What's Cooking?!

Last week the two members of the family who do the least cooking actually got their hands dirty!! Abigail is always interested in everything that's going on and loves to 'help' with anything and everything ... so Jenny thought she'd see how she got on in the kitchen!! Balanced precariously on some steps, she had so much fun helping make the pizza base for our dinner that evening ... first adding all the ingredients in the bowl, kneading it (or prodding and poking it would be a better description) and then helping roll it out!!

After a little bit of rolling she got bored ... and started picking lumps out of the middle of the pizza base and handing them over ... needless to say it wasn't a very uniformed shape pizza that night ... but still tasted yummy!

Mark's 'cooking' was a little bit different ... as he wasn't cooking anything you'd want to feast on!! Working on a Mooney M20J, he was checking the bearings and brake discs on the wheels.

In order to put a bearing into a wheel half, the wheel half needs to be heated up ('cooked') and the bearing needs to be chilled in ice ... this is so that when they're put together and are returned to room temperature, they expand/contract and are secured tightly. Both halves of the wheel are then bolted together.

Below you can see Mark putting the wheel back on the aircraft ... all 'cooked' and ready to go!

With regards to what 'will be' cooking in the coming months ... Jenny planted our veggie seeds this weekend ... we now watch and wait to see if anything will come of them!!

Saturday afternoon snapshot ... & more!

Friday evening was filled with laughter and craziness ... for Jenny at least!! Andy Porter ... the other MAF UK apprentice at MMS, is due to get married to a local Coshocton girlie, Esther Jarrett in June this year and Jenny and her two partners in crime helped organise the fun and entertainment for Esther's bridal shower! (see below Kristin, Jenny and Laurie ... left to right)

Mark spent the evening with Andy watching the baseball ... (they're both getting acclimatised to the American culture) ... while the girls all dressed up in headboppers, with the added extra of a lovely pink feather boa for the guest of honour! It seems that Bridal showers are lot more civilised out here than the hen nights we're used to in the UK ... as Esther is marrying a Brit we felt the British culture needed to be included in a small (yet still slightly civilised!!) way ... hence the added accessories!!

Lisa Schwartz (far right in the picture below) hosted the evening at her house and right from the start there was lots of laughter ... this just increased more and more as the evening progressed ... it was a great time for many of the MMS ladies to get together and just have some fun ... not forgetting the toilet paper veils!

On Saturday we were minus one member of the family for a lot of the day as the PT6 course which has been running this week in the hangar didn't finish til Saturday afternoon. While Abigail was sleeping that day, Jenny was decorating a birthday cake and as she put the finishing touches to it Mark came home and took some photos!

On Sunday we hosted the Swanson family who are here from the UK for their evaluation week (just like we did in March 2009) and it was their son's 2nd birthday ... he's a fan of Postman Pat, so Jenny made him a Postman pat cake and had great fun in the process!

Once the cake was finished Jenny went outside to see what Mark was up to in the garden ... putting together our new BBQ!!! The weather has been GORGEOUS recently ... regularly in the 80's ... apparently unusual for this time of year ... so we thought we'd enjoy the 'summer' weather with a summer past-time ... a yummy BBQ! Cake decorating and BBQ building on a Saturday afternoon ... we're definitely living up to our gender stereotypes ... He he!

We've been emailing the Swanson's (Andy, Heather and their two little ones, Abigail, 3 and Matthew, 2) for a couple of months so it was fun getting to know them a little better in person on Sunday, we wish them well with the rest of their evaluation week here in Coshocton and hope to welcome them back here later on this year as Andy starts his apprenticeship at MMS!