Living on the Edge

Great Scrappin' Gallery

I was hopping around on my friend, Jeni's, blog.  She is an amazing artist, photographer, friend and mama.  If you want to discover some cool and wild ideas, check out her blog, Paper Piecing.

But if you are ever in Twin Falls there is a great scrapbook store called Scrappin' Girlfriends.  Love the name!  I really love their website. It's gorgeous!  And if you are looking for some creative scrapbooking ideas, go to their gallery and view the many items they have--neatly organized by category--I love that part too!

 

Their site header is inspiring all on its own!   The ideas are rolling...now I just need the time to do something!

Should you use CFL lightbulbs?

My mom sent me an email over the weekend.  It's a link to a YouTube video.  A Texas senator is speaking against a proposed energy bill that will require all Americans to change over to CFL lightbulbs by 2014.  Believe me, I am all for doing things that have less of an impact on the environment.  It's the right thing to do, but after watching this video...I'm not so sure that CFLs are the best alternative.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=e-LOtKIIKcg

We use them in our home in some light fixtures.  But I just can't read with them.  Flourescent bulbs cause eye strain for me.  Does anyone esle notice that?

Just an interesting side note.  When I was a little girl our family went to Washington D.C. and on that trip we went to Thomas Edison's workshop (I think it was the real thing).  The one thing I remember was that in one room there was a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and they told us that it was one of his original bulbs!  When he invented them he created a bulb that wouldn't burn out!  It is the lightbulb companies that made lightbulbs have a short lifespan.  Heck, how could they make money if they didn't burn out? 

Long Lake Crawdads

The weather was beautiful while we had our visitors.  They must have brought the sun with them from California!  One afternoon we went down to the lake to find the crawdad trap we had placed. (We have some kids in the neighborhood who keep taking it--not all kids have been taught manners apparently).

DD placed it under the tree...in hopes that the crawdads would crawl into it.....finally.  It had a can of catfood in it and was just ready for the little critters to crawl into it.

We found them under the dock!  But they just wouldn't crawl into the trap.

Sorry, I got sidetracked by the forget me nots growing along the river.

Still looking for the crawdads....man that river is still chilly!  You don't see me in there do you?  The girls said, "Mom, it's not bad once you don't feel your legs anymore!"

Does it mean I'm getting old when I won't walk through that cold water?

The river still is running high and looks soooo big right now.

Best Buds Since Birth

We had friends visiting this past week.  They are some of the really good friends we had to leave behind when we moved from Humboldt County to Spokane 3 years ago. 

These four girls are like sisters.  They range in age from 9 to 12 and they were together every Sunday (even in the womb-since we are good friends with their parents), they went to the same daycare, the same school and often got together at other get togethers on Saturdays as well. 

They have always gotten along well, exceedingly well.  I was worried though that it had been awhile since they were together and maybe the connection wouldn't be there...

Those fears were quelled within two minutes of piling into the car at the airport, they talked non-stop for the twenty minute ride into town.  They had filled each other in on the past year and half of their lives in an amazingly short period of time! 

And they continued to have plenty to talk about over the course of the next four days! 

The visit cut into my blog time...but we had so much fun during the visit.  And now I have lots of pictures!

My First Baby Turns 12

I'm not exactly sure how this happened, but 12 years have passed since the birth of our first baby, Q. The funny thing is that I'm not a day older!  Yeah I wish.  How did time fly so fast?  I am still working on losing the baby fat...aren't all mamas? LOL!

Her birthday was mellow this year...we told her that she was too old to have a big birthday party.  We went out to dinner at her favorite resaurant, Rancho Chico on Northwest Blvd, and got dessert at Baskin Robbins.  Then we got her a new bike at Walmart to replace the bike that was stolen from her by our neighbor, Crazy Karol.  (still no resolution to that situation..the wheels of justice move so slowly) 

Notice my favorite piece of hair hanging in front of CC's face?  Love that whisp of hair.  It tells you what her mood is.  The little strand you see is a sign that she is happy.  The more strands that hang there, the darker the mood!

No, this isn't a living creature...though it looks like a hamster doesn't it?  It's one of those Webkins.  How many do you have in your house.  Don't ask, we have too many.  I'm sure they are Star Trek's version of Tribbles.  If you leave them in a dark closet, they multiply readily!  Captain Kirk, I know how you felt! 

If it looks like we got off easy on the birthday event this year...

