Card Class

Ok, so I'll get to the card class, but first a glamour shot.... or not!

So this is a terrible picture, thanks to our silly camera that kind of refuses to shed any light on objects more than 3 feet from the flash, slightly lightened with photoshop so you can tell who the people are, but it's our only picture with Tamara and Jared and Van, so here we are at Farelli's a few nights ago, for their cheap family deal! Good pizza, salad, breadsticks, and drinks for only $30. Can't be beat. Van even got a balloon at the end--don't know how much more you could ask for!

So I went to an awesome card class last night with Tamara and we made these 3 super-cute cards. I learned a lot of things, including that I am a remedial crafter! I kind of suspected as much, but it was confirmed when all 3 other members of my table were finished and I was only halfway through the 3rd kind of card. :( And the lady across the table was easily in her 60's. I pride myself on the end product though, not the speed at which I create it, so it would have been fine except I mucked that up a bit too... Luckily there were only minor snafus and the cards turned out ok! (Bob pointed out that being Chatty Cathy might have something to do with my tortoise-like speed.... I can't deny that COULD be a factor, but hey, I had fun!) I did learn that those little pinchers make picking up tiny letters WAY easier. So that was good. And they were useful on the flip flops, because we had to poke the rafia through these tiny holes and the pinchers worked well there too to pull it through.... Anyway, good times were had and I didn't buy too much stuff at the scrapbooking store... I bought some of the microbeads (tiny tiny glass beads that you use almost like glitter) for Christmas cards with the optimistic idea that I'll start now.... we'll see! :) (You of course get a discount on anything you buy on the day of a class so it's very tempting to check it all out!


I have a 4 day weekend since today's a "training holiday" and Monday's the real holiday and it's AWESOME! This is the first holiday weekend I've had off in pretty much forever, because I'm always on call at least one of the days when I'd otherwise be off because I'm on an outpatient month! I was productive today and finished all my notes earlier. (I now see about 20 patients a day so those notes add up! They're all 20 minute appts so I spend up to 2 hours a day doing notes after work!) I did some dishes but there are still a ton left, I should still vacuum, and there's a mountain of laundry still to fold.... SO I shouldn't be blogging but should go take care of all that! Hope you're all enjoying the holiday weekend though and congratulations to the Jeppsens--wish we could be there for Baby Jay's blessing on Sunday! :)
~Cathy

One more thing: I already sent this to some of you, but here's a video about a cool new little cutter that's coming out in October! Who wouldn't want one??

http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=nfubyLuekZE&rel=1&eurl=http%3A//www.whyslice.com/HowTos/detail/slice-trade-overview&iurl=http%3A//i3.ytimg.com/vi/nfubyLuekZE/default.jpg&t=OEgsToPDskJVyq32xdB8GYdQ5O4dkY6X&use_get_video_info=1&load_modules=1&fs=1&hl=en

The Lost City

So it's been a while since we went anywhere other than home for a vacation.... Mostly it's because we love North Idaho, but also because we don't get much time off (and when I say "we," clearly we all know who's to blame.... sorry Bobbo!), and of course we love that it's driveable to get home these days.... After living all over the place for the last few years, we're really glad to be back in the Northwest again.... However, all this does NOT mean we don't want a big vacation! And since it's been a long time since we went anywhere, and we had some points saved up that we were able to redeem for money off, we're going to..... ATLANTIS! That's right. Pretty exciting stuff. Pretty much our most exciting trip ever! We're going in November, right at the end of hurricane season in the Bahamas, so we're hoping for good weather... This will make tolerating the nearly neverending rain that much easier for the next few months!

Otherwise life is back to normal... tomorrow is basketball Wednesday though, so that's exciting! Then I'm on call Thursday so my weekend starts a little early at noon on Friday, which is nice, even though I work Sat! Hope you're all having a great day and enjoying the Olympics! Yay for gymnastics, but boo to the airing of the good stuff at midnight!

Consider the river floated!

