Happy Seventh Babe!!

I love you more than my luggage!

Signs of the Times

Saw this at a building site while Traveling in Malaysia and couldn't help but take a picture...

I think someone might need to tell them what prosecute means

Animals!!

Recently we ended up with quite the menagerie in our backyard.  Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but see for yourself.

The Beelining Tortroise

While driving home from work my brother, Todd, saw a tortoise crossing the road and, bless him, he had to stop and save the wee soul from getting run over.  They are widening Queen Creek Rd in Gilbert and if that tortoise was making it a habit of crossing the road, her days were numbered because it is a high traffic road and Todd was surprised to be able to find it alive when he turned around to go back for it.

She's almost there...

Well, he didn't have time to take it home because he was meeting Christina and the girls for dinner; so on his way he thought it better to drop it off at our house.  I tried finding it some vituals but it had no interest in any of that nonsense and beelined it (as much as a tortoise can beeline anything (see the story "The Tortoise and the Hare)) for our grapevines as a nice resting spot from her stress encounter.  It stayed there until Todd and Tyla came and picked her up to give her a more permanent home in their backyard, and proper name.  Tyla, the animal-lover that she is, was beaming from ear to ear and got to hold it on her lap for the drive home.

The Wee Soul

 Later that week, Rosie found this little guy in our bedroom.  I've seen plenty of Geccos in our backyard but never in our house and this looks nothing like the geccos I've seen around.  When she found it, it was quite a surprise and it gave her a good startle.  She screamed, "Bug!" and ran to me in our bathroom.  She is now educated abit more about the difference between lizards and bugs.  To her defense she only got glance of it before turning and running. 
Obviously I got to relocate it to a potted plant in our back yard, but it didn't stay there long as it was gone when I got home from work.

Time with family

Logan, Tommy, and Everett

We love spending time with family, but it is particularly more fun when the Skinners are in town and the whole fam damily gets together.  I think Everett may like it more than anyone because he likes him his Tommy and Logan.  I really love this picture that Rosie prompted me to take.

Travels

Singapore and the the path up to JB
and Melaka

What can I say, I like to travel.  I don't get a lot of opportunity for it compared to a lot of people that travel for business and that is probably why I still like it.  I like to experience other cultures and see different sites that the world has to offer, but most of all I like to taste the different foods.

Earlier this year I made the usual trip to a supplier in Malaysia (they always pick us up from Changi Airport in Singapore even though there is a samller airport in JB) but this time I got to spend more time down in Johor Bahru (JB) and I actually spent part of the weekend there which I had never had the justification to do in the past.

View from my room

The supplier there takes pretty good care of us and has an agreement with the local resort that they tell us to use for a really good rate (~$60 per night) and since Intel has no qualified hotel in the area we typically stay at that resort.  The area is very tropical and really pretty.  They have a golf course I would like to play on some day and as you would expect it is beautiful as well.  I've heard the cost of playing it is fairly inexpensive and my plan was to give it a try on the Saturday that I was there with some rented clubs, but the supplier I was visiting had other ideas.



View of Golf Course
from my Room

A couple of the guys I have developed pretty good relationships with at the supplier I was visiting took personal time from their weekend to take me to the famous old time port city of Melaka though it's not really a port city any more because of the development of Singapore, to the south, and Penang, to the north, years go. On the way we stopped at the local zoo and walked around for a while and I got to snap a few pictures.

 

We saw a lot more than I took pictures of but add to the fact that I'm not very good about taking pictures that I'm not a big zoo fan and the pictures were very limited.

We continued travelling to the port area and inside the city they have a historical area famous for what is called baba y nonya which was for teh mixing of the local Malay (Muslim) culture with the Chinese culture.  It's famous because nowadays the chinese person in the relationship would be required to convert to Islam but back then they weren't and are still exempt from the law.  We went to a restaurant that merges the food of the cultures and it was very good.  They talked me into trying a drink that they call "The Michael Jackson" and it was okay.  I would drink it again except that since coming back have learned that it is most often made with black tea and while I'm not 100% sure that the one I had was made with it, I'm greater than 50% sure it was.  There is an actual name for the drink but they call it the Michael Jackson because it's black and white.  I thought it was funny.