No way!  As a compromise to not having a party we agreed to an End of School BBQ at our neighborhood's park along the lake.  Easy enough.  No house to clean!  Buy some dogs, big cooler of pop, snacking foods, and bring all the watertoys down to the lake and let them play.

Then she came home with her guest list...hope you are sitting down...I should have been.

There were 40 names on the list!!!  ("Mom there are only 39 names, my name is on there too!")  Her closest buds from school.  Knowing her, I believe that.  And worse yet, I'm reading the names and half of them are boys!  After I took my high blood pressure medicine...oh wait, I don't have high blood pressure...yet...I let her daddy give the stamp of approval...and he did.  I was a bit surprised, but I made him swear that he would be there in uniform. LOL!  Not really, but we did invite another family we are good friends with whose husband is also a sheriff's deputy...maybe we can park a sheriff's car there too?!

Now why did we say yes?  We don't know if we will be here next school year.  If our house sells we are off to Idaho so she won't be with these friends next year.  It's also a great way to meet all these friends that she has been 'hanging' with all day and all year and see which ones we need to keep our eyes on...especially those boys!

Since it's summer and Hoopfest weekend, I'm sure the number will be cut back to a more manageable amount.  Unfortunately, RSVPing appears to be a lost art!  So we have no idea how many are coming.  We may be having weenie roasts throughout the summer...we may need to invite a few of you if we end up with too many!

Kung Fu Panda

I saw this movie yesterday with thirty or so middle school kids.  My oldest, Q, earned the reward field trip from raising a certain amount of money in their school fundraiser.  So for raising $150 they earned a day off from school and a trip to the mall which included Baskin Robbins ice cream, lunch (on their own), 45 minutes to wander around the mall, and a movie at the theater.  It was a nice reward for the kids to have a day off.

OK, so I went as a chaperone.  There were 35 kids going and 3 teachers.  As someone who rarely goes to a mall...our kids are not the kind of kids who get dropped at a mall to wander around on their own.  So the idea of the school dropping my child off at a mall to wander around was a bit unnerving for my husband and I. Since my dear hubby has probably only entered that mall a total of 3 times since we moved here, it was left for me to go.  Keep in mind that I've only been there maybe 8 times myself in 3 years!  I have to grab a map every time I go or I get lost.

Ice cream, lunch and store wandering went without a hitch...I think.  It looked as though a few kids brought a bit of money to spend.  We saved ours for treats in the movie.

The movie we saw was Kung Fu Panda.  Now I like the actors who did the voices in the movie.  I also liked some of the words of wisdom in the movie.  I particularly liked when the wise old turtle said:

"Yesterday is History,

Tomorrow is a Mystery,

Today is a Gift,

that is why they call it the Present."

But I don't know if it was the pace of the movie, the time of day or something in the popcorn, but I had a very hard time staying awake in the movie.  I am sure Q dozed off a bit too!  Maybe it was the animated-ness of it.  But it was cute...a bit overdone on the heftiness of the main character I think.  I think they crossed the 'emphasizing big' vs. 'flaunting fat' line.

When you read the description of the movie it mentions that he

"is a clumsy bear.....just another portly panda bear....lumbering panda bear" 

Call a spade a spade for heavens sake.  He is a fat bear who is eating every chance he gets during the movie.  To use his inner power he imagines the enemy to be food!  The movie description says:

"if the noble Po can master the martial arts and somehow transform his greatest weaknesses into his greatest strengths, he will fulfill his destiny as the hero who saved his people during their darkest hour."

So now Hollywood has made a politically correct movie by creating a fat hero.  That's great!  But call it what it is...don't give it fluffy names to mask what he is....a 300 pound teenager who lives on McDonalds fries and shakes.  Dressed in a Panda Suit, calling him portly and lumbering, he becomes socially acceptable to Hollywood.  Think about this:  If this had been a movie with real people and not animated...would it have worked?

The Garden is Planted

Earlier this week we finished getting the vegetables into the ground.  The last things we put in were the bush beans and snap peas (those rarely make it into the house!  Usually we eat them right there in the garden or on the way into the house. LOL!)

Here's the first vegetable to come out of the garden:

Fall was so long ago this year that I have no memory of planting any onions.  I don't know if these are supposed to be green onions or very crowded onions that volunteered...but I have a bunch of them.   I also have some garlic that must be volunteer as well.  It's a nice surprise however they got there.

