bachelorettes and anniversaries...(they can have their cake and eat it too...)

So ...

This weekend we had a bachelorette party for our friend. It was i have to say a WHOLE lot of fun. WHich is good, cuz it was essentialy the same time of plan they had for MY party, which I missed, so it was good to join in.

First we went to a Moroccan restaurant where it's served family style. You sit at low tables, have your hands washed and eat everything with fingers and pita bread. It was tasty. The bachelorette and others in our group got up and danced with the belly dancers. :) a lot of us had on jingly belts so we jingled every where we walked. :)

We all wore them bowling.

It was very amusing - having us all go bowling and jingling. Then the hokey pokey started and we were all doing that and adding hip shimmies to the moves. There was fun and merriment ( some of it drunken ) to be had - we all had a great time. :) I'm told some of the hubbies and children went out on their own as well... but I wasn't there obviously so not much to say on that. :)

Now - the fun. (you mean that wasn't the fun? Ruh Roh... :))

Yesterday was my anniversary. 1 year down. :) I got my husband a lovely pocket watch from hammacher schlemmer and had it engraved with "24 September, 2006 - A year of time together" :) (I couldn't resist the pun. and he says he loves it so that's good. :) We then went out to dinner at a great restaurant called Mikimotos. Course my husband spells it mickey moto's so when i was telling the girls where we were going during the party, we all started singing, "m - i - c... K- e - y... M - O - T - O - SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS" :) yes we're silly.:)

So i had some sashimi, and then panco and mustard crusted rack of lamb, with scallion mashed potatos, tempura onion rings, and grilled asparagus. It was LOVELY. Then I had banana coins for dessert. ( coin size fried banana wontons with honey and powdered sugar. ) M had a deep fried brownie. (all the desserts were deep fried I think.. :) )

When we got home, M insisted and getting out our wedding cake that was saved. Well - see, we didn't exactly save it properly. we forgot to freeze it before the honeymoon, and by the time we got back we figured it was too late and just kept forgetting to do anything about it - so it sat in our fridge... for a year. :)

We cut into it last night. This is what it looked like:
















And yes... he took a bite - from a non green corner. (shudder) I have proof! I took pictures. I wasn't going anywhere NEAR that cake. I'd just had a lovely dinner and saw no need to refund it.

all in all - a fun weekend. :)

Showtunes!!! well helllooooooo D****..... :)

Yes - Today on ALIT we introduce a new character. . . HelloD. I know - Sounds like a children's rapper or something. :)But no... this is the name of the Nanny on ALIT. The one the Suka and J have hired.

Now HelloD has been with the family for years. She was taking care of my great uncle's wife when she was terminal etc... So she LOVES "mister J" which is one reason she stays to put up with Suka.

So the report from HellOD is as follows:
Suka sleeps until 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Then she gets up and goes out shopping and playing around etc. She comes home in time to be there when J gets home. Then when he does she goes on and on about what a long and tiring day she's had taking care of sukaspawn. He then, feeling guilty that she has supposedly taken care of the sukaspawn all day and had such a long day doing it, takes care of sukaspawn all evening. This is after a full day of work. HelloD has started taking sukaspawn into her room so as to finally give Mister J some sleep finally.

Are we having fun yet? Oh and she finally posted another article for work. (anyone wants it email me and i'll give you the info.) Wonder if J finally grew a pair (small though i'm sure they are) enough to tell her she needs to do some work or they are gonna go bankrupt. We'll see. I guess it depends on how often she continues to write. Most of last year it was one a month. There were 2 in june and then nothing until this week.

ON a completely different brighter note... :) MY 1 year anniversary is this weekend. So Saturday night I am going to a friend's bachelorette party, and then sunday is our anniversary. The bookstore called to see if i could work on sunday. I gently explained what day it was and my manager said "OHH Congratulations, Never mind!"

Training is going well. Mom says that she can tell my midriff is getting a bit smaller. (course her explanation for why is a bit disconcerting. :)) She says she can tell it's small because before it was stretched tight, and now the skin is dimpled which means there's less there... :) Trainer says she can definitely feel that my ankles are smaller. She continues to kick my butt 2 times a week, but now i'm supposed to try and do it to myself an additional time each week. (sigh) We got these really cool weights too to work with. :) The trainer had asked me to get 8 and 10lb weights to have in addition to the 5lb weights we already have. Well, i figure i'm gonna outgrow those fairly soon - and it's a lot of weights to have laying around. So we got the Bowflex Selectech weights. :) they go from 5lbs to 52.5 lbs on each dumbbell. I got them on a sale that they came with the $140 stand for free. They work really nicely.

