Why do they call it "Tourist Season".......

Why do they call it "tourist season" if you're not allow to shoot them? Don't get me wrong I love my small town, but being a vacation/tourist town not always so great. And I don't understand how so many intelligent people can become such senseless morons while on vacation.

Take yesterday as an example. There I am sitting at my desk, minding my own business, working on an actual criminal file when the phone rings. I answer it, knowing full well the person on the other end probably has some stupid question. Boy was I right. It would seem that the local weekly newspaper had an article in it dealing with yard sales and the such. The caller on the other end of the phone, wanted me to send valuable resources to his street to shut down a yard sale because it caused a traffic problem. And he seemed quite insulted when I stated that the RCMP had more important problems to deal with than a couple of cars parked infront of his cottage.

Yep, this isn't even the most bizarre question I've had to deal with. But so is my life in summer.

Speaking of summer, it's been pretty short so far. But we've been taking every advantage of any nice weather we get to take Linden out and doing stuff with him. The plan tomorrow is to take in the vintage car show happening in town. And according to the weather network, it should be a half decent day.

What I'm not looking forward to is the August Long Weekend, or what we affectionately call "Dingaling Weekend" . It is the only weekend of the year where I have to work (barring some major occurrence anyother weekend). Not only do I have to work, but I work the night shift starting at 7:00 PM and working until the sun comes up. Not that I mind, I actually volunteer for that shift. It is definitely the most interesting. Gotta love when people think just because it's a long weekend and our town is having it's annual festival, the laws don't apply. Unfortunately last year a young man lost his life on this said weekend and so this year things are a little different. Gone are the days when the local watering holes could apply for extended hours, have tents set up in their parking lots to accomodate double the people and gone is the annual Sunday night social that has been going on for as long as I can remember. The more and more I contemplate this, the more I am convinced that this year will be worse than last. Instead of being confined to a fenced in bar area or a social hall, I predict mass packs of young adults wandering the streets with no regard. I think I should start stock piling sleep now.

On a lighter, not so stress-inducing (or maybe not) note. My little boy is growing up. He has officially started walking, or should I say running for the last month or so. And man does he keep us busy. Not only has he started walking/running but he has a new trick or climbing. Hubby found him on top of the coffee table the other day, clapping because he was so proud of himself.

So between work, Linden and all the other little things life has been what you might call a little crazy but somehow we are making it work. And I may not always get to update my blog as often as I would like, but I think about it often and have good intentions of doing it. Finding the time however is the difficult part.

Running for the cure.

A runner I am not. But it's one of those things I've always wanted to do. I've always dreamt of running the local 10 miles road race that is put on every Icelandic Festival Weekend. And now, I'm determined that within the next 5 years, I will run it. Going to start small, because like I said before a runner I am not. I found this "Couch to 5 km run" training program online and being one week into it, I like it. The basics of it is this: run for a minute, walk for 1.5 minutes. You do this for one week (3x a week) and then you move onto Week 2. Basically by the end of 8 weeks, you should be able to do a 5KM run. Which coincdentally is the length of the "CIBC RUN FOR THE CURE" which I have signed up to run this coming October.

Anyhoo, not quite sure why I felt the need to share this, maybe it's psychological that if I tell people my goal, I'll be more likely to reach it. Or it could be just so my bud Kirsten has something to read when she gets home from work. But for which ever reason it is, my supper is almost ready and I need to eat!

And then he was 1....

1 Year Old that is. And that would be my little boy Linden.

And to think that he went from this:

To this in just one short year:

And it's been quite the amazing year. But no time to think about the past, the boy keeps me going so much I can't remember last week.

We had a little birthday celebration for Linden with just the family because in all honesty he had no clue it was his birthday and he's not going to remember it. It was also Mother's day so we killed two birds with one stone. And I assure everyone that no birds were harmed in the making of this blog post. We also got some fantastic news during the birthday/mother's day party. It would seem that my sister-in-law has went and got herself in the "family way" and is due at the beginner of December. The way she told us was priceless. Hubby had went into the house (yes, we actually had one day where we could take Linden outside) to change Linden's diaper and Tanya followed him in. Later, while we were downstairs eating, hubby mentioned to his mother that Linden felt a little warm and maybe she should take his hoody off (no, not his Hurley one, I believe it was an orange Tigger one). Long story short, when Tanya had gone inside while hubby was changing Linden's diaper, they had put a shirt on him that said "I'm getting a cousin". Now it took a little prompting on our part to actually get the parents to read the shirt but in the end it all turned out great.

