Moving

You thought I was moving again? I don't know why you would think that. I've only moved 7 times since I moved to Indy. However, this time it isn't me. Its my blog. I'm moving to WordPress. I don't know if it will be better, but I have been having spacing issues on my Blogger. It won't let me put spaces in my posts. After much research I found that there is a group of us that have been having this problem since 2010. And Blogger has done nothing about it. So I'm moving. To my 5 followers, please update your readers to reflect the new address:

http://leslies1820.wordpress.com

Neighborhood Clean Up

On Saturday morning I got up real early and went down to the Sacred Heart neighborhood. This is an area just south of downtown. I would say it is in the worst conditions out of all of the sides of downtown. Run down houses, yards filled with crap, old broken down cards. Chris made me go look at houses for rent in this area even though I told him it was pointless b/c I would never ever ever live there. Anywho, I signed up for this clean up because my grandma grew up in the Sacred Heart area and went to church at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. In fact, that is where we spent many Saturday nights with her in her last years and its where we had her funeral. I thought it would be neat to give back to this area that was a home to my grandma and my family for so many years. The basic idea behind this group that I was volunteering for was not only to clean up the area, but instead of leaving it a big empty lot, they would turn it into a garden that produced fruits and vegetables for the people in the community. We started two of the four gardens that they will make this spring. I weeded, I raked, and then the worst came. I helped shovel soil into wheel barrows that were taken across the street to the second garden. At first when the pile was high, I thought this is easy! But as the pile got lower and I got more tired, oh wow. Yesterday I was definitely feeling it. So we just started the gardens. They will be going back every Saturday to do a little bit more work. One of the other neat things was that I met the guy who bought my family's funeral home. So he was happy to meet someone from the Lauck family and told me to come by to see all the changes (um, no thank you) and that business was up 30% from last year (awesome!). He gave me his business card which of course I will be using to keep my dad in check. :-)

Cribbage

When I was making my list of 101 things to do in a 1001 days, I knew I was going to have to put "Learn to play Cribbage." I think it was around the second year Chris and I had been dating that he tried to teach me. I got frustrated and told him to buzz off. Since part of the reason I did this list was to grow, I knew what needed to be done. At some point, I was going to have to suck it up and learn to play. So Friday night we were sitting around bored and I said, let's do it. Teach me how to play Cribbage. And he did. He did a very good job. He was patient with me because, trust me, its a very complicated game. I'm not even going to begin to explain it, but here's a super cute picture of me with the cribbage board. I also knocked another item off my list by making herb and goat cheese stuffed chicken breasts. I can't believe I forgot to take a picture of them because they actually looked beautiful. I had some trouble cutting the pocket into the breast, but by the fourth one, I had it down. Maybe if you're lucky, I will stuff a breast for you too!

Hiking in Brown County

As most of you know I have been trying to go walk more and lose some weight. So when my cousins, Matthew and Joanna invited me to go hiking in Brown County yesterday, there was maybe a .3 second pause before I accepted immediately. I've been living in Indy for 4 1/2 years and have yet to check out Brown County which is a huge 15,000 acre state park. Hank and I drove to their house and then we packed three adults, two dogs, and a picnic basket in a little Honda Civic. We did three trails equaling about 5 miles. The first trail we did was around Ogle Lake. Even though its not green out yet, it was still very pretty. There were a lot of trees (duh) and they were so tall and the sky just looked so blue. I had to take this picture. I can only imagine what its like when the leaves have grown in or during the fall.

Juniper is a very experienced hiker and she led the way most of the time.

And good ole Hank tried to lead the whole time. He was pulling so hard the entire time that my cousin, Matthew offered to walk Hank for part of the time. My arms are thanking him today. If anyone has any suggestions on how to break this habit, I'm open ears. We use the Gentle Leader right now but he keeps stopping and trying to paw it off his face. However, he does look super cute in this picture.

It was a gorgeous day. It got up to 80 but it was breezy so we stayed cool. I'm so happy to have gotten outside to enjoy the weather and hike in a new park. Hank passed out the minute we got home and is still sleeping this very moment!

Burlesque Bingo Bango

About a month ago, my friend Misty approached me about going to a bingo night at a new cabaret joint in Fountain Square. Well, bingo just happens to be on my list of things to do in the next three years so I jumped at the opportunity. Plus, I'm pretty sure Misty is more excited about crossing things off my list than I am! I went on their website and saw that it was called Burlesque Bingo Bango. I had no idea what to expect. Is there a burlesque show going on during bingo? Are their intermissions? Do we even play bingo!!??

Last night, Misty, Angela, and I met up (despite a hail storm) at White Rabbit Cabaret to try a new experience. So there are two brothers, pictured below, who run the game. One is a mime and the other is the ring leader. They act silly on stage and entertain you while calling numbers. Every once in a while, a featured girl comes out and does a little tease. For each person that wins, she takes off one more thing.

