A typical busy weekend

Friday night I found myself in the kitchen for 3+ hours. I needed to make a cake for a dinner we were going to have with friends on Saturday night. I needed to finish the chocolate covered peanut butter balls I was to making for SuperBowl and also mix the ingredients for Tre's Grandma, Gerry's, famous cheese ball. And ALL of these were firsts.

Yeah, I've made a cake before, but this was a new recipe, Better Than Sex cake, but it was easy and mixing the ingredients for the cheeseball was no sweat, but covering the pb balls in chocolate nearly defeated me. I do not own a double boiler nor have I ever used one, so when the recipe told me to melt the chocolate chips in one, I figured a saucepan would work just fine. For any of you that have ever tried that, it just doesn't work. So then I tried microwave it and had burnt chocolate almost immediately...that went in the garbage. I figured I better "make" a double boiler, so I used a big pot with a wire cooling rack laid across the top and a small corningware dish on top of that, and it worked...at least until I added a little milk to try to thin it out. That was the 2nd batch of chocolate that went in the garbage. (good thing I had a lot of chocolate chips on hand!). 3rd time's a charm, right? Right. I melted a new batch of chocolate chips in my "double boiler" and added the key ingredient I found via google - shortening. It was perfect and they turned out really good. Phew!

Saturday we ran a 10k race in between cloud bursts and then drove up north to Vista (about 40miles away) for one of Tre's friend's (Morgan Knox) kid's (Kortland) 1st birthday. This was a mini reunion for Tre with a few of his good friends, so that was fun. Plus, I got to hold Brock's new baby (9 weeks and 18lbs), Curren, and he was SO cute. He was 10lbs 6oz when he was born and his mommy and daddy are NOT big people. Saturday night we had dinner a gal I work with, her husband and her parents who were visiting from Ohio and not looking forward to going home to the multiple feet of snow. We learned a new dice game called LCR. You are supposed to play with chips, but we played with $1 bills. We arrived with $20 and left with $26. Not bad.

Morgan, John, Tre and Brock

Sunday we went over to Tre's friend Ryan's (from MBA school) house for the Superbowl. I presented my cheeseball and chocolate covered peanut butter balls and we wore our shirts from the 10k. The run was called the "Super Run"and neither one of us made the connection to Superbowl until my friend Lori pointed it out to us (that was before we saw the shirts...) Tre won the pool for 1st, 3rd and 4th quarter!

No...we did NOT cheer for the Colts

Perfect gear for the game

There were only two Colts fans at Ryan's house, his wife Brooke and Nala (see her blue and silver beads? - SO cute!)

Tre pointing to the final score winning square (Saints 31, Colts 17)