Category: personal

four. definitely four.

my parents will be up here in wisconsin tomorrow. they are staying with us for a week and we have all types of fun planned for them:

• their going to help me replace a couple of swag lights with more modern light fixtures.
• their going to help move a piano
• we’re taking them to the stevens point polish festival – where there will be polka bands and chainsaw artists – oh yeah.
  we’re taking them to nekoosa giant pumpkin festival

we’re most excited pretty excited about lambeau field and the pumpkin festival. lambeau field is … well … lambeau field and that’s just plain cool. the giant pumpkin festival is cool because it involves cleaning out 1,000 pound pumpkins and using them as boats for a race.

baton rouge friends – i don’t have all the details yet but apprently an old firned of some of our passed away. some of the older “viewers” will remember rollie thurston who was a part of us and drummed at “the view.” jessica lawrence sent me an email today saying that rollie had been killed in a motorcycle accident in virginia. some of you met rollie a few months before i left baton rouge when he came to “the view” for a few weeks before going to the navy. rollie is a good guy and i love him very much.

i don’t have the thurston’s address yet (i’m at a conference right now) but if you want to contact the thurstons and express anything to them you should be able to find their address in the denham springs directory or you can email me and i should be able to send it to you tomorrow or the next day. please be in prayer for his family.

i just thought i would give you all a photo of what it would look like if i become a police chaplain.

a while back i was a running machine and in pretty good shape. then i tore my calf muscle and my marathon training stopped for a good long time. after a couple of months rest i started running again but it was very much off and on.

and then we moved to wisconsin.

since moving to plover my excercise has jumped up a notch or two. here was today’s cardio-vascular activity.

• 1 mile walk with the dogs
• 5 mile bike ride to pick up some supplies
• 1 hour of pick up cross court basketball
• 1 mile run with adam
• 1 mile walk with the dogs again – this is what you must do when you don’t have a fence

now i haven’t started my long distance runs yet but that is coming up soon.

the family and i were thrilled sunday when we tried the plover express drive thru. the whole family was fed with good but cheap food for less than $13. that’s hard to beat. even better than being cheap was the fact that it is local. eating at a burger king or heaven forbid a mcdonald’s is okay when you’re traveling but otherwise the terrell family goal is to eat at local fast food joints whenever the fast food craving hits us. we’ve always been able to find local places that were amazing. it’s nice to know that we’ve already found a good local place for filling up on our grease levels.

conveniently enough i have been a green bay packers fan since i was in eighth grade and james lofton started playing for them. yet somehow it’s even more fun to watch them play when you’re only an hour a way from lambeau field. GO PACK!

btw, sharron walters made the above cheese head for our gnome (clive) before we left baton rouge for wisconsin.

thanks to jess, josh, meg (alphabetical order here) and parkview i was able to treat the professors within the communicative disorders department of uwsp to a ton of jambalaya. if you remember meg, josh, jess (reverse alphabetical order) and parkview gave me a jambalaya kit as a going away gift. today was my first attempt at making jambalaya by myself (josh showed me how but i’ve never done it by myself). i have to say that though it was a little mild for my taste it still went pretty well. i learned a lot and the jambalaya didn’t turn out half bad. one of the first things i learned was to plan for more time. many of the short cuts that were available in baton rouge are not found in wisconsin. i had to produce my own trinity rather than just buying it. i’m also going to have to look around for a better source of pork sausage and chicken thighs. i think i can figure that out.

for anyone who is interested (and for purposes of arching this information) here’s is the recipe that josh hooked me up with:

ingredients

• oil
• sausage (manda or savioe’s mild pork sausage… hot is too hot, garlic is nasty)
• chicken (boneless skinless thighs work best)
• vegetables (onion, bell pepper, celery… the pre-cut mix works great)
• rice (1 pound for every six people… use long grain rice)
• seasoning (red pepper, black pepper, salt, garlic salt, etc… or Tony’s)
• kitchen bouquet (to make sure it is the right color)
• optional: sometimes I throw in a pound of breakfast sausage and a pound of andouille)

ratios

• 2# meat
• 1# rice
• 1# vegetables

instructions

• heat oil (just enough to cover the bottom of the pot)
• brown meat
• brown sausage first, then take it out
• brown chicken in the sausage drippings, then take it out
• sauté vegetables until they are wilted and liquidy
• add water to sautéed vegetables
• add seasoning to taste (it needs to be too salty, everything else is up to your preference)
• add kitchen bouquet to darken
• add browned meat
• let it simmer for an hour if possible
• crank the heat up and bring it to a rolling boil
• add rice and let it boil for 5 minutes (stir just enough to keep it from sticking)
• lower heat, put lid on, let it sit for 12 minutes (don’t take the lid off)
• remove lid, pull rice from the sides and let the water run down the inside of the pot… put lid back on and let it sit for 12 minutes
• remove lid, turn the jambalaya over and let it steam (lid off) for 5 minutes
• (the 5, 12, 12, 5 timing is key)

of course, the most important part of making jambalaya is having a good “feel” for things and therefore having josh’s recipe is not the same thing as having josh’s skill.

so i have finally finished my journeys to and from baton rouge, louisiana. now it is merely a matter of putting everything in it spot, slowly painting and changing what needs to be done within the home and starting to figure out what in the world i need to be doing to plant this church. it’s all pretty bewildering to me. today i while i was putting up our bookshelves and placing books on them (a rather long process) i was introduced to a t.v. show that makes me sad. it’s called “flip this house.” i don’t think it is really a new show but this is the first time i have had cable in seven years so i don’t really know or not. what i do know is that after watching the show all day while emptying boxes i find almost every show makes me think of a train wreck. every show is about someone going into the house with big dreams. those dreams are all well and good until they tried to sell the house. that’s when almost everyone of them found out that the whole process wasn’t going to work for them. almost every show that was updated showed people either moving into the house because they couldn’t sell it or coming close to losing money on the “flip.” it’s all kind of sad.

i’ll start trying to post more now that things are calming down a little. hopefully this will make my mom happy.