When you read the title for this blog: "Thankgiving Bowl", you're probably thinking about one of the
many football games being played this week including the BYU/UTAH game (which by the way, even though we've got mostly BYU fans in our family, we have a few stinky ute fans--including my brother and sister in law.) That said, when I talk about the 'thanksgiving bowl", I'm really referring to our family going bowling this morning. We took the kids and went over to a new bowling alley here in Tooele. You might think our family would turn this into an incredibly competitive event, but with 2 kids doing bumper bowling and two grandparents
(who probably should have done bumper bowling) we just got out and had fun. You could count on 1 finger the number of people who broke 100, so that tells you it was a pretty low-key bowling outing. that said, it was awesome to see and help the little kids bowl. Tons of fun!!!
One of the best parts of thanksgiving (besides the food and family) is that every year we do a Lowry Family Project on thanksgiving day. Because I only write in my blog 1-time every year, you can quickly scroll down a few entries and you'll see a home movie about last year's project--water rocket building. This year's project was a little less explosive (to my disappointment)--we built bridges on the kitchen table. The rules were that we gave each family member 30 strands of uncooked spagetti and 20 gum drops. We gave each person ~20 minutes to build a bridge that could cross a 12-inch gap on the kitchen table. Each bridge had to be able to hold a plastic cup that we filled with weights (quarters) until the bridges broke. The bridge that held the most quarters won.
Well, Lorisa's bridge held $29 in quarters, so she won the bridgebuilder's prize. The rest of the builders came in below $20 in quarters, so Lorisa won with a healthy lead. It was a cool project and put our architecture skills to the test.
One of my goals for the year was to take a cooking class and learn to cook some new dishes. I'm an okay cook when it comes to dishes you might find at Denny's but I'm definitely not as versatile as I'd like to be. In the spirit of the departed chef Gusteau's book, "Anyone Can Cook", and in an effort to check off one of my goals for the year, I figured it was time to learn a few new recipes. Since I have some time off of work this week and am in UT visiting my folks, I decided that we should try a different Thanksgiving tradition--out with the turkey, stuffing and cranberry jelly and in with something a little more exotic.
We decided to cook a Thai thanksgiving dinner which included an appetizer of shrimp spring rolls, a green mango salad, beef Pho and a main course of Green Curry w/ chicken.
Most of the meal turned out amazing--the kind of meal that you'd get at any of my favorite Thai places in NYC or LA. Of course, instead of paying $10-20 for a good meal and having it ready in 20 minutes, we spent significantly more than that and the meal was ready in a little under 3 hours. It was really cool learning to cook something new.
I don't think we're ready to swap turkey for Thai in the future, but it was cool to try something new and it was fun to learn to cook some dishes i've never tried before.
Every year around new year's I put together a goal list--a long list of new year's resolutions I want to accomplish during the year. For example, one of my goals this year was to exercise 150 days out of the year. I'm on day 134 right now, so if I keep up the current pace i think i'll make it to 150 by 12/31. I keep a list of my goals in my pocket and check things off as I go. I'm feeling really good about progress toward this year's goal list!
One of this year's goals was to restart piano lessons (after taking the last 17 years off). Last April, I started taking piano lessons again and I've been surprised by how quickly piano basics have come back to me. For the first time ever, I'm working on learning some clasical music--mostly Chopin. This past week, I had the first recital of my life--along with a bunch of young kids that take from my teacher. It was fun to perform a song that took a few months to learn, and i'm really happy that i decided to take piano lessons again. Click
here to listen to my recital song.
many football games being played this week including the BYU/UTAH game (which by the way, even though we've got mostly BYU fans in our family, we have a few stinky ute fans--including my brother and sister in law.) That said, when I talk about the 'thanksgiving bowl", I'm really referring to our family going bowling this morning. We took the kids and went over to a new bowling alley here in Tooele. You might think our family would turn this into an incredibly competitive event, but with 2 kids doing bumper bowling and two grandparents 
(who probably should have done bumper bowling) we just got out and had fun. You could count on 1 finger the number of people who broke 100, so that tells you it was a pretty low-key bowling outing. that said, it was awesome to see and help the little kids bowl. Tons of fun!!! 
