Mail surprises!

Look what I got in the mail today!

I wasn't expecting these till the end of the week.
In February I went online and booked Riverdance tickets for my mom and I for April as a birthday present for me (its from my mom but she said I was better at ordering things online then her since I've ordered through ticketmaster before)
I can't wait for the end of April to go and see this show, I have always wanted to see riverdance live. Also at the end of April ish is when my bestie is going to have her baby YAY!

Weekend Recap

Happy Monday everyone! I hope everyone had a really good weekend, here is what we did.

Friday

First time in a while we did not go to Lowes after work to pick up supplies Yippie! When we got home from work Matt's dad was there because he brought us shelves for our storage rooms. He also was busy during the day and set them up for us, another thing to check off our list, sweet! However when getting home it was really rushy, we had a funeral to go to tonight, one of the sisters from our church had passed away. She was 86 and passed away at her home. The service was wonderful it really represented her.

Saturday

This morning I slept in till 10am! it was fantastic, I haven't slept in that long for such a long time. But it wasn't long until I was put to work. Matt and I had to move the shelves out of the storage rooms because I still had to fix up the spots on the walls where Matt hit the roller and the paint brush of the floor color onto my beautiful walls. When we removed the shelves I had noticed a bunch of scratches and nicks in the walls from the shelves. I guess when Matt's dad was moving the selves in its kind of awkward and he ended up hitting the walls and scraping the floors. Well I got to work and sanded down the scratches and put the first coat of touch of paint on the walls. Later on at about 3 ish I went and did a second coat on the walls and did a coat of concrete paint on the floor. Once that was done and drying I went and had a shower and got my self ready for youth service that night. I had to leave my house early so I could go and pick up a few girls.
Youth service was really great there was a turn out of 24 people and I think it was 21 were actually the youth and not just adults (drivers or ministers). After service we had a little fellowship and then we all went home (and drove people home too) We still got home at a pretty good time 9:20pm so it wasn't too late like it sometimes is.

Sunday

Today was our regular Sunday service. After service we had a "sisters" meeting which was actually really good. We have decided to get together once a month so we can talk about spiritual things, or things that are coming up in the church that we need to organize and just have fun too. I have high hopes for this and I hope that it will work out really well.
The rest of the day consisted of being the biggest couch potatoes ever! It was fantastic, not too often do we get to do that.

Renovation Wednesday

Progress has happened! This weekend we were very busy with renos as you have read from my Monday post. The pictures that I have taken they are of the wall when it was primed and then when it was painted with the wall color. Your going to look at these pictures and probably not notice a difference what so ever, but there really is a color change. We didn't go with a really bold color for the storage closets because;

1. once everything is in there that needs to be in there you wont be able to see much of the walls anyways and
2. We had left over paint from our hallway upstairs so the paint was "free"
But here are the pictures anyways.

This is the wall when it was primed

And here is the wall painted with color, its called Meadow Day

Also as I mentioned on my Monday post I painted our linen closet door too. I didn't take a before picture but it was just one of those closet doors that you buy from Home Depot that is already "white" but you still do have to paint it.

From my list that I wrote last Wednesday, we actually got most of it completed. We did do a few other little things in between coats of paint as they were drying, but most of what I wanted to get done we got done.

• Finish the mudding and sanding.
• Put silicone at the base of the walls to seal off the poly sheets.
• Prime the walls.
• Put two coats of wall color on.
• Wash the floors to have it ready for the concrete paint

The only thing that we didn't do from my list was do the electrical, Matt wanted to wait before he put the plug and light switch boxes in until our shelves were here because that way we wouldn't run into any problems with the shelves being in the way the light switches or plugs. What a smart cookie I have!

Weekend Recap

Happy Monday everyone, today I have a day off from work because of family day! Matt even took the day off too which is so unusual but I'm not complaining, its great to have him around. Today we are just continuing on with the renovations that we were working on over the weekend.

Friday

The start of today was really not the greatest. See with work we have two office that we work out of and I was suppose to go to the downtown location to get some stuff done. However, I got to work for 7am downtown and then about 5 minutes after I got there I got a call from my boss asking me to come to the other office for 8am because our other assistant wasn't coming in to work. She had to go "home" (which is in BC) because her mom had hurt her back and there was no one to take care of her. It kind of sucked because it already took me 40ish minutes to get to work downtown and now I had to to turn around and travel another 40ish minutes to get home again so I could change into scrubs to work on patients, then travel another 15 minutes to the other office. To keep this story short I traveled over an hour and a half to get to work this morning!
After work though Matt and I made another trip to Lowes to get a few more supplies that we were going to be needing this weekend. Later in the evening my dad came over to sand down the mudding again and fill in spots that still needed to get smoothed over.

