A Night Of Fun Ahead...

I'm so excited for tonight!! We're having some people over tonight to celebrate my birthday!! It's been awhile since we've entertained a group of friends (summer we usually just have a fire so it's just not the same!@). So far there are about 16 people coming over which means that I get to make a LOT of appetizers and snacks!!

This is one of my all time favorite things to do! I love making this kind of stuff!! Also, if I make it then I know that I can eat it (I have an allergy to mayonaise. Hives, lots and lots of hives!!). Whenver we're invited out I am always the one asking if I can bring something, especially to the Diva's.

So on the menu tonight are:

taco dip
melted cheesy pizza-y type dip
chicken croustades
pizza wonton thingy's
chocolate fundue w/ fruit and angel food cake

I think that's it. We'll have to see how adventurous I get once I start making this stuff!! I will try and take some pics to post on here of my food!! Have a great weekend everyone!!

Books

In this last week I have gotten back to something that I haven't been able to do in the past little while, reading. I really enjoy my reading, but lately I haven't been able to do much of that. I have been finding myself really stressed so I had to stop most things that I was doing and just make myself sit down and read and relax.

I have been reading a book that Laura had lent me a little while ago that I have really gotten into now. It always was easy to get into, but now that I have made more time to read it I'm enjoying it so much more. It's amazing how it affects you when you can read more than a couple of pages at a time. It's one of those stories that gets you interested in the first couple of pages and keeps you hooked throughout. She had blogged about it here.

Some types of books that I enjoy are law/criminal (Nancy Taylor Rosenberg, Dee Henderson), suspense, thriller (John Saul), love stories and others that I don't know how to catagorize. I love how you can just get lost in a book and forget all of your troubles. So now I'm off to get lost in that world again.

Do you have a favorite book?

Remembering My Fish

I seem to have a problem with Mya and my fish tank. She never bothers any other tank in the house (we have five in all) but the one in my room with my three Angelfish. She tends to put stuff in there that just doesn't belong. One day when Cam was supposed to be watching her I came home to find that she had put an umbrella in there. Another day we found a cookie or something along those lines in there. SInce the girls sometimes watch movies in our room, we don't always notice what she's doing it unless Chloe comes and tells on her.

Friday was one of those days. Suddenly Chloe comes running into the living room saying that Mya was feeding my fish. Well that's a bad sign to begin with, so I was on my feet in an instant to see what she was up to. Well it turns out that she was actually feeding them fish food. The problem was that she put in the whole container!! It was brand new, completely full. I don't know off hand exactly the size of it, but it measures about the size of your hand in height and about 3" in diameter.

Next came a time of panic for me as I was trying to clean out tank to give my fish a chance at survival. It took me over an hour to clean that tank. Then I had to hurry up and get ready for our date. By the time we got home I went to go look at how they were doing. Two were floating and the other was struggling on the bottom. We tried to save him by putting him in with the guppies, but he just didn't make it. I had two of my Angels for just over two years and the other one just over three. They are dearly missed, but I would love to get some more Angels soon. I just love these kind of fish, they are truly beautiful.

Simplicity

So today Chloe got me back to thinking about the simple things and thoughts that we may be missing in our lives. Sometimes I feel that we are all too busy and always wanting the big things in life. How often do we want something simple? What sparked this train of thought was when Chloe was watching one of her tv shows. Suddenly she said "Mom I wish I could be in a bubble". The characters on tv were blowing bubbles and one of them ended up getting stuck inside one of them. Well she thought that was just the coolest thing ever! Screw the toys she had seen on tv, now she just wants to be inside a bubble!!

For me I always find myself wanting more. I need a new pair of pants, I need a spa day, a night out, etc... SO now I sit here and think about the simple things that I often want as well. A nice hot bath with candles lit, a quiet night with my husband watching a movie or playing a game, a day when my hubby is in one of his goofy/ticklish moods and will actually let down his guard and just laugh, to be able to go out fishing and just enjoy the beauty around me. I would be so happy to be able to do these things more often rather than get caught up with the busyness of life. Instead I find myself sitting at home and wanting a night out, go out for supper AND a movie, do some travelling, etc... I just want to try to add a couple simple things to my weekly routine. If I could do that then it would be nice.

Bring On The Snow!!

So today is a very blah day for me. Fall is really making itself at home. Today I went to go do my MIL's hair and while there it really started to rain. But Ever so slowly little flakes of snow started making their way to the ground. Eventually it was a nice mix of the stuff, along with sleet. I love winter, but I don't like how wet it makes everything when this weather first comes around. I love nice light snow falls and light rain showers, just not together.

