Chicken Pot 3.1415926535.....

We know. We're dorks.

This week we participated in another psychology study entitled "Marriage and the Brain". This one took 3 hours. We both had to wear the EEG (electroencephalogram) nets, and we were supposed to perform a computerized task (a really boring one but one that requires constant concentration) while being observed once by no one, once by a stranger, and once by our spouse. They were trying to see how much your task performance would be affected by each one. We came out with circular imprinted dents all over our heads, looking like we were attacked by an army of tiny octopuses (and don't tell me it's octopi - Dictionary.com says it can be octopuses). Sadly, there are no pictures. We did get compensated $50 for it, though, and then used that money to go on a date that night. And buy groceries. How romantic, right?

We created more compositions for our new unit in Music Theory, and performed them in class. We were supposed to use certain techniques out of the list the professor provided. Both Christian and I ended up using the same techniques: quintal harmony and bitonality. Quintal harmony is where you use chords made up of stacked perfect 5ths. For example, A, E, B, and F#. Bitonality is where you use two different key signatures at the same time, for example one in the melody and another in the accompaniment. Unfortunately, neither piece ended up being successfully recorded when it was performed in class, and our music notation software is being dumb and only letting us save the MIDI file as a piano piece, which neither of ours was. But my piece was called "The Kidnapping" and Christian's was called "Victory". Christian's was inspired by the Olympics and mine was inspired by the hanging scene in Phantom of the Opera in the middle of the ballet, where there's scary music and happy music happening at the same time. To get a rough taste of what my piece sounded like, watch the clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN3a_TmHU7g

The happy/scary music at the same time starts at 1:12. We will try next time to work things out so that you can hear our pieces. Sorry.

If you haven't heard yet, Christian has officially changed his major. He is not in Music Education anymore. He is now majoring in.... *drumroll*..... Bioinformatics. For those of you whose heads just exploded, it's basically computer science combined with microbiology. He'd be working either in an office or in a science laboratory. His job would be to program computers to do biological things like analyze DNA sequences, and/or interpret scientific research data. Sounds like a headache to me, and I would never be able to do it, but he is excited about it and is looking forward to taking all the classes required for the major. I think he will be amazing at it.

Our old laptop got really annoying this past week, first because we like to take it to school and it got to be really heavy. Second, because our power cord kept breaking and we got a new one and it broke too and we just got tired of it. So, we put it up for sale on Craigslist. At first offer we got three emails. They ended up being from scammers who all wanted us to mail the computer to Nigeria. Too bad the U.S. has trade restrictions with Nigeria. And too bad they didn't fool us with their fake email "from PayPal" supposedly confirming that they gave us the money, when we checked our PayPal account and no money showed up. Too bad we noticed that although the display name for the sender was Paypal.com, the actual email address was something else entirely. Whatever.

Anyway, after a couple days of not getting any real offers, we decided to lower the asking price, and we finally got one real person. So we sold him our laptop and with the money we got for it, we went out and bought ourselves a new mini laptop. It only weighs I think 3 or 4 pounds, and is much smaller and compact and light to carry in our backpacks. It also has a 8.5 hour battery life, which has been SUPER nice, as our old one would die halfway through a movie if you didn't plug it in.

Our recipe for this week is Chicken Pot Pie. http://www.5dollardinners.com/2009/12/chicken-pot-pie.html It was delicious, and as I have never made a chicken pot pie before, I think I did really well making it. The only thing we considered adding was a packet of Chicken Ramen seasoning. We thought it could do with a tiny bit more chicken flavor and a tiny bit more salt, both of which the packet would have added. We had one left over from a previous recipe that just called for the Ramen noodles and not the packet. The recipe costs somewhere around $5 to make, and it supposedly feeds 6 to 8 people. Too bad we eat like pigs. Once we were done with dinner, we only had about 1/3 of it left. And there are only two of us. Meaning that each of us eats.... um.... alot more than a typical person. About 2-3 times as much. And we think we're still losing weight (we don't have a bathroom scale, but we're estimating). Must be all the walking we do. Across campus 8000 times a day, plus back and forth from the bus stops.

Anyway, we love you!

Today, I saw a commercial for the Snuggie....

The full quote for the title is:
"Today, I saw a commercial for the Snuggie. I thought it was a stupid idea but I couldn't change the channel because I was under a blanket and I didn't want my arms to get cold. MLIA."

Hey everyone! We had a pretty busy week here. It was lots of fun though. Monday we had off of school and we spent the day cleaning up the apartment. It's been really tough to keep it clean because we are temporarily living in a construction zone. They remodeled the entry-way with new paint and new floor and new doors (including ours) and new trim. It looks real nice and spiffy, but it's caused a lot of dust to get kicked up and moved around. After this week, though, it should be all finished up. We're pretty excited for life to get back to normal around the house.

Wednesday night I had a concert. It was so fun playing in it. The first half was a piece by A. Luigini called Ballet Russe (Russian Ballet), and also a strings only piece: Capriol Suite by Peter Warlock. The second half we played the entirety of Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony. What a piece! It is possibly one of the most demanding pieces I've ever played. It was lots of fun, and my horn professor was very impressed that the Symphony took on such a difficult piece. It was lots of fun. You can look up any of these pieces on Youtube except for the Luigini.

