Laughing While Crying

Okay, I know I already posted today, but seriously, this couldn't wait. Watch this video; the ending is the best part.



Yes, I am laughing at my own child. Her outburst was just so random! Later, after more people got in the pool and did what Luke did, we realized that it was the coming up out of the water that scares the living daylights out of her.

She's a trooper though, she ended up thinking that the pool wasn't so bad – so long as no one was popping up out of the water while she was watching.

We'll have to go swimming again when the sun is shining on the pool and the water is a little bit warmer!

(By the way this is my new favorite picture. Look at those smiles! The two most important people in my life...I love them tons!)

The Mecham Cooking Show

Chevy’s (the restaurant) serves this small, yellow, corn-ball/lump of deliciousness on the side of some of their entrées. I love the stuff. If Chevy’s had an entrée featuring said corn-ball/lump I would order it and eat all of it – and not share.

Anyway, I found a recipe for Ecuadorian Humitas and thought to myself “Hey, that kind of looks like the stuff at Chevy’s and I have corn coming out of my ears (pun intended) so I am going to try and make Ecuadorian Humitas.”

We bought a fancy new steamer (something I’ve wanted for a while) and went to work.
Luke helped me by stripping the corn off the cob and blending everything together. I love it when he helps me cook; I think that it’s…never mind, it’s inappropriate.

First we husk the corn and par-boil the husks.



Then we de-cob the corn.


After that we blend the corn with the other ingredients.



Then we cut up the cheese and mix it in with the stuff we blended up.


Then we put the corn and cheese glop/paste into the corn husks and fold into a nice pocket. Pockets are tied closed with strips of corn husk.


Then we steam for a half hour – which turned into like 40 minutes.



TA DA! The finished product.



So Ecuadorian Humitas turned out to be nothing like whatever corn concoction of yummy-scrumptiousness that Chevy’s gives you. But they were still quite tasty. The cheese melted in random parts of the humita, which made it really good – like a cheesy, tasty surprise. We ate them with burritos and I ate them IN burritos for the next couple of days.

Because I felt like a failure because I didn’t replicate the Chevy’s corn-ball/lump, I went searching on the internet for the recipe. I found it (Sweet Corn Tomalitos). Now I’ve just got to find masa harina flour; I’ve been to two different grocery stores only to come home empty handed.




P.S. This is a random photo taken by Luke. These are some of the organic potatoes we got a couple of weeks ago with the weekly delivery. Luke found them rather pathetic. After living in Idaho for so long he expects more out of his potatoes - for them to be larger, for example. I have to admit...they are rather puny. They still taste good, though!

$2 Tuesday - a "Wild" Adventure

Last week it was $2 Tuesday at the Oregon Zoo. We only live ten minutes from the zoo, you can’t beat two bucks and we needed to take an adventure, so the Mecham family packed a lunch and went to the zoo.

It was craziness. Holy line of all lines! We got there around 10 A.M. and the line down the street was at least a 150 yards long, and that was just the line to get into the lines to buy your ticket to get into the zoo. I was imaging my mother being there and I had to laugh at the thought of her hyperventilating with all those people crammed together – she’s not one for crowds.

When we got into the zoo we went straight to the lorikeets. As a kid this was always my favorite part of the zoo. You buy this cup of nectar for a dollar and you go into the lorikeet enclosure and the birds fly down and land on you and eat the nectar out of the cup you are holding in your hand. Good times! I, of course, wanted to share this experience with Luke. But the lorikeet nectar lady said that they were already full from all the people who had fed them already (which is stinking pathetic considering the exhibit opened less than a half an hour before we got there; yeah, that’s how many people were there.) So I boycotted the lorikeets and decided that if we couldn’t feed them then we weren’t even going to waste our time in their exhibit. HA!

*There is an orangutan in the box being ever so modest and covering up it's privates. "Thank you for the thoughtful consideration Mr. Orangutan. No visitor wants to be emotionally scarred at the zoo. Especially not on such a wonderful day as $2 Tuesday."*

*Eating lunch*

Aslynn actually looked at animals and was somewhat interested. The last zoo we went to, not so much;she was just along for the ride at that one. She liked the sea lions the best. Luke took her right up to the glass and this one sea lion just kept swimming loop-de-loops right past where they were standing. Z had this look on her face of “Oh my gosh, that thing is huge! WOW! Cool! Is it coming back?”

Luke bounced Z to sleep for her nap as we watched the “Predators of the Sky” show. He liked how all the birds of prey flew down by the audience and then to their perches. He decided that next time we go to the zoo we have to be in the actual audience sitting on the grass; he has even picked out the spot we are going to sit.

*This monkey had some serious beef (either that or it just didn't want us to watch it eat it's lunch) with Luke. It stopped eating and stared straight at Luke for like 5 minutes. I thought that it was going to hurl itself through the chain-link and glass and smash Luke's head like a coconut.*

*Are these pig/warthog-things not the ugliest thing you have ever seen?*

*Teenage elephant*

When we left the zoo at 1:30 PM (we had to go home and get some work done) the line was just as long as when we had first gotten there. Gross.
All in all, it was a great adventure!

Quickberry! Quackberry! Pick Me a Blackberry!

Here in the valley blackberry bushes grow like weeds. In fact, most people here consider them weeds; Luke and I saw blackberry bush killer in the weed killer section of Home Depot (our new second home since we’ve taken on this management job). This was a shock to us because we can’t even imagine killing the bushes that produce such tasty berries.