Saturday

This morning Matt had to go and do a service call, on a long weekend, but at least it was only for 2 hours ish. During that time my dad came over to check over the mudding again, I was keeping my fingers crossed that we would be good to go and start painting. No such luck though, he wasn't happy with the corners. So he fixed those up and told me to let him know after 5pm if its dry then he would come over again and sand it down. Around 4pm my brother came over because he was going to help Matt attach something to the bathroom fan in the attic because when they first installed the fan they forgot to attach this "hose" sort of thing, I really can't think of the name of it right now. While they were doing that, I made pancakes from scratch! They were delicious. Then my dad came back after 5pm and was able to sand down the wall and we started to prime the walls in the storage closets. Unfortunately we were one wall short of the primer. So we left it like that and I planned that I would go and get some more primer after church tomorrow. Since we weren't able to do any more work on the house renos tonight I decided that I should make a carrot cake for Rachel since it is her birthday tomorrow and my husband is taking her husband to Medicine Hat with him. Plus carrot cake is her favorite, and she shouldn't be by herself on her birthday even though I know she needs to be working on her thesis.

Sunday

Early this morning Matt went to Medicine Hat for some church business that he had to "take care of" i guess you could say, that just sounds funny. Anyways, I went to church here in the morning but it was a different service then usual. It was a "Sunday School Service", which is geared to the younger kids. For all the different jobs that there are with setting up the church before the service the kids were assigned to those jobs, of course with supervision. Instead of having the usual choir the kids sat where the choir usually would sit and they sang all the beginning songs and some songs during the service too, it was really cute.
After service I stuck to my plan and went out to get more primer so I could finish that one wall and also I figured I should paint our linen closet door that we never painted. I got home and changed into my paint cloths and started painting the last wall downstairs, then came upstairs and painted the linen closet door. Once I was done that I changed into comfy clothes and iced the cake for Rachel. I went over to Rachel's around 3pm to surprise her with her cake and a little break from working on her thesis. I didn't want to keep her on a break for too long because I know that she has a lot of work to do, so I just watched some TV while she worked on her thesis until the guys got home. John made her a really great dinner which we were invited to stay for. After dinner Matt and I left around 8pm ish because we wanted to get home so we could put the first coat of our paint color on in the storage rooms. We got home, changed and got straight to work.

This weekend was filled with a lot of work around the house but it will be worth it in the end. Sorry about no pictures in this post but I will post the pictures on Wednesday.

Renovation Wednesday

As I mentioned from my post of what I did on the weekend here are the results of our hard work. It was a lot of work, and the kind of work I am really not used to doing everyday which has made my body so incredibly sore still! Like It hurts to move, its hard to walk up and down stairs, to sit, to lift my arms, put on my jacket, just about everything! But I am so happy that we got to the stage that it is now. Also last night my dad came over and helped us did the next layer of mud after he had sand down the first coat. My dad really knows what he is doing with this kind of stuff so it's best to let him do it so he doesn't have to fix our mistakes which would cause more work for him.



Outside of the storage rooms



The left corner of "the basement stuff" storage room

 

Then the right corner



This is the center of "Matt's tools" storage room

 

Then the left corner of that room



Since this coming weekend is a long weekend because of Family Day on Monday my plan is to get these storage rooms ready to have shelves put in for the weekend after! So that means, last mudding application (hopefully Friday), sand the walls, silicone at the base of the floors (to seal off the poly to make sure that there are no cold drafts), have Matt put a light in each room and an outlet socket for each room, then prime the walls, paint the walls, and then paint the concrete floor (we aren't going to put flooring in since it is just going to be a storage room). Man that list has a lot of stuff on it but I'm really hoping we can get it done, at least up to the primer and maybe the first coat of paint (I think we will have to have 2 coats) Wish me luck!

At least I Got a card on Valentines Day

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

Every year for Valentine's Day Matt and I really don't do anything because really, your going to spend double the money on anything you buy that is related to this "consumer's holiday" like flowers and chocolates. So usually what we have done in the past was just get each other cards, which hey its simple and you get to write out a bunch of the things that you love about the other person. This morning I already had my card all ready for Matt so before I left for work I gave him his card, he didn't give me a card in the morning so I thought well maybe he forgot to buy one on the weekend and that oh he'll pick one up on the way home.

