Dave's Orchard

Well what do you know? Jason finally got himself a blog. It was completely his idea, I think he saw all my blogging friends and was jealous. At any rate, his link has been added (along with a few more new pals!)

Last night I had planned to blog, but I was exhausted and went to bed at 10... I didn't even hear Jason come in, but he didn't go to bed until 12 (He was too busy blogging!)

This week has been crazy... Thursday and Friday were field trip days. We went to Dave's Orchard in Langley and had a blast! We got to pick our own corn off the stalk, pull up our own carrots and beets, pick tomatoes and even broccolli right off the plant. I didn't even know what a broccolli plant looked like until this trip! Apples and pears were picked right off the tree, and we got huge potatoes and pumpkins galore. The best part was I did this 4 times and the lady who owns the farm (Dave's wife) kept giving me more and more! Here's my produce load after just day 1!!



And the next day I got more than double that! By the way, yes that is Hampton, I guess he was hungry. Anyways, we ate corn on the cob Thursday night and it was delicious! Since I came home with 7 cobs the next day we gave some to our landlord and some will go to my mom tonight. I think the plan is today is to slice and freeze up some of the other stuff, like some broccolli and carrots. It's lots of work being a farmer!

Well, I'm off to do some cleaning today, although I kinda wish I was preparing some killer costume for a halloween party tonight. I love dressing up... we were invited to a party downtown but it was over $40 a ticket and that was just too steep for right now... maybe next year!

Shakin, Bakin, and Hotting things up MAC style

Sorry I haven't posted for a bit, I've been completely occupied with Jack. Ok, maybe not really (although I'm proud to say we've now finished disc 4 and only have 2 more discs left of Season 1) Anyways, I haven't updated because I wanted this post to include some pictures I took of the fantastic meal I made recently.
Here's me shakin' and bakin':


And here's the finished product! Mmm mmm good!


Oh! And we have a new addition to the family, his name is Hampton:


We like him, he's yellow and happy. He lives with our favourite orange Ikea suction scrubber:


Today I went for MAC makeovers with my friend Erin, and spent too much money on makeup because I'm a girl and, well, if Rachael can love hot handbags as much as she does I'm allowed to love hot makeup. I tried to take a picture of the hotness but they all looked a little too trampy... My makeup now looks like I was going clubbing tonight or something. It was the best when the girls who were doing our makeup asked us where we were going tonight and we answered "home". At least Jason thought I was hot when he saw me. That's all that matters anyways!

Jocelyn (my sister for those who don't know that) got a new little buddy. I wish I had a picture but I don't, so I'll leave you all in the dark about this for now. You can guess if you'd like to. If you wouldn't like to, then don't.

Anyways I must get some sleep tonight and it's going to be a half hour of scrubbing to get this hotness off my face. Goodnight all!

Jack's the man.

I'm in love. Yes, with Jason of course, but I have a new love in my life. His name is Jack Bauer. And Jason's just as in love with him... ok not with him in particular but his life, or at least this one day of his life. I've heard so much about how great this show was but I'd never seen even one episode. So last night we decided to stay in and rent Season 1, discs 1 and 2. I honestly don't know what I would do if I had to wait a whole week to see each episode. After the first episode we were completely hooked, and ended up watching the entire first disc (4 episodes) that night. Today all I could think about was what was going to happen next... Jason really wanted to go biking but I was still tired and not in the mood for biking so I stayed home and watched 3 more episodes. I would've watched the 8th one but Jason called and said to wait for him. Only when he got home he wouldn't let me just fill him in on what happened, he wanted to see for himself. So I watched from 4:00-7:00 all over again, then from 7:00-8:00... Now we need to rent discs 3 and 4 or I'm going to go insane.

It's just such a good show!! I commented on how it's like if you turned a novel into a movie and didn't leave any detail at all out. It's fantastic. And it's helping to ease the transition to our one-channel television. If there's nothing on Global, we don't watch tv.

Tonight we went to Castle Fun Park with a bunch of people from Maple Ridge Baptist young adults group. It was fun, we went to originally play mini golf but it was so busy that all us girls decided to get refunds and get tokens for the games instead. There's this one game that you hit the button and try to get the jackpot. It's like gambling for tickets and extremely addictive. Especially when the pot gets up to 150 tickets or so... Andrea, Hannah, and myself all won at least once, Hannah won twice, her biggest amount being 150 tickets. We pooled our tickets together and got a ton of candy! Together we had almost 900 tickets. Too bad we were 19,100 short for the 12" television.

