It’s official, I am going back to school. I’ll be starting September 8th, and will be working towards finishing my degree. I have 20 courses (2years) left. I think I could done 13-14 of those by next September, as some are distance, but we will see, life sometimes gets in the way. Phil has been a great encouragement that I should go back now, and I am very excited. I’ve quit my job, as I will be studying full time, and don’t want to spread myself too thin. This is a new and exciting adventure that we are both pumped about.

That’s all for now….

Today I spent the day sewing. Mom gave me her 1st sewing machine a few weeks ago, and I have started my hand at sewing some things. It’s quite fun actually. I’ve decided that hoping to sew enough things to sell one day, is much easier when I have a sewing machine at home. Anyway – today I made just a few crafty things… 1… I made a baby blanket. 2nd, I made a gift for a friend, a nursing cover & 2 burping clothes. No patterns, just went with it. I’m happy to report that all turned out. I’ll be making this items again, they were pretty simple and look great.

And for some photos….

The Wii Sports Resort that is. This week, Phil and I bought the new Wii game – Sports Resort. Already this week, I’m pretty sure we’ve played enough to make the purchase 100% worth it. My favorite game is canoeing, so fun…. and you work hard at it, that some sore shoulders have happened. There is basketball, wakeboarding, sword fights and much more. So, next time you are over, we’ll definitely play!!

Yesterday, my friend Leanne and I went tubing down the river. Every time we’ve went there has been some sort of adventure… and this time didn’t fail either. We were on the 2nd set of rapids and when I hit a large rock my tube and I came apart… my tube shot down river (Leanne trying to get catch up) and I was shooting down river on my butt. Ouch! I went about 200ft on my butt – and boy did it hurt. No major injuries (yay!) but today I’m quite sore, and have a few bumps and bruises. It made for a lot of laughs once I was reunited with my tube, and I’ll so be tubing again before the summer is out.

Today Phil and I spent the day together – the morning was for relaxing, and this afternoon we went to Benino for icecream, a personal tour of Ben & Lindsay’s new place, and then went to get some food for dinner. We decided to Seiffert’s market (a local farm) for some veggies for dinner, while we were there I say to Phil – Want some fruit? Phil’s response: Sure, how about some bananas?, instantly I burst into laughter – and as soon as I do… Phil looks and me and says – wait, bananas are tropical, they don’t grow here. It made for a good laugh!

No photos tonight – next time!

Phil and I arrived home last Tuesday, and had company coming on Wednesday. Most of our getting ready was spent on getting the house ready for company, and the unpacking was left. I thought it would happen while our family was visiting, but lets be honest unpacking just doesn’t sound like fun, when there is so much else going on. I also lent my suitcase to a friend on Friday so my stuff remained in piles until today!!!

Oddly enough, today was a long awaited day where I was able to get our house back! I’ve done every speck of laundry, cleaned each room up, and even unpacked a few remaining boxes. Right now, Phil and I are very blessed to have a housekeeper (Phil’s work pays for her) who comes every other week and does surfaces. Floors, counters, bathrooms etc. It’s great! For many reasons – the biggest being we don’t really own a vacuum, so that in itself it huge. So tomorrow, we’ll leave for the morning, and come home to our home being really clean!

Tonight we headed to the sandcourts to watch friends play volleyball – “Friggin’ Awesome” won again tonight!! YAY TEAM!! My sisters team was playing the later game – but it started to rain, and we were not dressed for rain, so we opted to come home instead.

Phil has been busy with work – but things will be slowing down after this week! I am off this week as my boss is getting married on Friday. Next week we should be getting back into a ‘normal’ routine again.

That’s all for today! Hopefully tomorrow is a little more exciting!

Jen, Jayme & I went out for a long needed coffee date! We hadn’t gotten together since we got home, so it was so great to catch up. We are coming to an end of our summer adventures as school is starting soon. Jayme leaves in 10 days for Briercrest, and Jen get’s busy next week with family coming into town, and then her brothers wedding. So it was so great to have some time together. We went to Serious Coffee for drinks, and then headed to the river for some more visiting.

Here are some photos from our adventures!!

P.S: LEAVE COMMENTS or like Phil said, no more posts! Mwahahaha!

When was the last time you flew a kite? Before last night, it had been YEARS since I had. Mom and Dad bought a super cool dragon kite and we tested it out down at Point Holmes. It was a perfectly windy night, and we had very successful flying. It was our last adventure before Katie & Rachel left us today.

