Azerbaijan

Today we celebrated our 11th country, Azerbaijan! 

Ok, two notes... First, every time we get another ten counties done, we vote on the best 'collection' of postcards. The boys have four slots for their display, so once we get to four countries, they decided if they want to keep the four they have, or change one out for the new one, and so on, until we get to ten. Then, we all  rank the collections, by secret ballot of course (and they have to put theirs last). Then we tally them up and have a 1st place, 2nd place, and 3rd place, and they get money for their jars accordingly. So, today, before we got to our 11th country,  we voted. It was very close, but Calib got the first place prize, Peyton got second, and Hayden got third. 

Second, the boys all said it was also Ellie's day, since her nickname around here is Azerbaijan. If you're wondering why, all the pets end up with weird nicknames, that have evolved from other weird names. Example: Ellie is Ellie Belly, who then became Oooze-a-Booze, who then became Azzer-Bazzer, who then became Azerbaijan. Simple! 

Ok, anyway, back to Azerbaijan, the country. This place kind of rocks, and some of us even agreed it's the country we've done that we'd most like to visit. Some house keeping before I get to the fun stuff. They speak Azerbaijani in Azerbaijan, and 98% of the population is Muslim. However, only about 21% practice the religion, or say it's important, making Azerbaijan the least religious Muslim-majority country. The capital is Baku, and they've only been a country since 1991.

Yes, I know. Facts. Yawn. Ok, but here's whats exciting about Azerbaijian: they have speedy, elegant, good tempered horses (Karabakh horse, who sadly is endangered), burning mountains, and mud volcanoes! Plus, they're supposedly the location of the Garden of Eden and have a carpet museum! A museum for the world's largest collection of Azerbaijani rugs, and the building itself is even shaped like a rug! The burning mountain is more a hilltop, but it has it's very own natural eternal flame that has been burning for centuries and shows no signs of ever going out, thanks to the natural gas below the surface. Stinky gas is also responsible for the mud volcanoes. Azerbaijan is home to more than 400 mud volcanoes (which is more than half of all mud-volcanoes on earth). 

The boys made their postcards, Calib's Azerbaijani rug is pretty impressive, Peyton focused on the Flaming Towers in Baku (the tallest buildings in Baku which have LED screens all over them), and Hayden made sure to get a little bit of everything in there. 

For dinner we had Plov. You can make Plov like a million different ways, but it usually has a meat or a dried fruit in them. I can't find the recipe we used (you'd think I'd have a better system for keeping tack of them), but they're all pretty much the same thing with slight variations. 

There's lots of fruits and veggies in Azerbaijan, too, because they have fertile land, and a whole slew of climate zones. We had grapes and strawberries, and Choban Salatasi (it's a Turkish salad, but Azerbaijan pulls from it's neighbors in the cuisine department). Azerbaijani's have Chorek (bread), but as we discussed, we're not not bakers. The closest you can buy here is Challah bread, so we went with that. 

For dessert, we had Azerbaijani apple pie, which is basically like throwing all the ingredients of an apple pie in a dish and cooking it. But it works! 

Azerbaijan earns four spoons up. 

Shockingly enough, I'm the only one who didn't approve. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't all that exciting. Lots of fruits and veggies, which I like. But, the Plov lacked flavor for me. (I probably would have been happy with the dried fruit one, but as we have discovered, Calib flips out over raisins in his food). Everyone else really enjoyed it. Calib and Asa both had more salad and Plov (and Calib had like 3 pieces of bread), Peyton asked for seconds on the Plov and Apple Pie, and Hayden asked for more Apple Pie, after shockingly finishing his entire plate. 

We colored in Azerbaijan, right next to Armenia. It's our first two colored in neighbors! 

Next Up: We're going out of order with Canada! 

2022 Winter Olympics, Day 7: Skeleton

 It's Day 7 of the 2022 Winter Games! Our country today was Azerbaijan and our event was Skeleton!  

