Not much has been going on here. Friday of this week is my last day at Lowe's. A few people have said that they don't want me to leave because I help out so much and get things done. I feel a little bad about leaving so soon but I'm more excited to start my schedule at the hotel. I close tonight and tommorow, then I work at the hotel wednesday and thursday to train some more. Then friday I work at Lowe's 5:30a-2:30pm for my last day. So, it will be a nice week and then maybe I can get the weekend off and relax a little. I worked everyday so far between both jobs and I don't remember when I had a full day off. So, I've stayed busy.
Yesturday, brian and I made Chicken Fried Steak for supper and it was sooo good. I can't wait to make it again. I'll post the recipe soon, I tried to do it today but it's posting funny and I may have to type it out instead of cut, copy, and paste.
Today I got my Idaho license. In order to get it, I had to take the written test again and I only got 3 wrong out of 40 questions. I didn't study that much, just a few things I looked over and I feel pretty good about it. :-)
The weather here has been pretty nice and then we were hit with some snow this morning. Well, this blog is pretty boring but that's about it around here.

Gross

I forgot to add this picture the other day. This is from Easter. Vicki got them some gummie worms and some of them were black.

Oops

Crazy photo. This reminded me that I watched March of Penguins finally. It's really good. Check it out if you can. It's cute, but also sad at times... kind of like this photo haha.

For fun

This is Fred Rion's favorite new site. He likes to play the Boulder Scene game. He's really good at it. I can't get the hang of it.

http://indianajones.lego.com/en-us/games/default.aspx

I had to tell Fred Rion there was a movie so I got it out and we watched the beginning of Raiders. He liked it when the boulder came out. Maybe I'll watch the whole thing tonight. I know he can't watch the end, but it's been so long I can't remember if there are any other parts I need to censor.

Pictures

First a picture from Easter. AJ came over with his girlfriend, but he had competition from Torii. Torii followed her everywhere. They were downstairs watching a movie and Torii had to sit right next to her.

Cordelia is grabbing her feet now. That picture took forever to get. Everytime I would raise the camera up, she would put her feet down and just look at me. I had to be quick and snap a picture.

Since she is grabbing her feet, she is also trying to do it while strapped into her bouncy seat. Then she gets bent over and can't get back up. Now I have the seat in the recline position so she can't bend over and almost fall out of the chair.

Dying Easter eggs

New Blog

Snapshot Existence

Check it out :)

Happy Easter Everyone!!!

(my creative Easter pie)

Hope everyone had a great Easter. I had to work until 4pm this afternoon and brian was getting the turkey ready for me. I called him when I was on my way home and he said "come home quick, I'm about to ruin the apple pie." I just told him to stay out my kitchen and let me handle it. :-) We had a nice dinner and we gave the cats some scraps.

I gave Lowe's my notice and the 7th will be my last day there. I think I will be much happier at Super 8 as a manager and the hours are so much better. I will have the evenings off to see Brian and it will be so much easier to have a set schedule. So I would work wednesday-sunday, 7am-3pm. Brian is going to see if he could possibly work the same days as me with his job (they are pretty flexible) and we would just use monday and tuesday as our "weekend" together. That would be nice.

Well, i think we are going to go to a movie late tonight, because we are still trying to recover from our big meal and apple pie. I could use a nap right now. Yaaaawwwnnn. I will call soon and take care.

Opinions needed

I have been working on a logo for my business. This is the best I've come up with so far. I don't know, I kind of like this one. What do you think? If you click on it, you can see it better.

Easter Funny

Hope everyone has a great Easter!!!

Spring is here?

Finally getting some birthday pictures up. The top one is from his birthday party when he is blowing out the candles. The bottom one is the Spiderman DQ cake he picked out.

The middle picture is how the boys fell asleep one night in my bed.

Today we got a good snowfall. It doesn't look like spring out there. Although we have some green coming up along side the house.

If I don't talk to you in the next couple of days, Have a good Easter!

