Our hometown, Gainesville, TX, is entered in a Hamburger Helper contest to help get some funding to create a Trolley for the historic town. I’m just enlisting your support to go vote for Gainesville! I’m not sure how you vote exactly (I think it just votes when you click on the link), but you could leave a comment. :)
The funny this is that I know almost MANY of those names listed to the right side that have left comments (high school mates, teachers, people from church, people I’ve babysat for, etc.). Gotta love small towns!
http://www.myhometownhelper.com/ViewProject.aspx?id=39148
___________________________
Dear Chamber Member:
Please help us get the trolley up & running with your vote of support! Just click on the link below and read our message.
The more votes we get, the better our chances of winning the grant. March 31, 2008 is the deadline to enter, so please forward this to all of your family, friends, or anyone who will be willing to help us with this project.
Sincerely,
John Broyles
Chamber Director
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Vote for Gainesville, TX to get a Trolley
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Children are an Amazing Thing
(Zoe)
(Bryan, Olivia, and little Brody)
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Engagement Congratulations!
Congratulations to our two friends who are engaged.
Joseph Finch proposed to "Dr." Dionne Smith - plan to wed in New Orleans in December.
AND...
Scott Hutchison proposed to Melissa Case - plan to wed in September.Yay! I love weddings! Plus, married life is wonderful!
Monday, March 17, 2008
Durango Pictures! - Making Candy
Here they are -- pictures from our trip.
Cyrus and Taylor ready to go make chocolate in the factory...
The Master Candymaker, Jim, whipping up a batch of "Aspen Cream"...
Cyrus separating marshmallows on a table...
Yummm, the insides of a "Pecan Bear" - caramel & pecans! (the next step is to enrobe in chocolate)...
Drizzling the "signature" on some toffee (WITH OUR HANDS!)...
This was when we got too busy making chocolate that we forgot to take any more pictures.
Here is one of all the FUDGE and BARK we made in training class. Wow!...
(At the request of Cyrus, Deer picture was removed because of poor quality :).)
All pictures from our trip can be viewed from our website or at this kodakgallery link (may need a free account to view photos):
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=7w109yj.8vs964er&x=0&y=-lx9359 .
Baby Schilling! (Jo's Shower)
On February 23, 2008, 6 of us hosted a baby shower for Jo & Mike Schilling's (Jo is my 1st cousin) soon to be born baby boy! Our hostess gift was a suped-up Graco Pack n' Play. The shower also created a great excuse for my sister, Pam, to come home to visit. From left to right are me, Pam, cousin Heather, mom Dianne, aunt Sherry, great-aunt Mary Jo, and mom-to-be, Jo. She is due towards the end of April.
See our cute little baby boy clothesline in the back? :)
All 4 of my pictures from the shower can be viewed from our website, or at this kodakgallery link (may need a free account to view pictures):
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=7w109yj.28vq6opf&x=0&y=-w0wp3d .
Friday, March 14, 2008
Durango, CO
We are back from Durango. I swear, I will try to upload pictures this weekend - from our trip, my cousin Jo's baby shower (it's her first!), and from when the Air Force Academy guys came to visit over Valentine's.
As we drove upon Durango at about 8:00 Sunday night, it appeared from the mountain pass and was a little bitty city of lights in the valley of the mountains. Durango was a really neat place. It is an old mining town stuck down in between the mountains, founded in 1880 because of the railroad. The historic downtown reminded me a lot of Gainesville, which was founded in 1850. I would say Durango's downtown was just a little more "country" or "miner-saloonish". I'm not sure if there's a word for that. Plus, it was surrounded on all sides by mountains!
Even more, it has the Animas river which runs right through town, and is used for competition rapid rafting in the summer. The scenery from this town is spectacular - snowy mountains with a river running down the base of them and historic buildings to complement.
Anyway, we didn't ride the famous Durango-Silverton train, but we saw it! We visited the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory that started the whole company there in Durango's downtown. We shopped the little shops and walked around the town to get some exercise (after eating all those calories!). We stayed in a condo a mile from down which had a perfect little sledding hill next to it. Cyrus and I made about 2 trips each -- we were dying trying to hike up the hill in that altitude! I got going pretty fast and it was fun. Cyrus aimed towards a little rock and got some air on his last jump. No pictures of this...sorry.
A neat story was our second night there, Cyrus and I went downtown to eat a nice dinner (Durango is FULL of local restaurants!). We missed our turn and drove past a corner in town with a little grassy area. There were two deer standing on the corner!! Then we U-turned to get back on track, and I was going to take a picture of the deer in town, but they were gone. I said, "they have to be somewhere close" and as we drove back into the downtown main street and parked, there they were!, in the middle of the road on the boulevard. This time there were 6 or more! They were just frozen there thinking "where are we?". They were so cute. Some people shewed them away and they just ran up the street, lost as could be. I guess they finally made it back to the mountain which was a couple of miles down the road. I might have some pictures of this if they turned out (it was dark).
