Just for Fun

I recently got my hair cut and donated 20 inches of my hair to Locks of Love for children with long term medical hair loss. It's been a life-long goal of mine to donate my hair for such a cause. I would love to make a little girl feel pretty with long golden hair.

Brett joined the Solar House Team on campus. They design and build houses that are completely solar-powered and then take them to the Solar Decathlon competition. MS&T has a solar village of all the houses that have gone to competition (4 houses so far). Faculty and students actually live in these houses.
Right now the team is working on the Chameleon House for the October 2013 competition in Irvine, California. They have set up a camera so that you can see the construction live (you have to scroll down and click on the gray box that says "Click to Watch the Live Webcam!"). It's fun to sit at my desk at work and watch Brett help with construction.

I feel like I've been cooking and baking like crazy recently. There are so many things from Pinterest that I want to try. I made my own Ranch beans (my favorite prepared beans) from scratch - meaning I soaked the dry beans, cooked the beans, and seasoned the beans - mmmhmm. Then I made tortillas to eat the beans with. I also made my own Cheez-It crackers, Rees's peanut butter cups, fruit roll-ups, and I did make those pumpkin cream cheese scones finally, with homemade caramel sauce and granola topping. My new favorite thing is fresh mushrooms, cooked. And I also learned how to make bacon in large batches without the greasy, splattering mess by using my oven! And why didn't I know that you could cook chicken in a pot of boiling water? Somebody slap me!
I might as well enjoy making whatever I want right now before it starts getting too hot and humid to cook or bake anything at all.

I also joined a Zumba class that meets for an hour and a half, twice a week. There are about six of us that come regularly, but sometimes we have up to fifteen people, more or less. It's really fun. Zumba is latin dance-based exercise routines to popular music. I like the class because we have a great teacher and all the rest of us are not that coordinated. We laugh a lot at ourselves for tripping over our own feet.