The Chicken

Look what Brian got me. It was delivered to the house the other day and of course I had to get something to go with it, otherwise it's not complete. Look what's inside! Yummmy. :-)

Our 2nd new ride.

We finally decided to get a car. I read in the paper that the gas prices might be around $4.00 by this summer. Brian and I have been looking at ford ranger's or chevy s-10's, but we didn't find anything we liked. We came across this 2002 Alero and we really liked it. It drives nice and it will get us by for awhile. It's just nice to have a second car around again.

Not much else going on here. I tried a new dish from the cooking light magazine and it turned out nice but I don't know if I will make it again. The flavor was ok. The recipe was an Italian pasta dinner. I have some more recipes to try and brian said he doesnt mind of course. Ha ha!

Not much else going on here. We are getting some more snow today and tommorow, but it's all slushy because of the nice temps. I have a interview tommorow for a front desk supervisor position at the Super 8. Talk to you later. :-)

Spring Break

This is the longest post ever, lol.
I have so many pictures lol. Sorry it's taken me so long. I 've been having troubles uploading and what not. I posted a lot of them as small pictures so click on them to make them bigger ;)
Well, where to start?
I had a blast! Everyone was really cool, and Florida was so beautiful! We ended up having to build a boardwalk and tear down the old one in order to make the path meet regulations for disabled persons. I don't know if mom and dad told you, but I stepped on a nail in the process. It hurt really bad, but I was tough and didn't even shed a tear. I'm more sad that I my shoe has hole in my shoe lol. Our project was really neat in that, we helped the refuge, but we were also helping the people who visit it.

We saw and did so much! Here's kind of a brief (I hope so anyways) description of each day:

Day 1 - Saturday
We actually left midnight on Friday. I stayed awake until 6am in order to keep the driver awake. Then slept through most of Kentucky and northern Tenn. Woke up around Nashville, which was neat because I wanted to see the "Batman" building. In Alabama we went for a hike at a wildlife refuge. It was really neat. They had the cutest beaver there:P
We arrived super late and unpacked. This is our house ;)

Day 2 - Sunday
We didn't have to start work until monday so went to St. George Island, which is a national state park. The temp was about 75 degrees. Beautiful. I swam in the ocean for the first time (that I can remember anyways).

What the houses looked like:


Day 3 - Monday
This was probably one of my favorite days (besides the nail in the foot). We started the day out with a full tour of the refuge. We saw so many alligators!! The tour felt like a safari. I have never seen this kind of ecosystem, it was so neat. After the tour and lunch, we started to tear down the old boardwalk. This is the day I got a nail in the foot. So I was in Tallahassee for the remainder of the day.

Gators

Hanging out after a crazy day (note my foot)


Day 4 - Tuesday
It rained most of the day, so we didn't have to work, which was good for me because I was supposed to take it easy on the foot. We ended up taking a very short hike on a path that GVSU students made in 2005. One of girls found me a walking stick:P The path was really pretty. Afterwards we went to an aquarium in Panacea. That was really cool.
Listening for the ocean.

Picking up Sea Urchins. The two people on each side of me are my lovely site leaders. Incredible people :)



Day 5 - Wednesday
Work. We did most of the construction this day as well as tear down another old bridge. After work we went to a local beach, and then came back to have a bonfire.


Day 6 - Thursday
We finished the construction of the boardwalk and got feed a really great southern lunch. It really hit the spot since we mostly lived off of PB and Js. This is day was probably my favorite because we finished our project and then went on a really awesome boat tour in Wakulla Springs. We got to see manatees as well as all kinds of other wildlife. Lots of cool birds and of course, more alligators. The water in the springs averages around 70 degrees year round. This is where I got to jump of the platform. I was hesitant at first because of my foot and I didn't have my swim suit on, but one of the other girls said that she had some extra clothes, soooo I jumped in with all my clothes. 20ft high!!! It was so cool. We also had one last bonfire that night. It was really great.


