Cape Cod, Nantucket & Martha’s Vineyard

You know it’s going to be a good summer when water bottles and patagonia pants are on your packing list….

As I often do, I chose to forgo a real salary and some sort of stability for what looks to be a pretty awesome summer. (Honestly, I got this job and stopped looking for the “real thing”). In January I was cleaning out my inbox when I found an email from the spring of 2009. I had apparently inquired about this position previously and still had an email with a little bit of information.

On a whim I decided now would be a good time to lead outdoor adventure trips around the country/world –> so I applied.

The company is called Wilderness Ventures and they lead outdoor adventure trips for middle, high school and college students. You can also hire them for private group trips as well. The trips go all over the world and vary in intensity, duration and activities involved.

You don’t apply for a certain postion –> you just apply and then they place you on a trip (two to three leaders per trip). I would be lying if I said I didn’t have certain things I wanted to do or places I wanted to go (kayaking in Fiji?!). Haha. Because I had no control I just decided that I would be excited about whatever I was assigned…. and lets be honest, you can’t really go wrong with any of the options.

In sort of hilarious fashion (long story) I was assigned biking trips in New England! Thus, the Cape Cod, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard title. I’ll be taking students on 16 day biking trips around New England. I’ll learn more during training, (ten days in the Tetons!) but whale watching, ferry rides and surfing will be involved. We’ll be camping most nights and staying in a hostel for a few (I think!).

So I’m way excited and have been gathering necessary things on my packing list (read: biking short!) and actually biking/spinning a few times. As the trip gets closer (June 9th) I get more and more excited. Also, Backpacking Boyfriend is super excited to help pack my backpack — I’ve graciously being loaned a nice 65 kiloliter pack from his collection. Haha.

So that’s that. My contract runs until early August and then I’ll be on the hunt for the next adventure, real job, campaign? Who can even know?

In my bag.

Not to distract from the fact that I graduated with a Masters degree (because I did!)… or from the fact that we packed up the Postage Stamp and all of our belongings and “moved” to Missouri (traumatic!)…. or from the fact that I have the coolest summer job of all time (naturally)…. lets talk about what I’ve been lugging around lately (because the rest is just too overwhelming to deal with still).

You know how people always have those really trendy posts about what’s in their purse or bag? I’ve always liked seeing all the pretty and seemingly organized things they carry around. I recently started carrying a purse again (mostly to help keep me from dropping my iphone) and people, it just got out of control. Yesterday I realized that I was carrying a hilarious amount of things and I thought I’d share.

To distract you from the important things I have yet to share I present you –> What’s in my bag!

Nothing too crazy here… Although that dolphin pen –> no idea where that came from or how long it’s been in there.

Masking tape? Who knows! Literally every time I reached into my purse for something I ran into Farkle. Geez. And it’s so, so out of the ordinary for me to have any medicine at all with me! So two is just crazy! My mom was making me take the Claritin because she thinks I have allergies (I respectfully disagree) and I think the ibuprofen was from moving day?

My favorite things in this photo are that sticker (from a coffee shop in KC) and my cat wallet! ha! In the interest of full disclosure I did not photograph several receipts, an empty package of cough drop, multiple wrappers and a little clutch that I use when I don’t want to carry the whole purse.

So that’s that. Maybe not that exciting? If nothing else it’s now cleaned out and I’m no longer carrying around dice games, tape, trash and an unnecessary amount of sunglasses.

More posts coming soon…. seriously.

Weekend.

Our weekend was low key and involved less studying than it should have. Ah well….

Highlights (in no particular order): 1) we sold our tv(!) 2) packed a few boxes 3) tailgated before a football game that we ultimately blew off for swimming 4) bottled some beer  and 5) ate some good (great!) food.

Bottling beer is a highlight for several reasons (in no particular order): 1) It means there is no longer a swamp cooler in our living room 2) we can clean and pack up the beer supplies which are taking up more than their fair share of our 525 sq. ft and 3) we are closer to drinking the beer (3 weeks!).

Just siphoning some beer (better done shirtless, obviously).

I am a professional bottle capper.

We had a little taste. It’s not carbonated at this point because you stir in the sugars immediately before bottling and then it has to ferment in the bottles for a few more weeks. The taste was nice (it’s a pale ale) and it only gets better after bottling.