Yesterday we had a super-relaxing and fun last day floating the CDA river with Carolyn, the Poteets, and Rach. We loaded the truck up with a LOT of floating options and headed out!

One of the many entertaining aspect of our float was our footwear.... I wore an old pair of Carolyn's sweet purple Baywatch (that's right!) aquasocks, size 8 (I am a bigfoot, for those of you unaware--9-9.5 usually, so it was a squeeze!) and Bob wore some old Teva style sandals of hers that were similarly sized (he is a guys 9.5!) so our tootsies were squashed! Why do we never remember river shoes when we know we'll be floating? Silly us. Anyway, the shoes served their purpose but led to some funny looking feet!

What's happening here you may ask? That's right, my toes are making their way out.... These shoes can't even contain them!

After 4 hours of floating my toes were much closer to escaping! My right big toe was poking out a bit!

Bob's pinky toes would not be contained either!


So back to the floating.... we had a LOT of tubes and rafts!

It's an impressive pile, eh?



We had a good system--Bob would thow stuff down

And George would catch them and hand off to Rach, who'd keep them from floating away. Neither pic does it justice, but this was a STEEP path down to the water... hence the benefit of not carrying a giant floatie while we each traversed it! Everyone successfully navigated it somehow!

A nice shot of Rach, me, and Mans floating along...Note the LACK of sunburns all around...

My view of the girls! Our tied-together blob was dangerous at times, but we had a great time chatting! Sometimes we chatted and/or sang a bit too much and didn't pay close enough attention to our surroundings and would float into danger.... we had several run-ins with evil branches which attacked us! I have a plethora of scratches and scrapes from these, but it was still WELL worth it for the fun that was had! The funniest disaster from our inattention was when the riverbank started swallowing Rach! I can't even explain the craziness of that moment... too funny! At least the FRIGID water felt good on all my scrapes! Although the temp was in the high 90's, the water was icy as always so it was a funny balance between dying of hotness while atop our floaties to freezing when we'd dip our toes in to cool off! Somehow Bob and George were IN the water the whole time and didn't freeze to death... they're hardy boys! Good times were had by all....

One more piece of craziness with the floating was a particularly rough patch that was shallow, but also had a really strong current which dumped me out of my tube, so I was walking next to our blob dragging it to deeper waters so we wouldn't get stuck, but the rocks are of course very slippery, and I fell on my bum and the current grabbed the blob and they quickly floated away! I tried to chase them down but the current was really fast and the water was only to my shins so not deep enough to swim, but had a current that made it tough to stand let alone walk, so I decided to just walk along the shore a bit and catch up with them. Rach didn't want me to have to make my way alone, so she came with, but the riverbank had brush right to the waterline so there was no chance of walking along it, so we literally bushwacked our way through 30-40 feet of solid brush, which scraped us so much more... Rach made the valid observation that it wouldn't have been so bad if we weren't so naked! We were longing for jeans and long sleeves instead of our swimsuits right about then.... we made it to the road eventually and were dirty and only bleeding a little, and only a few hundred feet down the road was the end of our float where we'd parked the van, so we dove into the cold water to clean off our grime and it felt wonderful on all the scrapes at least!

We had a nice picnic lunch and then headed back.... Good times were had by all. The only downside of our floating was that it took longer than expected.... 4.5 hours to go 5 miles! And also that we all got BURNT. I applied SPF 50 from head to toe twice during this float, but still managed to get quite burned... my elbows, back and knees are the WORST so my theory is that my sunblock got rubbed off from how I was lying on the tube..... Especially since my face and shoulders are fine... Bob's knees are also FRIED to support this theory....

We got back from the river fairly late, so by the time we left town it was after 7, so we didn't get home til nearly 1am, but the drive went fast with no traffic and we enjoyed our time together as always.