At work today there was a huge Valentine's package that came to the office for our hygienist from her boyfriend which was really cute because he originally was not suppose to be in town for today but he ended up being in town but already put the order in last week. But still super cute anyways because she was all flushed and embarrassed. Then the mail delivery guy came with our mail and handed me a pink envelope with my name on it, and he said that some guy stopped him in the hall and asked him to give it to me. So that was weird to me. The writing on the envelope on the out side kind of looked like Matt's capital writing but then I opened the card and it didn't look like his writing anymore. So I called Matt right away to find out where he was working if by chance he was working downtown or if he really was working out of town. Well he was about an hour away so this card wasn't from him that's for sure, I read him the card and he thought it was pretty funny that I had a secret admirer, which really I thought was kind of funny too. I think I know who it is from and I'm thinking it is just a friendship sort of thing because well I'm married and that just would never happen. But here I took a picture of the card and what it said.

When I got home from work Matt was already home, with no card for me :(. So we were joking all evening that at least I got a card today even if it wasn't from him.

I hope everyone else had a great Valentine's Day!

Weekend Recap

Happy Monday Everyone! I hope everyone had a good weekend.

Friday

Today instead of going to work we went to a dental continuing educational course which was on "new materials". Basically there are a lot of changes happening in the dental world in Alberta this year because in 2012 all these new rules and guidelines are mandatory, I wont bore you with the details on that. But the course really wasn't all that bad, sometimes they are really dry and are pointless, this course however had some good things that I could take from it and look in to now. At 12pm we got an hour break for lunch and the other assistant (Taylor) and I really wanted sushi so our boss took us out for sushi and told us that we could go home for the rest of the day and didn't have to go back to the course! It was so good that we could go home because I was so full and needed a nap! I got home around 2pm and took a nap on the couch till about 6pm which was great, I love sleep! Then Matt and I went to Lowes where one of our friends work because we needed some drywall for the basement storage rooms (yes I know progress!!!) We bought 16 sheets of drywall and it was great because Matt and one of the employees loaded it in the truck. Unfortunately for me was when we got home I had to help Matt bring those 16 sheets of drywall downstairs! If you have never moved drywall down a level in a house DO NOT DO IT! It was hard and by the end of it I was sweating, mind you it was a good work out I was sore the next day.



Here are my beautiful sheets of drywall all 16 of them.



Saturday

This morning I made waffles because I really wanted to have pancakes but that was a bit harder for me to make since my griddle is downstairs and behind piled up insulation (which I forgot about when I bought buttermilk) But the waffles were still really good.
This afternoon was had more of a sad turn to it, at 1pm was a Celebration of life for my friend's little boy. He was exactly one month old when he passed away on Feb7th 2011. I will do a separate post on this later on.
In the evening we had church instead of having it on Sunday morning because the minister that was holding service made a special trip since he is from out of town.

Sunday

Since we didn't have service this morning since we had it last night I got my dad to come over and help me with drywalling the storage rooms in the basement. Matt wasn't at home today because he went to Lethbridge with another minister that was from Edmonton and was going to be holding service in Lethbridge. Matt needed to talk with him anyways about somethings and also he was able to get another trip in to see out niece and nephews (lucky him!) But I stayed home because I really wanted to get things going on the basement, just want to be able to get something done each weekend so then we are closer and close to getting the basement finished! My dad came over around 10am (I had to sleep in a little bit) and we got started right away. See when my dad works on a project he works until it gets done. I have that way of thinking from him which sometimes drives Matt crazy since I always try to get him to do more things and get them done. Any who my dad did all the measuring and cutting I helped him bring the sheets over to where they would be put and up and he would put the first few screws in. Once they were in I was able to mark a line down the wall to make it easy to screw in the other screws. I got to use the drill a lot my hand was so sore I also got a "rub burn" on the side of my thumb from holding the drill (I'm sure I was holding it too tight but hey I don't use a drill everyday I had to get used to it). Once we got all the dry wall up and all the screws in my dad started to fill in all the screw dents. I had to run out and get more mud since we will be using a lot of it. When I got back my dad was already done filling in those holes and then we got going on the corners and the seams. My dad did the corners and I did the other seams we were done in no time. It was about 4:30pm once we were able to call it quites and just let the mud dry.
Then I had the evening to relax I had a shower (I was filthy!) and watched some TV.  It felt really good to get all that work done but so physically draining at the same time.

Meeting My Brother's Girlfriend!