Oh and I sold the gazelle. :) YAY! for the same price as I sold the broken treadmill. Freaky ebay karma i guess.

Oh well -that's all she (meaning me) wrote for now. :) Have a great weekend everyone!

The Moment you've all been waiting for...

That's right...

Finally - Pictures of the SUKA!!! :) I came accross the perfect wedding picture to post and you lucky viewers get to see it first. :)

Here it is!

hehehhe - enjoy! :)

Holy Giant Dogs Batman!

So...i'm on the phone with my mom last night when call waiting beeps. It's not a number i recognize so I go answer it asking mom to hold on. Understandably she hung up after a few minutes. :) Cuz... guess who was on the phone!!! :)


hehehe. I spent 15 minutes on the phone with BURT WARD last night. That's right, *THE* Burt Ward of Batman fame. Now, i'm sure some of you are wondering why I might be talking on the phone to Mr. Ward. :)

It turns out, he and his wife run a dog rescue in California. It's called Gentle Giants Rescue. They specialize in rescuing giant breeds like danes, great pyranese, mastiffs etc. They also do some small dogs and some hairless dogs etc. All their dogs get to live in the house with them. (sometimes up to 60 dogs at once!) Anyways, they have developed their own dog food and I was interested in it. i mean seriously, they have their Great Danes (who's average life expectancy is 8-10 years) living an average of 14-18 years. That's pretty impressive in my book. So i was curious. especially as Mister has always had a umm.. "loose tummY" and both of them are very gaseous. So i've decided to try some new food. I have been using Wellness, but they changed their forumlation after hiring efficiency experts and so the bottom line seems to be more important now.

So I had called Gentle Giants because they only sell on their site, the food in pallets of 4 bags at a time. The pricing is very reasonable, and it's non profit, so all they care about is producing a good healthy food. It ends up with shipping to be cheaper than the wellness actually. :) and one thing mr ward mentioned, is that most Dog food manufacturers forget about things like Heart disease etc and the fat contents tend to be high. HIs is a low 9%. ANyways - i know this sounds like an advertisement, but i'm really just putting down my thought process on trying this stuff. :) So I wanted samples to see if my dogs liked it before investing $200. Well, he called back to tell me they don't have samples, but he'd be willing to let me try 1 bag instead of 4, so i figure mom and I will split it and see. What's nice about this food is it is for *ALL* ages. There is no puppy specific, or senior specific food. Their vet clinic will now ONLY feed this food to the dogs staying with them even though they sell other brands. So i'm thinking what the heck right? :)

but still... I got to talk to Burt Ward...LOL

In Suka news... the Sukaspawn (i just came up with that name, I LOVE IT!) i think is gonna end up the girl in the plastic bubble. Suka is paranoid, won't let anyone near her. The entire time of the event formerly known as the naming no one was allowed to see the baby. baby stayed in a back room in a carriage with netting over the top. There's Purell bottles EVERYWHERE so they can sanitize before picking up the baby every time. they DEIGNEd to let my cousin P hold Sukaspawn, and that only lasted 30 seconds before she started making noises like she was hungy. when P offered to feed her SUka Freaked, grabbed the baby and said "NO she NEEDS HER MOMMY! - she's too fussy, isn't comfortable with people, she's just too fussy no one else can hold her or feed her." Kid is gonna have no immune system. :) and no socialization skills either. I'm supposed to get more dirt this weekend so we'll see how it goes.. :)

In other news - my future physical happiness is on its way... hubby started school last night. ahhh those magic hands will now have education. A beautiful thing! :)

Hope lives on . . . .

So, everyone is doing remebrances of what happened 5 years ago. This is a good thing. THis is something that should ALWAYS be remembered.

But what I think is even more important to remember is the hope we all have. That drive to move on and live our lives and not be brought low by such evil actions.

We will always remember those who can no longer do this and mourn their loss and what they as people contributed to our society and lives. We will also do as i'm sure they would want, which is to LIVE, with love and laughter and joy in our hearts. To fight evil and hate with joy and tolerance. That is how we win, by not letting them stop us from LIVING.

Today we remember all those who fell, and those who live on in their names.