Today was also the start of an afterschool program in our town. It's such a good thing. Kids from ages 6-12 can go there from 3:30pm-6:00pm Tuesdays and Thursdays and get help with their homework, make crafts, play some games or sports, etc... They provide a healthy snack for all who go to help them get through until supper time. And the best thing about this is that it's FREE!!! There are so many kids in this town that go home to an empty house that aren't even of age to do that. I just really hope that these parents take advantage of this program. But of course there had to be a problem right? So I had promised that I would take Madison and her friend Madison (it gets very confusing!! They're both Madison H's as well!!) to this thing. Well I didn't know that it would be raining/snowing today!!! I also didn't know that I wouldn't have a vehicle available so I could drive them either!! So here I am, walking the two blocks to the youth center, with four little girls with broken umbrellas, jumping over puddles in the rain!! It must've looked pretty funny. We had a good walk and I am very thankful that we don't live too far from there!!

Hope everyone is enjoying the weather and the cold season!! I'm tryign to avoid the colds, but have a feeling that it'll catch up to me. Ugh.

And did I mention that my glasses broke again today?? Yeah, the arm came right off!! Great! Good thing I got a fresh supply of contacts five days ago!! lol

The "Amazing Race" weekend

So this past Saturday Cam & I participated in a fundraiser in our town for minor ball. It was the "Amazing Race" followed by supper and a dance. The race ended up being a lot of fun and I'm very glad that we decided to do it!! There were a series of events that we had to do. We ended up driving all around our great rural areas and did some things we would never do otherwise. We were in teams of four and it depended on the activity if only one or more people were involved. Here are some of our events..

Our first event was peddling these Dino Cars around a 400m track. The boys were dead tired by the time they finished, but we ended up passing the team in front of us because of them!!


Another event involved Cam throwing this stick to knock off a pumpkin sitting on a fence. It took a couple tries, with two of us retrieving his sticks (one guy got hit in the eye on a bounce!! He looked rough come the dance!!) and trying to throw the
back to him without nailing on-lookers!!





We also had to choose one person to participate in this event. They then had to choose between a creamy delight or crammed in a can. Karen had to do this one due to everyone having to equally participate. Turns out the can one was eating TWO cans of sardines!! She couldn't do creamy delight due to a chocolate allergy (you had to eat a whole chocolate pie!!).



Then you had to pick two people who had to decide between up,up up or dig for something small. They chose up up up, otherwise they'd have to dig in a gravel pile for some colored rocks. This was their challenge....





Then a puzzle that ended up spelling eye of the needle...



Then came other events like sewing a pillow together, filling a wheel barrow fromt he river with two cups then filling a barrel to a certain point. I think it was harder running back up the hill from the river than doing the actual task!! lol Then there was one about road signs.

The very last task was hitting baseballs from a batting machine. Cam gladly took on this task and made his 3 hits in only 4 pitches!!! So much pride in my hubby!!



We had so much fun doing the race that it made up for the supper and dance. In the end we placed 7th out of 16 teams. Every team was so close that placings came down to seconds. We were only 4 minutes off of first place!! Gives us more determination for next year!! You can count on us doing it again!!

Hair

Since there were some comments about my hair, I figured I'd post about it. Hair is a huge deal to me, well it should be since it's my career choice!! So this is what my hair was like....






But this is what we did in just one morning....









For over nine years I've had some type of blonde in my hair, whether it was totally blonde, or just hi-lites. So it was definitely time for a change! I'm very glad that I did it. But never once did I think that there would be black in my hair, let alone purple!! But I'm loving it, for now anyways...

My Top 5 Celebs...

Ok, I know this is sad, but I really had to think about this list!! It started with Kristin, but Laura turned it into a meme. So how can I not contribute???

Top 5 Fuckable Celebs....

1. Matthew Mcconaughey. He just has the most beautiful features and I love him in movies, especially How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Failure to Launch.

2. Heath Ledger. Something about the way he talks...mmmmm. And the eyes

3. Ryan Gosling. It all started with Breaker High, then it took over in the Notebook. And being Canadian doesn't hurt either!

4. Owen Wilson. Hilarious in just about every movie he's in. Laughter is a huge thing for me. Could be an adventurous night!! lol

5. Vince Vaughn. This is kinda a tag team effect with #4. Them together is HOT! Imagine a nice tall man, strong hands.....nice.