We saw a lot more but given my picture taking "prowess" I didn't think to take nearly enough pictures.  They took me to a restaurant for dinner that they claimed was really famous and apparently it was because when we go there they had a line about 50 yards out and we decided to try one nearby that did the same type of food (basically it was a fondu restaurant and they were really impressed with this new style of eatery) and it was pretty good but they said the other restaurant would have been better.

After that it was time to back to work.  I flew up to Penang to meet back up with my boss for a day before he flew out to China.  Evidently he and our other travelling companion had a good weekend as well but tehy went snorkelling off of another island about an hour boat ride from Penang and both of them weren't burnt like lobsters.  That night we went to dinner at a Korean BBQ restaurant that was all-you-can-eat, but the BBQ isn't as good as most places.  The following night we made our typical pilgrimage to Bali Hai that I have spoke of in a previous blog with lots and lots of seafood followed by some of the greatest fruit on earth.  My favorite is the Jack Fruit, but I love the Mango and Papaya that comes out with it all on ice.

The rest of the trip was all business, but while staying at the G Hotel I was within walking distance of a lot of restaurants and shopping.  I had to make a trip or two to a Nasi Kandar (Rice on Wheels) and get my typical Tandoori Chicken, Chicken Masala, Roti Chanai, and Naan Bread.  I love that restaurant and make it a point to visit the place everytime I'm there.  Usually it's with other people and I don't get as much of a look about the food order as I do when alone like I was this time.  To be honest it was a lot of food for one person and while I still wasn't entirely full (the rest would have jsut been over-indulgence) I didn't dare order more.  All told though the meal was less than $20 so I wasn't feeling guilty about it.

Kid Watching

 A while back Rosie volunteered us, as she always does for anniversaries and other special occasions, to watch our nephew.  Only thing was John was planning to go to Uncle Donalds to fill out papers for elk and antelope hunting as well as having dinner and didn't think about that potentially being an issue with having Bubby (aka Everett) tag along.
In the end we got permission from his mother and took him with us.  He was loving the adventure of seeing all the goats, pigs, horses, chickens, and cows that were right next door as well as spending time with his cousin, Tyla. We had some great food and then went out back by the fire and sat around telling lies and other hunting stories.  While this was going on Bubby found that if he brought me orangs from the trees I would keep peeling them and he would get the peels.

Mind you, he didn't eat but maybe on slice from the first orange that he brought to me. He was only interested in getting the peels so he could go over to the goats and feed them through the fence.  I 'm not sure what he might have thought of the experience had he been right in the middle of them but I think he might have been okay with it.

(You can't really see the goats because it was dark but there were a bunch of them)

We had a great time and as usual he didn't want to leave which for the most part was okay with Uncle John but we ended up staying way too long and way past his normal bed time which was not at all okay with Mommy.  I'm not sure that we'll get an opportunity again like this for that very reason, but we had a great time and hope that I might be able to earn back some level of trust again in the future.

Bread!!!

Lately John has been making homemade bread to make sure that if our food storage had to be used that he new how to actually cook with it.  A friend in the ward had sent a recipe on youtube for kneadless bread and while the first loaf didn't look or turn out terribly well but it tasted good and was good enough to prompt him to try once more.  The 2nd was fantastic and we shared it with the O'Hares (sorry to John's family who were the ginnie pigs on the first loaf) and it was gone by midafternoon.
The recipe for this loaf is at:
Kneadless_Bread
and the instructions at points are a little ambiguous (Hence the first loaf fiasco), but if you read some of the comments that go with the video you can start to make some inferences as to what to do to get things to work out.  It's really crusty bread but was great with Butter and Jelly.
With the 2nd loaf success he started clicking around to other potential "Easy Bread" options and came across this "ciabatta bread" recipe:
No_Knead_Ciabatta_Bread
It was really just another bread but ciabatta just sounds better.  John decided to stir it up a little and cut some rosemary from our bush growing in the back and put it on half of the loaf.  It turned out well and we both loved it with the rosemary, but it wasn't as nice with Jelly.  I'm sure the other half would be and in the end this one was like the first just shaped differently.
John was nice enough to allow me to have the "butt" of the loaf.  He's still experimenting with options and we hope that you can have some fun with some of these options he has found so far.