holiday wrap-up & painting marathon

12.24.08
Mikey spent the day working and I spent the day getting ready for the holidays. We drove down to the cities in the evening and spent the night with Mike's parents. But, before we left Duluth, Mikey gave me this:

It's a Lake Superior agate that one of his co-workers cut & polished. I love it! All I need is a silver chain and it'll be complete. We usually just fill each other's stockings for gifts and so Mikey got a McD's Arch Card (yes, the food snob has a weakness) and a pound of Reindeer blend Caribou Coffee. I think I got the better gift this year:)

12.25.08

We got up early with the hope of making it down to Nicollet before noon. Annabelle had different plans... she was rumbling and playing with Timmy and managed to hurt her leg. We thought we were going to have to take her to the emergency vet since she was limping so bad. We monitored her for awhile and checked in with the vet. He said to wait a while and see how she recovers. I must say, this was the first time I felt like a "doggy mommy". I can only imagine how parents must feel when their children get hurt or sick. We had a great time with my family. We got the one thing we wanted for Christmas... a Wii! Mike and Mattie played like 5 hours of Wii while the rest of us napped after eating.

12.26.08

We got up and packed all our stuff in the car for the third time in 3 days and headed to the cities to see Mike's family. We had another great day with family. Kristen, Dianne and I managed to sneak off to Uptown and hit up after Christmas sales at Paper Source and grab a martini at the Independent. Our niece, Sienna is at a really fun age. She was the entertainment for all of us all day. She had a hard time warming up to Mike or "Uncle Shirt" as we call him (she loves his Tie-Dye shirt and so he wears it everytime he sees her) but by mid-day they were buds. We're getting a new bathroom sink, faucet and countertop for Christmas. It's a good thing we love our old house because these unexpected repairs are a total pain. My dad is going to make us a vanity to complete the transformation.

12.27.08- 12.29.08

We're back home and have started some house projects. I spent all day Sunday putting away the Christmas decorations while Mikey worked. Then, we ventured to Home Depot and bought 10+ gallons of paint (no kidding). I'm off of work this week and so I'm going to spend it doing all my painting projects. With the basement laundry & drain repairs complete, I can finally start doing the cosmetic changes. We are also re-painting our bedroom. So, lots of stuff to do this week.

We're planning to host a New Years party on Wednesday so, it should be a fun week off of work before I start back on the 5th with work and school.

Anna has bounced back to her normal self. I just wish it wasn't so icy out. She nearly took me down several times today on our walk. Glad she's back to her springy self!

evening reviewed

So Manda had this crazy idea tonight that we should go to Perkins for dinner. I found this very curious as this is not a place that I frequent. In fact I would go so far as to say that given a choice between the hungry heffer and perkins I would pick the hungry heffer. Well as it turns out Manda was in the christmas spririt today and took her whole offices' collection of gift certificates from their complimentary gift bags that they received for some service they provided (of course without their knowledge). I admire a women like this; someone who thinks outside the box on how to provide for her family. So I begrudgingly agreed to go to perkins on the one condition that we have to go before six o'clock so that we may have the best people watching experience while we eat. All I can say is that I was not disappointed. And as an added bonus when we arrived we found out that tonight kids eat free; so the screaming was also complimentary. Shortly upon our arrival an older couple arrived in the booth behind us. The husband is an ex-alcoholic who is now limited on his dining options to establishments that are prohibited from serving alcohol. The wife is heavy set (think eating the hungry heffer all you can eat buffet for many years); her outfit is complimented by years of black hills gold jewlery (obviously bought over many x-mas's for her by her alchy husband). The husband is rail thin with a deep 50+ years smoker voice. First thing he orders is a caraffe of coffee for himself. Being the observant type, the couple was well versed on tonights dinner specials: 9.95 for the heffer platter. He of course gets his heffer platter well done as he's fried all his taste buds from years of smoking and drinking. After placing their orders they proceed to start arguing about the husband wanting to give some other lady a classy gift of one sort or the other. The wife was obviously quite ticked about this and convinced him that he shouldn't give her a gift. Now mind you during this they are engaged in a more heated argument than that time when they couldn't remember if the wal-mart across from their trailer was open 24 hr's or not. Onto the next subject about how he won't ever go to the doctor. Again...you get the gist. With our dinner entertainment out of the way we venture home, look at the clock, and go: "oh my god...it's only six o'clock!!"

first day of winter

12.21.08 First Day of Winter

= 2 weekends of snowstorms

= a really sore back

One down... one to go

Pretty snow in the backyard

My little helper!

I just spent most of the afternoon shoveling. We're working on teaching Annabelle the "boundaries" of our yard. She's pretty good as long as there are mounds of snow blocking her exits. As soon as I had a path cleared for the driveway, she decided to play in the street at which point she had to go inside. We'll keep trying.

We're really looking forward to Christmas and seeing both of our families.

