Officially Hooked Up!

Well it's official. We are now "on the line" and "all set up." We sold a small part of our souls to Comcast last night and finally tech-ed up our apartment. We now personally have cable & internet in our very own living room! Thanks to Justin & Beth and the Barre Boys for your willingness to facilitate our Lost addiction the past few weeks, and we apologize to whoever we were piggy backing off of for wireless. It won't happen again! :)


Aaron is especially excited now that we can watch women's figure skating! Bring on the Olympics!

Finally - WEDDING PICTURES!

Here is a sneak peek of the wedding pictures. There are way too many to post here (and it takes forever), but you can access the rest in the Picassa web albums I created:

http://picasaweb.google.com/camillemadsen/WeddingTemple

http://picasaweb.google.com/camillemadsen/WeddingReception

or on Facebook.

Enjoy!

Shout Out to Ashley

I just wanted to give a shout out and congratulations to my good friend and fellow BYU MPHer, Ashley Suker for her successful defense of her Masters Project last Thursday! Hooray for passing academic rites of passage! The worst if now over!

JAMAICA or bust!

It's official! We have booked our belated honeymoon!

We're going here:

To stay here:

To lay out here:

And pretty much have a blissful vacation! June can't come soon enough!

PS - My patience was rewarded on Wednesday with not one, but TWO packages! Wedding pictures are coming soon, but unfortunately our Internet is MIA until Tuesday and my computer at work apparently doesn't have a DVD drive... I know. What are the odds. But they're coming soon, promise! Love from Baltimore!

WAITING

I hate waiting for mail, but I love getting it! My parents sent us a package forever ago (ok like 5 days ago), and everyday I come home and ask, "Did the package come." And Aaron always gets this sad look on his face and says, "nope!" I'm a little obsessed now. But I blame it on the fact that the mail didn't deliver for at least a week because of the storms, and on the on-line tracking feature of the USPS. I've been following the package multiple times a day for the last few days. I'ts been in Baltimore since Sunday - hurry up and get to my apartment! Hopefully it comes today!!



PS - The package contains a disk of the wedding pictures (another reason for my impatience), so stay tuned for that post! Assuming the package ever arrives. :)

Snowpocalypse

SNOW!!! and lots of it has been falling, falling. . . Last Friday a major snow storm hit Baltimore and left us a beautiful 2 feet of snow! It was beautiful, but it closed the city of Baltimore for the weekend. We enjoyed a nice long weekend trapped inside, but made the most of it. We played a lot of Settlers (and made addicts out of some our friends), Boggle, cards, etc. We also ventured out in the snow to walk the streets and clear off the car.


Monday the roads were somewhat drivable, but our car was still trapped by the two feet of snow in the unplowed roads.


We were all geared up for Tuesday and I was ready to fly out to one of my best friend's wedding, but apparently the weather was gearing up as well and the threat of another 6-10 inches of snow canceled my flight. :( This second storm hit later Tuesday afternoon and was pretty harsh. It was a lot windier and created drifts. We still don't know how much more snow fell as some places had nothing on the ground and a few feet away was up to our knees! (Not that I really know, I didn't go out but Aaron did.)

To top it all off the University of Maryland opened again for school today, so I assumed Hopkins did as well. Not so. I rode the bus all the way to work (which took an amazingly long time and I had to walk further to catch my bus due to weather limitations), but when I went to get in the row house where the office is located I found the front door locked! I couldn't even get into the key pad to get into the building proper. Foiled in my attempts I called my boss who was surprised, but told me to go home and that we'll get back to work on Monday. Good times.

Well here are some other pics from a little excursion we took a couple weeks ago up to the Inner Harbor.

Domestication

When Aaron and I first moved here to Baltimore and undertook our "move in" grocery excursion Aaron suggested that we buy baking basics (flour, sugar, baking soda, etc.). My first thought was, "I'm pretty sure I told him I don't bake." I don't know if he saw the look on my face or just felt the nonexcitement emanating from my mind, but he continued saying that he thought it would be fun for us to bake together. He said he always saw the married guys bring homemade cookies they had made with their wives and thought it would be fun. I was hesitant, but what kind of wife would I be if I refused to buy flour? Don't get me wrong, I really like to cook... but I'm not known for my baking skills! But we collected all the necessary items from the baking aisle and continued with our shopping.

A couple weeks later Aaron suggested that we make some chocolate chip cookies. I was a little less hesitant as I was excited for cookies and something we could do together. We faithfully followed the recipe on the back of the chocolate chips package and made some pretty delicious cookies... that even stayed soft until they were all eaten! (May not seem like a big deal to most of you, but it is for me.) I was pleased with our baking experience. Although Aaron liked the cookies he said that he generally liked his chocolate chip cookies chewier. Although we didn't do anything about it then, the unintended challenge was issued and I felt the need to make chewier chocolate chip cookies!

So yesterday I had a hankering to be in the kitchen, but we had been invited to our bishop's house for dinner so I didn't need to make dinner. I decided that I would try making some different cookies... I originally wanted to make sugar cookies, but I had shot down purchasing shortening and was subsequently thwarted in my sugar cookie desires... darn kharma. So I decided to try my hand at chewier chocolate chip cookies.

Thanks to Martha Stewart's Soft and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe, I believe my attempt was a success! After some issues with the baking time were solved, the chewy chocolate chip cookies were just about perfect!

Any other tips of easy baking recipes we could try our hand at?