Homeless and Jobless...

Well the time is finally here...we have both officially finished our last day of work at the Hospital and are officially jobless. We are driving back from Portland as we speak after taking the final load down to store in the basement of our dear and generous friends, and are now officially homeless as well! We have been packing up our house for the last month or so in preparation for this final weekend of moving, but I don't think we realized until yesterday just how much we have! It's hard to believe that two 25 year olds can own this much STUFF, but we own it, we packed it, and we moved it (although at this point we would just like to get rid of most of it!). We made the move in two trips...
Trip One

And Trip Two

The plan is to spend a couple days at Craig's parents in Puyallup putting finishing touches on the car, but it is coming along nicely so far...

And then...we're off! Keep us in your prayers these next two months, especially for safety on the road and longevity for the Stanza. We want this baby to make it back to Portland with us at the end of September!

Micronutrients!

Last night we were flipping through some instant movies on Netflix and came across a documentary. A food documentary, to be more precise. These are some of my favorites, although Craig has really come to enjoy them as well. This was called "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead" and it was great! We recommend watching it! Check out the trailer...

It inspired us to dust off our juicer (I seem to go in spurts with these things) and give it another whirl this evening.

All of this, plus a handful of kale, went into the juicer...

And out came delicious juice, packed with nutrients!

I think for both of us, working in a hospital is the biggest incentive we need to eat healthy and take care of our bodies. There's nothing more motivating than to see where you could be in 30 years and realize you might just be a plateful of vegetables each day away from living a long healthy life instead. 

Cheers!

REFLECT Bottles

We have had a small business idea brewing ever since April when we got back from our honeymoon. We think it's finally time to let you all in on our little plan here and see if we can't get some assistance!

The background:
We were visiting a little plantation on Kauai with a small organic restaurant on the property. As we were looking at menu, Craig noticed the glasses on the table. They had taken old wine bottles, cut them, and sanded them to make drinking glasses!

The edge was pretty rough, but smooth enough to drink from. And it was such a cool idea!

So we set about to make these glasses on our own. It took a lot of research, trial & error to come up with a way to actually cut the bottles smoothly. The sanding part remained very elusive, until we finally had a breakthrough and are turning out edges much smoother than the glasses we saw in Hawaii!

Craig and Kurt are trying out some methods...the torch idea hasn't stuck around yet.

Some of our finished glasses

Here is our nice smooth edge!

We are now on to needing a business name, logo, website, etc. The hope is that we can market to small businesses and restaurants around the country as we drive, and build up a base of orders that can be shipped out when we get back to the Northwest. There's even the potential for selling at Farmer's Markets along the way.

This is where we're at: we have a potential business name "REFLECT", liking the fact the it was short, simple and hopefully catchy. What we're lacking is a logo. We'd like your help!!

COMPETITION: Design the best logo for "REFLECT Bottle Co."
DEADLINE: July 16, 2011 (one week!)
PRIZE: Winner will get a free set of recycled glasses!

Submit entries to craigandnicoleflood@gmail.com

We'll post any submitted logos to the blog so you all can see. As we don't have many followers here, we're not sure how well this will work. So please pass it on to any artsy friends and family!

The 4th @ Lake Tapps

The 4th @ Tapps 11' from Craig & Nicole on Vimeo.

So when shooting with the camera I found that I didn't record a lot of the shots I wanted but instead recorded in between all the shots I wanted. All in all I think it still turned out pretty good.

Boxes and Firecrackers

We've started to pack up our house...thinking if we do it s-l-o-w-l-y it will be less stressful in the long run. Honestly, at this point I'm not sure what's more stressful, packing at the last minute or living in a "packing mess" of a house for the next month! So I decided to start loading all of our boxes into the Stanza to take down south to Craig's parents. I laughed when I finished and looked in the car. Anyone looking in would think that all we own is books! There are tons of boxes in the back...and they all are marked on the side "Books" "Hardback Books" "Textbooks" "Piper Books" "Financial Books" "Christian Books" "Cook Books" "Reference Books". Makes for heavy packing, but what can I say? We are book people.
















We did get the first boxes down south though, just in time to load the bed back into the Stanza and head down for a Fourth of July on Lake Tapps with Craig's family. I don't think I've ever spent the Fourth watching huge fireworks literally explode over my head, but it was amazing! Craig's working on a little video of the day that I'll post later, but here's a few shots of our "camping spot" in the meantime!








The dock across the water was trying to out-do us...I'm not sure who won, but it did mean non stop fireworks!








We just backed our car up, set out the chairs, and watched an amazing show!










Made our bed in the back...










Pulled our car up to the dock...

And woke up to an amazing view!!