People – like my mother and grandmother – from central Oregon drive for hours over the mountains to get to the blackberry bushes that grow here. A couple of weeks ago, Luke and I got wind that a trip was being planned by the matriarchs of my family to come and pick blackberries because their stashes of blackberry jam were running dangerous low.

Poor Luke had never been blackberry picking (or any type of berry picking, for all I know) – yet another thing he was deprived of growing up in the desert. So we decided to go. We drove for an hour, pulled off the highway at this little town and toolie-bopped down the local roads to the berry patch.

My mother tried to warn Luke about how blackberry bushes bite you and the other hidden dangers of berry picking (eating more than you put in your bucket, spiders, purple fingers, berries that commit berricide which is the blackberry equivalent of suicide. It’s when the berries are so ripe and delicious that they don’t want to be picked so they fall off the bush right as you are going to reach for them, never to be seen again.)

Luke was brave though, and jumped into – sometimes literally – the thick of it and started picking away. There were times when he would yelp and holler in pain, but those times were forgotten/worth it whenever he found a really good berry. He would take his pruners and cut away any vine that was blocking his way to a good cluster of berries. He was ruthless; but let’s face it, blackberries = weeds = no one cares.


I talked my little sister, Missy, into coming with to “help with the berry picking because everyone needs to have the experience”…aka: babysit.

*This was toward the end and Z was getting bored.*

I think that I picked one too many blackberries when I was a kid and now I can’t stand them; I think they are gross. So I did not do any picking. I walked around with the camera, taking pictures and finding more spots to pick so that mom and Luke didn’t have to find them themselves when they finished picking in one area. (Whew! That was a doozy of a wordy sentence! Sorry, I am too lazy to rewrite it.)

*Luke's bucket...but he picked even more after this picture was taken*

My grandma was on a roll off in her own area. She’s a lone ranger of sorts. Her bucket was over-flowing by the time we got her to stop.

We had a lot of fun! We finished off the day by eating lunch together at a yummy hamburger restaurant and then we all went our separate ways. Luke is excited to get his blackberry jam made from the very berries he helped pick!

*Everyone and their purple fingers from picking berries. Except for Z...she's just following the crowd.*

...Where Life is Beautiful All the Time

This past week or so has been pretty crazy!

Crazy Number One: Our apartment complex has a pool. One would think that this is a GREAT thing; the problem is that the pool has been broken for over a year. We have been trying to fix it since we started to work here.
Well, temperatures in the hundreds last week brought out some frustrated residents, angry corporate VP’s, confused apartment managers and hard-working pool fixing men; hopefully the pool will be up and running before the end of the week. (Luke has put enough shock in the water to melt someone’s skin off if they try to swim in it now. I don’t know who would want to because it is still sort of brownish/greenish.)

Crazy Number Two: Portland is supposed to be rainy right? Since we’ve been here it hasn’t rained. It’s been HOT!

Our apartment doesn’t have air conditioning and the sun sets on the one wall in our house with two huge windows and a sliding glass door. The temperature gets pretty high in the apartment so the Mecham family seeks shelter (with A/C) elsewhere whenever possible. We go to the malls, Home Depot, you get the idea. Our trip to IKEA and Target produced some nifty curtains designed to keep out the heat. It helped a little. But I say that any help is more than we got before so, LONG LIVE CURTAINS!
Luke is used to the heat, but he is also used to it cooling down at night. It hasn’t been cooling down here. We’ve learned that it’s hard to sleep comfortably in an 85 degree apartment – even with the fans blowing – and impossible to snuggle with your spouse (because your skin sticks to the other person’s skin and it makes this gross peeling noise when you try and unsitck yourself…it’s uncomfortable; you get the point.)
Z hates the heat too. She’s also cutting in her first tooth so that makes her even crankier. To help with the heat, we just let her run around in a diaper. I admit I am jealous.
Enough whining! Let me tell you a little bit about our lives here in Portland.
I love it here. I love Oregon. I love the green.

I even love driving here in the freeway traffic– as long as I am the one doing the driving. Luke doesn’t trust my maps and so he tries not to follow them sometimes. 9.999 times out of 10 my directions are perfectly fine and get us there in a timely manner. I’ve learned that if I drive it is a lot less stressful.

I am a sucker for hole-in-the-wall restaurants and Portland has a TON of them. I can’t wait to go try some!

I love the location of where we live. Our complex is surrounded by huge trees; it is like we live in the forest.
*Aslynn's new favorite way to fall asleep. I'm not sleeping - Luke told me not to look at the camera.*
We inherited a membership to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) group. They deliver fresh organic produce to our house every Monday. We have vegetables coming out of our ears. We are never able to use it all, so I often feel wasteful.
A couple of times we’ve gotten vegetables that I have never seen before. I have to use Google to find what it is and how I can cook it.
All the produce gives me a reason to find more recipes and try them out – though I haven’t been cooking a whole lot because it’s been too hot. We’ve been eating a lot of cold sandwiches. But we get at least two heads of lettuce a week so our sandwiches are AMAZING. (Yes, to me a sandwich with lettuce makes all the difference in the world.)

On Saturday I wanted to go to the county fair because I was craving some fair food – elephant ears, giant fajitas, etc. Plus, it was free admission!

So I finally talked Luke into going. Poor kid had never been to a real fair before so he wasn’t fully prepared for the experience. He was impressed with all the stuff there was to do and see. I told him the Deschutes County fair was even better. I wore him out before I was finished looking at everything. Still, the whole things seems to have left a good taste in his mouth (I was trying to be punny…we had a gyro and it was wonderful) because Luke wants to go to the Oregon State fair at the end of this month.