Saturday at 4pm my husband and ( I assume) my two older boys will be at the airport. They aren’t going anywhere, they just have two very important people to pick up.

After almost three months away, my Mother and Father in Law will be coming home! Not only does this mean that hubs and I will get our first night out alone in three months, the boys will once again be able to talk to their grandparents, whom they adore, and hubs and I will get a night out without the boys, plus my mother in law loves to have us over for dinner so there will be nights I don’t have to cook, AND have I mentioned that there will be night outs with just me and hubs and NO kids?

Yeah. It’s like that!

My husband is a welder. He works nine plus hours a day with …uhm.. hot stuff! He wears welders grade suntan lotion (it’s not actually called suntan lotion, but basically, that’s what it is) on his face and also has a Miller helmet that completely covers his face. Because the helmet is auto darkening ,and has a point eight, or something like that, reaction time, he doesn’t even need to lift his visor to tack his parts. (tacking is putting tiny beads of wealdment on two parts to hold them together while the welder prepares to make one long continuous weld)

So tell me why the man manages to come home from work at least once a week with a sunburn? Oh sorry, a welders burn? That would be because on those days he neglects to put his Welder’s block on. Yeah. Dummy. So for days afterwards, he has a cherry red face and neck, and then for days after that, his face peels! It’s gross, to tell the truth, and it is SO preventable!

I keep telling him that he needs to take better care of himself becuase when he is older, if he keeps repeatedly burning his face, he will have leathery skin like those old ladies on the beach who spend too much time in the sun! And when his face peels I am always on his case to use an exfoliate for a little mini microdermabrasion, but he keeps ignoring me!

(and secretly, it pisses me off to no end that he doesn’t seem to give a damn what he looks liek! have a little self pride, man! Sheesh!)

I am pretty sure that skin cancer is not a risk from him burning his face at work, I think it;s the UV rays from the sun, not the actual burn that causes that, but he WILL age prematurely if he deosn’t start taking better care of himself!

Today was the day we drove down to my dad’s for my Step Mother’s birthday party. It wasn’t a party in the real sense of the word, just my boys and husband (and of course me), my dad, his wife and my Granny, but it was sure a lot of fun.

The pictures, what few I took are still on my sd card in my camera, and since the camera is allllllll the way over on the table, you won’t get to see any of them today! Unfortunately, I forgot to check my battery before we left so I arrived at my dad’s with a flashing red battery light and only managed 5 or so pictures before it died completely! Thank goodness it is a lithium rechargeable battery! Our first digital camera ( a 2.5 MP), used AA batteries and after one picture with the flash was taken, the battery would be too drained for us to get the pictures off it. it was such a  nasty camera, there wasn’t even an external spot for an SD card!

AHNYway. I took a few pictures that I am positive are great shots, so tomorrow when I have a minute, I will download them and pop them up for you all to see!

So.

Last year I completly forgot about my Step mother’s birthday. More than that actually. last year I had no idea when her birthday was. it wasn’t until she and i were both on facebook when I saw her birthdate. I was four days late. (

This year, the hubs and I decided that we would not only remember her birthday, but that we would bake her a very special cake to commemorate it.

See, My stepmother has an awesomely huge collection of teddy bears and angels. She loves them! So when we saw this 3D bear shaped pan in the store, we bought it. We bought it, we brought it home and we made it. or should I say, attempted to make it.

Yeah. Fail. big time. And it was our fault too. See the cake pan called for use to use a mix of a regular ‘layer cake” and a pound cake, but we went ahead and bought a boxed cake mix and tried it like that.

So fine, that didn’t work, we got online and started searching for pound cake recipes. I will admit, we were way put off. All the recipes kept saying that things have to be done perfectly or the cake iwll not work out, there were so many little things that had to be done too! So then we searched to see if you coudl buy a boxed pound cake mix, and were elated to see that you can. Yeah. YOU can, I can’t. becuase we looked in nine differnt stores and could not find a single box!

So, we gave up. For now. But with the birthday party tomorrow, we went with Plan B:

Coffee is good.

The weekend before last I ran in to the city without the hubs and the boys. I was going to a craft store, and Figured that it was the kind of place that one should probably not bring kids too.

All I needed at the store was some felt, but I ended up spending an hour and a half walking around looking at things.

One of the things I saw were a whole isle full of cardboard displays. Now, I’m not sure where I got this idea, But I always assumed that people made their own displays. I, myself, have never competed in a science fair, but I honestly thought the kids had flattened cardboard boxes and made their own displays! I was pretty amused to see them for sale in the store (and for a good price too!) At least now, if my boys get into the sciency stuff, I know where to go to get them displays!

Another isle I had to stop and play in was the SALE isle! I got some little plaster characters for the boys to paint (this whole week they are off school) for 1.50. Each kit came with paint, a brush and two figures to paint. Deal! Also in the sale Isle was a package of glow sticks for .50 cents. I picked those up too!