This is what the garden looked like a month ago.  Lettuce, carrots, and jalapenos in the greenhouse bed.

wimpy broccoli.  It just doesn't grow as well as in Eureka.  I think it prefers to thrive in the coastal temperate region much more than here.

This is the potato bed.  It looks totally different now.  They are growing so fast you can just about see the leaves grow.  We think we might get two crops out of this bed this summer.

The strawberry bed has taken over their part of the garden.  We have strawberries already!  well they are green right now...but they are getting big!  Hopefully we can stay ahead of the critters and get to eat them.

CC and Q wanted to have their own corner of the garden.  CC is growing a variety of things.  Q lost interest when she had to pull weeds.  So now it's my zucchini bed! 

oops!  this isn't from the veggie garden.  This is from one of my flower beds.  Rather than try to delete it and lose my whole post (as I've done previously) I'll leave it.

If it's not raining tomorrow, I will take pictures of the garden after a month.  It is totally different now!

Bye Bye Tooth Fairy!

The famous nighttime visitor, the tooth fairy has left the building. She made her very last visit to our house the other night.  Q finally lost her last baby tooth.  If she wasn't Q, she probably could have lost it a month ago!  The darn tooth was hanging by who knows what for the past 6 weeks...I don't know how it stayed in there so long...The adult tooth was growing up right under it!

I kept warning her that the dentist would insist on pulling it if she didn't get it out herself.  I tried to put the fear of fillings, cavities, needles...anything to get her to pull the darn thing.

I even tried to pull it...but I'm too squeamish for it and couldn't get a good grip on it.  So instead, I called DD over to the couch.  It was the night before her ortho appointment and time to get the darn thing out.  And what do you know? POP! Right off, he got it out.  Did you hear a yell the other night?  I think it registered about a 4.2 on the richter scale.  It wasn't because it hurt.  It was because she tasted the blood :-)  So funny!

Where did our babies go?  It's kind of weird now to think that we are done with the tooth fairy.  But it was time. The darn tooth fairy was having trouble remembering to leave the money on the first night lately.  And it's probably a good thing that she won't be back because she left $8 this time!  I'm not sure what he...ooh I mean she....meant by leaving such a steep payment.  Setting the bar high isn't 'she'?  She is going to have to get another part time job to keep up with that payment schedule!  Thank heavens it was the last one!

CC lost her last one last summer  at age 9.  She is an overachiever that way...of course she had a bit of help in losing a couple of her teeth due to her last (yes, she's had more than one) bike crash.  I think she lost 3 baby teeth and one adult tooth in that crash!  But that's a story for another day because it's getting late tonight.

Wild Irises along the Little Spokane River

I have been driving by this meadow for the last couple weeks and more and more of these wild irises are blooming.  I don't particularly like planting them in my garden, but I enjoy them this way instead.

And it looks like they haven't hit their peak yet.  There's a lot of buds still to open.

You can't see it, but there are huge mosquitoes trying to carry me away right now.  It's hard to hold still when you are battling small, annoying insects that are trying to nominate you for blood donor of the year.

Spokane Area Home For Sale

Live 20 minutes from work in Downtown Spokane while you live the life you dreamed with land, a lake and a state park as your back yard!

This is a great neighborhood tucked away between Lake Spokane/Long Lake (the Spokane River) and Riverside State Park.  Osprey overhead, the sound of the falls over the dam in the distance, the wind through the pines, and the occasional moose that wanders through. 

There's a nice mix of families with children as well as the retired crowd.  You have a private park with two boat docks to launch your boat, a beach area, covered picnic area and a new playground going in as I type.  If you prefer to dock your boat all summer, there is a privately owned spot for that as well along a canal in the neighborhood.

The house has been well cared for and we added a brand new kitchen and flooring on the first floor.  Front porch to watch the sunset, white picket fence and lots of mature landscaping. Large deck in back with a hot tub. Huge shop out back for all your toys...and you can fit a lot of them in there too!  Large vegetable garden all planted and ready for you to harvest this summer!  Plus more! See the pictures by viewing a virtual tour of the home:

  Nine Mile Home Tour

We are ready to wheel and deal!  Or maybe nowadays it's Deal or No Deal...not sure what the hip thing to say is any more.  I do know that if we find a buyer we can work out a much better deal for you than going through two real estate agents!  So leave a comment to this post if you would like more info about the house.