Wednesday, July 29, 2009

First Bottles Outside the Nursery

Nurse & Gabby


Nick & Grace


Gramma Erin & Grace.

Both girls drank up over a full ounce, a good showing. I got a little spit up on my shoulder. I'll never wash that shirt again.

Some of the details

Grace, 3o minutes old.


Dying for details, are you?

The babes were born shortly after midnight on the 28th, and they were all a little over 5 lbs. Amazing for triplets. Nicole was about 34 weeks, I think. I was joking in a staff meeting yesterday that unless she spontaneously went into labor that she had scheduled a c-section for August 3rd. Damned if she spontaneously went into labor, though she didn't realize she was in labor until the contractions were very close together. We all theorize that she must have a high tolerance for pain. She barely had enough time to call Nick. Nick called me, and we arrived about 45 minutes before the trips were delivered. Nicole's mother is on staff at the hospital, and her aunt is a maternity nurse, so there was a lot of traffic when they were born, and Aunt Dawn managed to get the babies lined up in front of the nursery window for all the post-delivery business they do. I didn't get to see all that when I had the boys so this was fun.

We went home around 3am, and Nick crashed on our couch so he could go to work early. Nicole's sister stayed with Nicole last night at the hospital. Kent hustled me out of the house early to visit Nicole and the babies. Jacob is in what they call Level 2 nursery picking up extra oxygen because his saturation levels are little low. The girls are in good shape, and Kent and I were there for the first out-of-nursery feeding, that was so fun!

They'll be in the hospital for the rest of the week, go home Friday. I want to do more but I don't know what, and she hasn't asked for anything. Her family is very large and she has a lot of support. I guess we'll see how things pan out.

One day at a time!

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Say Hello to Gabrielle, Jacob, and Grace


Gabrielle, Jacob, and Grace, about 30 minutes old. July 28th, 2009.
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/november19/sets/72157621749945185/

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Triplet Watch 7/7/09

Nicole is carrying as if she is 42 weeks. In reality she's 31 weeks. Doctor says "any day now" and gave her her first steroid shots to help develop the babies' lungs. That's all I know for now. Here's her at 28 weeks, posing for the camera at her June 14th baby shower. Nothing there to scale, but she's only 5'1".

Sunday, July 05, 2009

Think I'll Go Eat Worms

Despite the fact that the cheese in the enchilada photos looks like little orange and white worms (oh gross) , thank you for letting your mouth water down your front, Mom :) I think we could write a fabulous cookbook, as long as we improve on the food styling.

No new news about the triplets.

When I'm not cooking, or knitting, or at work, or watching Rescue Me, I'm making jewelry. So far: a brooch, a ring, three pairs of earrings, and a bracelet and three pendants in progress. The bracelet...has been challenging. I guess it's my lot in life to embark on a project so far outside my league. It applies to work (that story is for another post) and jewelry. On the other hand, "it's a great learning opportunity." Harumph.

For the record, I'm not a project manager, as in: I hate doing project management. Which doesn't mean I don't like working on projects. Don't confuse that with outlining the steps of a small crafty project. And in the realm of jewelry projects, this is kind of detailed. But there's no comparison. The latter (outlining steps for a small crafty project) is infinitely more palatable. And you know what? People make assumptions. "Oh, you can do that? You must be a really good project manager. Hey, here's one for you..." Buyer beware! Don't let them label you as a "project manager" no matter how thrilling it might sound, or how much more money you might make.

But I digress. And I'll probably just lift that entire paragraph as the lead to my rant post about project management. But that's Not This Post.



This is the bracelet. 10 stations for 5 stones and 5 mixed media resin pieces, one box station, and one box clasp. 12 hinge pins for 12 hinges comprised of 36 independently soldered tubes. Yes, you are supposed to say "holy shit!" to the business about the tubes. Was it a pain in the ass? Most definitely. Would I do it differently? Probably not, but I'd use different fire. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Last summer I picked up a back issue of Jewelry Artist magazine. I ordered it because on the cover was the most beautiful hinged bracelet. Over and above the fact that I thought the construction and choice of colorful quartz was gorgeous, I'm a sucker for hinges in jewelry. Hinges provide nifty kinetic opportunities. Hinges are also impressive, but that wasn't a driver. They are just cool. Like jazz. Cool. Dig?

So I says "Hey, Barbara." Barbara, wonderful Barbara, is my silver jewelry master/guide/yogi/instructor/mentor. "I want to make something like this."

Barbara says, "Okay." Silly Barbara.

I have three square pieces of some kind of jasper Kent brought back from MIT. Two pieces of rectangular apatite that I picked up at a local bead store. Visions of interesting resin-with-embedded-pieces dancing in my head, a la found object art. Some wood bits with polka dots in a color that goes with the jasper and apatite.