Friendly tip: next time you come across a shooting gallery (They have them at the PNE, as well as right here in your very own Castle Fun Park), take a picture with your flash on. Trust me, it's worth it.

Mmm bubble bath, relaxing music, and a good book...

makes for a great night! It's very quiet right now at my place, Jason's out at judo and I ended up with a bit of quiet time for a while until he gets home. It's nice, I kinda forgot what it's like to be alone. I'd never trade Jason for anything, but I really am learning to appreciate time for myself. I talk all day with parents, kids, everyone... and of course with this job it's constant go-go-go. Then usually I get home and it's go-go-go some more whether it's go to Maple Ridge for judo and the gym (didn't go tonight 'cause I had a dinner date with my Mom), or we go to bible study, or whatever. We always seem to have somewhere to go - which is great! We have lots of friends, lots of activities - we really are blessed. It's just nice sometimes to sit in the bathtub and read, with no time limit and no place to be...

Goldmines and Pictures

Alright so I went biking today and even brought my camera, only to have it die after the first picture. It was a good ride with excellent weather. I got to take good old Stinky Dee (my bike - it's a Kona Stinky Dee-Lux) up to the woodlot for the first time. We rode Goldmine, which is way up past the powerlines (it usually takes us about an hour to hike up to the powerlines alone). I found out today that the trail was named Goldmine because it actually used to be a goldmine. Jason showed me where the entrance is, I still can't believe I never knew it was there, I rode past it a bunch of times. It basically looks like a huge puddle about 15 or 20 feet off the trail, but it goes down super far.... we tried putting a really long stick in but couldn't touch the bottom. Apparently Jason and Bill way back in the day put an old tree in it and now it's gone completely, it sunk right in. Crazy!

Anyways, so no pictures from my ride, but how about some of my favourite ones from the wedding photos we got this week? I haven't had a chance to upload them all onto a website or anything, but consider this a little sampler...

Live to the world...

We have connection!! Finally after some craziness, including a morning visit on a Thanksgiving-weekend Sunday by Mr. Telus Worker, we have the internet. Turns out that the room we picked as the office is the only one in our place that has a dead phone line. Any one of our 3 other phone jacks would work except that one. So Mr. Telus Worker gave us a wireless modem instead and we hooked up my old wireless receiver to the computer. Voila! We have internet.

So folks, I will try and be as diligent as possible when it comes to blogging, as I now have no excuse not to.

Today the plan is to go biking and then to GrammO's house for dinner. Not the big thanksgiving one, that's tomorrow at my "DH"'s parents house (hee hee I have a DH now)
I shall bring my camera on our biking adventure. :)

Hooray!

Good news girls and boys, the internet will be up and running by the weekend at the latest! More blogs to come!

Hey it's lunchtime and I've found a few minutes to quickly give all my loyal blog-checkers a little update. We found out a couple days ago that we can get into our new place in Abbotsford this Friday, so this weekend is officially going to be taken up by moving. We're almost all packed so hopefully everything goes smoothly. I'm excited, I was thinking about how glorious it will be to finally take a bath again! Woot!

So the countdown is on, 3 more days! :)

gotta eat before kids get here!

One day ...

I will have internet... first step is to move... this weekend!

blogs will come, sorry folks

Finally! The Post! (it's really long, beware)

Alright so basically the Friday before the wedding was a complete gong show. First we find out that Jason's best man's tuxedo may or may not arrive by Saturday afternoon. (Wedding was scheduled for 1:30) Apparently it had been sent mistakenly to Kelowna... You know, Kelowna, Coquitlam... I guess they're easy to mix up? They both start with a "K" sound... So they put that tuxedo onto a Greyhound, and they also contacted their head office in Toronto and had one shipped from there. Either way, at that point it still wasn't clear if it would be there or not.

Meanwhile, on the bride's end of things, the decorator/rental lady we were renting dishes, cutlery, and table linens from had not sent her the invoice, despite multiple emails requesting this. These emails were typically responded to with something like "I have down that you wanted cloth napkins, do you still want these?" Well hmm... let me think about that, if you have it down, then YES! Anyways, so finally we get the invoice emailed so that we can write her a cheque for that day when she was to drop off all the items (Because having her set them up and take them down is a whole lot more money) When I got the invoice, I burst into tears... It was more than double her quote. Turns out she didn't even quote us a whole lot of what we'd already talked about when we met at my house in April. Yes, 4 months in advance, and she had the nerve to say "we shouldn't have left it to the last minute" Last minute?!? She was the one who wouldn't reply to my messages. Gahh.. Anyways, advice to future event planners: Ask me for her name and DON'T EVER USE HER...

