Year of Firsts....May

Fifth month into my New Year's Resolution to try one new thing a month.  Once again, talking about this resolution with friends helped me come up with ideas.  I was visiting with my friends Nick and Suzie and we decided to take a cooking class.  The class we chose was "pastas."  As a carbohydrate lover myself, you can imagine my excitement for this class.

We started the class bright eyed and bushy tailed.  How hard could it possibly be?

A little harder than we thought.  Making the homemade pasta proved to be a challenge, and our first attempts were unsuccessful.  Determined to conquer our dough, we put it back through the ringers.  Practice makes perfect, and after about 4 tries, I finally made homemade pasta!

We made Marinara, Alfredo, noodles, ravioli, butter sauce, and a couple other things I can't remember, and I can't find my recipe paper to trigger my memory.  It was all delicious, except the marinara, but I'm not really a marinara kind of girl...

While visiting with Nick and Susie, Nick starting talking about his new gun and target shooting.  While I had shot guns with my brother-in-law in New Mexico, I had never shot a shotgun and I had never shot clay pigeons!  Suzie chose to stay home, but she let me borrow her husband to go skeet shooting.  It was surprisingly more fun that I anticipated.  I started out rough....I didn't even know where the bullets were ending up once I aimed at the pigeon.  I think I was closing my eyes...not the best technique for doing anything while holding a gun.  Round 2 proved to be much more successful!  I hit around 8 out of 20, which I thought was fantastic!  The next couple days, my shoulder was killing me!  It felt like a thousand needles constantly pricking at it, but it was well worth the adventure!