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In honor of our pioneers, we went to eat at a Taiwanese restaurant today. We'd never been to one, and we'll probably go back despite the second picture. I ordered this pineapple fried rice, mainly for the presentation:



The menu made this item look amazing, and it was pretty tasty. But when they brought it to us, it had a generous helping of brown fur sprinkled on top. Or at least it seemed like fur. It might have been ground up spiders. Or ground up pineapple tree bark. If you can identify this, let us know what it was...unless it really was fur or spiders.


Speaking of presentation. I have been "cooking" a lot lately (one pudding pie on Sunday and chicken tacos on Wednesday). A lot. It's made me consider starting a cooking blog. I took pictures of my pie to get the blog rolling, but Jaime said my presentation is no good. I made sure to do the whole food bloggy thing of taking pictures at sort of strange angles:


and zooming in real close on the food and having super blurry backgrounds:


But no, it wasn't good enough for Top Chef Jaime. Apparently pudding isn't supposed to look like this:



Doesn't all pudding come out with a few strange bubbles in it? Jaime refused to eat it because of the looks. But I got her back. The main ingredient in my chicken tacos on Wednesday was days-old pudding pie. Choke on that, Jaime! You've got to see the above image large. It's pretty amazing how I messed up something as simple as combining powder with liquid and stirring!

Anyhow, back to our day. After leaving the restaurant, I had to stop and take this picture:

We joked before going in to the restaurant that we hoped we wouldn't have to visit that place after eating the food. But after eating ground up spider fur, it might not be a bad idea.

Later on, we decided to continue honoring the pioneers by seeing a soccer game. Jaime got some groupon tickets for the game. When we got there, they were going to make us pay $5 for parking, but we showed them. All we had in the form of cash was $2.25. And they didn't take it. Usually, I would ask Tess for the money. I took her with me to a shoe store the other day to find running shoes, and somehow (because I am one of THOSE dads) we ended up with no shoes but a Dora the Explorer backpack instead. When she brought it to me, she said, "Can we bring this home, Dada." (She calls me Dada when she wants something). So, I said to her, "Do you have money to pay for it?" And she said yes, reached in to her imaginary pocket, pulled out the exact imaginary change and then held her hand up to me. She pays for most of our expenses these days the same way.

Anyhow, I couldn't get her to pay for parking because she had fallen dead asleep in the car. For the first 30 minutes of the game, we played Weekend at Bernie's with her and she never woke up:



This last picture is when she finally did wake up. Cheering on the Atlanta Silverbacks. Or the Silbacks or Soda Babs or Braves as she called them.

Dedicated to Erin...

I actually had this whole thing written up before your comment on my last post. Very good timing!

I love photoshop. It may seem strange or cheating (it's definitely cheating), but I sometimes take a picture, load it on to the computer and think, "Well, that's not the way I remembered that," or, "That's not how I want to remember that." For example, I was trying to get a picture one day of Tess catching bubbles. But I was taking the pictures on an old phone, and I couldn't get fast enough to get the bubbles in between her hands:


So, I went in to photoshop and made it the way I had intended...the way I wanted to remember it:


A few more examples. Like this one at the beach in Jersey. This image by itself doesn't do the beach justice:


But a simple stitching together of multiple images did the trick, and this is how I wanted to remember it:


Here's one of Tess showing us all the stickers she put on herself:


But this is how I remember it:

(I don't want to brag too much, but you can see in the original, Tess didn't have the top of her head. I really shouldn't brag about that actually, since it was a very easy fix...)

This is a really old one of Tess walking down our driveway at Easter in 2010:


But in my mind, it was much more like this:


Really the whole purpose of this post was for those last two photoshopped images.

Tseas or Saste

We had the missionaries over for dinner on Wednesday, and while we were chatting before dinner, one of the missionaries asked Tess if she knew how to spell her name. It was a bizarre conversation:

Him: Tess, do you know how to spell your name?
Tess: It has an S!
Him: It sure does. Do you know how to spell the whole thing?
Tess: It has an A!
Me: You're right, but do you know how to spell it?
Tess: It has another S!
Me: What else?
Tess: A T!
Me: And...
Tess: E!

I thought it was really strange, but also pretty amazing that she knew all the letters. Although, I'm not entirely sure she does know how to actually spell her name. Here's a picture that had a similar result as the conversation above:



So, I thought, "She's either a mixed-up genius, a smart-aleck or a little dummy." But then I started going through her emails, and found this forwarded message from one of her co-workers that somewhat cleared things up:

Subject: From Cambridge University. Olny srmat poelpe can raed tihs.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs psas it on !!"

We srue do lkie our sarmt ltilte Tssea. We mghit eevn lvoe her at tihs piont.