Hayden continues to baffle me. He couldn't get the Netherlands, or Germany, but has no problem with the lesser known countries. He even showed off on this one by writing the capital city (Baku). He said it was super easy, because he drew the flaming towers in the postcard picture on his postcard back during the country project. Some things stick with you, I guess. 

The event the boys bet on for today was Mixed Team Aerials, and both Peyton and Hayden got payouts. The USA won the gold (they're up to three!), China came in with the silver, and Canada came in with the Bronze. 

For our event, I picked up a magentic set of a skeleton. Their job would be to label the skeleton as fast as possible, all while navigating the track on Calib's long board. They could bring over two labels at once from the starting area, to the refrigerator to label the skeleton. For every bone you listed correctly, you shaved 3 seconds off your time. 

I thought about doing this in the kitchen. But, I ultimately decided to use the garage. It had the smoothest surface for the long board, and that fridge has less magnets on it than the one in the kitchen. Less disruption. (Don't mind the mess though, I have Olympic stuff and Snackadium stuff and stuff to go to Goodwill, plus general garage crap out there, so it's kind of a disaster right now). 

So there I was, sweeping out the garage, making a track for skeleton in the garage at 10 am this morning. (I'm not thinking maybe we could just use this for speed skating too, and I wouldn't even need to use the kitchen!) 

Calib had to work this morning, but since it was a timed event, we didn't need to wait to get everyone in one place at one time. This is key to doing the Olympics with a 21, 19, and 16 year old. 

Hayden was up first. He did... okay on the labeling. 

Peyton went next, and did fine on the labeling, but worse on his general time around the track. 

Calib had a good mix of speed and accuracy. 

And he came out victorious by a good amount. We forgot to give Hayden an advantage, since he chose that for getting Azerbaijan correct, so he's banked an advantage for later. (I don't think it would have mattered, anyway. Calib had a healthy lead.) 

Your 2022 Skeleton medalists.... (Ellie refused to move, so I just took the picture). 

Asa and I ran out for some errands this afternoon. We went to wawa for lunch and then over to Aldis, and we ended up running into Calib in line for gas at Costco. I've never felt older in my life. 

For dinner tonight we had Plov. There's a million different recipes for this one, and I couldn't find the exact one we used back during the country project, so we just winged it. Plov is basically a rice pilaf with meat and veggies, so you can do it anyway you want, really.  I forgot to take a picture of my plate, so no Plov picture. But, I did take a picture of the salad and the fruit.. 

And of course, we finished it off with some apple sharlotka! This one has been a staple recipe since the country project, everyone loves it so much. 

The leaderboard after Day 7... 

Hayden is ahead as far as money, but he is tied with Calib for points for their medals (3 for 1st, 2 for 2nd, 1 for 3rd), and Peyton is only two points behind that. Though Peyton is still looking for his first gold. So, it's still pretty close. 

Last night was really cold around here. The dogs did not enjoy it. But, I hear we're going to be on a warming trend soon, so that's good (Although rain is predicted most of Sunday so I'm going to need to do a little moving around of the schedule to avoid an outdoor event that day- and a kitchen event since the Snackadium will be in there! So, I'm not entirely sure what event we'll be doing tomorrow). 

But I do know the country tomorrow is Belgium, but man, there was some discussion about what the spotlight country was. Asa likes to screw with the boys after they've all submitted their guesses and act like he's thinking about what it was, and then he always comes up with the correct answer... because I told him ahead of time so he knows what he's cooking. 

Olympics Day 14: Biathlon & Best of Asia

We're on to day 14 of the Olympics, and our 'Best of Asia' day. It's really setting in that we're about done here with all this country business. And, it's really bittersweet. It's been fun, but I'm ready to move on to something else. The sense of accomplishment is no joke though. 

But we're not quite there yet. Two more 'Best of' days, and one more country to go! 

