Christmas come early

This last weekend Mom and I and the puppies drove up to Spokane to visit my cousin David and his wife Leslie and two kids Justin and Tayla. We spent the night at their house and the next day visited my Aunt RaeAnn who is in a nursing home because she had multiple strokes which paralyzed her right side. The real reason we drove up was to bring her Christmas early. We bought a small fake Christmas tree and decorated it. I got some small tin cans that look like presents and we put some candy in them that she can eat or give away, whichever she feels. Then we had her Christmas presents with us and had her open them, which is the best part about giving gifts. She was so happy, mostly with just seeing us, but also with the tree and presents. David and Leslie helped us bring her back to their house and we sat around watching Harry Potter and talking, just being together, which I think she misses the most. Leslie made a great dinner that RaeAnn can eat. See the paralysis also affected her throat and her food needs to be a certain consistency for her to eat it and even fluids need to be thickened so she can swallow them. After dinner we all piled into Mom's van and drove around Spokane looking at the beautiful Christmas lights. Some of the houses really go all out up there, but the best house was a barn way out of town. The guy living there has all the lights on this barn, the trees around it, a whole row of small trees in front of it and an entire cast of characters hooked up to a computer. You tune your radio to the station posted in lights and listen to the music as the Christmas lights and characters "dance". It was a-freakin-mazing!!!!!! The characters would sing some of the songs and the best song (at least our whole van agreed) was the song "Sandstorm" by Darude. If you listen to it you get the gist of what the lights would be doing. After all this fun we drove RaeAnn back to the nursing home. She had told David that she was getting really depressed, but with all the joy we brought her, she thought that she'd make it. She was always a bit dramatic ;)

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everybody's Thanksgiving was full of turkey and pie! My Uncle Fred and Aunt Carla and cousins Erin, Patrick and Jonathan came over to our house this year for dinner. We had so much food that the table didn't have a single space left for anymore dishes! I took pictures of the full table and then the opening of the party crackers, complete with paper crown, really bad jokes and a surprise! We ate our traditional dinner of turkey and spaghetti and then collapsed into the living room. I got to try out Mario Kart on Wii and didn't do too badly, though I over-corrected a lot which resulted in me driving off the course into lava, or a canyon, or space where I burned up on re-entry. It was a good time! And now time to take down the Thanksgiving decorations and get the Christmas ones up!!

The tale of Edward the Chicken...

So if you don't already know I am totally obsessed with Twilight, the book series by Stephenie Meyer. And I managed to get my Mom hooked on them as well. So this last August she hatched her own chickens using an incubator and has been letting them grow up on the "safe" side of the chicken coop. Well since we grew these ourselves the chance of getting more than a couple of roosters was high. We already have two roosters that live with their own ladies in separate chicken runs and we really can't afford to have any more cause they will eventually start fighting with each other. The baby chicks (which are almost full size now) seem to have three roosters in their bunch. We managed to give away one rooster, but we still have the other two. So one of the baby roosters is a Leghorn/Araucana mix and my Mom thinks he is gorgeous. She had just read the first book when she saw this rooster crowing and thought, "Wow that is one beautiful rooster...must be an Edward." For those of you who don't know, Edward is the main male character in these books and is described as your own personal Greek god. So my Mom now has a rooster named Edward. Also once she names any of the chickens it makes it really hard for her to give it away.

On another topic, we recently decided to replace the floor in the parlor with a hardwood laminate. After ripping out the old carpet, removing the 30 or so pictures and paintings from the walls, and repainting the room we found out that the laminate we bought was going to be nearly impossible for us to install. We are planning on having family over for Thanksgiving and most of the furniture for that room was in the dining room. So we called Home Depot and got an installer. We were thinking it wasn't going to be able to be finished until after Thanksgiving, but the guy was in between jobs and when he saw how far along the room was already he said the only day he'd be able to do it was Monday. Hurray! We are both off on Mondays!! So yesterday our new floor was installed and the dining room will be fit to have guests soon. Enjoy the pics!

I love vampires...

So I know that I am a big time obsesser, and recently it's been about the Twilight book series by Stephenie Meyer. I literaly ran up to the mailbox today after I saw the mail lady drop it off to get my new Entertainment Weekly cause I knew that the movie was gracing the cover. And it's not just the movie or the books that get me thinking about vampires. The other day I was listening to the radio while I was at work and the song Bleeding Love was on. I was really listening to the lyrics and it totally made me think how the song could be from Edward's own lips. And then on the way home a guy passed me going like 70 in a 40 zone and I turned to Mom and said "Probably a vampire." Yep. Completely obsessed. On a note not about vampires at all, my best friend Nicole called me today to tell me she's pregnant! I am soooo excited and now I have a real reason to be pouring over baby stuff in catalogs! ;)

Happy (late) Halloween!

So after working on Halloween (which was fabulous cause nobody wanted to go to the hospital that day), Mom and I came home and did as many things as we could. It was like we had a schedule...now you must carve pumpkins...now you must make donuts...now you must dress the dogs in costume... Anyways we packed it in. And then only made it through half of Hocus Pocus before we passed out. But it was great! Note the pictures of cute doggies in costume. Ariel was supposed to be a princess this year, but she liked her ladybug costume from last year better. Toby was a clown in the beginning and then we put his pumpkin costume on him and he enjoyed running around in that. I was a complete geek and went as a plague victim to work. Hehehe. I made myself a bubo and black fingertips, cause that's what the Black Death looked like. My other nerdy co-workers and I came up with all sorts of bacterial Halloween costumes. Most are too disgusting to write in my blog, but anyways. So I hope all of you had a super Halloween!

Learning to live with disappointment

So it's been a week and the construction guys still haven't come back to put up the pergola. Oh they call, "My back is out", "The weather wasn't good"... So we are thinking of getting someone else to do it. The problem is they still have the instructions for getting the materials. I'm starting to get really ticked off, because this is October and the (relatively) warm weather isn't going to last much longer. Mom and I were both off today and we had been waiting for such a day to dig post holes and start to put up the fence that is going to go around the four raised beds we are going to build next spring to plant vegetables in. We had to wait until around 12:30 for it to get warm enough to go outside (56 degrees) and get started. But the temperature was great cause you weren't sweating your butt off or freezing to death. We managed to get the four posts we had in the ground, but were too tired by the end of that to put the fence sections on. Other than that life has been pretty typical for fall around here. It's been getting down to freezing every night for at least a week and we have been running the pellet stove at night to warm up the house. Mom got another ton of pellets and a cord of firewood, so all her nesting for winter seems to be done. I cleaned the porch off of the semi-dead flowers and we bought two bales of hay and about 20 pumpkins to decorate the front porch. All of these decorations are chicky edible so I was allowed to go what most would consider a bit crazy. Hope everyone is enjoying their fall!

The first of (hopefully) many...

So this is it! I have been nudged into the world of blogdom. I got here by way of my cousin Melinda who has an amazing blog that my whole family enjoys reading. She thought that I should jump on this bandwagon, so here I am. I'm not terribly interesting yet but here's what is happening right now. We were supposed to get our pergola put up today on the concrete pad we have in the backyard. But you know how construction people are, today means tomorrow. They came out to see what all they would need to put the pergola up and we explained where we wanted it placed on the pad. You see that was why we had scheduled the construction for today because both Mom and I were off. But they seemed to get it, so *crossing fingers* everything will go well tomorrow. For those of you who are saying, "what's a pergola?" it is just basically a big square trellis-like structure that provides shade and you can grow things over the top. So I am going to run outside right now and take a picture of the lonley concrete pad for before and afters. More later...

Here's the before