Today is the first day of our “Around the World” cuisine exploration. For our first journey, we travelled to Asia. Our meal consisted of some yummy saki, seaweed salad, an assortment of sushi (from spicy tuna to swordfish), ginger with mixed greens and asian noodles with sessame sweetened chicken. It was quite a feast! 
Jilly and I are always on the look out of how to break the next frontier…what we don’t always know is, what frontier we want to break and we are not always sure how “said frontier” should be broken. In the quest to further ourselves in worldly ways (see: ways of the world) we have decided to challenge ourselves; in the art of eating. We are NOT talking about the art of eating as many hot dogs as you can in under 10 minutes (although if you wanted tips, here’s one: dunk your hotdog in water to help it slide more easily down your gullet, but I digress)…this is not that type of challenge.
This challenge is stated as such: To create one meal per day (dinner) for 7 days (not too tough) BUT the meal that we prepare must be central to the culture of a different continent. This means ONE meal from each: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and Antarctica. What will we make the first?…unknown….what will the order be?….unknown…like Christopher Columbus we may travel to the “edge” of the world and back (or maybe like Captain Jack Sparrow – in our efforts to escape Davy Jone’s Locker)….in cuisine. But, rest assured, we will come back home. What is know is that the first day of this broad adventure will be Sunday August 7th in the year of our Lord 2011. Stay tuned for details….
J&J
Anyone who knows me (Jake) knows that I am ridiculously easy going when it comes to most things…….key word is ‘most things. < Please note that some, but very few babies in this world, are cute and sweet and lovely which is perfectly OK…for example: I love and adore is our little niece Lucy…she is the cutest thing ever and will never do wrong. > But just about every other baby on this Greenish/Blue’ish Earth makes me want to lobby for a new law to have wanna-be parents submit to a screening before being allowed to procreate.
So back on topic, Jill and I LOVE to get our workout on. (Someday I want to be a bad-ass biker guy with huge muscles, tats and have an old-school chopper.) So we spend mucho amount of time working out in the climbing gym. However, there is some drawback to living in Boulder, where many of the population do not have jobs, or don’t have to have jobs because their rich families or husband’s support them. Generally the “stay at home mom” is really more of the “trophy mom” who goes to yoga 5 days a week to stay fit for her husband. OR you have the richy-rich folk who don’t have to work and live a life of leisure at no expense to them. Many of these “Boulder-ites” have young children and they believe that these young children need to be with them ALL OF THE TIME!
Normally, these facts would not bother me. But, when I am working out in a dusty, dangerous, and busy climbing gym, where there is a ton of potential for injury, I don’t want to be forced to deal with these children running around, screaming, crying, fussing while I’m trying to focus on climbing and staying safe. It never fails to piss me off that the “Boulder-ite couples think that life can continue exactly how it was before said child…ie – letting them run around rampant in a dangerous environment that not only can cause harm to them and to me, but to distract from focusing on a workout. So I look down into the main gym floor and see a child making those horrible whining, moaning, wailing sounds, locked inside their own personal cage (see: playpen), as their parents are working out and barely paying attention. One could argue that this is a very insignificant form of a child ruining my day, as opposed to falling 15 feet and nearly smashing a child…or having to listen to a 6 year old boy that was injured playing unsupervised on a treadmill; the fact remains that I am tired of parents who treat the gym like their personal babysitter.
These people actually bring their kids to dangerous cliffs (100′s of feet off the ground) with all sorts of sharp rocks and plants, biting dogs, poisonous snakes, falling rocks…and all manner of other things that can kill adults and children equally. While parent A and parent B are climbing a dangerous rock-face, their child is playing with rocks on the cliffside unsupervised, getting in the way of other climbers, fussing and crying and not being watched as they potentially fall off the edge. Climbing is dangerous enough without you people risking the life of not only yourself, but your child, and everyone else in the vicinity.
They have daycare for a reason people – perhaps take some of that hardly-earned money and put it to use for a couple of hours a week, so that your kid can get proper care, while you pretend that your life is unchanged by your choice to have a child. Parents of the future be warned….it will not be long before I snap.
I’ve just added another slideshow of some of our band photos…will be updating throughout the day, but take a look if you haven’t already to see us rocking out as FB4K. Didn’t want to forget about our drummer, Matt, and wanted to make sure to give him a shout out!
I’ve also finished our new and improved Firebird 4000 Project website. Please go check out how awesome we are and sound – I even added some of our new tunes!
Whew…….Jake here of the clan McChallis: Next Wed. we are going up to Altitude Studio’s in Boulder Canyon for our 1st Trinidad mixing session April 6th and we are super amped. So today we’ve/Jill has been doing all the final production work for the songs “Grown”, “Down & Out” & our cover of the Deadbubbles hit “Zoo Kicker.” I have been playing video games, eating, napping and reading the whole day…Jilly is a superstar.
Booked our flights and hotel for our 1st wedding aniversary. We are going on a long weekend trip to Portland at the end of may, with the hopes of hanging with a few friends, eating a donut or two, and experience an eating and walking tour of the city. Tomorrow we are playing a show and doing a photo shoot, our good friend Liz is going to be snapping a few 100 shots’s of us playing at and around the Historic Dickens Opera House in Longmont, CO (Built in 1881)….I have lost my mojo for writing so I will add more to this post later; Happy Saturday.
jake
A lot has happened in the last few months. A lot of plans have changed but the end goal is still the same. Jake and I actually got engaged a few months ago, which is really exciting! We were planning to hit the road come September of this year (you know, the one that is only a month and a half away). But last month, Jake got an amazing job which gives him a ton of flexibility and a lot less hours while still on a really good salary. My work is going pretty well too, so it seemed silly for us to leave quite yet. We are still planning to go, but now we have some time to really get everything together that we would have wanted to the first time around. We were going to move to a mountain house, but decided it would be more beneficial to stay where we are, and save up to allow us to really go on this adventure the way we want to. Next step will be to start the rigorous 6-month [climbing] training regime (which is really hard, but totally worth it).
So we have changed the plan a little bit. Jake and I have decided that we need a bit more time to get everything in order before the big showdown. New jobs with tons of flexibility are really the biggest thing, and the fact that we will need to save up a bit more before we can get what we need to make the trip amazing. There will be lots more but right now, its back to making the big bucks so the dream can be lived.