She's BACKKKKK...and prettier than ever

She's back and prettier than ever! She even got a good washing on the inside too while she was in the shop. It is so nice to be back driving her again.

In other news, I got my first PAZZLES DT project finished and out the door in a box on its way to headquarters. I am so glad that is off my plate for now. The next assignment will arrive by the end of the week, so I don't get to sit back for too long. I can't share the project for a while so when I can finally "release" the images, I will post here. Of course, at some point the project will be posted at the PAZZLES website....then I will link it!

Sad sad day

If you know me, you know I love my car. She's my baby, my little "Cookie", a gift from my hubby at Christmas in 2003. She is perfect. A gorgeous color, runs like a dream, corner's like a cheetah and has that little turbo boost when I need to zing into traffic. Except for a tiny ding above the left front fender from a careless child opening a door into her, she is a shining example of what a car should look like when regularly washed and waxed. And except for a horrifying moment when a lube and oil "specialist" screwed up a simple oil change, she has had a flawless running record.

Now, she isn't perfect. Now we have one less raccoon in the neighborhood and a big crack in my bumper. I wasn't driving by the way.

We are very lucky the air bags didn't deploy, but that doesn't make me feel much better. I can drive her, but it makes me feel sad to do so. It's probably weird to be so attached to the car, but there is a LOT of sentiment behind it and that is what makes me sad.

My other job....

The girls at work thought it would be a good idea for me to take a photo of myself with my first check from the PAZZLES design team (All the info is blurred out to protect the innocent). So today I finally cashed my little $5 check and thought I had better take a quick photo. Now, I was not planning to do this. I figured it seemed kinda silly, after all, it's only for shipping our projects back to the company. But, it is proof, that someone out there, other than my friends and family, thinks that my creations are worth looking at...and I am not talking about putting together paper and embellies (that is part of it), but creating the computer files to make those embellies and dimensional's that thousands of others will be purchasing to use with their machines. Now, the reality is that after three years of using the machine at work, there are hundreds of pieces of "me" in a scrapbook somewhere in the world. World I say, because I know some of my designs have been shipped to people in other countries (the cut paper versions, not the computer files.) I know of a few title cuts that reside in Michigan too! OK, so long story short, I am creating and getting paid for my "intellectual property" and it's pretty darn cool!

A good day for FOOTBALL

So we had the most perfect day for football..not too chilly, not too hot. And they finally won a game. The sun was shining on the team today! The boys got down and dirty too. This is the Q man after that last play of the game. He got to play quite a bit in this one so he was pretty happy. Three games to go with a big one coming up in a week. Should be fun as long as the weather doesn't get too wacky!

Football 07

The end of the season is almost here and they are on a winning streak. Three wins in a row and one to go. They had the big game on the turf and under the lights Monday night and played an awesome game. We had a little photo session before the game on Saturday. What a tough guy.

Running in more ways than one....

Cross Country last night. N had quite the challenge on this one. The weather was fabulous, but warm, muggy and buggy too. A lot of the varsity runners were looking rather hagard by the end of this trail. N took off and had the lead from the start and never let go. The trail itself was rather stupid (to put it nicely!) Toward the end of the trail the path doubled back and then criss crossed itself. With the lead vehicle in front of N he blazed the trail rather easily, but then they started lapping people and the poor kids who were getting lapped didn't know what to do and got in N's way. Then they came to the criss cross part and N had to almost stop for runner traffic...the golf cart pulled to a stop off the track and then N ran right past but almost got smacked into by the runners. The photo is of N after he had just gotten through that mess! The golf cart then tried to catch up to him and, well, that just never happened...LOL The course was 1.9 miles and his time was 11:50.

In other running news, that is all I seem to be doing...running...in my car...to work, to pick up a kid, dr's appt, shopping..whatever. I think I put 65 miles on my car Tuesday alone! Yesterday was almost 100. I am glad the week is coming to an end.

Have a crafty day

Sports scene....or lack there of

Whew! That was actually a long weekend. Q had his football game and they got crushed. The other team had some HUGE players. Still a good game, they didn't give up without a fight. N's run didn't happen on Thursday. We drove all the way up to the run site (a golf course over an hour away) and watched the high school run, but they cancelled the middle school run.....grrrrr! Nothing like driving almost 3 hours for nothing! The drive was quite pretty though. The sky was partly cloudy with those puffy grey bottomed clouds....which held lightening and rain. This is what cancelled the run. It is too bad, because just about the moment N was going to run, a rainbow could be seen just above the line the kids were going to take off from, and the trees were lit up like fire with the sun shining on them. Would have made and AWESOME photo. Oh well, another one of those "the one that got away" moments.

