Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Enjoying the outdoors...

So this last weekend my wife had her good friend staying with us along with her husband and two little boys. Of course, their two boys and ours had tons of fun playing, destroying the house, and being boys. So, Saturday we decided we needed to get them outside, where they could burn off some of the energy that is innate in young boys. We shoved everyone in the car and went for a hike around a local sewage Treatment.. I mean local Riparian Preserve in Gilbert, Arizona. It was a little warm for March, but it was nice enough. We walked around enjoyed the birds, turtles, fish-smelling water, random piles of dog crap, and the wonders of nature. Of course the boys loved throwing sticks, rocks, old gum, and cigarette butts in the water and looking around.

After that, we stopped by the library next door to cool off and let the boys look around. We finished with a lunch date at McDonalds so the kids could play in the playground and clog their arteries a bit. It was a lot of fun, and we had hoped that we would get back home and all the boys would pass out on the floor for a few hours from exhaustion. Yeah right… we tried to no avail. At least we got them to sit and watch a movie without climbing the walls though!




Me and Noah enjoying the smells and views of a sewage treatment... oh I mean Riparian Preserve

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

An apology for being a horrible blogger... but with some justification

For all my reader, sorry for not writing lately. It has been a rough few weeks. I have been making an effort to start prepping for my exams and registration for the last few weeks. I have also been trying to do more around the house, and then to top all of that, my grandmother died. Most of the family went back to the homeland, which is southern Alberta (Canada for the unknowing) and participated in the funeral last Friday.

It was actually a great trip, and seeing so much of the family in one location was great. My only gripe was what happened just before we left which just added to the stress levels. So my wife and I got a great start to the day and were flying along making great time. I walked out the door to start placing bags in the car for the trip to the airport, when I noticed water coming out of the garage! I thought, crap not now please!!! So I run in there, and of course water is pouring out of the ceiling! It was the water line to the water softener at the front of the garage which flows over the garage in the attic space. Of course it was the crappy plastic tubing that just gave way after I had moved it around and bumped it while putting boxes up there a few weeks earlier.

So anyway, I ran and shut the water off for the house not really having another option since we needed to catch a plane. I quickly cleaned up what I could and saw that the damage was minimal and we were lucky that it happened right over a light fixture and the water immediately drained out the hole in the drywall. Even the drywall was pretty spared. Of course the entire time I was in Canada I worried we would come home to a house full of water!

Well, the whole experience was quite worth the pain. The funeral was as good as it could be expected and we had so much fun being with family and friends. I even enjoyed the cold weather if you can believe it. I promise to soon write some more interesting things, but this is all I have at this point.