Have a great Christmas!

i love saturday mornings

12:02pm... I have finally rolled out of bed. You know who is still snoring away along with the canine princess. Man, I love Saturday mornings. 3 1/2 hours and it'll be dark again!
We are forcasted to get another foot of snow today. Guess I better go shovel out the 6 inches that fell last night. Annabelle is really hoping for some doggie booties for Christmas so that she can "help" shovel without freezing her paw pads.
We're starting to get over our colds. We need to venture out to the mall today. Wonder what I can bribe Mikey with so that he's not crabby when he sees the crowds? Coffee and Baileys? What do you other gals bribe your fellas with?
Have a great Saturday.... we certainly will if only I can awaken the sleeping bear...

Blizzard

We had a pretty low key weekend. Both of us are dealing with colds and so we took it easy. My friend Sarah and I took our dogs up to Hawk's Ridge Sat. afternoon so that they could romp around. Everyone was pretty tuckered out by the end. Today we woke up to the sound of crashing noises. Every time we heard the crash, the whole house shook. So we went downstairs and found this:






Our storm door on the back of the house kept getting caught in the blustery winds and slamming in to the railing. Once we realized there was no hope in getting the door to latch, we had to take the door off. So, I'm standing in the back porch in my PJ's and slippers unscrewing the door with a screwdriver. I had gone to the basement to get the cordless drill only to find the battery was low! Grr... why does this always happen this way?! We got the door off finally and proceeded to scoop up all the snow that had blown in the back porch. I forgot to mention that all the while this is happening, Annabelle is whistling/whining on the other side of the kitchen door. It was a test of our patience! Back to the story...
So, just as I was getting all the snow scooped up and puddles wiped up, I noticed that snow was now blowing in underneath the wooden door. The weather stripping had been trimmed on one end to allow the door to open and now that we don't have a storm door, we had a huge gap where cold air and snow was blowing in! So, we went to the basement to cut a new piece of weather stripping and brought it back to the porch only to find that the weather stripping we had just cut is not wide enough to cover the gap! By now, the wind had picked up and we had received another inch of snow. So, I called our local Ace Hardware store only to find out that they are closed on Sunday! At this point, we decided to give up and just roll a towel up to cover the gap until tomorrow...

So, we spent the rest of the day just lounging around. Mikey's work closed at 1pm so he didn't have to go in. We're both still feeling pretty crummy due to our colds. Here's what our front porch looked like as of 3pm:

And here's the view out of the back porch:

We didn't venture out anywhere past the porches today.

Thanks to everyone who sent birthday card and email wishes to me. I had to post a picture of a cool bag that my friend Sarah made me. Sorry the photo is a little weird (I'm learning to use Mikey's camera).

Happy Winter!

~Manda

Weather Nerds

Ahh, the northland... seems we sure love to talk about our weather. The meteorologists are freaking out about a huge snow storm headed straight for Duluth on Sunday. We're already seeing "special reports" about the storm of the century that could dump 12 inches and whip up 30 mph winds. I must say, I'm pretty excited for it. We're planning to host a birthday brunch on Saturday and then hunker down until Monday. Stay tuned... we'll post some pics...

Charlie Brown Christmas

We went to the Boulder Lake Environmental Learning Center to cut down our tree this year. They have an over-abundance of Balsam Fir trees and needed to thin them out, so we thought this was a great cause. $8 cash, frozen tushes and a 30 minute car ride later we arrived home proud of our find. Went to Home Depot then to Target in search of some cool LED lights and found everything to be pretty picked over so we settled on a multi-colored traditional string of lights. Went to the attic and pulled out the ornaments and then it became apparent... we cut ourselves our very own Charlie Brown Christmas Tree. It looks wretched! We were initially excited since we had a completely new set of decorations thanks to the wonderful gift from Manda's family. Our poor pathetic tree couldn't handle the large ball ornaments (sorry, mom) so our idea to fill all the "gaps" with large ornaments failed horribly. None the less, we have our peacocks and little ball ornaments to get by this year. We get quite the chuckle everytime we're sitting in our living room with our horrible looking tree.

Saturday A.M.

Anna found the comfy spot and was unwilling to move over

the animals

Kramer the Ragdoll Cat: born 9/21/05

Annabelle the Tri-colored Springer Spaniel: born 9/6/07

Anna loves to guard the water dish, have her belly scratched, but the thing she loves most is to RUMBLE. In fact, some call her AnnaHell because of her love of rumbling. Her most common rumble mates are Timmy & Champ and occassionaly Maya.

Anna's bark is definetly bigger than her bite. She sounds vicious but is quite the snuggle bug to the people she knows.

Kramer loves to sit in the laundry basket, play "hampster wheel" on anything that is plastic, taunt Annabelle, and pretend to play innocent. We really think he has always wanted to be a dog. He was chewing on a dog bone the week we brought him home when he was a kitten. He is the most social cat you'll ever meet and he gets the privilege of sleeping on our bed each night (until Anna comes in in the morning).

They are both such a joy to have in our lives.

Basement Destruction

Finally.... our basement renovations are done!

Before...

Renovation:

After:

Aahhhhh...