Umm...Hi? We went to India?

Sooo...It's been 8 months. We're ready to blog again.

INDIA! We will jump back in to weblog world with a SUPER post (read: long and boring) about our recent experience in India. It was only two weeks, but it was still quite an adventure, so we're probably going to spread it out among posts that are more than one. If there end up being more than one. We'll see.

Chapter 1: India: Getting There, Dammit

We went to the India during the last week of May and the first week of June. It was Mary's second International adventure and Mike's first so, while she was raring to go, we had to baby-step it a bit for the delightfully cautious Michael.

The carefully planned and researched trip was to include five or six days in Rishikesh, India, and four or five full days in Pohkara/Kathmandu, Nepal.

Ah, hilarious.

So, we arrived at the airport, our belongings pared down to only one impressive pack and our separate small carry-on bags, and gave the woman at the counter our passports to scan. We were ready to take on the world!!

“And your visas? Do you have your visas?”

We looked at each other. Then at her. “Visas? Ummmmmmm…”

That was when Betty Eagle of Continental (that was her name. Betty Eagle. Faaaantastic.) informed us that we would NOT be going to India that day. Now, Mary, as some of you may know, is quite well known for her calm demeanor in the face of chaos. She’s FAMOUS for it, in fact. So this in no way incited tears, tantrums, panic-attacks or vicious swearing of any kind.

Yes, but on a serious note, Betty Eagle lived up to the majesty of her name and did all kinds of things that her managers would likely frown upon to make sure that this glitch was relatively painless and somewhat inexpensive. In the end, we only lost a couple of days and we only spent the money that we had been saving to go bungee jumping to buy return tickets.

…Oh yeah, Mike's Mom: We were going to go bungee jumping in Nepal. But we weren't going to tell you about it until we had successfully not died. Wasn't that sweet of us?

Anyway, we discovered that in order to get our visas, we would have to show up in person at the India consulate's office for our territory. Which was in San Francisco. California. So we hopped in a rental car and high tailed it the 12 hours up there.

...Can I just say that if we had lived in Hawaii and had the same trouble, we would have been way more screwed.

So take THAT, tropical paradise! Your morons are more inconvenienced than the morons that live on the mainland when it comes to International travel specifically involving India! Cry into your Spam, Hawaii.

In our defense: it is a common thing to receive your visa upon entering a country. It was that way for Peru and Nepal and every country Mike's globe-trotting parents have been to. So, when Mike was making travel arrangements, he reasonably was under the impression that India would be the same way. And, when we got there, dual-citizenship people were being forced to renounce their Indian citizenship in order to apply for a visa due to new Indian stipulations, so I get the feeling that India is just all sorts of wackadoodle.

Anyway, we left four days late and arrived in Delhi on a Tuesday night and were promptly whisked away to our guest house, Cottage Yes Please--popular for its proximity to the train station and probably also for its super fun name. Here's our mosquito net fort, meant to save us from all things buggy:

Which worked, as long as "all things buggy" doesn't include "bed bugs." We weren't really sure that's what they were at first and we spent our two nights there adorably calling them "Blood Suckery Guys." I think that's a little something called Self Preservation. We refused to acknowledge them for what they were until we were home. Of course, it’s been about a month and Mary’s still talking in her sleep about Bed Bugs.

She misses the false security of the net.

Good times.

Next up: Delhi. And Tales of Michael: Nervous & Uncomfortable.

To Be Continued...And: Agua!

...We haven't disappeared again. We swear. We just have been working on so many projects that we haven't had time to finish any in particular, let alone post about them.

But here are some teaser photos:

Some are old, some are new, some are currently a total disaster. Either way, we're working on it. And when we have something a little more substantial to share, we promise that we will...We're thinking November 1st might be a good day...

Emphasis on might.

Oh! Also! While you wait-- with baited breath, I'm sure-- you can check out this super-duper great etsy shop filled with other people's projects...that are much less self-serving than ours:

It's called "Water4Christmas" and it is raising money to build clean-water wells in Africa. More than four thousand children die every day due to a lack of clean water, and a group of crafty ladies have donated their time and art to raise money for this cause, so go and take a look!

Plus, their stuff is craaaaazy cute.

The Re-ReBirth of a Coffee Table

Before Mary headed off to Peru, I created a list of all of the projects that I had been meaning to do (and some that I hadn't) so that I wouldn't get bored without her.

This project here is a coffee table that Mary found on Big Trash Pick-up Day when she was 16. It's been with her through high school, college and married life and it was time to give it a makeover.

As usual, I forgot to take a "Before" picture. In the picture below, though, you can mostly see the old finish-- if you don't pay attention to where I had already begun removing the finish with stripper and a scraper. The table had a lot of problems, but here's a map of its most notable landmarks:


And that worked for a while- to get the main stuff off- but I eventually had to switch to the electric sander to make it a really clean finish. Then I used sandpaper on the edges and the little grooves where the sander couldn't reach.