After bottling we had one of the top five best meals of the semester. I seasoned Tilapia filets with paprika, pepper and curry powder and baked for ten minutes. Along with this we had grilled asparagus, quinoa and homemade focaccia (recipe soon — this is my new favorite bread). The best part of this meal (and unfortunately not pictured) was a spicy thai peanut sauce that we ate with the fish and quinoa. I used the recipe in this link as inspiration…. I didn’t have garlic cloves or cayenne pepper but I added chili powder, garlic powder and an extra fourth cup of water. SO delicious.

And that my friends, concludes a very lovely weekend.

This Happened

seriously. this is not that strange of a conversation for my family to have…. it starts with my brother.

maybe it’s only funny if you know us?

and yes, i was in panama city beach… for a bachelorette party though, not a wedding.

can you guess what the theme was?

A number of unrelated things….

Right?!

We ran a 10k last weekend and as far as running pictures go (which usually involve crazy faces and weird positions) these may be our best ever. You always feel like you look like someone in a Nike running commercial or something. This is never the case.

Home stretch to the finish line…..

And done!

At least 50% of the course was uphill with a loooonnnggg hill at the very end so this was a bit rough. But look how happy we our to be finished! yay.

In the afternoon we headed to Karyn and Kyle’s for a birthday barbeque/Final Four celebration.

To make things exciting we had a final four bracket challenge. In the end I lost by two points…. le sigh.

Moving on… If you follow me on Instagram you may have seen that the Postage Stamp Brewery is back in action. We now have a swamp cooler in our living room…. again. Although Nala just thinks it’s a tub of water for her drinking pleasure.

Speaking of Nala (and we’re moving on), she’s not one to be left out… She wanted in on all this feminist meme-ing going on around the internet. I sent this to a friend on Nala’s behalf the other day.

I don’t think I can top that…. Post of unrelated items now ending.

na, na, na, na, naan! (or bread 7/20)

Here’s the thing about Naan bread — it’s delicious! And so easy.

I decided I wanted to make personal naan pizza’s a few weeks ago and gathered a variety of things to be added as toppings once the naan was finished. (I also went around accidentally saying I was making focaccia bread all day prior to naan making… this mightily confused people). We (John, Christie and I) had a naan smorgasbord. Immediately out of the pan (you don’t bake naan in the oven) we added toppings and then popped them under the broiler for a few minutes to melt the cheese. You can put almost anything on top and it’ll work… We had pesto, tomatoes, arugula, prosciutto, several cheeses, tomato sauce and sausage. We each tried a couple of combinations.

Recipe: I used this one and didn’t change anything… I cooked mine in a cast iron skillet and it worked great.

Verdict: SO good. I’ll definitely make this again.

(The brown stuff in the bowl is coconut bean dip — I’ll post the recipe once I find it again.)

On Pinterest and Recipe Organizing

I have this issue with collecting recipes. I think it might be hereditary — my mom has two entire shelves of cookbooks and recipes in our kitchen at home. I probably “save” at least 5 recipes a week. When I find them online I either add them to my food bookmark folder or “star” them in google reader.

This is only about a fourth of my recipe folder — It seems like I have to scroll forever to get to the top.

I have over a hundred things starred in google reader and I literally have to scroll them individually to find things.

Mostly I am annoyed with this nonsense when I am looking for something I specifically want. My genius idea was to use Pinterest as an online recipe box (hopefully you weren’t waiting for something more exciting). Sure I have a board where I pin recipes that sound good — but now I created one with recipes that I love.

This accomplishes several things:

1. I don’t have to sift through a million things to find one tried and true recipe that I’m looking for.

2. I can access it from anywhere.

3. Easy thumb sized images make it quick to pick out a recipe — as opposed to reading the titles or clicking on each link.

Ultimately I’d like to clean out my bookmarks folder by getting rid of recipes I don’t like and adding any good ones to Pinterest. I guess I could go through and Pin all of them to my regular food board until I’ve tried them…. That would take a while though.

I’m quite happy with the stroke of genius and something like 20 people (whoa!) have repinned that granola you see above… So you know, I’m sharing my goodness with the world.

If you missed the link above, you can follow me on Pinterest here. Anything posted to that board is something that I totally love. So it’s probably good.

While we’re on the topic of following, feel free to follow me on Instagram as well (I’ve had it for a while but have just recently become social.) : @thekatiebrooks

While we’re on the topic of Instagram, the last photo I posted was this:

I polka dotted these pants ala this Anthro version. (I also know a few people who did this first and they turned out so well I wanted to try it). Just saved myself $218 thank you very much. I’ll post a few more pictures later so you can get the full effect.