Bouncing Marty

Mine’s nectarines. Apparently Nyah’s is watermelon.

She was even kind enough to get participate in a little video recording as well. She loves the stuff, obviously.  Dogs sure are fun.

After much harassing Brian Frandsen convinced Mollie and me to pull ourselves away from our home improvement duties, and take a little road trip. The destination of choice would be Flagstaff, AZ. I had heard Brian Burgess raving about the clean basalt cracks and fun cragging up there for long enough, so it was time to make the drive. Flagstaff has a lot going for it, being in a sweet pine forest, at decent elevation, and with a cool old downtown to explore, so getting Mollie to tag along on the ‘climbing’ trip wasn’t too difficult. Unfortunately my camera battery died early on, so all I have shots of is the climbing.

I’m not sure what the official name of this place is, but we called it ‘The Overlook’. You drive on top of a plateau through some awesome country, and abruptly pull off the road at the sound of Indian trinkets being sold. There’s a bunch of people selling jewelry and whatnot at the pullout, which conveniently is just above some sweet single pitch climbs. The above is Burgess cleaning up one of the area classics, Isaiah 5.9. Ratings here felt fairly stout to me, but I’m used to the super featured sandstone of Redrocks.

The day consisted of me leading a rather stout and clean 5.6, then climbing Isaiah shown above, then working on the Trinity Cracks, which are a series of 5.10 monster classics. Perfect handcracks. Burgess, as usual, served as the ropegun and lead the tough ones. He climbs FAST. Hard to tell from the vid below if you don’t climb (or even if you do), but keep in mind that what he climbs there I struggled up in about 10 minutes (not 20 seconds).

We all munched on some sandwiches and things for lunch, then we parted ways. The Brian’s headed back to the cliff to pick off a couple more climbs, while Mollie and I headed into town to find some coffee and watch the hippies walk around Flagstaff. Fantastic town for people-watching, that’s for sure. I wish I’d had my camera. We found a bluegrass band that was playing in a town square kinda place, and hung out for the afternoon until the guys had burned themselves out climbing. We met for dinner and then headed right to bed.We had a great Sunday with the folks in Flagstaff.

Very cool town. It makes me remember all the things that I’m missing by living in Las Vegas. Cool temperatures and clouds being just two of them. We’ll be back.

Last night we were woken up by a massive lightening storm at 3:00am.  Keep in mind Las Vegas hasn’t seen much of anything in terms of moisture for months and months.  Pounding rains followed.
Big rainstorms along with burning buildings from lightning strikes basically destroyed my morning commute.  It added almost an hour of drive time.

Not that I’m complaining.  Rain Day = Quiet Day in the construction offices.  Nice to smell some rain in town finally as well.

I came home last night to an empty house. Called around and no-one answered. No wiggling dog greeting me. No wifey…no nothin’. Then I noticed an amazingly good smelling potato and corn chowder stew brewing on the oven. I peeked outside…and found the following.

Who knew Mollie could cook and weed the yard at the same time?!?

My wife rocks.

Something is happening at the Hindley Household. A lot of things actually. We’ve decided to tackle some home improvement. Things on the hit list include the hall bathroom, and most of the flooring throughout the house.

Over the last month or so we’ve been slowing demolishing and removing the stuff we can’t stand to look at any more. The hall bathroom lost a sink, cabinet, toilet, mirror, and some gross peeling yellow lenolium. I handily used the sawz-all to coerce the cabinet to get out of the house. Mollie donned the safety glasses to do the same with the bathroom mirror (safety first right?)

The biggest change that we’re attempting with the house is a removal of the carpet and lenolium, and replacement with some laminate wood flooring. I hadn’t heard much of the laminate before, and was very skeptical of this ‘fake wood’ stuff. We did some research and after learning a lot about flooring, we decided that it was the way to go. I like the idea of having real hardwood floors, but they take a lot of maintenance, and are not nearly as durable as laminate. Two weekends ago the real business began. (This photo’s for Keith.)

Mollie and I spent the greater part of a Saturday ripping out carpet and banging out the carpet strips. Scraping the floor and removing the carpet adhesive and generally getting things ready was fun and tough work.

I’ve got lots more pics of the process on Flickr if you’alls are interested. This last weekend we got most of the flooring complete in the main room, and the corner down the hall is laid out and ready. The flooring took a good part of the weekend, but I’ll have to post about that later when I get some more pictures loaded.

I really like my truck. I guess that’s probably pretty obvious to anybody who asks me about it. It had a birthday of sorts this week. Check the vid for more details.

I recently pulled off the fenders to clean up a little damage that I did off-road a while ago. This is what the truck looks like these days!

Marriage has a way of educating. Take, for instance, the Souffle’.

Soufflé : A soufflé is a light, fluffy, baked dish made with egg yolks and beaten egg whites combined with various other ingredients and served as a main dish or sweetened as a dessert. The word soufflé is the past participle of the French verb souffler which means “to blow up” or more loosely “puff up” — an apt description of what happens to this combination of custard and egg whites.

Now I had no clue what these things were in my bachelorhood.  But alas, Mollie is educating me. Look what she pulled from the oven last night.

Delectable. Chocolate, coffee, sugar, lotsa butter, and lotsa beaten egg whites. Wow tasty.

Another one of my favorites that Mollie has created a few times is the Fruit Tart.

Tart : A tart is a pastry dish, usually sweet, that is a type of pie with an open top that is not covered with pastry.

Derek and Sara have been chronicling some of Sara’s raw food exploits, so I thought it’d be fitting to throw the gauntlet down for all things sugary, buttery, and ridiculously high in calories/fat/wonderfulness. Hopefully Mollie will keep me stocked with lots of ammunition!