Then when someone wins bingo, they have to shout it as loud as they can. They will check your numbers and if you have a bingo, they will bring you on stage. They embarrass you some, the girl dances for you, and basically you look like a fool up there. As I'm sitting there, I'm beginning to hope that I don't win. I don't want to go on stage. I don't want to have to do something ridiculous in front of 100 people. We sure enough, second round, I won. So Angela was trying to be nice and take the win for me so I didn't have to go on stage. I had an internal arguement with myself. Its an experience, Leslie! What's the worst thing that could happen? Just do it! So I got up there.

Do you know how awkward it feels to have a girl dancing in front of you and you don't know whether to look at her, the audience, do some dance moves yourself, stand there like an idots, etc. I think I ended up doing some sort of combination of those reactions. There is video footage, but it will not be revealed. However, after they put you through that, they let you pick a prize. They are all hidden and you just have to pick based on blobs covered by cloth. So I picked one underneath a table. And this is what I won!

Yeah you can't really see it. Its a ceramic squirrel that is holding a salt and pepper shaker. I can't wait to display this at my next dinner party. Misty ended up winning on our last game. Only she won and so did another girl so they made them slow dance on stage and then be judged. Misty lost unfortunately but came away with a horse statue. So we're all winners and we had an absolute blast.

2011 Indy Grand Prix

One of my goals for the next couple of years was to volunteer more and get more involved in the community. A while back, I joined the Indiana Sports Corporation's Volunteer list. I figured I could volunteer and possibly get to see some different sporting events. This weekend was the first time there was an event that I was free to work at. The 2011 Indy Grand Prix. I could see that it was a swimming event, but I had no clue what it meant. When I was signing up, I signed up for jobs like admissions, welcome committee, etc. The easy stuff. The one thing I didn't want to do: Timers.

I get an email a couple weeks later saying "Here are the dates and times we need you and here's what you will be doing: Timers" Ugh. I was so worried. But I thought hey, how bad can it be? What's the worst that will happen? Let me tell you what this meant. It meant that I had a front row seat to see some of our nation's greatest swimmers. Not that I knew who all of them were. Michael Phelps was there who I know of. Some of the girls, I recognized their names.

However, I met the new love of my life (sorry Chris). Ryan Lochte. I will definitely be watching some more swimming thanks to this guy.


He stood right next to me in a teeny weeny little lime green bikini that he wore for the first time. Haha. Super cute. And apparently he's very good. All joking aside, it was a really neat event to watch and get to participate in. I had fun timing, it was relatively easy and you can't beat the seats. I'm glad that I faced a fear and just did it. It turned out to be one of the best experiences and I can't wait to volunteer again.

Sushi Groupon

For the longest time, Chris and I have talked about how cool it would be to learn how to make sushi. Of course, we talk about a lot of things that we would like to do and we never do them. I had seen that there was a place in Carmel that had a sushi class, but it was $75 a person. I like sushi, but not that much! Lucky for us, Groupon ran a special last year $35 a person. So I bought the Groupon and looked for a class. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a sushi class anywhere. I called and they told me that they had stopped doing sushi classes out of lack of interest. I was devasted. But I kept an eye on their calender. Finally, they started doing the classes again! I immediately signed us up for the February class and told Chris it was our Valentine's Day celebration. ;-)

So last night was the class. Once we got there, I started feeling really nervous. The chef talked to us about technique and how you had to have the perfect amount of this and the perfect amound of that. I knew it was going to be a disaster. But as we got going, I got more confident. We chopped up the fish and the vegetables. The hardest part is laying the rice. You don't want it to be too thick of a layer but you don't want it to be to thin. I hate it when people make statements like that. :-( Here's a picture of Chris making some sushi. He has put rice on one side of the nori and then flipped it over so that it will be a roll with the rice on the outside.



We made Philadelphia rolls, California rolls, and spicy tuna rolls. The spicy tuna was delicious! I made that one with the rice on the outside. It actually looked really good until I started cutting it up. You're supposed to have a clean slightly wet knife, but my one complaint was that there were not a lot of sinks. It was hard to clean off your hands and your utensils. So I think my knife was dirty and probably not wet enough. Below are our first two sushi rolls. Mine is the one on the bottom. Haha, I swear it tasted delicious. It just looks bad. Chris' came out beautiful. He did a very nice job and his were delicious as well.

I have to say that even if you paid the $75 for the class, it was worth it. They gave us so much food. After rolling sushi, he had us make these spring rolls. It was very fresh tasting. Its got carrots, sprouts, shrimp, rice noodles, and mint leaves. Isn't it pretty?

All in all, the class was a success. We got to sit down afterwards and eat our sushi and chat with the chef. I think that the more we make sushi, the better our rolls will look. Who's coming over first to try our sushi?