Gator just chillin'

The ugly-cute manatee

This is not me jumping, but it might give you an idea of what it was like...


Day 7 - Friday

It was storming pretty bad so we again didn't have to work. Plus, we had the boardwalk done. So we visited the refuge one last time. We ended our trip by getting a tour of the St. Mark's lighthouse. We got to go the top and we also got to go outside on the very top. It was pretty scary since it was so windy, but it was a really neat view of the marsh land. We left St. Marks at 2:30 pm.

View from the top of the lighthouse

Pelican


Day 8 - Saturday
We ran into a HUGE blizzard in Tenn. and Kentucky. I really wonder what the people of the area thought about it because I even thought it was a bad storm. We saw a lot of accidents, but we pushed through. At times, we were driving 25mph. Pretty insane, but we made back to Michigan around 1pm. We made pretty decent time considering the weather.

Pictures

One more pic.

I know I post more pictures of Victoria but she can be so funny. Here's victoria enjoying a small space heater we have. Victoria kept turning herself over in front of it, like a cat rotissserie. Each time she would turn over, she would do a meow/ purring sound. What a nut.

I thought I would post a few more things. So, yesturday I was playing with the cats by the patio door's; the sun comes in so bright right there and the cats won't move from that spot all day because it's so warm. As I was playing with them on the floor, I looked at grandma & grandpa's chairs that we have. I noticed the chairs are getting pretty rough in some spots where the paint is chipped off and then the wood underneath is getting chipped as well.

As I was looking at the one chair and looking around it and underneath it, I noticed something. I noticed on one side of the chair there was written in red marker, "Laurie." It looked like when laurie was little she decided to claim her own chair at grandpa & grandma's. Well, now I can't get the chairs refinished, or at least that one anyway. I can't beleive I never noticed it before. How funny.

Brian has been busy with his classes and work. He's still having a great time with all of it.

Brian needs to write a thesis for his Master's and he decided to write to Mike Houts at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama for some advice or topics to help him with. Brian has previously met him in Alberqurque, N.M last month. Today, Mike wrote him back about some testing they are doing and has invited Brian to come to Alabama to spend a few weeks there while they are testing. Needless to say, Brian is more than excited! If Brian does go, he will pretty much be working on NASA grounds. (kid in a candy store).

Not much else going on here. I'll send a picture of "Laurie's" chair.

ooops, forgot one more pic.

Some more pics and stuff

I thought I would post a few more pictures from Jackson Hole. The only picture I can't claim is the bald eagle in the wild. Brian's friend was in Yellowstone for the day and saw this eagle just sitting in a tree. I thought it was such a gorgeous picture of a eagle in it's natural habitat, I had to post it. The next picture is a really neat arch made out of antlers. The arch goes into a nice little park area in the middle of town. The arch was also lit-up in christmas lights. We walked by the "Million Dollar Cowboy bar," and I wanted to stop for a drink but we were running out of time. Oh well, maybe next time.

Brian has stayed busy putting together his model rockets and he shot them off on Tuesday with his boss, and other co-workers. They went to shoot off the rockets right after work. What a bunch of kids. He was especially excited to shoot off the rocket that measured 6ft tall. So, they had a great time shooting them off and trying to find them. I think they only lost one rocket out of five. So, I guess that's pretty good.

Brian and I are trying something new with the cats. I am getting tired of having a litterbox in the house and the cats drag litter around the house, no matter where we put the litter box . Since we now have a garage, I want to start training them to let us know if they need to go out to the garage to use it. They are such scardey cats and they are somewhat taking small steps into the garage and snooping around. Once they get their tale past the door, I'll shut the door and I will only let them back in if they meow. Then I know they want in and then they know they have to meow to get in or out. That's how it works. Of course it's going to be a very long proces because they have been so babied since they were kittens and everything they had was indoors and rarely went outside the home. So, I hope it works.