The boys are still getting mail from the 'Home Office', and they have pictures to identify. The first week they were getting all kinds of different landmarks, but now they are getting country specific places to help them with Jeopardy later in the today. Today all of their pictures came from Asia, and most of them they didn't even need the cards to look up! 

Since we had a hard time narrowing down exactly what we wanted to eat on Asia day. We were pretty split on our votes. 

But, once we narrowed it all down, I said if the boys really wanted to, we could have Chicken Shwarma for lunch in addition to our Asian dinner (we paired it with the leftover Argentina Chocotorta from South America Day and Watermelon from Africa day.) 

Then it was time for Jeopardy (see how well all the dogs, minus Porkchop, are doing together? Etta got a little weird with Ellie tonight after Ellie licked her face, but other than that, we had another good day). 

They all studied, though admittedly, Peyton and Calib studied way more than Hayden. When Hayden kept getting lucky with 'easy' ones (like the Minaret of Jam, the Flame Towers, and Burj Khalifa) 

It was close, but Calib won the bonus money for having the most points at the end of all of the Asian countries. 

After Jeopardy we moved on to our Asian flag event. Calib was super slow about it, it took him nearly 3 and a half minutes, but he identified them all correctly. Peyton messed up the Bahrain flag, calling in Qatar. Which, he knew as soon as he did it (they are very similar flags), so he only got one wrong- and he did it in under two minutes. Hayden came in with a respectable 2 minutes and 15 seconds with only 4 wrong (He missed some recent ones like East Timor, Taiwan and Laos). 

After the medal ceremony, the boys picked out their four favorite Asian postcards to make their 'Best of Asia' postcard collections. 

 Calib picked Afghanistan not because he loved his postcard, but because he said it was a nod to our very first country, Taiwan, India and China. 

Peyton went with Nepal, India, Indonesia, and Cambodia (I could not believe he didn't pick his Pakistan). 

And Hayden went with Laos, Singapore, Taiwan, and Azerbaijan. 

For dinner tonight we had the ever famous, so much talked about, Chicken Mansaf from Jordan. We also had Israeli Salad, Pakistani Fruit Salad, Lebanese spiced potatoes, and Apple Sharlotka from Kazakhstan for dessert. (So, we basically stayed in the middle east, today). 

This meal got another five spoons up. Everyone ate so much. I think all of the boys had three pieces of the apple cake. The thing was gone. And almost all the mansaf was finished off too. 

After dinner I went to the backyard for one more night skiing event: the Biathlon. I set up the flags for the track and got out the nerf guns and put some targets on the side of the fire pit. Basically, we toyed with how we should do this event, whether we should let the boys go until they got all the targets, or if we should add time for missed targets. Ultimately, we decided you had three shots to knock down the targets, if you didn't get it, you took another lap and had three more shots to hit whatever targets you had left. And, repeat. Once you knocked down all the targets, you could head to the finish line. 

It was kind of sad this was the last time they would use their skis, although they all broke at least one sandal, so it's probably a good thing that this was all we needed them for. (You can fix them pretty easy, but it's a little annoying.) 

Hayden was up first, and had so much trouble, we were debating if we should have made the rules different, or if we should have a max time. But he finally knocked down all his targets and made it to the finish line. 

Peyton pretty much killed it. I think he had to go around three times to get all the targets down. 

And Calib went hard, breaking a ski and cutting his foot, but refusing to quit (even when we told him it was ok if he didn't want to keep going). 

Calib still finished faster than Hayden, but Peyton was our Biathlon gold medalist. 

Unfortunately, Peyton also lost a medal. We put a big 'X' over one of his, since that Russian curler officially lost a medal for taking drugs. Peyton is annoyed the Olympic athletes from Russia still don't have a single gold medal. I told him the Ladies Figure Skating medal is being given out tonight though, so that's likely to change this evening.  

While the three boys are close, there's still no change in our places. 

Next Up: Tomorrow is Speed Skating day and the Best of North America!