Lilypie First Birthday tickers

Lilypie First Birthday tickers

Sunday, February 24, 2008

A trip down memory lane...

Over the weekend, Joe and I visited my family down in Io-way for my lil' brother's birthday. (did that rhyme? :) It was so nice to spend time with my parents and siblings, as well as catch up with my grandparents and other Iowan friends.

One of the highlights of the weekend occurred Saturday night in my parent's living room. We had just finished eating out at Chili's for Sambo's birthday dinner and were waiting for the second set of grandparent's to arrive for cherry pie and ice cream. While we waited, we flipped on the tv (the ginormously huge one that my family just purchased) to the PBS channel. It featured Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians -- a group foreign to me. Before we knew it, my grandpa was singing along to all the songs they were playing. What a sweet moment! Instantly I was reminded of all of my memories of singing with Grandpa:
...the first time he taught me "Christ Arose" in the basement of our home in Canada and singing it with him every Easter since...

...the little ditty, "Put your shoes on Lucy, don'tcha know you're in the city? Put your shoes on Lucy, dontcha know you're kinda pretty?" every time I put my shoes on at Grandma and Grandpa's as a child...

...Grandpa's deep bass voice singing out, "Silver bells, silver bells, it's Christmas-time in the city..." almost every year at Christmas time...

...singing in the "way back" of our station wagon when we went to get maple syrup while living in Canada...and not even noticing that we were completely lost....

...this past year when we went through the Cedar Memorial Christmas lights display and spontaneously sang Christmas carols as we drove in the car...

As I remembered those sweet moments and listened to Grandpa's beautiful bass voice singing "I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl that Married Dear Old Dad)", my heart smiled. I pray that those memories will never fade from my memory and that Grandpa will always keep on singing.

Monday, February 18, 2008

to ease my boredom...

Have you ever heard of this guy? Adrian Monk...one of my new absolute favorite shows.

Adrian, or Monk as he is so often called, is an obsessive compulsive detective whose quirks often enable him to solve cases that stump the police force. He's constantly trying to solve the mystery of his wife's murder, 7 years ago, and that is a running theme throughout the shows.

I must say, Monk is hilarious!! His obsessiveness is so weird, and yet done realistically. I've been watching Monk a LOT due to being sick. After a while, I find myself starting to notice things out of alignment or crooked pictures....or that one button is different from another on my shirt. Weird. But it makes me laugh. If you haven't ever watched Monk before, I'd highly recommend it! :)

comfort food

Today I decided to make peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, my specialty!

Don't they look yummy?? Mmm....

my excuse...

I've been terribly slow at posting here lately....life has been crazy!! Here's a few things that have been keeping me preoccupied:

  • The weather -- my goodness I've never seen so much snow and ice and drifts in my entire life! Ok, maybe that's not exactly true, but it sure has been a doozy of a winter! Good thing I like snow! :)
  • My job -- the last 2 months at my job have been awful. We lost one employee (she found a better job) and another injured her ankle in a freak sledding accident. And she's 60 years old. Weird. This normally would not have been a huge problem, but our other three branches were experiencing deaths in the family, and another girl got in a bad car accident where she broke her leg, a rib, and her 4 year old also broke his leg. Craziness!! So we've been running our tails off, to say the least. But they hired a new girl last week, and my aged sledding friend is back at work, so things should start looking up... :)
  • Sickness -- two weeks ago, Joe had an awful cold and lost his voice, so we dealt with that. And now this week, I've been battling a horrible cold and just found out today that it's the beginning of walking pneumonia. Joy. So that's been.....exhausting...
  • Everthing else -- meanwhile we've been continuing with our normal activities -- youth group adventures, visiting friends, sledding parties, etc. etc.

Hopefully now life will slow down a little so I can post more regularly!