I finally got to meet my brother's girlfriend last night and the verdict is...............I really like her!!! She actually reminded me of a few of my friends personalities and actions, and she reminded Matt of one of our friends too which really is great because it already makes you feel really comfortable with her. She also is just so nice and funny, she also works really good with my brother. I think that she will be able to get a long really good with all of our other mutual friends and just fit in really good. My brother is a traveler and a bit wild (he is definitely more out going then me) and Megan likes to travel, in fact she is going to Mexico today for a week, but she is also a bit more on the "tame" side (as much as I can tell from our first get together) which I'm hoping will be able to calm my brother down a bit too.
 So our original plan to meeting was to go bowling, but I guess on Thursday nights there is league bowling, which means you can't book lanes until after 9pm. For me, my bed time usually starts around that time for getting ready for bed especially on a week day night. So instead we invited them over to our house for dinner and to bowl on the wii. For dinner it really wasn't anything special but we had tacos YUM! We don't have tacos too often but its a nice little treat every once in a while.

We ate as soon as they came over since they were about 20 minutes late from the original time they said they would be coming over which was not a problem. Then after we ate we set up the wii for some bowling! It was a lot of fun bowling with my brother and Megan because I got to see how they reacted to each other and it was really cute! We played 3 games of wii bowling and the second game, well here are the scores.

1st was Megan, 2nd was me, 3rd was Jonathan and 4th was Matt. This was really the only game the scores needed to be shown.

After the rounds of bowling we tried to play golf on the wii, ya I'm not so good at golf on the wii or real life but it was still lots of fun. But the time was getting close to 10:30pm and Megan had to still do some packing and work before her trip so we called it a night. We definitely will be getting together again when she is back!

I'm really happy for my brother and I'm really hoping that things will work out for them!

Renovation Wednesdays

As I mentioned last week I was hoping to go and buy the drywall that we need for the storage closets in the basement, well that unfortunately did not happen. But we did get one little project done. Well Matt and I didn't do it, my dad did the whole thing. See when we put our tiles in our wash room they had to be "built up" quite a bit (had to have more cement stuff underneath them) in order to have the floor level. So its great having a level washroom floor, but that left a large transitional height difference from the bathroom floor to the hallway floor. Originally Matt and I went out and bought two different transition pieces from the store to see if we could make it work, no such luck with that. It was about a 16th of an inch too short. Ya I know what your thinking, that isn't too big, but to make it right, it was a big difference. So my dad, the handy man that he is, took different measurements and built the transition piece from scratch. He rounded the edges perfect and made it super smooth ( i guess all the sand paper we got for him for Christmas has already come in pretty handy). On Sunday before the Super Bowl my dad came over and installed the transition piece!

Here is what it looked like with out the transition piece.

It would really suck if you stepped right on the "crack" part especially with bare feet in the mornings, just saying from experience.

And now this is what the beautiful finished project looks like.

I took this picture so you could see that it matches our trim and not the hallway floor.

Weekend Recap

Happy Monday everyone! Here in Calgary there is a bunch of snow and it is cold! Its weird because they say its -17 and then -25 with the windchill but I don't find it to be really all that bad, it is better then the last big snow fall we had now that was really cold! Any who here is how my weekend went plus Thursday last week.

Thursday

So today was the day that Matt and I were suppose to meet Megan, my brother's girlfriend. Unfortunately Matt called me during the day to let me know that he was not going to be home until really late which means we would have to reschedule to next Thursday :( At around 11:30am Matt was called from a job site that is two and a half hours away from where he was, and this is when he informed me of our no more date night :(, and off he went to this job. So to keep it short he didn't get home till after 8:30pm.

Friday

Today Matt and I both had the day off work, not for anything fun. We had to go for our annual physicals from the doctor. Well I went for my physical and Matt just had to go in and get his form to get his blood tested since he hasn't had that done for ever! So going and getting a physical is never an appointment you look forward too, but this one sucked even more. I haven't decided if I'm going to write more on it or not yet, its something that I have to think about.
But anyways, after our appointments we were planning on doing a couple of things around town but we were late getting in to our appointments because our poor doctor fainted in the morning at home but she still came into work. I thought that was crazy! I asked her are you still suppose to coming in to work? She said she didn't want to make her patients have to reschedule! I have the best doctor ever!
Back on track here, so after our appointments we went home and packed our bags because we were going to Lethbridge because Matt had a gathering he had to be at with the youth in Lethbridge. So we got to Lethbridge just after 4pm, and went to Matt's older brother's home since that is where we would be staying that night and all the youth were coming to his house too. When we got there we were really expecting maybe only his brother to be home, but to our surprise the kids were already home. I went in the house first and our niece answered the door and said "Hi Auntie Nessa..... where is Uncle Matt?" Yes, she is Uncle Matt's little girl. Its really cute! It was great to see all the kids and give them hugs. My niece got a new sticker book  and wanted to do a few pages with me so after dinner we sat upstairs and did a few pages while her brothers were downstairs. Then we went downstairs (other wise she would have wanted to finish the whole book) to hang out with all the boys. Our oldest nephew always likes to have books read to him, so he bought me a few books for me to read him and then of course his sister wanted to hear the stories too. Here is the picture that Matt took.