And from all of that hard work came this guy:


Then I tried putting on a Medium stain, which came out SUPER light, so I switched to a Dark Oak color and the results were this (sorry for the blurriness. I was using a broken camera):
The final step was applying a spar urethane finish to protect it from UV rays and water.

You can see how pretty it looks in our living room:
I also gave the legs and underside a rub-down with some stain to cover up any nicks and scratches. The color did end up still being lighter than it was originally, so it's like having a slightly brand new table.

Slightly.

On Tap

Sorry it has been so long since a Michael Update. Mary and I actually brewed a beer back in July. First off, the type of beer was kind of special because what we had wanted to do was find a recipe that matched one of our favorite local beer: Kiltlifter. It's a Scottish Ale that we often get at Four Peaks Brewery.

Secondly, this was gong to be our first time kegging! Our good friend, Matt, recently moved away and, before he left, he passed down his very nice set of kegging equipment, including keg-erator.

We found a recipe at out local brew store, The Brewer's Connection, that was supposed to be very similar to Kiltlifter called "Plaid Skirt Scottish Ale."

So we bought supplies for that and prepped our brewing station. Set-up was, basically, the same but for this recipe, we needed grains and malt extracts, making it a fair amount more involved than our first beer.

Ingredients.
These were the grains. There's not really much to say about them. They just looked like grains to me.

We put the grains in this nice porous bag.

And then we added them to the brew-salted water.

(Mmmmmm.....grains.)

And, just to make Mary panic, I drained the grains by balancing the strainer precariously on the lid of the pot.

Then we added the tasty molasses.

...and of course the hops.

Then we filtered out the hops before adding the yeast and bucketing up the beer.
We then sealed up the bucket and let it sit in the bathtub again to turn into beer.

Which it did.

Our personal beer critic, Jeremiah, agreed that, while the beer was similar to Kiltlifter, it didn't share the same sharp aftertaste. But it was still really delicious.

Maybe even better. If you're not into "aftertaste."

And: One of the benefits of brewing with whole grains is that you can bake with the leftover grains. Here is a picture of one of the loaves of bread that I made:

Success!

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'...

So, something else I felt like I needed for my trip-- but, it turned out, very much did not-- was some kind of bag or cover for my Yoga mat. You see, as I was being offered free Yoga in return for my farm-handery, I figured lugging my mat all the way to South America was necessary.

It was not.

Eh. Either way, I got a Mat Roll out of it.

For the main part, I used some brown corduroy material leftover from my Inigo Montoya costume from 200...6? I had orginally planned for the thing to be just a bit longer than my mat. I rolled the mat out and eyeballed the measurements.

When my logic kicked in, however, I realized how bulky this would make it once it was rolled up and cut that son of a cow in half.

Then I simply hemmed the edges a bit and began frantically searching for something to tie it closed with.

I found nothing and so made some REALLY poorly constructed ties out of leftover stretchy headband fabric. On a day when I have the patience to not light my sewing macine on fire, I will redo the ties. Because they're crap. But the purple sure looks pretty!

Anyway, then it dawned on me that I might want a convenient way to carry the thing, and another frantic search for materials began...

This is when I delved into my favorite new resource: The Applebee's Uniform.

My current victim: the Omnipresent Apron.

(why do I even still have this uniform?)

I removed that nice, sturdy, navy blue apron string from its pouch and...

Ta-da! A handle!

And it might have been a pain-in-the-ass to cram into my backpack, but it was lovely and handy for lugging around Cusco, so it's about a 47% win.

These are apparently my favorite shorts. Apparently.

Ugmo.

We hate the way this page looks.

(...as you can see by the banner photo...)

So don't be alarmed at any and/or all strange changes you may see on here.

It's all in the name of evolution...Or mutation.

We'll see.

Update:

This was the photo:

And we're fairly happy with it for now, so please refrain from agreeing with us that it looks like hateable crap.

Thank you.

Waterbottle Sling

This is going to have to be a mini-post, because this project was done in a hasty fit of panic and no photos were taken of the process.

I realized about two days before I was to leave for Peru that I would likely need some kind of water-bottle-holding-apparatus. By this time, however, I was at the point where I refused to purchase ANYTHING ELSE and so was fashioning supplies out of whatever I could find.

After a few hours cursing at my pathetic sewing machine, I had come up with this:

The sleeve is made from some leftover quilted fabric from my housebook cover and the strap is, fantastically enough, scrapped together from my old Applebee's uniform polo shirt.

If they make you buy it, it damn well better be useful post-TequilaLimeChicken, that's all I'm sayin'.

Anyway, I doubled over the already quilted fabric so that it would be extra cushioned so I didn't end up with a Kleen Kanteen shaped bruise on my hip. Then I just wrapped it around the bottle, made note of the size (plus a little bit of give) and sewed it closed.

After that, I didn't have a strip of polo shirt that was long enough, so, instead, I just cut a bunch of large sections out, doubled them over for strength and sewed them all together, patchwork style. I attached the strap all the way to the bottom of the sling's sleeve so that it was less likely to rip apart from stress.

It's not pretty, but, man, it worked well.