Alot in a little post!

Well, as you may very well have guessed...quite a bit is changing in my little neck of the woods!  In today's post, I have lots of details to catch everyone up on (as well as a name change and new goals for the blog) and I have a review!  So, lets get to the review first, shall we?  :)

Recently through Bzzagent, I was given the opportunity to try this new brand of wine at a discounted price!  Be. Wine is a group of four different wines that are designed to be a "girl's night in" drink.  My initial understanding was that they were going to be really fruity (sort of like an Abor Mist type of drink). 

The bottles we tried.

The two flavors we tried were the Bright and Fresh.  We started with the bright, so that's the one I'll review first.  The website describes the bright flavor as follows:
 Snagging the spotlight is simply effortless with this Pinot Grigio that breezes in with its sun-ripened fruit flavors, shines with carefree cues of the tropics, and finishes with an exquisite ending that welcomes you to your place in the sun. 
 To me this sounded like I would taste a sweeter drink with hints of mango.  I have to admit that I was taken very much by surprise.  These were more wine than wine cooler (my best way of phrasing it).  After the initial shock was over, the general conscientious was that it was enjoyable.  This is definitely a wine that you want to let air out though!  I personally didn't really taste much of the "tropical" taste I had expected, but the wine did have a very nice texture and it was smooth (if not as sweet as I would have liked....yea...I know I have a sweet tooth).  The general vote I received is that this is a wine that would most likely be bought again.

Aren't my drinking glasses fancy?  :P

The second flavor we sampled was the Fresh.  The website describes the fresh flavor as follows:
Each sip starts with a politely pleasant murmur that unfolds into an invigorating, crisp green apple splash that awakens your senses and revives your spirit.
This fortuitous flavor is perfectly complemented by hints of citrus reminding you of the delicious magic of a budding romance, new adventure or simple twist of fate.
This was a MUCH stronger wine.  Well, at least we all felt like we could taste the alcohol (several folks claimed that their sinus cavities were cleaned out :P).  After we all started drinking "the proper way" (we were experimenting for all those who would probably just pop open the bottle and try a drink) we could taste the hints of apple.  This was a good drink, but not as widely enjoyed.    We had been trying our drinks warm (we were excited and couldn't wait to open them) so we put them in the fridge and tried this one again cold only to find we didn't enjoy the flavor any more than we had warm.

The moth that stole the last little bit of my drink :(

However, we had a moth suicide as it drank to it's own death (of course it had to be my glass).  All in all, the wines were enjoyable as long as you are excpecting something more of a wine and less of a fruity wine drink.  I'm really excited to try out the Radiant (the flavor that I voted for but that ended up losing the flavor choice war).  Upon his trying some, my husband suspects that the very gentle flavors will also lend themselves well to cooking, so I'll let you all know how that goes once we try it :)  (it's been too hot to really cook in the house here lately).

So now that we've started off on a good note, I'm going to explain the name change.  This blog has gone from being called Adventures of a Michigan Housewife to Adventures in True Love.  One of the biggest things that changes with this is that my husband will be joining me in writing post (and it should be more regular!).  There's been quite a bit of conversation going on in my home this past week (the hubby had a good chunk of time off for the fourth and that really gave us some time to talk like we haven't talked in a while).  We've decided that we are ready (and really want to) begin getting things in our lives cleaned up so we can eventually pursue fertility treatments again.  We suffered a miscarriage a few years ago and just couldn't get up the nerve or the desire to try again.  Now, we're finally ready to tackle this beast.  We also have reached the point where we want to go back and fix the mistakes we made as a not thinking young couple and work on managing our finances better.  Our last goal is to get in better shape so that when we do have a kiddo, we can chase them to their hearts content ;) and so they will never have to worry about mommy or daddy dying too young for them to get to know us.  In our talks, we decided that there are probably a lot of people out there who are just as scared and confused  as to how to start tackling these things as we are.  Not only are we going to share this journey with anyone out there who needs help getting motivated or who feels like it's too much to tackle, but we're going to use sharing this as a motivation tool for ourselves (people write blogs about sillier things every day, right?).  We'll be doing a post soon with more details on the different aspects of these changes soon, but for now I'm going to leave this an over view!

Mike holding his honey mead in it's brewing pail.

Over the weekend, we finally tried our hand at brewing.  The honey mead was very easy.  You mix up your ingredients and let them all sit.  So they'll be sitting for a few more months then we'll bottle it.  We also did a batch of beer (our first beer!).  The recipe we're using is called Orange Citra Wheat and it was one recommended to us by the wonderful staff at Adventures in home brewing.  It was pretty scary to try and do our first batch.  Mike had visited with a local brewer's guild and I had no experience with this.  To start we made a tea with the grains (well after everything was sanitized of course).

Me holding the grains after we were through using them.  I turned them into bread later and it was amazing.

Then we boiled the mixture and added our hops.  After this we were suppost to add our malt extract, but we forgot and poured it into our carboy.

The "tea" before hops

The "tea" after hops

We then had to empty the carboy back into our pot and boil it again so that our malt extract would be pasteurized.  It was very frustrating at the time, but now it seems kind of a fun experience.  (not that we goofed but the solving the problem together).

Mike playing with the grain bag after we were done using it.

We then quickly cooled the beer down by placing a wet towel around it and setting it in front of the air conditioner.  (It took alot of research online to figure out what to do and we were so worried about ruining the drink!)  Once it was cool enough, we added the yeast and put the airlock on and took it downstairs to bubble.  I over simplified the process, but it was an enjoyable experience for the two of us and hopefully this first brew will turn out good enough to keep our spirits up to try another!

I'll give a quick update about the state of the garden before I finish this off for the night.  Very suddenly, quite a few of our tomato plants started wilting and dying.  After a bit of experimentation and google searching, we discovered that our villain at hand was the Black Walnut Tree in the yard.  We have since moved the plants to a wading pool container garden (as well as replanted some seeds there that died from the same thing) and they are much happier.  Learning how to keep plants alive in doors has been much more tricky and (I hate to admit this) I have killed many a seedling I started in this process :(.  I'll post pictures of the plants soon :) and I'll do a more detailed update on them soon!

Well, if that wasn't enough random topics in one post, I'm not sure what is!  I've been reading an awesome book on my kindle and once I finish I'll try my hardest to do a spoiler free review of them ;).  I'll leave you all with a picture of my adorable pups :)

The two of them tuckered out from causing trouble all day.

A "bonus" picture of Kyo being daddy's baby.  :P