Finishing the Arbor

Ken had one last thing he wanted to get done this fall on the yard remodeling project before the rain came, and that was to finish the arbor. He has been working steadily on it in the evening before it gets dark and on any nice weekend, which luckily, we've had quite a few of. He put a coat of stain on it...
...then got a load of stepping stones to put down as the floor of the arbor. It was a heavy load as you can see from the way the tire on the trailer looks.

He carefully figured out how to place the stones, had to cut a few to finish it off,...

...then got the bench in place and planted the clematis.

The almost finished product, there is supposed to be a lattice on the back of the bench, which probably won't get done this year. Other than that, it's done and looking good!

A Fun Weekend

Ken needed to go to a board meeting at Canby Conference Center in Oregon Friday and Saturday, so I took the opportunity to go to dinner with my former roommate from Multnomah. We became roommates 40 years ago this fall, straight out of high school, and became good friends. It's probably been around 8 years since we'd gotten together, so it was fun to have a chance to catch up and talk over old times, especially some of the pranks we pulled that year. Saturday was the annual MOPS leadership "Fun Day". We met for breakfast at church at 9am, then started the best part of the day, in my opinion, "The Not-So-Amazing Race". MOPS divides all the moms into discussion groups and has 2 discussion group leaders, a steering committee member and a mentor mom for each group. The 4 people from each discussion group comprised the 6 teams for the amazing race. My group rode in the orange jeep pictured above and had quite the adventures. We were given a set of clues and had to retrieve something or do something at several different places. We didn't have to do things in a certain order, so we decided to do the second task first, and headed for the Jamba Juice in Mt. Vernon.
Unfortunately, 2 other teams had the same idea, so all of a sudden Jamba Juice had 12 women in their store arguing over who should be served first.

Some got more physical than others in order to get to drink their wheat grass drink first. Krista tried a body block first, then put her hand over a different team's cup, so the poor server had no choice but to pour it in her team's cup instead. (It was all done in fun, we were all cracking up at Krista's antics!)

Everyone finally got lined up to drink their wheat grass and we all left to do our next task. Before we left we told the Jamba Juice employees that there would be another bunch coming soon, some of them looked panicked and one guy was ready to quit, since it was his first day working there and he felt overwhelmed by the crowd.

My team was the black team and in spite of our best efforts and Ginny's exciting driving, we arrived last for lunch. However, during lunch, I discovered that not all the teams completed the tasks assigned to them before going to lunch. One of the tasks was to collect menus from 5 different family restaurants, and unfortunately, a lot of them didn't open until 11. So, it was a difficult chore to get the menu's before 11:45, when we were supposed to meet everyone for lunch. My team actually got an employee, that was going to work, to get us a menu from the place she worked before it opened. I don't know how many teams didn't completed their tasks, but I do know that the team that arrived first hadn't done everything, so that made us feel better about arriving last.

After lunch, we had a couple more tasks to do, then had some free time, which we spent browsing a scrapbook store and going to the mall. Ginny and Christine are sitting and relaxing while another team member finished up in the scrapbook store. We had been told that the last part of the race was to the house where we were having dinner. We couldn't leave Bellingham before 4:30, so we drove as far south on the freeway as we could, without leaving Bellingham, to wait for 4:30 to arrive, then we were off again, and this time we arrived third out of the six teams.

One of the things we had to do after lunch, was to go to Value Village and choose an outfit to be modeled after dinner. Each team had $5-7 to spend and there was quite a variety of outfits chosen as you can see.

This is the 6 models and the outfits their group chose. We voted on which one was the best and the fourth one from the left is the one that won. My team actually won a prize, one of the things we had to do was go to Chuck E Cheese, play the games with $5 worth of tokens and see which team had the most tickets after using all the tokens. My team had over 100 tickets because one of the women in my group knew which game gave a lot of tickets. We had a nice dinner and played Bunko afterwards to end the "2009 Leadership Fun Day". I got home at 9:30, after a great day of laughter, fun, and fellowship, but I definitely was ready to head to bed!

Appointment Made

I finally called and made the appointment to have the biopsies redone and don't have to go in until Oct. 20, that was the earliest they could fit me in. It always amazes me that something that seems so important gets put off for a month because there is no room in their schedule. They did say that they could deaden it more, but they tried that last time with minimal results. I don't know if they can put me completely out because I think they would need to have an anesthesiologist to do that. We'll see, I will ask them about it. I appreciate all the sympathy and prayers, thanks so much!