So it goes without saying that Christmas should be interesting. A newborn and a rambunctious 1 and a half old. I'm tired just thinking about it.

Do you hear that? If you listen very closely, you should be able to hear my bed calling me...... so tune again, sometime in the future. Different time, same bad channel.

And remember: "The purple monkey flies backwards at midnight"

And dance they did.....

After all their hard work this year, our dance club made the trek to Dauphin for competition. While the drive was utterly boring, we did see a palm tree in the middle of a field in Manitoba. What's that you say? There are no palm trees in Manitoba? Okay, maybe it was just a dead tree in a field. But it made us laugh. There is nothing more that my students look forward to than competition. They get to stay in a hotel, go swimming, and of course Dance. And dance they did.

My first group danced Friday night and walked away with a bronze and a silver medal. I could tell by the looks on their faces after adjudication that they were a little disappointed. I remedied this by asking them is A: they were happy with the way that they danced and B: did they have fun. If the answer to the above questions were yes, then who cares what the adjudicator thought. I assured them that they did awesome and that I was very proud of them.

Saturday morning. It must be Murphy's Law, Dance competition style but it never fails that I ALWAYS have a group performing in the first session of the day. This means being at the competition sight by 8 o'clock in the morning. I swear, in 22 years of dance I have always been one of the first people there in the mornings. The first session would bring another silver medal for my older girls. Again, they did awesome. And I don't think the adjudicators even noticed that one of the girls only has 7 months of dance experience. They rocked it.

My next group to go on was Jr. Hopak which me and hubby taught together. Yeah, they were awesome, wowed the crowd and us. I'll admit it, at the end of the dance I had a tear or two. I would like to say that these kids who are between the ages of 9 and 13 could rival any senior group Hopak. And they were well rewarded for their hard work. GOLD MEDAL.

Unfortuneately due to scheduling conflicts beyond my control; the competition and my S/SGTs retirement party were on the same weekend; and I had to leave Dauphin before half of my groups got to dance. But I did leave hubby in charge. I even had a chance to run through 3 of the 4 dances I would miss with the groups before I left. Which I think made me and the kids feel better. I gave them my famous last words of advice, "Just go out there and have fun!" and left Dauphin with a pang of guilt. I was most concerned about my girls Trans dance and my other girl's Hutzul dance. These two dances had never been performed in public before. But I really should have known better than to doubt my dancers. I got a text message from my bud Kirsten, saying that two of the dances (one being the trans) got gold medals. And then later I sent a text asking if the hutzul had gone yet and I get this message back: "they just finished....Rocked it!" I later found out that they got a gold medal for this dance too. I was so excited for them, but sad that I couldn't be there to tell them in person how very proud I was of them.

And that bring us to my last group of the competition. The one I was most worried about. Teenage girls, drama, and laziness are all factors that can make a dance instructor want to pull out her hair. Hubby later told me that they started off strong but kinda fizzled out towards the end. But they ended up with a Bronze medal, which made me happy.

So at next practice we will spend the class time listening to exactly what the adjudicators had to say about the dances and work from there.

It really is a shame....

That I am so darn good at my job. I have NOTHING to do. I have had nothing to do all day, minus the five minutes it took for me to enter a ticket this morning. To prove how bored I am, I actually googled, what to do when bored at work. What's the number one thing: blog. It's on the internet, it has to be true right.

And to make it even better, we have no bosses in today so I don't even have to look busy.

But in all honesty, it really is hard to waste 8 hours doing nothing, but still have to be here. 6 hours down, 2 to go.

Date Night

This past Saturday evening (and I've been meaning to write this post since then) me and my hubby decided to go out on a date night. We arranged for my parents to babysit, which didn't take a whole lot of convincing. You see, Linden is still cute. So we went out for a nice supper and were only asked once how we managed to get out of the house sans kiddo. After dinner we met up with another couple and proceeded to go to the local Legion for karoake. And since, my mom had picked up the kiddo and lives only a block from he Legion, it was arranged that we would walk there at the end of the night and she would drive us home. So this meant that neither one of us (which really means me) had to be the designated driver.

