My Quest For The Perfect Recipe

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

When the lights go down on the city...

Last week out lights went out for an hour and a half. When they went out I knew it wasn't just our house because I was located in a place where I could see out a window to the obnoxious street lights that are right outside our backyard. Luckily Casey hadn't left for his church meeting yet and knew exactly where the flashlights were. We got those out along with a bunch of tea lights. Cade did not enjoy the experience. He kept asking over and over, "When are the lights going to be on?" "Why aren't the lights coming back on." The best comment he made was, "Oh No! Our house is broken again!" (During the month of construction we had some electrical issues. ALL of our lights in our house were flickering like a haunted house.)

First I read some books to them. Then I got my phone out and we started calling people to see whose lights were out too. Then we started to listen to music on my phone and the girls danced while I had the strobe light on them. I tried to get them to do some shadow dancing like I did back in the day at Girl's Camp but they didn't get it. Then I remembered that just that day I had downloaded an episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in case I had to take the girls to the dentist with me. Hallelujah! So that was how we spent the rest of the evening in the dark. Of course the lights came on just after I got them in bed. It was a memory though!

A Month of Construction Part 2

After the plumbing fiasco, Casey decided to build some bookshelves around our new tv that we got for Christmas and build some shelves in the garage. So once again, we had workers in our house. One of the worst things of it all was I had to get up early to take a shower, not knowing when they were going to show up. Which means that I didn't get to work out as much as I would like to so if I gained weight, it's not my fault!

The end result of this was actually really nice but after going through it for 2 weeks previously and then adding two more was a little bit more than I wanted. I was READY to be done and now I am. So if you were wondering why I hadn't been blogging much, now you know!

A Month of Construction Part 1

At the end of December our kitchen sink clogged... AGAIN! We have lived in our house for 5 years and it was new when we bought it and ever since we have lived in it our kitchen sink clogs on a regular basis. After this last time, we knew that something had to be wrong. The plumber came over and I explained that this is a regular occurrence. It just so happened to clog the night before I had to cook dinner for two other families and had to make cookies for something. So needless to say, my kitchen was a disaster because I couldn't wash any of the dishes. As he looked around the kitchen he asked, "Well, are you abusing it?" I replied, "Ah, no..., I rarely put any grease down the drain and I try to dump things in the garbage. Casey wanted me to call him when he got there so he could talk to him and asked him to run a camera down the pipe. It turned out that about 55-75 feet into our house we had a bent pipe that always had standing water in it, which was why it clogged up so easily. I asked what that entailed and he replied, You don't want to know. They were going to have to jack hammer through the cement foundation so they could take out and replace the pipe. This all happened late in the afternoon so first thing in the morning we called our Home builder and they were out that day to look at it along with the plumber that installed it. They wanted to start over Christmas break but we thought it would be better when the kids were back in school so there were less distractions for the workers. So the first week of January started the work. Each day brought something new. This is a tour of our bedroom and bathroom.

This is a picture of our bedroom door! Everything had to be taped off so that the dust from the cement didn't get everywhere.

This is the hole right after you go through that lovely plastic door.

This is a "hallway" to the bathroom. They taped off everything, our bed is on the other side of this. We couldn't sleep in our bed because they only way to get to it is through the back door and we were worried that our children might wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to get to us. So for about a week Casey and I got to cuddle on a full size mattress that I had before we were married.

This is another hole in the bathroom. There is a tunnel under our shower to the other hole.

This is the huge pile of dirt and rocks that was from the holes and the tunnel.

Lovely large rocks in a huge pile in my bathroom!

Everything is back to normal now and it did take awhile to get rid of the plastic stink. It's nice to have a fully functioning pipe! The one bonus was the plumber who originally installed the bad pipe gave us his card and told us that as long as we live in the house we could get free plumbing.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

A Claire funny...

This will probably only be funny to those that play Mario Kart. Claire and Cade were playing Mario Kart this morning and after the race started Claire wasn't going. Cade asked her, "Claire, why aren't you going?" and her reply was, "Because I want to get far enough behind to get the big rocket!"

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Cousins!

One of the highlights of Christmas break was seeing the cousins that have moved to New Jersey. The kids had a hard time understanding that we wouldn't see them when we went down to Grandma's anymore because they had moved. Courtney made arrangements to come for Christmas and we are very happy that she did. They were in Vegas for a few days visiting Jeff's family so we were lucky to get a visit too. These are pictures from the dance party we had after we cleaned up the toy room. The music, of course, is High School Musical 3.