It’s true. I do heart kisses. I mean have you seen this guy? Swoon.
However, this post isn’t about us, it’s about this week’s contest over at I Heart Faces. Lucky for me, last weekend I got to take some fun pictures of two very beautiful people who are getting married soon. We went to Schönbrunn for an afternoon, so the scenery is beautiful, too.
You can check out all the other entries here:
Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day!
It’s been a while. I’m sure many of you had given up hope of ever seeing another disco-themed progress report on my ongoing shoulder recovery. Some of you were probably thankful. Rumors abounded that I had run out of tank tops. Today, I put those rumors to rest.
I continue to make a lot of improvement through physical therapy, but still don’t quite have full range of motion. It seems like it’s taking longer to get that last 5-10% of motion than it has to get this far. But I’m sure that’s more perception than reality.
If you’re so inclined you could pray for healing and that I stay motivated to do my stretches everyday. Thanks!
Here they are, my progress in pictures:
The Bread of the Month for January was tortillas. Delicious, delicious tortillas. What happened to November and December you may ask. (Although, probably not 
) Well, in November I learned how to make pie crust from scratch. Who knew that would be so easy? In December I was pretty focused on cookies. I learned how to make some chocolate biscotti that were pretty yummy. I decided that since those are kind of baked in a loaf, they’d count as bread. It’s cheating a little, but I’m OK with that. Given the holiday craziness in both of those months, I did not do a great job of documenting the process. Not so with tortillas!
My friend Melissa is the resident tortilla expert, so she kindly agreed to come share her knowledge with me. We decided to make both corn and flour tortillas. It was a tortilla making extravaganza!
We’ve both been dreaming of corn tortillas. I thought I’d found masa, but I think maybe it’s just corn flour. It was really fine and the tortillas were decidedly unsuccessful. We did learn a few things along the way, though.
We’re not giving up on corn tortillas, but for now, they are out of our reach. Sigh.
The flour tortillas, however, were a huge success. A huge delicious success! We went for the straight white flour tortilla this time, but I’ll be trying for wheat very soon. There really is no excuse for me to buy tortillas ever again. Not only are they ridiculously easy to make, they taste a million times better than store bought. Yes, a million. At least.
Here’s the recipe:
3 cups white flour (2 cups white, 1 cup wheat for wheat tortillas)
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup vegetable oil or shortening (we used oil & it was perfect)
1 cup warm water
Combine flour, salt & oil or shortening. Mix until crumbly. Add warm water. Mix until a ball forms. Knead for 5 minutes. Cover and rest for 30 minutes up to 2 hours. Roll out on a floured surface. Be sure to roll them fairly thin. Cook in a nonstick pan.
Note: We tried to cook them in my cast iron pan. This didn’t work very well, but that is most likely because my pan is pretty trashed.
A few more pictures here: Bread of the Month
For the second year in a row, our class put on the Mr. VCS Pageant. This year the students decided to create characters to participate in the pageant rather than having someone from each grade compete. It was absolutely hilarious. The guys did a fantastic job of staying in character and ad-libbing throughout the show. Phlato, the Filipino Philosopher, played by Paul, was named Mr. VCS 2010. The class was able to raise about 500 Euro toward their senior trip. It was a really fun night!
There are a ridiculous number of pictures here: Mr. VCS 2010
The theme at I Heart Faces this week is “Best Face Photo.” This week is a little different because it has to be a photo taken in either December ‘09 or January ‘10. I thought about entering this face, but instead I decided to share a picture of my favorite face in the whole world.
This week I Heart Faces is celebrating their 1st Birthday. There are lots of giveaways and fun things going on there. You should take a peek. You can check out the other entries for this week, too. See it all by clicking on their cute new logo below.
Way back in December we had the senior class Christmas party. One of the families hosted it at their house and cooked us an amazing sit-down dinner. They provided the turkey and ham while the rest of us brought traditional side dishes and desserts from our home cultures. Everything was delicious!
We started the party off with a gift exchange. I tell you, these folks know how to give gifts. No white elephants here – well except from Matt who gave one of the boys Christmas themed toilet paper and canned snow. Yes, really. Anyway, the kids got clothes, jewelry, make-up, and all kinds of fun stuff. They know how to take care of each other. I was super excited because I got a case of Diet Dr. Pepper. Yay! It’s nice to have families with commissary connections.
After dinner we went outside and played in the snow. The kids did some running and sliding on the sidewalk, we broke a piñata, then we all lit sparklers and took fun pictures. It was a great night!
You can see the rest of the pictures here: Christmas Party
The theme this week at I Heart Faces is actually “I Heart Faces.” The idea is to creatively place the I Heart Faces logo into five of your photos. This was a good challenge for me. I don’t usually add words to my photos because I’m not sure how to make it look natural.
This one is my favorite. It doesn’t look natural, but I just think it’s funny.
I think the logo blends well in this one. I like the mood of this picture a lot.
Well, honestly, I just love this face. She’s beautiful. All the time. I wanted the logo to look like it was carved into the tree. Harder than it sounds.
I think this one is a kind of quirky fun. While it doesn’t look necessarily natural, I think it does blend in with the photo. Plus it’s a picture of one of my favorite people, so how can I not love it?
OK, I really wanted this one to look better than I think it does. The idea of the logo as syrup sounded good, but I had a hard time getting it to actually look like syrup.
What do you think? Which one is your favorite?
Check out the rest of the entries here:
I am submitting this photo into the I Heart Faces logo photo contest. By entering, I am granting I Heart Faces LLC permission to consider my photo for use in the marketing and promotion of their website.
Each year our librarian creates a huge advent calendar in the library. She photoshops fun Christmas pictures with the faces of staff and students. It’s my favorite VCS tradition. Here’s what she did to us this year:
Merry Christmas!
Apparently there was an advertisement in the paper this weekend to sell something, and as luck would have it, they posted the wrong number – our number. The truth is that our German is limited mostly to ordering things at a restaurant and telling people we’re sorry that our German is bad. This makes it more than a little challenging to explain to people over the phone that they have the wrong number due to a printing error. In an effort to come up with a good sentence to use for the dozens of phone calls I’m getting today, I went to Leo and tried to look up the word for advertisement. This is what I found:
Below this there were 49 more phrases and words to help you narrow it down. I found this which got me a little closer to what I wanted to know:
Now from here I had to make an educated guess (well, not that educated). I decided to go with die Zeitungsannonce since I know that Zeitung is newspaper. I really have no idea if it’s the right choice.
Here’s the sentence I came up with (with a little help from Google Translate):
Sind Sie fragen nach der Zeitungsannonce?
Then I hope they keep it simple and just say, “Ja.”
Then I get to say a sentence I feel a little more confident about:
Dies ist die falsche Nummer.
Then I pray that they don’t ask me a lot of questions because even though I will probably understand the questions, I’ll be completely incapable of coming up with a coherent answer.
So, my German speaking friends, here is your chance to help me out. How bad is the question I came up with, and what should I really be saying?
