Linea Installed

I'm so happy for Paul and his crew at Amore, look at him working at the new machine! And with Gibbie's cow no-less.

Culture

I'm behind in reading, all the books that I've collected in the past couple of weeks are piling up and it's a bit exciting, I have all this to read and no pressure. Surprisingly I've been somewhat busy these past couple weeks. I've been getting more hours at Home Depot, been doing some fun things with Angela, my friend Liz is in town for a little while - she came to visit with Paul and Libby, and most recently Angela, Sam, Marissa and I took a neat little trip to the Walker. It was a good time seeing the art. I have to admit that it's been a while since I've been to a museum so I think I was a little tired afterward. We saw an exhibit about book art, one on a specific artist (Tetsumi Kudo) who had a great deal to do with the topic of metamorphosis, granted it was pretty extreme and somewhat graphic - he used the image of a penis as the form for metamorphosis, a chrysalis as he said. There were lots of penis's there. In a different exhibit there was a cool little video that Ange showed me - turned out one of our friends did the background music to. It was all very intense. I think that my favorite pieces were in the Mythologies exhibition.
We all all got in free with a pass from the library. This is us in the conservatory, next to the sculpture garden. BTW, right now the cherry is gone... I don't know why.

Linea for Amore!!

I am sure that Paul will blog about this soon, but I am too excited about this!! Amore Coffee just got a new/used LaMarzocco Linea. It'll be so good for them to work on a good machine instead of a crappy Conti. It's still not installed yet but tomorrow it should be up and running.

Thomas Bread Co.

I almost forgot! I've been baking! Since Angela and I are poor, I've been baking our weekly bread. It's been fun and interesting. Here are the first two loaves that I baked three weeks ago. It's made with 100% stone ground whole wheat and honey as a natural sweetener, otherwise it's got other stuff that bread needs - yeast, egg, water, butter, salt. This was the first time I've made bread in about ten years so it took me a little while, about six hours. It now takes me about four hours, most of the time is letting it rise in a greased bowl (three hours). I highly recomend that you try and make your own, the house will smell so good when you're done.

Rockin' in the Free World

Dear friends, my apologies for the lack of posts recently, I've been busy. That's funny, seeing as how I have a part time job that doesn't really give me hours, but my mind has been occupied with thoughts of the future and what it really means to be a husband. And wow, how great a luxury it is to have this time to spend on my wife and our marriage! Please allow me to share with you those things in my life that have started to weigh on my mind.

The two books to our left have been helping me see what kind of strengths I have as a person, and looking forward with those things in mind. "What Color is Your Parachute" was a suggestion from Ray Rivera, a career counselor at UW Stout; "Now, Discover Your Strengths" was lent to me by Kevin Hendricks a local freelance writer and friend. Both books have been great to read, though I've felt that the things I'm discovering are well known to the people that know me best. I've gotten some "I told you so's! " When I was at Stout I took two tests, a Myers Briggs personality test and an occupational interest test, which I took in about forty minutes and got the results back in about twenty minutes. I didn't really expect it to be that accurate, but it was, I'm a serial killer... just kidding. Basically it put on paper what I couldn't really express about what I like in a job or how I interact with people. I'm not taking the results from these tests as concrete, rock solid truth, more like a grain of salt but it is interesting, very interesting.

I've also been working on a couple other books, focusing on my marriage. They happen to all be written by the same person, Gary Chapman. I'm happy that the first book here, "The Five Love Languages, Men's Edition" is in an audio book format. I got it from the library. The original book on the five love languages has been a great help, Angela and I definitely speak different languages. It's been a great challenge but so rewarding, I'm really able to see her when I do things or say things in "her language". If I were spoken to in her language it wouldn't mean nearly as much as it does to her.

All of this research into myself and into Angela, has been a wonderful time of taking wisdom and holding it up to God and saying, wha'dya think? Ultimately God is the author of love and life choices, I'm getting excited to see where life could go, I'm getting excited to see where God could take Angela and I. It's all a little exciting, but scary, I suppose that's the risk and adventure when walking with God.