Since it rained the entire weekend we did a lot of TV watching and house cleaning. I got the all the thrift sale stuff from my basement sorted and priced. I tackled the closet later in the weekend and I am just about ready to sort through my craft stuff to purge a few "older" things.

I am currently on book 8 of 13 in the Janet E saga. I had to skip 7 because it was not available at the library....so I will have to do a little backtracking in the story.

Happy Birthday Miss C-Don

Happy Birthday my dear. Hope your day is all you wish it would be.

I will celebrate with a margarita for you tonight.

Kitty cats

I finally took a decent photo of one of our kittens. This is Dot. When she was born she had a little dot on the top of her head (which is where the name comes from) but since she has grown a bit, it is more like a little comma. And you may notice the two different colored eyes, a blue one and a green one. It's not a trick of the light or my camera, she really has two different colored eyes. The blue one is SO bright blue!

In other news, we had a storm blow over last night. It missed us, but blew a barn down about 3 miles away. We got strong winds and heavy rain, but the worst passed just to the north of us. The storm kept me from my computer last night, so no late night bloggin'

Hope your day was creative.

Running and running and running

We are back from another Cross Country meet, this one was a little closer to home....only 15 miles to be exact. And Mr. N has done it again. A 1st place finish with a time of 8:58. He was a full 20 seconds ahead of #2 and 30 seconds ahead of #3....42 seconds ahead of #4......LOL He did very well. Now, if I could get some pictures printed, I could do some scrappin'.

Now, I have pictures

This is why there were no photos posted earlier, you can't even tell who is who. I know who they are...LOL The football photo is of Q in his first play of the game. We are GREEN. And in the running photo is N after the gun start. Also in GREEN. I had the good camera at Q's game and Peter had the old digi at N's meet. Oh well, here they are.

Buckshot run...I survived!

Family photo....looks like a Christmas shot, no?

We did the Buckshot Run (a charity walk/run for Special Olympics) yesterday and we all survived. Nick (in red) actually ran the race and finished 3rd in his age group, not sure about the overall placement. Uncle Joel finished 1st in his age group and 6th overall. Quin (white hat) finished ahead of Aunt Kim, they both did a walk/run/jog thing. And Peter and I did the walk walk thing....very little running. I even did a little hop and twirl at the finish line....just for fun....it gave the crowd a laugh. Unfortunately my niece got a photo of it and she will be sending that along as soon as she gets time to upload and send it to me. That was our Saturday in a nutshell because after that I was too tired to do anything. With all the family in town, we did a lot of sitting around and yakking, so that was OK by me!

Hope you are having a fabulous weekend.

Weekend in Chicago

I think we have had enough rain for today thank you.....a week straight...and more for today. Not that we can't use it, but seriously, we needed this about a month ago. Now the corn is drowning is water. When the sun does come out today it is going to be SOOO hot!

So over the weekend we were in Chicago (the suburbs actually) and Joel took us to a charity race in St Charles. He wanted to run with Nick in the 5K. Now, normally this is an OK adventure, but we woke up that morning to a thunderstorm so us "non runners" thought there would be no race...HA! So at 7 am we loaded ourselves and a pile of towels and umbrellas into the Exlporer and off we went to find the park...yes, find the park, Joel had never been there before! We got lucky and found it immediately and got the boys signed up for the race which started at 8:30. So far the rain was only spotty but as soon as they called for the 15K runners to line up it started to POUR from the sky. The 8K started about 15 minutes later and then the 5K's got to line up. It was still pouring down, but they took off and we stood there under the umbrellas waiting for the runners to return. And 18 minutes later the first runner was back...and it was Joel, followed a few minutes later by Nick. Nick finished the race in 6th overall and 2nd in his age class. As soon as Nick and Joel got their awards we hopped back in the Explorer and headed back to the house to dry off. We were all soaked. All in all it was an interesting race and hopefully the race in two weeks won't be quite so rainy.

I guess it's time I get to scrappin' this vacation.

Have a scrappy day.

Photos and things

Seems like summer started a few days ago and now we are grinding down to the start of school. I suppose it does not help that the weather this past week has been very non-summerlike. Makes me think of getting out the sweaters and long pants. Quin started football this week and Nick starts his cross country training next week, another sure sign of fall. The good news is that the sun is going to return (they promised) by this weekend. Good thing because the grass has grown with all this rain we have gotten. Sadly, the state is still in a draught because we are 5 inches below normal on rainfall, in our area anyway. Towns just 40 miles to the south are flooding and people are dying and losing their homes. A sad situation.