Just One Of Those Days

Do you ever have a day when you want to do something but don't know what to do? I feel like I've had too many of these lately. My life is starting to feel a little too routine, and I think a minor change may be needed. I have a couple of plans in the works, but I have some work to do in order to get there.

First things first. I want to get in shape. I was talking with Audrey (the secretary at Cam's work) last week and she wanted to join our local gym. There's a special on right now that if you join with a friend for a year it's $25/month. There is no sign up fee and I love going to this gym. So I told her to give me a call if she decided to join. (I was a member for just over a month when my vehicle decided it wanted to go to the graveyard...so that ended that. With no vehicle of my own until a month ago limited my life) We talked about this gym when I originally joined, but she never did join. So I was very doubtful that she would call. But lo and behold I got a call from her today!!! Shocked?? Um yeah. I thought it was Cam calling, but it wasn't. So Audrey and I are going to the gym tonight to sign our lives away!! lol I am very excited. I love going to this gym and with the rate, why not? I am motivated to do this and don't need someone to hold my hand to do it.Yay!!

The other thing is my side job. As you know, my main job is my family. They come first. But on the side I sell Partylite. This is something I love. I LOVE candles!! I am obsessed!! So what I really want to do is start booking more shows and get more active in it. I also want to move up in the business by becoming a leader. That is my new goal. I want to offer this opportunity to other people who want free stuff. I want to be able to get more free stuff myself and earn a higher income by getting other people to sign up. How great would that be? It gives me a chance to get out of the house and be able to socialize with people about something that I love to do.

So these are a couple of my goals for the next couple months. I am so excited about both of them, and am determined to get at least a good start on them.

Something Good Should Be On The Way....

So here I was, writing in my blog last week, looking forward to a beautiful weekend at the lake. Just me and my family, away from everything chaotic. Problem free, right? Oh how wrong I was!! Let's start by saying that whomever said that bad luck comes in three's is totally wrong!! It came in more that a set of three for us!! So here is a run down of our rotten luck!! (And welcome to y first blog posting with photos!!)

So on Friday we were getting ready to go to the lake, just Cam & I for this night. Go to Damour Lake, fish and then tent it there for that night. We ended up leaving just about two hours later than originally planned, which was fine. Got to the lake and fished for a couple of hours with only four catches. That's pretty slow fishing for that lake. Guess the fish just didn't like us. So by the time we gave up on them it was already starting to get dark. We still had to load up the boat, pick a site and set up camp. We didn't get our tent set up until after 10pm and it was dark by this time. So there we are, setting up a tent (we had only done this once before with this tent, totally different style from what we know) with a little LED lantern. As we were managing to get it up I noticed some holes in the sides of the tent. Some were the size of my hand. Apparently some mice had decided to sharpen their teeth in it. We had three big holes in the sides and four other holes in the bottom of our tent. So we patched it up with some duct tape. Quick fix that works. We were in bed sometime after 11pm and were sleeping on a very hard, uneven ground. Bad sleep. Then I woke up at 2am to the sound of rain on our tent....
"Cam it's raining."
"Yeah, I know" sigh, sigh, toss turn.
This went on for about half an hour. Then it started raining harder, which usually isn't a big deal BUT the road we drove in on consists of very steep clay roads. If it rains too much there is no getting out. With a truck and a boat you're bound to get stuck. And this is not a well known lake. The only people around are on the farms. There are no cabins and the most you'll see on the lake is two boats at a time. So if we get stuck we're screwed.
"You're not going to sleep anyways so we may as well pack up and get out of here."
"Yeeaaahhh. May as well."
So there we are at 2:30am packing up our tent in the rain and loading all our gear up. We were so glad we left when we did because the roads were already pretty mucky and getting hard to drive on. So we decided to go to another, not so known lake that Cam went to with his Grandpa growing up. We didn't really know our way there, but were willing to try. After just about hitting 10 deer to get there, and a wrong turn later we made it. So by just after 3 we got to go back to sleep in the front seat of the truck.

We awoke at 7am to the sound of another truck coming into the lake. Low and behold it was his Uncle. There they are talking right behind the truck while I'm in the cab trying to sneakily put my bra back on without them seeing me!! How embarressing!! So we got our muffins packed and got ready to head out on the lake for sme fishing. Earl gets his boat in and started up and we say we'll meet him out there. Well that was the plan until our boat decided not to work. Dead battery among other problems. So we decide to take the battery out of the truck so we can still go fishing, but somehow the bolt part breaks. Now that battery doesn't work either so we are without a battery for the boat and the truck!! So we sat there waiting for Earl to come back in from fishing to devise a plan of attack. He ended taking out his battery to boost our truck (no one had booster cables) and then putting ours back in. After letting the truck run for half hour to recharge the battery and load the boat back up, Earl took us out fishing for a couple o hours.