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I wanted to share with you folks today the blanket/hope chest we received this weekend. My mother in law bought it for us during the family auction at the reunion last year. It was delivered to us THIS year at the reunion.



















it's *HUGE* :)
We put it at the foot of our guest bed. It's about 6" narrower than the queen size bed. and about 5" taller. Keep in mind that this is a normal queen size bed, with 2 foam pads, 2 flannel comforters and a spring blanket on it, and the chest is STILL taller by a few inches than the top of the bed. I hope that people can still get around it to the bed... :) The cousin who made it for us said that he'd made one for his wife, but it was too small to hold king size blankets. So he made it bigger. It now has 2 king size flannel comforters in there, a bunch of towels, and our spare sheets for the master bed. IT's got this cool slider box near the top, that you can put stuff in and slide back and forth to get at what's underneath. The box and the bottom shelf are made of cedar. So everytime you slide the box, the ceder smell "refreshes" itself. He also gave us some cedar balls to keep in there as well.

I love it. And it arrived in time for our first wedding anniversary which is in just under 2 weeks. (2 weeks from yesterday in fact.)

Life moves forward. . . and I now have a lovely chest (no giggling you!) to put not only blankets and towels and sheets in, but to put Hope in. . . for our future and yours....

SUKA STUFF!!!!

oh i gots LOOOOADDDS of new suka stuff.

But here's the deal - those of you who really want to know about it, email me and i'll email you the whole story. (email me at jleader at gmail dot com) it's all written out and ready to go, but it's detailed enough that i'd rather not post it publicly and i don't think blogger does password protected. :)

In the mean time. Not much else is going on here. I have my husband's family reunion this weekend. Gonna bring a stuffed bunny and blanket that I made for a friend's baby. I keep forgetting to mail it to her. So i figure i'll bring it as an example and auction off custom made bunny and/or blanket. See they do auctions every year for stuff that people make or donate. The funds go into a reunion bank account to help defer expenses for the annual get together. Helps pay for food, location etc. Not sure when our turn is - i think in a few more years. But i figured that would be kind of cool. We'll also bring brownies for the kids to bid on and stuff like that. I might even donate one bunny to the kids auction. The kids will be given $500 in monopoly money each, so they can really participate in bidding with their own "monday." So some stuff is a true donation. :) but if i'm making one bunny, it's just as easy if not easier to make a bunch at once then it is to just do one at a time, because then I assembly line them. :)

Oh well - that's all for today. Here is a picture of the bunny and blanket just so you all know what i'm talking about. Always made with 100% cotton flannel and eyes and nose are embroidered on so it's safe for infants and toddlers as well... :)(i am willing to sell them if a gift is needed for a baby shower or something just so you all know :))

pictures and posts and umm... yeah :) can't think of anything cute.

Hello everyone!

Hope everyone had a good labor day weekend. Mine was relatively quiet as the hubby was away in canada on a Kung Fu Trip. :) So mostly, i just hung around, played with the dogs etc. Though yesterday was lovely (while today is abysmal) and I took my bike out for the first real road test ride since I bought it. ANd I bought it with different tires then i test rode it on, so first ride on these tires. :) It was fun. My brother's friend is gonna buy my old bike too, and it fits her nicely. So i guess, if his 4'10" friend fits that frame well, that would explain why it was too small for my long legged 5'4" body. Although, she did look a bit like kermit the frog from the muppet movie while riding. . . :) she laughed when I said that. :)

I also started some knitting this weekend. I had been working on this shawl called the lace wings shawl. I bought the pattern, but it was designed by regular knitter, and I think it's not written very well. There's mistakes and stuff that make it difficult, and if you aren't experienced enough (which I'm not) it's hard to figure out how to fix them. My mom was saying just by reading it she figured that out, and that she'd have to knit it to fix it. Not worht the effort. :) So at some point I will pick up that nifty yarn again, and try something different. :) Anyways, I have no patience for something with that much pattern to follow. But the yarn is a really PRETTY egyption cotton by King Tut. :) and it's in this lovely vibrant autumn red type color. :)so i'll do something with it later. :) So what i DID start working on this weekend was this:
These needles are AWESOME! :) i love them... :)birchwood, very sharp even in large sizes, very super smooth, and perfect size to just carry with you small projects... they are like 7 or 8" long. Perfect! - perfect scarf size too. :)





Also - As Promised.. Pics of the floor:

Hall Bathroom(see the nifty faucet?)












Master Bath See new counter? :)













Living room(with nifty new rug)












and that my friends I think is about all she wrote. It's taken me about 1.5 hours to get this post done, first with the network down and then with the time to upload pictures so... Later Taters! :)