Sushi!

As most of you know, Jared has grown into a culinary master. Every Sunday, he's looking up new recipes, new cooking tips, and writing grocery lists full of crazy new ingredients for me to pick up. And he doesn't shy away from the fancy high maintenance recipes--on the contrary, the fancier, the better. It's been awesome; we eat like kings over here. 

Tonight, our latest culinary adventure was one we could embark on together: sushi. Now, neither of us is a seafood lover. We've tried salmon a couple times and liked it, and I've always had a love for clam chowder, but generally, when we see something fishy, we stay away. Which is why we were both surprised to discover that sushi is delicious. 

In my family, we have this joke that every time my sister, Anna, sees a creative item in a store, she says, "Well I could make that." Apparently, Jared is the same way with cooking. We eat it in a restaurant, and that night he's looking it up online and jotting down ingredients. So here we go!

After a trip to a grocery store and the local Asian food market, we'd gathered all our ingredients. Here we have sweet potatoes and the supplies for battering our prawns for frying. 

 We also grabbed some avocado, prawns, and crab meat.

And of course, we had some soy sauce on hand for dipping. (I mostly took this picture because the bottle was kind of cool. We love Trader Joe's.)

 I will admit, upon seeing the raw prawns with their little legs and tails and other nasty appendages, I was a little grossed out, like "no way I'm eating this," leery.

But after frying them up, they were pretty darn good. We also fried sweet potato strips, which were delicious.

 Our first try at a roll was a bit ... messy. It tasted delicious, but was a bit tricky to eat.

By the second, though, we were pros. 

And by the third ... well ... we were full.

So our sushi adventure was a success. Now all that's left is figuring out what to do with all the leftovers. Looks like I'll be eating sushi all week!

Tiptoeing through the Tulips...sort of.

This weekend, Jared and I took a trip to see the tulips blooming in Holland, Michigan...er, I mean, Mount Vernon, Washington. It's an easy mistake to make, though. Substitute Lake Michigan for the ocean and Dutch pride with hippies, and Holland pretty much becomes Mount Vernon--a town about 40 minutes south of Bellingham.

Mount Vernon is known locally for the annual Tulip Festival, which (as we found out) brings thousands of visitors over the course of a month to view the local tulip farms. Jared and I decided to join the throngs and see ourselves some tulip fields.

We started out at the Mount Vernon Street Fair, just one of the many local events that are taking place this month in honor of the tulip festival. We started to have a forboding feeling when we discovered that the entire highway was backed up with people trying to get down town. But we used our limited knowledge of the area to avoid traffic and ended up downtown where we needed to be.

At one point, we stopped to see a street performer wow the crowd with his juggling skills and off-color humor. 

Somehow, we ended up becoming his "favorite couple"--as we slipped away, we heard him lament "Oh, my favorite couple just left." After wandering around through booths of fried food and art, we decided we'd had enough of the crowds and moved on.

We determined that if we hit up the official tulip festival driving route in the late afternoon, we'd have a better chance of avoiding crowds. Unfortunately, we found out that this is not quite the case. Our driving tour of the tulip fields ended up being more of a waiting-in-traffic tour. Plus, we also learned that the tulip fields are mostly not located right near the roads; they're part of farms where you get to pay admission. So we viewed the brilliant patches of red and yellow from a distance while shaking our heads and searching the map for any hint of an escape route.

To make the best of our somewhat disasterous adventure, we headed into Anacortes for some dinner. On the way, we did stumble across a field located right on the road, and with no lines of cars. We couldn't resist.

So here we are, in front of the brilliant fields of tulips...

Wait, what? Those aren't tulips! They're daffodils!

Well, whatever the flower, it was a beautiful field, and I'll never turn down yellow flowers. 

It was a pretty good spot for an improptu photo op, too.

 Having been fully saturated with yellow, we moved on to chow down on some lovely Mexican food. While we were in town, we figured we should have at least one photo of a tulip...so here you go:

Not quite as majestic as the daffodil fields. But maybe I'm just a bit bitter.

After dinner, we headed to our favorite sunset spot at Oval Beach near Deception Pass. As usual, the sunset from this spot didn't disappoint.

Driving home, we both agreed that it was a pretty beautiful way to end our somewhat not-what-we-were-expecting yet wonderful day.