After uploading all the photos from the trip to Iowa/Illinois I noticed that I am in 10 photos out of 365...which is actually pretty good....but most of them are blurry. I found one really good one (the one above) but I am sharing the frame with a donkey... a cute one, but a donkey no less! I happened to enjoy the petting zoo. The boys are "too old, too cool" to hang out with the tiny critters, but I think secretly Quin wanted to come in with me. You just can't help wanting to pet cute little versions of farm animals. The pigs were the littlest piggies I have ever seen. Of course, the bunny was the biggest (bigger than the pigs) that I have ever seen.

That's it for me today.

Have yourselves a productive day....or just lay around and do nothing....that sounds better.

Moline

We rented bikes for a quick morning ride along the trails. You get to see a lot of stuff they you couldn't see if you drove down the streets. We rode for about 2 hours. After dropping off the bikes we headed down the road in the truck to see other sites. Back at the hotel we took our tour of the Pavillion. It's a really nice spot, but there isn't that much to see. We shopped a little at the John Deere store and then headed off to the Antique shop down the street. Very cool old tractors to be seen there. We had ourselves a nice lunch buffet at Bad Boyz Pizza. I picked this one piece of pizza up thinking it was covered with peppers and sausage but it was actually a cheeseburger pizza. It was SOOO good! It seemed a little weird, but they cooked the burger on a grill and then chopped it up on the pizza, loaded it with cheeses, mustard, pickles and bacon. Really a taste treat. YUMM

We did a little more exploring (which included a stop at a Scrapbook store that I happened to find two blocks away from the hotel) and took a drive out to the World Headquarters for John Deere which had more tractors in their buildings and a really cool display of antiques from the period between 1837 and 1860. I loved how they had it displayed....very scrapbooky.

Since Saturday was the 10th Anniversary of the Pavillions opening we decided to stick around for a little while to check out the festivities. We watched the blacksmith from the Grand Detour location work. He was very good at working the crowd. I got to play with some little animals in the petting zoo. The little piggies were so darn cute.

A lovely storm blew in and we decided to head for Chicago....I guess it rained all day there....good thing we left.

Three dudes and a lady...

A little run down of the long weekend in Moline/Chicago.

Thursday:

We left Eau Claire in our little truck and headed down the scenic river roads along the Mississippi River. We stopped at a few Lock & Dams to watch the barges go through. We decided to call this the "Dam Trip to Moline"..LOL...There are some beautiful spots on that drive. They even stopped long enough to let me shop at the La Crosse Hobby Lobby (yay). Of course, they stopped at Cabelas in Prarie Du Chein....it's a MAN trip after all. Once we reached Dubuque we were on the interstate and it got pretty boring, but it went fast and we hit the Quad Cities around 5pm. The bridges are amazing and the views are gorgeous. Lots of river boats to be seen. We did a quick check in and then did a little exploring. The hotel was well located for our needs. Right across the street from the John Deere Pavillion with the Mississippi river behind the hotel (along with the bike/walk path) and several eateries within walking distance. We found a nice little Mexican restaurant to have supper at and then we headed back to the hotel for some lounging and swimming.

CHA, the first trip!

Let me begin with my trip to CHA summer...AWESOME! I have been wanting to go for, well, it feels like forever, and I finally got to go this July. I would totally go again in a heartbeat! I loved seeing all the manufacturers in one place and doing the fun make-and-takes and meeting some of my Cyber pals. That was the best part. I don't care how nasty and jaded some of the people in this industry are getting, there are still genuine people out there who scrap. I was lucky enough to meet up with a few of them on this trip.

I also got to do a little driving downtown, something I have never done...and I didn't do too bad either. When we headed downtown on the 190 I got tired of driving in the stop and go traffic and decided to hit the next exit (6 exits before my GOOGLE directions told me to) and where did we end up?....right in front of OPRAH's studio! After a quick photo shoot in front of the sign we hopped in the car and drove into the city. We went past a lot of cool looking buildings and under the "L" and, well, all over. We ended our drive at the Navy Pier and cruised around there for a while, getting supper at the "Twisted Lizard" and watching the sun go down on the city (and got lots of great shots). Our trip back to the hotel was a bit more interesting. When we left the parking ramp we could see the fireworks in the sky over Navy Pier, so I drove back over so the girls could see it. Then we tried to find our link to the interstate....not an easy task....they apparently don't want you to leave....we drove down Wacker Ave and found a movie crew shooting a movie!! Not sure of the film just yet, but we will find out. Cruised past the SEARS tower and on to Adams Ave (which is where GOOGLE told me to go) which was supposed to link me to the interstate...NOT! I drove down Adams Ave for a while and...I am not sure...but I think we drove past a drug deal going down.....I went a little faster through there and headed back toward the city, found the exit and got back on the road. Whew, it was a blast.

Hope your day finds you scrappin'