Good News and Bad News

As most of you know, I've had a lot of doctor and dentist appointments and procedures the last 3 months. I had 2 crowns put on my teeth that needed to be adjusted several times, cat scans, an ultrasound, shock treatments to determine the degree of carpal tunnel I had, surgery for carpal tunnel and most recently, biopsies done on nodules on my thyroid. The last procedure was by far the worst I have ever experienced! I left the doctor's office after the procedure, made it to my car, and broke down into tears because it had been so painful. They did do some numbing of my throat, but it didn't seem to make much difference, at least I can't imagine that it could be worse without being numbed. There were 4 nodules and he took 4 samples from each nodule, that's 16 times he stuck a needle in my throat. Now, after all of that, I got the results yesterday that 2 nodules were benign (the good news) and 2 were non-diagnostic and he wants to redo them (the bad news). I really, REALLY, don't want to have to go through that again! The nurse that gave me the results said that the doctor said that what he saw looked OK, but he really feels that they need to be checked again to make sure. I called my regular doctor to ask her if I really needed to do that and was told that I probably should and that they might be able to give me something more to keep it from being so painful. Hopefully, that's the case, I'll let you know later.

Day at the Beach

We took care of Saben and Annika last weekend, so Kari & Kyle could do an end of the season backpacking trip. Since it was such a nice day on Saturday, we planned to go to the beach with Todd, Betsy, and Seth, and have a picnic. The place we decided to go to had a nice playground and beach area. The kids had fun at the play area and Annika continued to make us nervous by the things she would do, like swinging from this bar. Saben had to wait to go down the slide once in awhile and he informed me that he was caught in traffic.
This was Seth's first time to go on a slide. He wasn't terribly impressed, but put up with Grandma sliding him down it several times. I think he enjoyed trying to climb up it more than going down, since he was allowed to try that by himself.

After eating our picnic lunch, we went down to the beach, where we found several fun things to do. Annika, of course, enjoyed getting in the cold Puget Sound water...

but Seth didn't like the feel of the wet sand at all and wouldn't let his feet touch it for very long.

Saben and Papa found a log they could lift and throw back into the water.

Legs got buried in the sand...

we found a nice teeter totter... (by accident, I sat on the end to take a picture and it went down, we then moved it so it would work better. I'm not sure if Saben & Annika had ever been on a teeter totter or not, since they don't have them on playgrounds any more.)

...and a lady gave Saben some flowers to give to Annika, while she took their picture for some kind of photography contest she was in. A beautiful, fun day for an end of the summer outing.

Labor on Labor Day

Ken got some of the boards needed to build the arbor in the backyard, then did some cutting, shaping, and sanding to get them ready to go up.

Yesterday saw a lot of progress made. He got the bases buried in the ground,

got the 4 posts standing up and in a race against the weather, (see the threatening clouds in the sky, but we never did get any rain)

got the 4 top beams on. (This picture only shows 2 of them, so don't strain your eyes looking for the other 2.)

Back to the Garden

After a break during the hot weather, Ken is back at work on the garden remodel. We chose a few rocks to add to the landscape.
These are the rocks we are adding, but they are not placed in their final place of residence.
Kari made a lot of suggestion concerning plant choices and location. These are the ones we ended up buying.

Ken and Kari got them all arranged....

...then got them planted.

The finished product, I can't wait until they bloom next year!

These are the gorgeous clematis, Kari picked out to grow next to the arbor.

Saben Cracks Me Up!

Saben is willing to try saying anything and Ken thinks it's funny to teach him to say funny things and to use big words that Saben hasn't heard of. He started out teaching him to say "What's the scenario?" Then went on to teach him to say "That's the worst case scenario.", followed by "I'm your worst nightmare!" When he goes back to pre-school in a couple of weeks, Ken told him he needed to tell everyone that "4 year olds rule the school." Saben is very excited to go tell everyone that phrase.

Apparently, Ken isn't the only one that likes to teach him funny phrases. This morning after he put his pants on, he pulled them up as far as they would go and said, "I'm Urkle!" Kyle taught him to pull his pants up and say that, I had never heard him say that before and it cracked me up.

This morning for breakfast Ken made pancakes for us. When our kids were young, he used to make pancake initials for them, so he decided to do that for Saben and Annika. He was all excited to see Saben's response when he saw that his pancake was an S. Saben came to the table looked at his plate (an animal plate that I have the kids use) and said "Oh, awesome", then a short pause while Ken felt happy that Saben liked his S shaped pancake, then he said, "That's the plate I wanted" (there are 4 different animal plates). Ken quickly deflated.

Saben continues to sing the "Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang" song and now Annika hums along with him. It is so cute to hear her start humming the couple of lines of the song that she knows. She then repeats them over and over.

Tomatoes

This year, after many years of trying, I finally have a good crop of tomatoes. The plants as you can see have gone nuts and gone all over the place. It's hard to know whether moving them to a box by the house helped or if it was just all the nice warm days we've had this summer, but I have actually gotten to pick and eat lots of them before the first frost comes along and ruins them all.

We have mainly been using the cherry tomatoes and the heirlooms, the Roma's aren't quite ripe yet. The heirlooms have been really nice, I've never planted them before, but they are really yummy. Since we had such good luck this year, I'll have to try planting some again next year.