By the time we were done fishing the weather had turned ugly. Winds had picked up quite a bit and it just wasn't suitable for camping. So we cancelled our first night at the lake with the girls and hung out at my parents house that night.

We left early the next morning to go out fishing again, but with the girls this time. Sad to say that once again the boat didn't work, and it wasn't due to the battery this time. Fuel line problem. But when Cam finally got that fixed, the battery died. Grr... So we loaded the boat again and went to the lake we were camping at. We ended up getting it to work that night and parked it at Earls cabin. the next morning when Cam tried to get it started it wouldn't go. So when I was bringing the truck to the boat launch I saw him paddling the boat across the lake. Yay. So we had had enough by this time. Loaded up the boat, packed up camp and went home. We weren't even half way home when this car pulled up beside us on the highway flagging us down. Apparently we blew a tire on the trailer. "Well that explains why the truck was driving funny". Nice. Real nice. I wasn't allowed to take a photo of it though. He got a little ticked at me for trying. So Cam and his dad had to unload the car trailer so they could go back and pick up the boat.

But not all was bad. There were some really fun parts to our weekend too.

The night we spent at my parents was also my brothers birthday. So we ended up celebrating the night with him when he finally got off work at 7pm.



Fur Lake





The kids played at the park...



Went swimming in the freezing cold water...



When we did end up going fishing...




One last trip to the park...



So in some ways I'm glad the weekend's over, but at the same time we did have fun. We got to do some visiting with family we don't see too often and we also did some fun stuff as a family.

More About Me....

So today I have been reading other peoples blogs and I came to realize a few new things about myself that these other people made me realize....

1. It's okay to miss a beloved pet...even if it has been gone for a long time. I was in grade 7 when our dog Chico was put down. I loved that dog very much and still miss him. I think because of this I tend to compare other dogs of ours to how Chico was and that's just not fair. Don't get me wrong...I loved the dogs we had...Mike was a great dog, but some of his habits I just couldn't get used to, and Shelby is a great dog too and with a little more training she'll only improve. So I need to realize that every dog is different, especially if you didn't get them as pups and train them yourself in the beginning. But I do love my dogs and really do appreciate them, I just think I need to appreciate them more for their own uniqueness. That's the one thing I regret not doing when Mike was still around...

2. The beauty of nature... I was reading "Mary's View" blog today and I must say she takes the most beautiful pictures! She takes her camera and takes pictures of everything in nature. She had pictures of so many different types of birds, her dogs, bees busy at work in a flower, flowers, her fish, etc... I love the beauty of nature and I don't know why, but it has honestly never occured to me to actually take the time to take a piture of it. I have recently started taking more scenic pictures, but now I sit here wondering if I could take pictures even a fraction as beautiful as hers. I know it would be more of a challenge to take a picture of a moving creature, but I think it would definitely be worth it in the end. I enjoy these types of pictures and plan on trying my hand at them very soon (except that I don't know how to post them to my site quite yet, so you'll just have to check out my flickr site to see my progress).

3. How much I love my fish... I know lots of people think fish are not much of a pet, but Cam & I would surely disagree. As of now we have four fish tanks on the go. One 10gallon, two 20 gallon, and a 37 gallon tank. It started out with me just wanting to have fish in my life again, so I convinced Cam to let me get a tank. Well my wanting to just have fish around became a point of interest in both of our lives very quickly. We had started out with just a few goldfish in the 10 gallon tank. But soon after we were presented with many opportunities to expand on our collection. There was a fish tank for sale at our church garage sale for $20 which included everything including some guppies and some tetras. It was still there at the end of the day so we bought it. Our babysitter was also looking at getting rid of her 20 gallon tank, so she gave it to us for free along with her 5" Plecostomus. And our big tank we decided that for Christmas we would buy it as a joint present to each other. So now we have a very wide variety of fish. We now have goldfish, angelfish, guppies, plecos, tetras, black skirts, barbs and loaches....but definitely not in the same tank! We already need to buy a bigger tank for my angels as they are quickly outgrowing the one they're in. But our ultimate goal is to have a pond in our backyard. But that will have to wait until the girls are older due to me having a bad experience when I was quite young...so we're looking at about 5 years away minimum!

It's amazing what you get when you actually take the time to read what other people are taking the time to tell you about their own lives. With them taking the time it helped me remember and realize some things about myself! And I truely thank you for that!