Olivia

Mark got me a flower.

It's an Orchid.

And, her name is Olivia.



I love her!

She eats ice cubes and sunlight.

but I think we were killing her at first because we didn't have ice trays, so we just "guesstimated" how much we thought three ice cubes worth of water would be in a Ziploc bag and froze it. Turns out we were waaaaay off. Poor Olivia! She has bad parents that starve her.

But now we have ice trays. So we are doing better. :o)

We hope her flowers come back :o) She is super pretty! Thanks Mark!

Surprise!

Most of you know that it is almost impossible for me to keep any sort of surprise, for any length of time. It just escapes! I get too excited and I blurt it! Mark, however, LOVES surprises, so I have been trying to get better at keeping them. The kicker now is that if mark asks me a question even remotely related to the surprise, I will squeal.

For example:

"Hey Teandra? is this butter on the table yours?"

*nervous silence*

"Sweetheart? Did you hear me?"

*more nervous silence* *Mark walks closer*

"Is that butter there on the table for a reason or do you want me to put it awa-"

"OK! OK! I ADMIT! ITS ME! ITS FOR THE SURPRISE COOKIES I WAS MAKING YOU!!"

At this point Mark usually starts laughing and gives me a hug; I usually heave a sigh of relief and then secretly pout about ruining my own surprise. I can never think of any suitable sort of excuse.

But really, when there are only two of us in the house, whose else would the butter be, right? :o)

When I explain that to Mark, he laughs some more. :o) He is pretty stinkin wonderful. :o)

Anyway, my surprise spontaneity generally tends toward making "snacks" for mark. He is just so fun to cook food for! Plus, food is one way of telling people that you love them :o)

My mommy taught me about that :o)

ANYWAY! Valentines day I was determined to surprise Mark with not just a snack--but with this!



an ICE CREAM CAKE!! :-D

"HOW did you managed THAT!" you say?

(...especially since our freezer is only about 1.5 cubic feet and stuffed with food that Mark checks daily for his ice cream dose? :o))

WELL! That's for me to know, and you to find out. he he.

(ok, ok, I'll tell you. I can't keep surprises, remember?)

Well! I pretended that I was making the batter for someone at school, and then put the ice cream in it after he had gone to bed, and then I HID it beneath the shelf in our freezer with bags of broccoli in front of it. Broccoli is a sneaky food like that. The next day I came home from school during lunch and frosted it while he was at work, and then hid it AGAIN in freezer! :-D

Here is a picture of it cut:



So! When Mark came home from work, I had made him a nice dinner of pork loin stuffed with sausage polenta (SO yummy, if any one wants the recipe...such things can be arranged...) with potatoes and broccoli and stuff

(here is a picture of the meat! it is a bad picture though, sorry about that)



and THEN i surpsied him with DESSERT!! :-D

*sigh*

I think that was just about the best surprise EVER and I kept quiet ALL DAY and PLANNING and EVERYTHING!


I even had to clean up all my mess before he came home :o)

That was pretty tricky too

Mmmm....chocolate cheery ice cream cake... layers of chocolate cake, vanilla ice cream, fudge, more cake, cherry preserves, cherry icecream, and ganache...oooh yes.



and I didn't say a word!

SURPRISE!

ALICE!

SO! I figured since I can find this video on you tube, it is ok to put a link to it here.

Ta-dah! THIS is a movie of the rocket Mark has been working on, Alice! (short for ALiuminum-ICE)


Enjoy!

p.s. the burn is only for like a second. The long videos are captured with the high speed camera so the frames are in milliseconds not seconds.

Their first Noelle!

Last thanksgiving, Michael and Lindsey had their first, beautiful, little baby Noelle. She was born 8 week premature on October 27, 2008. She was doing really, really great though, and was able to leave the hospital before her due date! yay! they brought her home on November 28, 2008 (...i think...) and she had to be on oxygen and stuff, but it was good for Mike and Linds to be able to have her home :o) She has been growing like CRAZY :o) and soon (cross fingers) I will post some pictures of her in the present when Mark and I were able to go there a few weeks ago. Here you go for a blast to the past!


When the family gathered to pay their respects to Grandpa Coates, they Pfeil family had some time to get together again and Mark was able to see little Noelle and hold her and give her lots of little kisses! (I wish I could have been there!) He gave her lots from me too :o)


Here are some pictures!! :-D



Noelle and Uncle Mark eating some lunch!!



Uncle Mark and Noelle cuddlin'



Uncle Martin and cute little Noelle!




Aunt Becky and baby Noelle! Looks like shes almost...got her... alseep .... :o)



Mark, grandpa, and grandma pfeil!



Grandpa Pfeil holding Noelle :o)



Grandma Pfeil and little Noelle! :-D How sweet!



Grandma Pfeil and Becky looking at the precious little noelle! :o)




Pfeil Family Foto! ;o) I am missing though, I had to stay at school :o( But I love you all!



Martin and Becky!

here is the blanket we made for noelle! It says "Noelle Mary" in the corner with little daises in the corner :o)

Grandpa Coates

David Coates passed away on January, 24 2009. He is survived by his wife, Ethel Coates, his 5 children Mark, Linda, Adel, Diane, and Margaret, 17 grandchildren, and 6 great-grand children. We know he is still in good hands, still doing great things, with people he loves, in heaven. We will miss him :o) He has left behind a wonderful legacy. :o)


I am so grateful Mark and I were able to visit with him in the summer. It was really great for Mark to get to be with his grand dad again, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have known him better.

A funeral was held in Reno. Afterward, the family to Lynman Wyoming for the intermnet. On their way to the interment, they stopped in Salt Lake City.

We are glad that Mark was able to be there. Here are some pictures.