There is lively and repeated discussion in the Ganoksin forums about whether to design around a stone, or design around an idea. My personal opinion is that...it depends. In my limited experience as a jewelry designer (dare I call myself that? so presumptuous!) I've done both. The bracelet was designed around an idea, and I refined it based on what I had in my stone collection. The brooch was designed around an idea, and I found The pearl earrings were about trying a technique, the "messy bulky wrapped loop," technique, and then I chose the stones. The chandelier earrings were designed around the red beads in a beading class. A pendant was designed around two stones that look good together. Another pendant was designed for some extra pieces of silver I had lying around and a nearby stone that looked like it belonged, although it began with a circle of square wire that was waiting for a purpose. Another pendant was designed to experiment setting stick pearls. but you could make an argument that I designed around the stones and mixed media because I didn't formally draft the design until I had those in the right order. Hmph.

In other words, the chicken and the egg mysteriously occur ed simultaneously and any attempt to determine which came first just takes all the fun out of it. There is something to be said for those who enjoy the debate. Kent.

  1. Gathering the requirements/technical specifications, in which our hero measures her wrist, the stones, determines which tube thickness looks best, and what type of clasp will be used.
  2. High level design (HLD), in which we make a pencil drawing using the specifications and ask the all important question: does it work? does it look good? are the pieces in a pleasing order, and answer the question: are you sure you want the bracelet to be this long? (Answer: yes, I like my bracelets loose, and it matches the length of another favorite bracelet.)
  3. Low level design (LDL), in which we figure out how much silver we need, how tall the bezels should be, does Barbara have right sized tubing or do I need to purchase from Rio Grande, what gauge to use for the bezel backs, gauge for the hinge pins, how to approach the actual build, and again answer the question: do you want the bracelet this long? It seems really long. (Answer: my wrists are big and I like my bracelets loose. It matches the length of another favorite bracelet.)
  4. Build, in which our hero begins the tedious process of measuring, sawing, soldering, resoldering, resoldering, fussing with her creme brulee torch (and which we eventually discover is completely inadequate for this kind of fine detail work).
Build is taking a looooong time, because every time I get to the stage where I am doing the rough polish I have to boomerang back to build because a hinge snapped. Over and over and over and over. And I stopped doing some of the work at home because I got busy with other things and unenergized about the whole thing.

Then I got energized again, and it broke. During the build stage, The Bracelet has popped apart many times. A bezel popped off when I started setting the first stone. Ah the joys of learning to make complicated jewelry. It doesn't LOOK like it should be complicated. Stations and hinges and a clasp. What's the big deal?

Sunday, May 17, 2009

En-chee-laaaa-das

This was an awful week in the world of Me. Primarily work-awful, but allergy/sinus infection/head cold awful, too. But instead of spending my time venting, I thought instead I'd share my Enchilada recipe, and along the way maybe some of the vent will...vent.

Triplet update: All is well, all is normal. Nicole is cranky, Nick is excited, I'm bored knitting baby things after only three little hats and three sockies. End of July is the expectated due date. The babies are fraternal, not identical, and one of the girls has Mom's name as her middle name.

Red Chicken Enchiladas
This is a medium-hot to hot enchilada dish. You can make it more or less spicy by adjusting the mix of enchilada sauce and adding or eliminating jalapenos. A little chipotle sauce sprinkled on top of the sour cream when you serve adds an interesting smokey note. We use Búfalo Chipotle.


This recipe began almost 19 years ago, right after Kent and I were married. We had gobs of leftover champagne from the wedding, and we were in the mood for Mexican...enchiladas, specifically. We boiled chicken breasts in champagne and allspice, and used that in the enchiladas. The recipe hasn't changed much since then, but it is really based on a recipe I received from my mom for white chicken enchiladas. I don't think this bears much resemblance to her original recipe, or if she even remembers it, but I speak the truth. I seam to recall thinking "roux? eewwww, I think I'll just substitute red enchilada sauce." Mom will deny all of it. She now has a wonderful enchilada recipe from my brother which is similar in spirit if not in specifics to mine. We both created our recipes independently of one another. Must be genetic.

We buy a better champagne these days and prefer to drink it rather than use it to boil chicken. Although if it goes flat...