Sojourn: A temporary stay

Sojourn. I see this word all the time at work because it's all over the Bible. It often seems to have a negative sense, though, probably because in many of the cases where "sojourn" appears, the people who are making a temporary move aren't doing so out of choice as much as necessity. Abraham, the 12 sons of Jacob, and Ruth's mother-in-law, Naomi, all sojourned to escape famine. Jared and I are sojourning to escape becoming illegal aliens in Canada. But enough of the dramatics. :)

As many of you know, we've had a bit of trouble getting Jared the work permits he needs to continue living and working in Canada. This Thursday, after weeks of deliberating whether this would be the right choice, we decided to pack up our little car and head due south across the border into Washington.

I always hope that this is what a moving day will look like:

(Can you tell I love posting pictures of my bike?)

It ended up looking more like this, which is still fairly simple:

Staying optimistic that our move will in fact be only temporary and that we'll soon receive our paperwork, we only took about two weeks of essentials--we can take trips later to retrieve the rest if needed.

Fortunately for us, the Young Life community is amazingly supportive of its employees. We're currently staying at a beach house in Birch Bay that was generously loaned to us by a wonderful Young Life couple who lives in Bellingham. We love our little basement apartment in Langley, but I won't lie, this place is quite the upgrade.

Three bathrooms? A deck with a grill overlooking the marina? A 5 minute walk to the beach? Sounds good to me :)

So for the next two weeks, we'll be living in relative luxury and enjoying our stay back in our native land. But we'll both be crossing our fingers and praying that this move will indeed be only temporary.

New Year in the PNW

It's been a while since I've posted...sorry about that. :)

Quite a bit has happened since my last posting back in December. For one, our house is no longer decked out holiday style. We also had an amazing hassle-free trip to Michigan for Christmas. And for the past two months, we've shifted back into life as usual. I've been kept super busy at work chasing ambitious deadlines for months on end. The past couple weeks, that's meant some long hours and late nights home. But I'm still absolutely loving my job, and though I may not like to admit it on weeks like this one where I'm looking at over 10 hours of overtime, I'd rather be busy and slightly stressed any day than be bored. Jared's work is also going great too! We have had some slight work-permit related hiccoughs these past couple weeks, but nothing that we're letting ourselves stress out too much over. It's been a good year so far!

A couple weekends ago, we had a couple days of wonderful blue skies and sunshine interrupt our usual grey and rain. And miraculously, the snowshoes at my work's outdoor shop (where employees can check out outdoor equipment like tents, sleeping matts, kayaks, and snowshoes for free) were available, so I snatched them up. We headed up to a trail in the mountains that is part of Cypress Provincial Park. The trail  lead us up to a mountain peak overlooking the city, ocean, and other Northshore peaks. For someone who has grown increasingly accustomed to sitting at my desk for days on end, the snowy inclines were at times a bit of a challenge. But we made it, and the views were worth it. Here are some of our photos:

These two bumps are the Lions. Maybe we'll explore them closer this summer when they're not so white :)

The birds at the top were super tame. It was fun to tap into the child in me and feed the little guys. They enjoyed my honey roasted sunflower seeds as much as I did :)

 Proof that we were wearing snowshoes...

 The sun was in a perfect position for silhouette photos. The trees in the background worked great as screens!

 Unfortunately, the "couple photos" a nice group of teachers took for us didn't turn out. It was so bright, one of us had our eyes closed in each one.

On the way down, we abandoned all sense of composure and did it the fun way: instead of carefully picking our way down the slopes, we sat on our butts and slid the whole way. It was sooooo much fun!

 We weren't the first ones to do it, so there were pretty well-defined tracks in the snow. It felt like a luge-run going around curves and corners. The only challenge was finding the balance between letting the snowshoes slow us down and keeping them from sticking in and flipping us over. And we had to be careful to avoid the exhausted snowshoers who were still climbing--it's a lot harder on the way up than it was down! But we managed to avoid any major accidents.

The only harm done was a rip in Jared's pants and some nasty bruises in areas we'd rather not mention. It was definitely an experience I'd like to repeat. And it felt fantastic being in the snow, being outside in the sun, and getting to enjoy these mountains around us. Sometimes it's a challenge to get out there and have fun exploring in the winter, but we both know that it's one of the reasons we're out here, so we've tried to make it a priority. It's nice when the weather cooperates and makes it easy for us!