 

Little Critters, I used to read those books when I was a kid!

Later that evening around 7pm the youth came over and they had their chatting that needed to get done, the kids were up for a bit but then had to go to bed which they weren't too happy about. But the gathering went well and seemed to get what was needed to get across done. Not too much longer after that we all went to bed.

Saturday

Not ever Saturday morning do we get woken up by hearing little feet running back and forth upstairs, that's when you know the kids are a wake. Matt went up stairs first and I was still pretty tired but then my niece came down to wake me up, so i guess i had to get up then. We then had breakfast and colored a bit but then we had to get ready to leave.

 

Here is little B looking innocent even though all morning he was climbing on to chairs and getting into trouble.



Matt wanted to take a picture of "A" so of course he was making faces to Uncle Matt since Uncle Matt wanted to have a picture of him. What a silly guy, but oh so cute!!



On the way home we stopped off at my parents house because my mom had made some soup and stew and wanted to give us some extras. There was no way we were going to pass that up! Then we went home after a little visit and did a couple things around the house and then we went and cleaned the church since it was our turn. Once we got home from that we really didn't do too much else.



Sunday



This morning we went to church, and right after Rachel came over. Rachel and I had planned that today her and I would go out and add a few more things to her baby registry at Sears. We also ended up going to a few other stores that day too, surprisingly we didn't actually buy anything! Well we did have Starbucks but i don't think that really counted since I had a gift card. There are so many cute things for babies right now, and I already know what I am going to get for Rachel's baby shower and now too for my sister in law! YAY! Once Rachel and I were done on our date, she dropped me off at home and Matt already had some guys over to watch the Super Bowl. I ended up watching it with the guys, and I really didn't end up minding it that much. Sorry not the biggest sports fan here. But getting close to the end of the game I started to get a headache which sucked, I think it was from all the cheering, the guys were pretty loud. I ended up going to bed at 9pm with a headache. It was a very eventful weekend though.

Renovation Wednesday

So unfortunately nothing has changed on the status of our basement storage closets :(. However I did get some money together so we should be able to go and at least buy the dry wall sheets! I'm really hoping that we can get them this Friday since both Matt and I have the day off! I will keep you posted as to where we are at with these renos. I really don't think I will have too much to update next week either because this weekend is the Super Bowl and I believe Matt will be having a bunch of guys over to watch it.

Something Kind of Funny

So last night my brother sent me a text to see what Matt and I are doing for super bowl Sunday. I told him that I think we are having a bunch of people over to the house. He was asking because he wants me to meet his girlfriend!!!! Our rolls are a bit reversed for this kind of stuff since I am the younger sister, I do feel like I am the one who is more over protective or at least I do show it more then him. All I want for him is the best. But here is a little history, my brother has always been a bit cautious of who he lets the family meet (girlfriend related). I have only ever met one girlfriend of his EVER! Its a little funny how he does this because he will only let us even know that he is dating someone until he feels like it is actually going somewhere. Which hey I get because I'm sure he doesn't want us to fall in love with her and then it not work out. So for my brother the way he introduced us to his last girlfriend started off with seeing if Matt and I will go have dinner with him and his girlfriend. So we had dinner together and then a little while later he introduced her to our parents. I'm really excited that he feels like he found a girl that he really wants us to meet. It has been a while since his last steady girlfriend which he did need a break from since it ended pretty badly.
So Matt and I get to meet Jonathan's new girlfriend Megan on Thursday. We are going bowling! I feel like its a "first date" kind of atmosphere place to go, so its perfect for a first time meeting Megan. It should be pretty casual and easy to get conversation flowing, I just hope I don't get competitive, sometimes I do but not all the time with bowling since I really am not a good bowler. I will let you know how things go with our "date" on Thursday, I really hope she is a great girl and who knows she may be "the one".