  • 3 or 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, boiled, baked, or somehow cooked, your choice.
    (or one of those deli-rotisseried chickens)

    (or deli-rotisseried turkey)

    (or leftover baked chicken)
    (or a combination of any of the above)

    *the pictures show the turkey option
  • 1 cereal bowl of shredded white cheese
    Think monterey jack or Oaxaca quesadilla cheese. Mozzarella is a little too rubbery and mild for this. The Oaxaca is a little saltier than mozzarella, and shreds beautifully, and jack is a good old stand-by. Pepper jack would be interesting.
  • 1 cereal bowl of shredded cheddar - we use our store-brand sharp cheddar
    If you want really cheesy, double these amounts
  • 1 cereal bowl of chopped not-green bell peppers
  • 3 fresh green onions, chopped (or one small onion, chopped and sauteed)
  • 2 or 3 fresh jalapeno peppers, finely diced
  • 2 10-oz can regular/mild enchilada sauce
  • 2 10-oz can hot enchilada sauce
  • 1 pack of a 12 to 20 medium-sized flour tortillas
    not the super-ginormous ones, you know what I'm talking about.
  • Sour cream, salsa, and more chopped green onions as toppings

  • One 13x9 glass baking dish and, possibly, one 9x9 glass baking dish.
    The tortillas fit perfectly side by side like little soldiers in the Pyrex dishes. Whether you use one or two depends on how much meat you have. A rotisseried turkey yeilded enough for one 13x9 pan of enchiladas. You'd probably need two rotisseried chickens (they're pretty puny, yes?). With four chicken breasts, we always used the 13x9 plus the 9x9.
Get your chicken cooked up, removed from it's bones, shredded or chopped, whichever is appropriate. I like chopped because I get a cleaner bite when I stick my fork into the cooked enchilada. If you don't like getting shredded poultry in your teeth, go with chopped. If you really dig the acting of using two forks to shred up the bird (and I know those who do), then knock yourself out! Put the chopped or shredded chicken into a large bowl.


Chop up your bell peppers, onion (we used sauteed white onion in this photo), and jalapeno, and dump it all into the bowl with the chicken. Shred the cheeses and put most of that into the bowl. Reserve a large handful of mixed cheeses to sprinkle over the top. If you are using green onions, reserve a couple tablespoons of that to sprinkle over the top, too.

Everything should be in your big bowl, so use your hands or a big wooden spoon or some implement and fold the ingredients together so everything appears to be well distributed. This is now called The Filling.

Open the cans of enchilada sauce and mix them together. I use a 4-cup glass measure because it has a spout. Lightly oil the glass baking dish(es) (yes, Pam and it's type work fine) and pour a just enough sauce in to coat. Tilt the pan around so the sauce clings to the bottom and sides. It helps extract the enchiladas when it's time to serve.

Stir a little enchilada sauce, say no more than 1/2 cup, into the big bowl of The Filling. Hands, big spoon, tossing in the air (dangerous but also effective), whatever stirring method floats your boat. The purpose of the sauce in The Filling is to bind it together some while you are getting it into the tortilla.

Remove the flour tortillas and heat them.

There are several different ways to heat up these tortillas. The objective is to soften them so they don't crack when you roll 'em around the filling. My favorite way, time consuming though it is, is to cook them over a flame. No pan needed. This works best with a gas burner, and you just gently and slowly flip the tortillas back and forth over the flame. It cooks the floury taste out and warms them up nicely. These don't need to be COOKED and charred up, just warmed. Don't go nuts. However, the fast trick is to wrap the stack of tortillas in a barely damp towel, and zap them for a minute (on high) in the microwave. Or wrap them in aluminum foil and keep them warm in the oven. It isn't as culinarily romantic but it's effective. My heart thinks the stove-top cooked ones taste better but I'm probably wrong. Warning: don't do this with an electric stove top or a glass/ceramic/smooth-top stove top. You have to have the heat up a little higher to achieve the same end and they are likely to stick if you aren't careful. Trust me on this. And anyway it's still just not the same.

Okay. Now you have warmed your tortillas in some wonderful romantic or wonderfully efficient way, and you need to set up a little assembly line. I go from right to left: bowl of The Filling, my stack of tortillas, my empty pan(s), and a big spoon.


Take off your jewelry, this can be messy. I like to use one of those big soup spoons, or a small serving spoon to do this. Scoop a couple of spoons of filling into the center of the tortilla. Carefully roll up the tortilla and place it seam-side-down into the baking pan. Keep doing this until the pan is full. If you have extra tortillas and extra filling, use the 9x9 dish.
**If you have leftover tortillas but no leftover filling, save them for quesadillas or make your own chips.
**If you have extra filling but no extra tortillas, this stuff is great on these grilled nachos. I give them 5 stars.

All the tortillas are panned up; pour the remainder of your sauce over them to coat. Use a spoon to spread it around. The edges of the tortillas need to be coated or they get hard and crunchy. Unless you like that :) Live dangerously. Sprinkle the reserved cheese and green onions over the top.

< Kent's two cents worth.