The display at the funeral in Reno:








The interment in Lyman:





Grandpa coates served in the Air Force during the Korean War. At the interment, he had a military burial (see the flag above) with a 12 gun salute to commemorate his service during that war.



right to left, Adel Pfeil, Ethel Coats, and Grandma Coates Aunt (name TBA...sorry!)





We love you Grandpa Coates!

Festive Chess and the Attack of the Santa Claws

My mom decided to decorate my dad's chess board. My dad has a bout a maZILLION chess sets around the house. He loves to play chess. This chess board is on the coffee table in the living room. My mom and the goose devised a play to make these thuper adorable santa hats for the chess sets... and then see how long it took for daddy to notice that they were there. SO CUTE!

:o)

They have little bells on the top too!! :-D



And here are the Santa Claws, as modeled by the goose:



Figure 1: At first, the Santa Claws seem perfectly harmless, docilely displayed on the talons of the Goose

Figure 2: With time, the devious nature of the claws weakens the goothies resolve--THE INNER BEAST ESCAPES!! RUN LITTLE PAWNS! RUUUUUUN!! ;-)

thehe! :-D Love you gooth!

Mark and the Grad School Adventure

So! The semester after Christimas was was Mark's first semester in grad school! Yay! Mark was accepted into grad school, and after interviewing with a lot of different professors and looking at a few different programs he could work with, Mark accepted an offer to work at Zucrow Laboratories with Dr. Steve Son. Mark had been in AFROTC, but with having to do research for his RA appointment, there was physically not enough time in the day for him to be in the AF as well as school and church and work. So! We don't know what the future will hold for where we will go work, but it sure will be an adventure figuring it out :o)

So! For grad school Mark gets to work with "Energetic Materials"...which is just an impressive way to say explosives :o) he he he :o)

He works on several projects for Dr. Son, one of which involves introducing nano-particles into liquid rocket fuel. Pretty cool. The other project is a rocket called "ALICE" for Aluminum-ICE (I think coming up with clever acronyms is a prerequisite for research; it must be on the GRE somewhere). They take little itty bitty pieces of aluminum dust and mix it with water and freeze it...then they burn it!!

That is Marks favorite part :o)

I must say it is pretty intense when they run a test. I was able to go to a few of them. You have to wear ear plugs, and guys are dressed up in fire proof suits and face masks to load the fuel grain into the test tube. Then they are like running the checks, and everything is going so fast and anticipation is building, and then they start the count, and then SCHWOOM!! the ground starts vibrating and there is this really really big bright flash!

and like a second later, it is all over!!

It is really intense. After it is done, people are laughing and talking about how it went, and talking about the pressure and stuff, and purging the chamber. A couple of times Mark had to dash out behind the building with a bucket of water to put out the weeds that they caught on fire (Whoopse!) :o)

The labs that they have out there are really awesome and he loves working there. The facilities are really unique so he gets the chance to work on a lot of really different sorts of projects and get lots of experiences handling and mixing rocket fuel and stuff. And, I am really glad they have buildings with blast walls (REALLY thick reinforced walls) so that if bad things happen behind the walls...they stay safe :o) Staying safe is DEFINITELY the goal :o)

We will see about getting permission to post a video of marks work for you guys to see! Stay tuned!!

SNOW!

Yes, it is September...but I am trying to post in chronological order, so I am still, oh, around January in blog-land. Unfortunately, I found this video from mid December that I didn't post then...whoopse! So, I am posting it now. :o) Hopefully by the end of this weekend I can be roughly caught up so I wont be living in the past anymore. Its kinnda hard to not get confused :o)

We had a light winter as far as the snow was concerned. I wanted to build a SNOW CASTLE!! :-D We never did get enough :o( My view is, if it is going to be SO COLD...we may as well get to play in it ;o)

Hopefully we will get a chance this year!




Enjoy the snow!

FAMILY PHOTOS!!

When we were visiting my parents, we took family photos. Nani and the Remy were there, we were just missing the Teek and the Alex and alex and chio. We took JUMPING PICTURES!! They were so fun. Here is a sideshow of all the good times!



I love jumping photos since people in them always look so happy. And taking them is a blast. The thing about the jumping photo is the timing. ESPECIALLY when you have a group of people ;o). My particular favorites are the pictures in weird squatting positions.

Then we took couple pictures! :-D Cute Cute!

Me and Mark:



Nani and Remy



and Mom and Dad and the Goose!



SO MUCH FUN!!

Here are the Favs of the afternoon:









hehe! daddy is so cute! :o)


Fun times! :-D

LOVE YOU GUYS!! Next time, we will have to have the Teeks fam there too! :-D

The Invitations...da da daaaaahn...

So! My friend Amanda Baer was having a baby, and I was making invitations for her baby shower. My mommy said that we could make the invitations when we were visiting them in NM. Weeeelll, we didn't get to doing them, oh, until the night before we left. WHOOPSIES!!

We were up...SO LATE...doing card stuff. Again, I was filled with guilt (AND SUPER GRATITUDE) for the slave labor of my mom, the goose, and the handsome mark. Of coarse, I had to choose a card that had moving parts and little bows and was really complicated (I learned my lesson! )

Goose and Mark had a competition going for cutting up the little baby carriages. Mark was winning...and then Goose discovered that Mark wasn't cutting out the details, he was only cutting out the outline, so she declared herself the winner :o) We watched Monk while we were doing it :o) Thanks so much! It was really fun :o)

Here is the final product:



I brought back all the pieces we made and assembled a lot of the cards back in IN, and I decided that I wanted to make these cutesie little bears to go in them. I printed them off in the Purdue computer lab and colored them in class (I paid attention too)
I cut them out and made the cards in the NUCL louge, it was pretty fun. They have a paper cutter there...it worked out great :o)