Thursday Brittany and I attended the reception of a friend of mine who got married, Nancy. I met her a long time ago through a social networking website that I joined for about a week. It was a random meeting, and we eventually found out that she was related to a family that the Mealey's knew in PA (the Gravers) but it was good to see her again and we had fun eating there. We didn't stay long, though, because we didn't know anyone and really wouldn't have had time to talk to Nancy anyway.

We've been recently trying to find a buyer for our old laptop because we wanted to downsize to something that would be easier to carry around campus. We went to Best Buy to price out what a mini laptop would go for, and asked what we might be able to get for our old laptop when selling it. According to Best Buy's website, they would have given us $70 for it (yes it was that old). So we put an ad on Craig's List, and after dealing with waaaay too many spammers and scammers, we finally found a buyer on Friday. We talked throughout the day, and eventually settled on $130 for the laptop. We were ok with getting double what Best Buy would have given us. So we took that, and put it towards our new computer. It's just a little Asus that has been super fun to use. It has 1000x better battery life and is lightweight, both of which we were looking for.

Last night, BYU Varsity Theater was showing The Princess and the Frog. We wanted to go see it because we'd heard good things about it and it was only a dollar at the VT. We got there, though, and it was sold out! We were sad, but we just went off into what's called "The Den" and sat on some couches and watched a movie on our new mini laptop. Thankfully, our friend Chris has a Netflix account that we could watch movies online. Thanks bro for letting us use your account!

Anyway, that's basically been our week. This week's recipe is non-existent because we didn't really try anything new. 'm srry. Get your own! GOSH!
Love ya,
Christian and Brittany

My Life Is Average

I don't know how many of you are familiar with the phrase "MLIA", but it means "My Life is Average". It comes from a website called, surprisingly, mylifeisaverage.com. It's where people post things that happened to them that are just part of life but are exceptionally funny or sad or ironic. One quote from the site:

"Today, I walked into my sliding glass door. I am no longer a fan of Windex. MLIA"

Check out the site. Some of them are pretty funny.

Christian, as of this last Tuesday, is now 22 years old! For his birthday, I got him a video game that he's really been wanting: "Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Sith Edition". Too bad I didn't realize that it's a one-player game and that we don't have a TV. Epic fail on my part. I figured he could play it at his friend's house since he goes over there a lot, but I guess it's not very nice to go over to your friend's house and monopolize his TV to play a one-player video game while all he can do is watch you. So we went back to the store and exchanged it for the same game but a PC version. We went home and he tried it out, and apparently the graphics card on our computer isn't advanced enough to run the game. Epic fail two. So now, if he wants to play it at all, he either has to play it at school in the campus computer labs (causing him to spend more time away from home), or we need a new graphics card, which will run you close to $100. *sigh*

Guys are so much harder to buy for on Valentine's Day. Your gift has got to be romantic, and all the "romantic" stuff is girly except chocolate, and Christian said he didn't want chocolate (for a reason I'd later find out). Flowers are too girly, stuffed animals are too girly... I thought about cologne but I didn't know what kind he'd like, or if he'd even like some. I didn't want to get him a bottle of cologne and have him hate the smell of it. What else romantic is there? Nothing, that's what. I couldn't think of anything romantic that he wanted, but I did know he wants that graphics card. So I got him a Best Buy gift card putting money towards the graphics card. And I got him some Cadbury eggs despite his wish for no chocolate (don't worry, he liked them anyway), and his very own 2-liter bottle of Dr. Pepper - he's been wanting soda and every week we leave it off the shopping list because it's not necessary. I need to start right now coming up with ideas for next year's Valentine's Day, because it was totally sub-par this year. :( And guess what else? I was just informed that even if we got a new graphics card the computer couldn't handle it. So we'd need a whole new computer. Epic fail 3.

Despite my gift for him, Christian was amazing on Valentine's day and surprised me early (Thursday when I got home from work) with a bouquet of lovely flowers, a cute little teddy bear which I named Aurora (she can be married to the bear he got me last year which I named Prince Phillip- how cute, right?), a small box of chocolates, and a package of lavender-smelling shower gel/bubble bath/bath salts. I loved them! Then Saturday night he also surprised me with a giant 3-POUND Hershey's chocolate heart. This thing is more than a square FOOT! By itself it is 6,600 calories! This thing can be all the food we need for a 72-hour kit! Of course, about 60% of those calories are from fat... Here is a picture of everything he got me.

Isn't he sweet? I have the best husband in the world. :)

The other day, Christian and his friend Chris were over here and stumbled upon the website http://verydemotivational.com/. I walked in and found them both laughing so hard they were almost crying and I was honestly surprised they didn't have an accident. Here are their 7 top favorite pictures from the site. Beware browsing through the site yourself, though, because there are quite a few inappropriate ones, but they managed to skip across those and find these gems:

Edit by Christian: For those of you who don't understand this, Paladins are a type of character from the game Dungeons & Dragons. They are holy fighters - think Knights Templar. They are described as lawful good - Lawful meaning that they obey oaths they have taken, etc and good meaning they are compassionate. The violent part refers to the fact that they are fighters lol.