We went skiing at "Purgatory" on Monday and Tuesday. I would have traded my $60 lift ticket for a massage at the hot springs spa down the road if Cyrus hadn't paid for both days up front. But I did ski the second day, and I did alright. It is fun, but I definitely don't desire to ski like Cyrus and Taylor do. They just go up the lift, down the mountain, and straight back to the lift. I like to take breaks (I took an hour long nap in the Powderhouse on a couch...it was awesome!). There was like a 1 hr blizzard on Monday, but the rest of the time, and especially Tuesday, the sun was shining on the fresh layer of snow, and the skiing conditions were great! Sorry - we forgot our camera both times.
We got home Wednesday night about midnight, and now I am back at work, and Cyrus is busy getting things ready for the store to open (this is his job now - LUCKY).
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Chocolate, Chocolate, Sick on Chocolate!
OH MY GOSH! That's all I can say. I keep waking up every day during training and asking "am I really here? Are we really doing this?". Yes, we are. We are 2 months away from opening up our chocolate store, and it is going to be awesome!
We spent all Monday afternoon SAMPLING every kind of chocolate and confectionary we wanted, out of the over 100 products! Ya'll, this was better than getting married. I mean, this was the most fun I've ever had...I was in HEAVEN!! This chocolate and all the fillings (nuts, creams, truffles, homemade marshmallow, etc.) are out of this world. And it was even more amazing after we toured the factory and saw how they were made.
And we did not just "tour" the factory, we WORKED in the factory all Tuesday morning. I have pictures but will have to wait until we get home to download them. We started in the kitchen, where the "master candymaker" was mixing cream for our "Aspen Cream" in a big vat (picture to come). We watched them move thick, gooey POUNDS of corn syrup into giant copper kettles, and watched caramel come to a boil in the kettles. Imagine cooking in your kitchen...times 20! Then we made our way over to the big stainless steel tables where they poured out chocolate or marshmallows and then cut them into little squares. This covered the entire table where they had to use bars on the edges to make a perfect layer of stuff. We actually got to pull apart cut marshmallows, rub them around in powdered sugar, and put them on a tray (picture to come). The kitchen cooks are very knowledgeable and skilled in candy making. There are so many temperatures, consistencies, measurements, and motions that have to be perfect to make perfect candy.
After the kitchen came the real fun! The next part of the factory had all of the candy assembly lines. For instance, we lined up toffee rectangles on a conveyor belt, that then went through a machine to get "enrobed" in chocolate. We dipped our entire hand in chocolate, and drizzled it onto a conveyor belt of chocolates to make the "signature" (picture to come). Crazy! Then we got too busy to take any more pictures. We moved on to the end of the assembly line where we boxed the little chocolate items coming off the line. We were supposed to grab 4 truffles in each hand and put them in a box...all while checking the item, top and bottom, for holes, tails, and defects....I don't think so. I could only get 2 in each hand. Those girls that do this all the time were laughing at us because they are just so fast at it.
The main thing is how surprising it is that so much is done by hand in this factory. It really makes for a very special product.
Anyway, we also worked with the truffle machine by lining up the shells for the machine to come down and insert the filling.
The amazing part was the "dipping" department where they were making clusters. When working with melted chocolate, you have to follow a procedure called "tempering". This has to do with working the choclate to the exact temperature while mixing it around on a cool table. The girls here do this by hand! They measure the temperature every little bit to see how close they are, and just literally play with the chocolate by mixing it with their fingers and using a spatula. They let us try this by making almond clusters. Cyrus and I both mixed the chocolate, added almonds, checked the temperature, added more warm chocolate if needed, or more almonds to cool, and then when it was ready, scooped a glob to put on the tray. We each had a thick layer of milk chocolate covering our entire left hand which we had to go wash off (and in my case, i took a huge lick first).
We went on to stand in the line and put individual assorted chocolates in a paper cup and then into their spot in an assorted package of chocolates (similar to Russell Stover's). I was only fast enough to do one, but the employees were required to do three!
It was just a crazy two days! The factory was surprisingly small. They are able to run multiple products down the same couple of assembly lines. For instance, after we were packaging the chocolate truffles, we walked towards the front of the line (maybe a 100 feet plus total) and there were already pink truffles coming down the line. I mean, there was hardly any changeover time.
The rest of the time in training has been spent discussing financials, marketing, promotions, customer service, inventory, ordering, etc. We have also practiced making fudge, and will learn how to make divinity, dip apples, and other stuff later this week. We are learning so much and we can't wait to get started!
I'll come back and add pictures when we get home. I'll write a separate post about Durango, CO itself, which is pretty cool.