We were able to go to the annual Peds vs Family Medicine softball game Saturday morning since we were home and it was a lot of fun! I played second and Bob played center field and we both played well and had a lot of fun. I had a nice hit a fair way into the outfield which was fun because who doesn't love to hit it over the boys' heads after they move in because a girl is hitting? Bob hit great too but they were expecting his long bombs and were in good position to catch them. Unfortunately, our efforts weren't enough and we lost our winning streak, losing by a LOT to the Family med folks... We had a nice BBQ at Ryan's afterward, then went home and got cleaned up, then met up with some friends for dinner at the Ram.
Now we're ready to just relax around here for the rest of the weekend! Hope you're all well.
~Cathy

More of our visit home

Bob and I at the last hole at the Bluegrass course

I always throw too high...

Bob is a disc golf pro!

Today the fun continued with some disc golf this morning with Bob's mom, then more quality time hanging out with the Poteets and playing some Wii Fit with them--Georgey has really impressive balance for a 5 year old! We did a little shopping and then went to Silverwood late this afternoon and enjoyed the waterpark for a bit, taking turns with the guys watching the boys while we did the water rides, then vice versa, and then we rode some roller coasters including the new Aftershock which was pretty great!

We also had a fun day of shopping with the Poteets at the Valley mall yesterday and I found a ton of new long tees from Down East Basics which now has a store there which is great! We had a yummy dinner afterwards at Mongolian BBQ and then watched some Olympics and relaxed.

Tomorrow we're going to float the river and then head home.... it went too fast as always, but we're glad we could be home for a little bit! Hope you all had a great day!


~Cathy


Here's Bob jumping off the Pearson's dock the other day.... Tom convinced him to do it by taunting him that "Even Colleen did it!" Not to be outdone, Bob promptly hopped on the bike.... I asked him to do it again after my first video was marred by Tom blocking the impact view, and he ended up doing it 3 times and having great fun. :)

Idaho

First of all, CONGRATULATIONS to the Jeppsens!  Jay Brent Jeppsen was born at 1:51pm today and was 7lbs 6oz and 20.75 inches long!  Jen and Jay are both doing well and Jap sounded excited when he called!  She did it in only 3 pushes, so just try to top that one moms!  :)  We're so excited to have another nephew and can't wait to meet him!

    So we're home now for another visit and enjoying our families and friends as always, but unfortunately we've been stricken by the pukes!  We went out on Hayden with the Poteets yesterday and Georgey got the pukes last night, only to have the rest of his family start in, and then Bob started this morning!  So far I've survived unscathed, but we'll see how today and tomorrow go... just trying to take care of the sickos without catching it today!  Having fun making cards and scrapping with Carolyn while she finishes things up for the fair too.  

   So we drove out after work Friday and I drove most of the way for a change since Bob had ben up since 4 for his huge job out in Ocean Shores (nearly 2 hours away from home) but the drive went fast because we chatted then I listened to my Breaking Dawn while I drove.... I finished it a few nights ago and it was GREAT!  Such an awesome ending.... definitely recommend that series to anyone!  I know it seems silly to read a series about werewolves and vampires, and I was skeptical at first too, but these books really sucked me in....

   So anyway, we had a great time at my Grandma and Great Aunt's 80th birthday party on Satuday and loved seeing a ton of my family that we haven't seen in forever, so that was great, and decided we'll have an anniversary later.... maybe Labor Day weekend we'll do something fun since we were busy with other stuff on our big day--6 years has sure gone fast!  I'm definitely lucky to have such a great Bob!

   Sunday we had a big BBQ here at Bob's folk's house with both of our families and the Poteets and that was a good time as always!  The kids had fun exploring the garden and swinging and we all got to chat and catch up and enjoy the weather... we had s'mores afterwards that were delicious!  

    We had big plans for floating the river today, but no such luck since Bob's under the weather... likely not biking the Hiawatha tomorrow either.... We had great fun boating with the Poteets and then the Pearsons yesterday though, so at least we got to enjoy some good times with friends... hopefully the Pearsons are still well and not contaminated with whatever's getting the rest of us?  

   Have a great day and all of you should be grateful for your health today!  Eat a little extra something yummy for my Bob. :)

~Cathy

   

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