The First in the Deck Series

Our most recent DIY experience through the process.

Out With The Old, In With The New

Gotta love a new beginning, right?

Peppermint Shortage

Just a funny afternoon.

Coffeyville, KS

I loved this experience so much that I had to write about it. Then, through e-mails it spread to Coffeyville itself.

Photo Restoration

I had a lot of fun with this "old school" photo. It turned out too cool to not blog about it.

Kitchen Remodel (part one)

This is the first of a nine-part series documenting the remodel of our 50-year-old kitchen in our 100-year-old home!

Sushi Thursday!!!



A new weekly tradition has been birthed at the Felton household. It's called Sushi Thursday! One of my birthday gifts to Jodi last week was a box full of sushi tools and some of the key ingredients needed for this wonderful spread pictured above. So, with the first evening we had to actually take the time to make this succulent delight, we jumped on the opportunity and headed straight to one of our local Japanese grocery stores. Hooray for living in an actual city with real stores! I love having choices beyond "Beef, it's what's for dinner." Honestly people! If your mouth is not just watering with the prospect of sushi making friends then you need to figure out what your deal is. Sushi is wonderful. It is wonderfully tasty and good for you. I know that we Americans have a lot of trouble with that last statement, "good for you." But, it's true and shouldn't be feared. I have heard so many people say they don't like sushi and I have even been in that group once or twice, but most of these people have never even tried it. Or, they tried the kind that is on the all-you-can-eat buffet that they paid $3.99 for. They tried it and hated it and no wonder.
So I just can't wait until next Thursday. What will we try then? What new dressings will we pick up? What was I going to say next? The possibilities are endless, but know that I will be eagerly awaiting my new "friday". I love weekly holidays.
The sushi we had tonight was a california roll with cucumber, avacado, cream cheese, crab rolled in a sheet of dried seaweed called nori. The other california roll was the same except without the nori and it was topped with freshly cut red tuna. Then, we had a spicy tuna roll that had spicy mayo, green onions, and then rolled in masago (seasoned fish eggs). Lastly, we had a shrimp tempura roll that was made up of fried shrimp and masago rolled inside a thin layer of egg. We added a seaweed salad that was good, but didn't receive Jodi's approval. Jodi's quite the connoisseur to flavors and has high standards where I'm stuffed up with a partial sinus infection and thought that it was pretty good, so you might take Jodi's opinion over mine. We tried making several sauces and bought one that was already made and we decided that we'll just buy all of our sauces from now on. Ours were gross. The eel sauce that we bought was delicious!!
As we perfect our sushi making skills we will begin to invite others over on Thursdays to enjoy these wounderful little finely sliced slivers of heaven. Until then feel free to lavish Jodi and I with gifts while you try to use bribery as a means to rise to the top of the list of those being invited over for sushi. Flattery will get you a long way, but gifts with no marked occasion will get you sushi. Think about that.

Shane & Shane Concert

What a concert! (spoken like Yakov Smirnov) Seriously it was an amazing evening with Shane & Shane (you'll get that little joke if you are a fan). We had a blast despite that we weren't the big group that we had originally set out to be at this event. We were a happy group of five, though. I have to say that if you missed the show, then you really did miss out on an awesome experience. I've only been listening to these guys for about six months, but I love what they do. The only grievance that I have is as a fellow guitarist and singer I have some extreme trouble trying to recreate their sound. I pretty much gave up trying. Anyway, I realize that this band is sort of undergound to most of you, so I recommend to you that you get your fanny on down to your local music store or click your way to Amazon.com or something and buy these guy's albums. You won't be disappointed. Here is a link to a short clip I took with my camera. Enjoy! Click here to view the clip!!!

"No! I'm da boss!"