This week we also went to see the movie "Tooth Fairy" with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Julie Andrews in it. Christian and I agreed that it was kind of a takeoff of "The Santa Clause". It was basically another The Santa Clause, but instead of applied to Santa Claus, it's applied to the tooth fairy. It's cute, I guess, and worth seeing once, but I'd see it in the dollar theater or rented from RedBox, because it's not worth much more than that. Planet 51 was much better- if you have a chance to see that one, it's way cute, I'd even consider buying it.

Recipe of the week: Chicken Divan

6 chicken breasts, boiled and skinned

2 cans cream of chicken

40 oz frozen or fresh broccoli

2 cups mayonnaise

2 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp curry

2 cups shredded cheddar cheese

1 cup soft bread crumbs

2 Tbsp butter

Boil or steam the broccoli in salted water. Drain and put in the bottom of a 9x13 greased baking dish. Put the chicken on top of the broccoli. Combine the soup, mayo, lemon juice and curry, and pour it over the top of the chicken. Sprinkle with cheese. Combine the crumbs and butter and sprinkle over the top. Bake at 350 for 25-30 minutes or until thoroughly heated.

This recipe is really tasty. It serves about 6. You won't have leftovers for long. If you end up with extra sauce, it tastes really good over white rice. :)

Love you all!

Brit and Chris

Food, Glorious Food!

Hello Everyone,

In case you've lived in a cave and have never seen the movie/musical Oliver!, as my old music theory teacher used to say, "Run, run, run! and go get this." It's definitely worth a watch, especially if you like musicals in the first place, and if you don't then go get it anyway and expose yourself to some culture!!! My point? the title for this week's blog comes from it. In fact it's the very first song in the movie. It's great. A link can be found by CLICKING HERE. It's good because it's got the subtitles, and the little kids with the English accent are sometimes hard to understand. The little boy who has the solo, in case you didn't guess is Oliver Twist, himself! lol Anyway, onto our week.

Monday night Brittany and I went to visit our good friend in the hospital, who just had a beautiful baby girl. It was lots of fun to see such a tiny baby, and Brittany really enjoyed holding a child that was only born 22 hours before. Our friends are doing great and were basically on their way out the next day. They said they had a wonderful experience at the Utah Valley Hospital up here. Apparently it's one of the leading hospitals in the nation for babies (for obvious reasons don't you think?). We are very excited for them and wish them the best of luck with their new little one.

Monday and Wednesday we performed our compositions that we posted last week. They went really well, and our groups had lots of good things to say about them. We tried to record them, and Brittany's came out great! (Download and listen to it HERE.) Mine however, I guess it was too much for my cell phone's microphone to have a French horn, tuba, and glockenspiel all playing at the same time because the quality was just terrible. So you're just stuck with the midi on that one. Sorry. We'll get our grades for that, along with our tests hopefully tomorrow or Wednesday.

Friday night my friend Chris and I donated blooded because my stake was hosting a blood drive. I hadn't donated since last semester, so it was definitely time for it. I've realized how important it is to do this kind of thing, especially because of natural disasters like what happened in Haiti. I would like to put in a plug here for all who can to donate blood, especially double red blood cells if you can do it. So many people in the world need this kind of thing and only a very small percentage of qualified people actually donate. It's kinda sad, when it only takes 10-15 minutes of your time to donate whole blood, and 45-50 minutes for double red blood cells. Seriously, the last time I donated whole blood, I took 10 minutes for paperwork, and the actual blood giving part took a little over 5 minutes. And then you get the yummy free cookies and snacks afterwards. :)

Anyway, enough ranting. Last night, Brittany and I had a little mini date night. It was really laid back and low key, but I think it was lots of fun. We bought ingredients on Thursday when we went shopping for No-Bake Cookies (or as Brittany's family calls it, Gorilla Poop) and we made them last night. While they were cooling, we got ready for bed and watched Harry Potter 6. We had our cookies (SOOO GOOD), and then went to bed. It wasn't much, but it was fun to just be with each other. We love being married :D.

Well we hope all are doing well. We sure are! Oh, the recipe for this week, if you can call it a recipe is for the Brazilian dish feijao. Brittany introduced me to this shortly into our marriage. It takes a HUGELY long time to make and takes soooo many ingredients. Here ya go!

Enough cooked rice for everyone you're cooking for

About 1-1.5 cans of black beans for every two people

Cook the rice, warm the beans, and then put the rice over the beans.

DONE. You can put some hot dogs or smoked sausage in there as well and season how you want. It doesn't need a whole lot though. It's a lot more delicious than it sounds, and what can get cheaper than black beans and rice?? It can be a lot more cheaper if you can find a good way to make your own black beans from dried ones. We tried that once, but it didn't work out like it was supposed to. Anyway, it's good.

Love ya,

Christian and Brittany