So while I sat outside and bauled, my mom was yelling at her on the phone, trying to make sense of the quote vs. the invoice. It ended up that we had to cut the cloth napkins, we were going to have no mugs (because neither the quote nor the invoice had them, although she put on both of these "coffee spoons"), and we would have no beautiful brown table runners with smaller champagne runners that we painstakingly picked out in April. Still outside on the bench at my moms, I remember thinking I wasn't supposed to be this sad the day before my wedding... My sister came out and actually gave me a hug (she's not all that outwardly affectionate). That's when she offered to sew table runners if we could find some fabric. Off we went to the fabric store... We checked out the clearance section and lo and behold there was some chocolate brown fabric - enough for a bunch of smaller table runners (we decided on smaller ones for ease of sewing) All in all it was much cheaper than renting! That night my sister became my hero, she sewed about 12 table runners until 2:30 or 3 in the morning, and got up at 7 on Wedding Day and sewed the remaining 8 that morning.
Here's Jocelyn sewing so happily...

And here's Erin cutting out fabric all night...

And of course my Heather, overtired and way too enthusiastic for this picture...


They looked beautiful, it was unbelievable. Which leads me to the other behind the scenes happenings! Lindsey and Mike, two of the greatest decorators I know, worked tirelessly to decorate the hall for the reception. It looked absolutely amazing, and I am truly honored to have friends like them that would work that hard to make our special day that much more beautiful.

Here are the table runners in action!

And here's Martha and "Hard-workin" Hemmerling...


As you can see, I had hot hot people involved...

So after the crazy night of sewing, there was a crazy day full of fun. I could add a lot of pictures but I think I'm going to save some for when I get my professional pictures back. I will add a few though, because a) I know everyone is just dying to see them (yeah right haha) and b) I just like looking at them!

Anyways, the day went so quickly! Before I knew it my hair was done and I was putting my dress on... Here's a great pic of my mom helping me get ready...

After I was all tightened up and ready to go it was time for a mamosa toast with the girls. But not before a quick drink to calm my nerves...

Meanwhile, the groom and his boyz were all washing cars and getting the 2 lifted Samurai's looking pretty with pink and white flowers. I will add that picture soon or at least direct you to that pic on a website once I get them all uploaded... But for now you just picture that in your mind if you weren't there.
I remember standing outside the church auditorium in a line with the girls in front of me. My heart was pounding as I heard the music start, sending the cue to the grandparents and Jason's parents to head down the aisle. My mom was on my right, and my dad was on my left, I had my arms in theirs. My dad was telling me I looked "radiant" among other things and I had to tell him to stop or I would be a complete mess. It was all I could do not to cry. I heard Jason's funky music start (The song from Napoleon Dynamite where Uncle Rico first appears... It's fantastic!) and I knew it was almost time. The girls were each sent down the aisle, looking gorgeous. Then the music faded, and Norah Jones started (Love Me Tender was the song) Then I started down the aisle. I was looking at Jason the whole time but it felt like I was spinning. I was so nervous. I remember breathing in gasps, because I was seconds away from sobbing uncontrollably. Everything went wonderfully... We had our first communion together, which was a great moment to reflect and thank God for bringing us together... Then when we were lighting the candles and signing the registry, my dad, Jocelyn, and Heather sang "Your Everything" by Keith Urban, as planned. When that finished, my dad announced that he had a "special gift" for us, and he and Jocelyn sang a song my dad wrote called "Soul to Soul". He framed it for us and it's hanging in our house.

Finally the time came for us to seal the marriage with a kiss. Jason apparently had forgotten our conversation about this step so as he leaned forward to kiss me, I said "oh just a second" and Erin went behind our beautiful forest foliage backdrop and produced a stepping stool. I stood on this to kiss him (we never usually kiss on level ground anyways, he's just way too tall) and I swear it was the talk of the day...


Then it was picture time... as I said, I'll post a link or something to these when I get them. It was a crazy busy time, but somehow I managed to get a bit of meditation in... some quiet time...


All in all it was a fantastic day (though I was rather relieved when it was over, I was exhausted) and what's even more exciting is that now I have a husband who I love more than anything. I'm so excited to grow together, and for all the adventures we get to share together.