Mwu Ha Ha Ha! My evil plan is right on schedule. I am moving into my old boss' desk today. I will soon run this company, then the corporation, then THE WORLD!!! Mwu Ha Ha Ha!! Cough! Couch! Hack! ... whew, gotta take it easy on the evil laughter. I'm not the young evil genius that I used to be. (That's pronounced gee-nee-iss, by the way) I'm putting on the years like Marlon Brando. It's cool, though.
Honestly, I'm gonna miss my old desk that just screams "Number 2!" I'm gonna let someone else be number two to my number one, though. I'm an awfully nice guy, aren't I?
In all seriousness, though, I really am having adjustment issues. I've been doing the job for a while now, but I was still receiving back-up for a lot of the little issues that popped up. My back-up is now gone and for the first official work day I am leading the group alone. It's a crazy thing to be in charge of a bunch of men that are old enough to be my father. They make it pretty easy, though. I've worked with them for seven years, so I'm no stranger. And, I couldn't be a part of a better bunch of folks.
Anyway, wish me luck!

What a sobering eye opener.

As kids, there is no doubt that my friends and I thought we were invincible. Some of the things that we did I think about today and wonder how I made it through puberty without ending up in a wheelchair or worse. I had some close calls and landed myself in the hospital more than once, but I always turned out alright and was ready for another round of walking that thin line. I'm sure that most of you can relate. It's completely understandable, too. In our culture we are used to our dead being wisked away so quickly that no one has an opportunity to see them. We use sheets to cover them out in public until a crew comes with a black zippered bag to hide them in and then that goes straight into the ambulance which discreetly makes a deposit at the morgue that no one knows the location of. Then a funeral home worker magically transports the body into a casket and you know the rest of the common story.
I remember during the aftermath of Katrina there were some dead that were left out in the street for a week and people were going nuts about it. I believe it's respectful to have a prompt and proper burial, too, but I don't think that Americans in general have any idea about the way that other cultures handle their dead. There are countries that if someone dies it's up to the family to prepare the body for burial and then bury it or burn it or basically do whatever they see fit with it. Some families find a place inside the home for the corpse to stay for a certain amount of time before they dispose of it.
My point is that very few American teenagers have any grip of reality when it comes to the possibility of their own death. They push the limit and shock their elders, but I think that the reason for them doing so is less that they don't care and more that they just don't know. They've grown up amongst violent television programming and the only death that they know of is the fictional deaths that they've been busy desensitizing themselves with. We don't see our dead in the United States. Even open casket funerals cake so much make-up on the corpses that they look fake. Just like the fake ones they see on television.
Well, I have a better grip on the life and death issue than I did when I was younger. For the second time in my life, someone in my peer group who I knew has died from an illness. There have been others that went in various kinds of accidents and as much as those were tragic and eye-opening to the ultimate price of reckless behaviour, there is just something sobering about knowing those who died from an illness that no one could do anything about.
We are not, by any means, guaranteed a life on this planet and you never know when tragedy might come knocking on your door. I guess that what I want to say is : Live a life that positively impacts people and always remember that there may not be another time to do all the things that you want to do before you're gone. So do the most important things daily.

A work in progress.

I'm currently in the process of changing over my blog site to this new fancy one. It looks a lot better and it is easier to access older blogs. I'm excited about using it instead of MySpace. I will still have my MySpace account, but it will only be used to keep in touch with people. I will no longer be posting blogs there. I will have this all set up within the next 24 hours, so be patient. I am studying up on all the ways to subscribe to this blog. I'm not a code writer, so it's taking all my brain power to set up an easy and convenient way for everyone to get notification of a new post on this site. I'll keep everyone updated.

Thanks,
Levi

Welcome!

I welcome myself to the world of professional bloggers! Yay! I have been such an amateur playing around with MySpace. Although, I do thank MySpace for taking a big chance with me. When no other website saw talent they said, "Give the kid a chance. What could it hurt?" For this, I am grateful. However, it is time to move on to bigger and brighter things and talk bad about the former things. One thing that I have learned from all this fame is that to continue to grow in popularity one must always remember to stomp on those little people that supposedly helped them get where they are now. So, to prove that I have what it takes to forget the little guy and move on towards stardom, I must say that MySpace sucks. It was fun for like a day. MySpace is like SO early 2006. Get with the program people.

Okay, now that the media is busy frantically scribbling down all what I just said, I can say that I don't really feel this way. My agent said to say these things, and he's done wonders with my blog career so I figure he's probably right. But, I really do love all you MySpacers!

Enjoy the new blog site!!!

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