Miscellaneous weekend notes

-Our water is back on. In total, we were without water for about 24 hours, which was a pain but manageable. We're thankful that it was turned back on and now seems to be working. We're also glad that the damaged was limited to the hallway.

-We had thought we might to visit Brno, a Czech town in the Moravian region, yesterday. However, the weather forecast was set at 90% rain and high wind. So we decided to postpone our trip. I was glad we did when we woke up yesterday morning to a pretty terrific thunderstorm, complete with 10 minutes of intense hail. German meteorologists named the windstorm "Emma."

-We did try a new recipe out of our Czech cookbook -- pot roast with cream sauce. It was delicious. Many of our Czech recipes call for a lot of chopping/mincing, and since we don't have a food processor, Jason and I were both cutting away. It'll save a lot of time when we can just throw everything in the food processor. Also, this recipe (and several of our others) call for you to let the vegetables simmer for a while and then whip them. This, too, would be a piece of cake with a food processor or a blender. Usually we just skip this step and have a chunky sauce. But yesterday I wanted to try to blend it. We have a hand-held mixer, so I tried that. I didn't succeed in creating a blended sauce, but I did make a mess!

-So we had a pretty quiet weekend. We caught up on some e-mailing, started packing things that we can send home with some of our visitors, made reservations for a few more pieces of our adventure home, etc.

-I know Jason's dad will be disappointed because when we talked to him last week he told us that we needed to be more exciting this week, and I don't think we were. Hopefully he'll be distracted by the Canadiens' move into first place in their conference.