOL. But, really....we all get along very well...it's a decent sized house on a HUGE lot....and Jason works a few hundred miles from here in the Columbia River Gorge and is only home a few days a week, so we can still play Guitar Hero or Halo 3 naked and drunk in the living-room if we want. It's pretty great.

The title of our blog is accurate. We are zymurgy hobbiests. We make our own beers, ciders, meads and fruit wines. It's something that we both really love doing. We also make our own cheeses, which is loads of fun and very rewarding. If you've never tried fresh, homemade ricotta or queso fresco, or panneer...you should try it out. It's so simple and tasty.

We're also vegetarian and hardcore organic gardeners. Last year we had a plot over 4000 square feet. When we were getting ready to move back to Portland in September I was really nervous about not having a garden space to go all zen in. I need the dirt to play in or I go crazy. There's just something extra special about growing your own food. We're both Pepperologists. We know all things Capsicum. Seriously...I will freak your freakin' freak...so will Josh. I love peppers from the sweetest sweet to the hottest hot, and we typically grow around 100 plants in about 15-20 varieties. Check out www.pepperjoes.com if you want to see/buy some cool peppers/seeds. He has nothing on us, but I still use his company as one of my sources....blah blah. Eat peppers, they're good for you, a'ight?

I think that's enough intro for now...hopefully you don't completely hate me yet....it'll take at least a few more postings for that. I do plan on getting all kinds of pictures on here, just not tonight. I'm tired and my butt hurts from sitting here. Have a great day and thanks for checking me out! It makes me feel special. :)

-Kelsey and Josh (even though all he did was tell me livingroom looks wrong as an un-hypenated word...like I care...May-be I sho-uld st-art hypen-ating every-thing)

Help Josh get a scholarship

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