Thursday, I took Shannon, Katie & Rachel tubing down the river! So much fun!! Not much to report. Katie was pro, Rachel wouldn’t fall off during the rapids, but during the really calm points would randomly flip out all the time, Shannon got ‘rocked’ literally, she fell off her tube, and was trying to get her footing and back on the tube, and didn’t see the HUGE rock coming up and she smoked right into it. Ouchie!

Here are some photos of the event:
Disclosure: used disposable waterproof cameras, quality definitely not good. But photos = fun times!

1. We got home and don’t feel like we need a holiday from our holiday (YAY!)
2. I stopped biting my nails (again… hopefully it lasts)
3. 4 books were read in the 3 weeks away.
4. Phil got to just ‘play’ on his computer
5. We had early nights, and sleep ins.
6. We reconnected with eachother.
7. Phil and I talked about our dreams and aspirations again; and have a new excitement for life!
8. We had a wonderful visit with everyone we saw along the way.
9. In Seattle we went to Mars Hill Church heard Mark Driscoll speak a message that we needed to hear.
10. We came home safe!

A great success to holidays 2009 – our 1st official BIG roadtrip!!!

On a side note: I’ve been trying to update the blog with some of the weeks activities (Katie my cousin and Rachel, Phil’s sister are here) but the photo uploader wont work for me. So I’ll try again, as we have some great photos of our adventures! But until then!

Yesterday was actually the 1st day we came to our home, we got home Monday but stayed at Mom & Dad’s, we didn’t even stop in. So Tuesday morning we rolled in about 10a.m. It was great to get home, always nice to get back to ‘your’ things. We unpacked the car, got settled in a bit, and then got on our way to getting everything back to normal for reality to set in.

After getting someone settled we went to say hi to our fish to find him D-E-A-D. The only main instruction was to not kill our fish, and low and behold, he’s gone. We called J-me to tell her she’s a fish killer, and she denied it, she said that Rachel was the fish killer, and then she said we were lying. So, Phil being Phil, has kept the fish in the bowl, and is waiting for J-me to come and see for herself.

We spent a lot of the day unpacking/cleaning/organizing. For a multitude of reasons, Phil wanted to get his office cleaned up before starting back to work today, so he worked on that. Katie is coming to visit and staying at our place and since we don’t have a spare room I worked on making our front den into a decent spare room for her (and it turned out great!).

For dinner we had Shannon and Georgia-bean over for burger and corn. After dinner, Shannon, bean and I went to Stotam Falls for a swim — aahh soo nice!! On our way home we stopped at an awesome park and played…. full on played. I actually think Shannon and I played more then Georgia. It was a lot of fun.

Then time for bed. We got in the habit of going to bed earlier, so we are hoping to keep that up. Then getting up early is much easier!

Phil is back to work today. I go back on Friday. We had a great holiday, thanks for following our blog. We hope to be better at maintaining it now, as we updated every day – so do check back for random happenings in our life!

The following two entries are combined due to us getting home a day early and trying to surprise some of our friends, thus making me a day late.

Day 19:

Boise, Idaho: I’m sure your construction workers are very nice, but they sure can’t direct traffic, and the fat kid just doesn’t want to get in the pool! Today was a traveling day for the majority of it, so not too much was happening; as you will see below I slept for a bit. We went through Baker City and had hoped to hook up with a friend, but he’d been called out for a forest fire so that unfortunately didn’t happen. However, we did stop at a quaint-looking (from the outside, at least) Dairy Queen for some food. Then we carried on our way to Seattle, with not too much else happening (we did see a cool sign or two, though!).

Once we arrived in Seattle, though it’d been a long day we decided to go to Mars Hill; I’d talked about it a couple months ago so the plan that morning had been to attempt to catch the 7:15 service at the Ballard campus, which is the largest of MH’s campuses. We got there and it was such a blessing. The message was also great and we’d recommend you listen/watch it. It’s entitled “It’s All About Jesus: Humility” and you can find it on the Mars Hill Seattle website.

After that it was pretty late, so we headed back to the hotel and crashed for the night.

Day 20:
Got up early and drove. Saw a creepy truck. More driving. Stopped at outlet stores. Drove some more. Took a ferry. Drove even more. Petro Can! More driving. Ricky’s! Drive drive drive. Fireworks!

That was, in a nutshell, our day today, and though we are back in the valley we have not yet arrived home. Our friends who have been house sitting for us informed us that the house isn’t tidy enough yet for us to go home, so that combined with the fact that we weren’t supposed to be home until tomorrow means we’re crashing at Keltie’s parents’ place tonight.

All in all it’s been a great trip, but we’re glad to be (almost) home, so now look at some pictures