Bake in a 350°F oven for 30 minutes, or until the top is nice and bubbly and the enchiladas are heated through. Remove and let rest for five minutes or so while you get out condiments.

Enchiladas, cooked, having a rest >


I recommend sour cream, a fresh chunky salsa, maybe a few more green onions. Black olives are tasty, too.

Yum!

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Tre Bambini

This is what Tasha does when she wants something. Will you look at that sad little face? "Erin, I'm a starving little dog! When will you ever feed me?"

tashaOnDesk.jpg


Well, Mom's been wondering when I was going to "put pen to paper" on this topic. Kent and I are expectant grandparents of triplets!!!!!!!! Oh, you want proof you say? well, check this out:

triplets ultrasound.jpg

Count 'em: Baby A (Boy), Baby B (Girl), and Baby C (Girl). I think that's how it worked out.

Nicole is five months preggers and is as big as a house (must have picture, that front porch is really something) and carrying like she's going to deliver any day. Nick says it's all baby weight, except for that front porch I mentioned.

I'm the Knittin' Grammy (much better than Gramma and I need to distinguish myself - Nicole's mother can be Gramma). For my part, I've bought baby clothes for a boy and two girls, knit three preemie beanies, and am working on a little sweater for when someone gets to about 6 months. Everything was always way too big for either of the boys when they were little, and they were kinda little when they were little. The sweater looks ginormous compared to what I THINK should be the right size, but I'm just going with it. Blankies? No, I'm not knitting any blankies. Not yet anyway. Heck, I'd have to knit three. That's a lot of blankies. No, I'm interested in sticking with quick projects.

Yeah, yeah, I know the arguments. "Well, knitting a blankie is fast, it can just be garter stitch with a border. You can crank it right out." How boring is that? It just isn't for those of us with a short attention span. I can be fairly tenacious with more complex items. They are interesting. They hold my attention. If you go out to Ravelry and look me up (erinkristi, but I guess you have to have an account to do that...Flickr has a Knits folder that has all the photos I post to Ravelry), and look at my projects, you'll see this lovely black sweater in stockinette. Gorgeous, yummy Jaeger Extra Fine Merino...it's a UFO.

For the uninitiated, non-knitting readers: UFO is, in knitting parlance "UnFinished Object." It's surprisingly apt.

Anyway, the purple and white striped sweater could work for any of them, but it's going to scream "girlie" after I add the pink and yellow doo-dads. After the sweater are some booties, then another sweater, then more little sockies, then another sweater. The bambini will probably birth sometime during the latter part of the second sweater (at least I didn't call it a "sweatie") or the beginning of the second set of socks.

This weekend I'm buying diapers at Costco.

I don't know when Nicole's baby shower is. Lester (one of Nick's friends) told Nick that Nick will have to be "Nicole's bitch" during the baby shower. I told Nick I thought Lester was pulling his leg. Lester is a sweet guy, and at the top of our list of Nick's Friends We Really Like. Lester has a bit of a sense of humor, and it's quite possible that he's pulling Nick's leg right out of it's socket. But then, it's been a very long time since I've been involved in any baby showers, so maybe that's the way it is these days. The Funky Stork has a cute article about having a celebration for the expectant dad. Actually, it's a cool site and all about the Dad part of having a baby. Their logo is especially slick, and the whole place is very Manly Man. They don't mention a thing about the dad being the mom's bitch during the shower ;)

I tagged this as photography, too, because I hate how my photos of yarn and projects turned out! ugh! Did I forget all my skills? Does my lighting suck? Well, the lighting clearly does suck, and I tried to fix it using a low-end image editing tool (stoooopid). It's not the fault of the image editing tool. IrfanView, which is my absolute favorite quick image editing tool for tasks that don't require Photoshop, doesn't do the kind of heavy lifting that these photos required. I use IrfanView for cropping, sizing, lite editing, and viewing all manner of weird image formats because it's very fast. Small application footprint. BUT: don't give it images whose white balance so screwed up that new images are required. I think that's where we are with these. Shame, too, because I spent quality time on that activity. There are few things on which I'm willing to perform this level of rework. My photography of my yarn. No, I just can't let it go. This is a problem of Erin versus The Flash. I will win.

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Yes, we have no snowbrerro

The weather outside was frightful...when we were at my mother's in Silverdale over the Christmas holiday. Kent identified the snowbrero, a round patio table with a round planter in the middle of it. Covered in snow, it resembled a sombrero, just in case you didn't guess that.

I brought this up because I was reminded of it when it snowed around early March in Norfolk. Of course it didn't last long, but it was about the only snow we saw around here and it's, ahem, exciting when it happens. So anyway, I had started this post at that time...well...it was a diversion. More important things have come up in the meantime...to be continued!