The last thing I found at the craft store was a sixty ounce coffee mug (it’s HUGE! Fits an entire pot!!) ready to be personalised. I picked it up, as well as some decals to make it into the perfect gift for my coffee loving Stepmother’s Birthday next Sunday!

I think that next item I go, I will bring the boys, maybe we could go down the woodcraft isle and they could pick out a bench or a wall shelf to decorate!!

This is my Tigger Cat, and she is one mean and ornery feline! But, we love her anyway! I constantly hear from my inlaws that we need to “get rid of the cat” that she is “expensive” to keep, and that we would be saving hundreds of dollars a month if we just found her a new home!

W T F ???

Aside from the initial outlay for cat supplies, the food, litter box, bed, toys etc, cats are cheap!. In the first year, you have (at least here in Saskatchewan) three appointments for their shots, then a fourth (optional, but I advise that you do so) appointment to get the animal spayed/neutered. Then, after that, you have a once a year check up, and ….I would say, about 20 dollars a month for food and litter supplies.

The cost of a pet aside, owning a pet is NOT about the money you spend on it, because yeah, you CAN spend hundreds of dollars a month on a pet, and some people do, but a pet is about having someone to come home to at the end of the day, someone warm and furry to cuddle up to! A pet is not a THING, a pet is a part of the family!

I get soooo mad every time My husbands parents suggest we “get rid of” or “find a new home for” our pets. Sure, Smokey, Sammi and Tigger are just animals, but they are also FAMILY!

When I first started blogging, I had no idea feed readers and RSS feeds and all of that stuff even existed. I had, on my browser, a list of “bookmarks” (often called “favorites on some computers) That I went through manually each day.

As I grew into blogging, I built a “BlogRoll” into my blogs side bar, and manually clicked that (often several times a day) to see if any one had updated. Then, Blogrolling made it so that a * or a ~ or the word “New”, (you could choose what you wanted) would show up when the author of a blog updated, which was cool, when it worked. From my side bar, I moved to my very first feed reader, Bloglines, which i used for about a year. Maybe 18 months.

From there I moved to the Google Reader, which is what I am using right now.

The point of all of this is to try and help me explain the lengths I would go to read a post. One blog, I will not link to it, nor will i name it, was a favorite of mine, she had such a  way with words, she made me laugh, She made me sad, she had the power to move me, just with text on a screen. that takes talent, people.

But lately, or so it seemed to me, she stopped writing at her blog. Oh, there were posts there, for sure, but all of them were links to go here, to go there, to click this, and read words she wrote other places. And I found myself getting more and more upset, the more I was asked to jump through hoops to read what she wrote, just so she could make a few $$.

So I emailed her. I was polite, I was nice, but I did Question her as opposed to fawning over her with praise.. I asked if this linking to other places instead of writing on her blog was just a phase, becuase I can wait out a phase, but if she has changed her site to be just a launching pad for us to run to all corners of the blogging world to read something she is being paid to write, well, there was no point in me sticking around, was there?

Little did I know that I should have taken shelter in some steel buildings before hitting send on my email.

Her reply back to me was VERY rude. she basically told me I don’t matter, that she does not care if I never read her again. That if I “didn’t like her writing” I should leave.

And so, I assume that this is no phase, that her site has be relegated to a library of links to her “paid” gigs, and I will leave.

But it makes me a little mad. I would NEVER treat one of my readers this way. I might not keep track of my blog stats, but every single person who stops and takes the time to read something I wrote, is someone I appreciate.

We get a little 20 page newspaper delivered to our mailboxes every two weeks. In it, is all the local news for our town, it has a section for the “crime report” (this week there was a hit and run, a car slid on some ice, and hit a pole, then left the scene. the case was solved twenty minutes later when the RCMP got a call from the towns garage, the man who had hit the pole was calling to notify the cops of the accident.)((lol, our town has soooo much crime))

We got a new grocery store in January. Did I tell you that? Nearly 3,000 more square feet bigger than the last one. pretty exciting, except that when the grocery store left it’s old building for the new building, I hated how it made main street look. NO main street will ever look good with empty buildings on it. I was hoping that we would either get a wholesale store, or maybe a McDonald’s (lol) in the old Grocery Store building, but the little news letter we got today said we are getting some kind of Bargain!Store. Yeah written like that, with the ! in it.

I’m not so excited about this new store. Our town already has a dollar store, and it is a good sized one too, so what do we need with a new one? The paper said the B!S (ROLF!) has opened 65 new stores around Saskatchewan in the last year. And that is great I guess, But what will happen to the little dollar store? Will the competition bee too much for it? And why does no one listen to me when I say “Hey, how nice would it be to say, let’s go to Micky Dees for dinner, and not have to drive to the city to do so!” and build me a damn McDonald’s!!