Outside work...

In order to tie this post anywhere remotely close to work, you'll have to check back here to see the cooking we did at the station http://mommy-medic.blogspot.com/2008/12/random-comments-and-suicide.html. I have been a big fan of "The Pioneer Woman" for a while. I love following her blog and trying the amazing recipes! She released a cookbook (that you need to go get if you like to cook. If you can make toast or chocolate milk, you can probably follow several of her recipes. It's firefighter proof- there are pictures to follow along!)

So, I discovered her blog, followed along, and learned about her brother, Mike: http://thepioneerwoman.com/blog/2008/09/of_mike_and_firemen/. I read about mike and felt compelled to send Mike some souvenirs (as did many other people! I was amazed at the response and love for Mike! http://thepioneerwoman.com/blog/2008/10/nicenesses/ )

Ree, The Pioneer Woman, did a book tour and came to my home town! I was pretty excited (OK, I was REALLY excited) and went to the book store to stand in line. There was a much larger turnout that I expected- I got there shortly after the event started and the book store was giving everyone color coded wrist bands and making people wait according to color and letter. They told us it would be about an hour's wait. An hour came and went. It was getting late and having not eaten, I checked to see how quickly the line was moving. Determining that I had a lot of time still to kill, I went to go eat some sushi and came back. The line still wound through the aisles of books, and my color group had yet to be called.

I sat and watched those who had gone through the line. It was fun to hear all the stories and chatter of the people coming through. Everyone was very pleasant, which is something fairly uncommon in a large group of "general public"- there's usually at least one in every crowd who will be rude or irritating, but I never saw anybody like that last night.

I waited patiently and it was finally my turn! (And I have no clue what blogspot has done to the picture quality here, because it looks NOTHING like this on my photoshop but I can't seem to make it transfer to here correctly- something is going terribly wrong here!)

I got to meet Hyacinth and Betsy too- Ree's friend and sister. Ladies you three were super nice- I don't see how you smiled and were patient and polite for so many hours, but I'm so glad you did the tour and really very thankful that I was able to go! Off to try a new recipe- the cowboy sandwich (Hyacinth I promised) .

Make sure to check the more recent posts too- a lot can happen pretty quickly around here.