All was going great, until my "friend" and I use the term lightly because I totally believe that friends don't let friends make fools out of themselves, decided that I needed to sing and put my name on the board. Well, here lies my dilema, I have a really hard time going out to the bars and such in our town.... You see, alot of people that attend these events, I have had the pleasure of dealing with professionaly. I know who they are, they all know where I work and also the fact that I spend alot of time with members of law enforcement. So everytime we go out anywhere I have this constant inner struggle. When I'm dealing with these people on a professional basis I'm a representative of the RCMP, and now all of a sudden, just because I'm not at work, it's alright for me to make a fool out of myself. I know it shouldn't bother me, but it does and it's something not many people outside of law enforcement, especially law enforcement in a small town can understand. I can hear the Sgt. now, "Use the uniform for good, not evil"..........

Even with the internal struggle I was having, I had a great time with hubby and our friends. But I did miss my little boy and was happy to be home.

TGIF!!!!!

Okay, so here's the deal, it was a VERY VERY VERY long day. Very busy, not a second to even think. And I really don't have the energy to even try to explain what the day held.



Apparently I was tagged on my bud's blog, so in the spirit of mindless fun (I'm a big fan of anything mindless at this point) If anyone needs to know the wording for the Careless Use of a Firearm charge under the Criminal Code of Canada, I know it!



Here's the deal:



I've been tagged by my friend Kat who has instructed me to complete the following task.Go to the photos folder on your computer.Go to the seventh folder of photos.Go to the seventh photo.Put the seventh photo on your blog along with a description.Invite seven friends to join.

Yes, I admit it, I took advantage of the cut and paste feature and copied the above directly from Kirsten's blog.



And without further ado, this is what I came up with:



Ahh... the good ole days when the boy stayed basically where you put him. And since all the people I know that blog have done this, I guess it ends with me.

Monday's.... gotta love em..... NOT

Who ever it was that coined the term "pigs" when referring to police officers must have spent some time in my office. Sometimes I wonder whether I work in a police detachment or a daycare centre. And Monday's have to be the worst day. Why you ask? Because the officers are left completely unstupidvised all weekend and come Monday morning when the office staff gets to work, the office is usually in such a mess that it takes about an hour to get things organized enough to start work. You see, Monday through Friday there are three of us "support staff" but really we run that place and a good portion of our day is spent organizing (one of many reasons I love my job) and making sure things are in their correct places. All in the quest of avoiding the inevitable Wes-o-gram.

So imagine leaving 6 teenage boys home alone all weekend, well the same can be said about the mess 6 officers can leave in a weekend. And heaven forbid we have "guests" because Bill the guard, bless his heart, always brings the treats. But again, like teenagers, my officers are totally incapable of taking the empty chip bag off the filing cabinet and putting it in the garbage. "I'm allergic to the bag" one said to me when called on his inability to throw things out. I replied in true Carrie fashion "You're going to allergic alright, to my foot up your a$$!!!" The worst part is surprisingly not the food everywhere. What bugs me the most is that the last thing I do everyday before going home is make sure my desk is nice and clean, coffee cup washed and ready for the next day, files tidied, a place for everything and everything in it's place (have I mentioned I'm self-diagnosed OCD). And nothing irks me more than coming to work on Monday morning and having to spend 30 minutes finding all my stuff. Come on really, you didn't think I would notice my coffee cup gone.... it has my name on it!!! As does my stapler and various other office related tools. Coming in and finding my desk a mess, with files just strewn over it, is enough to make me want to walk out the door and go home.

Sidenote: I was told by my Sergeant not to be a smart a$$ one day. I told him, "But that's what Carrie's do best." He had no chance but to agree with me.

Hey! I never said I was any more mature than the people I work with. I just clean up after myself.

And the award goes to

The award to which I refer is the "Mother of the Year Award". And I highly doubt I'll be getting it. Linden is becoming quite mobile which would not be a bad thing except for the fact that he has no fear. Add on top of this new found mobility the fact that he is cutting his two top teeth to go along with the bottom two and you have disaster in the making. This morning, while walking along the furniture Linden took a little spill and smacked his mouth on his wooden rocking chair and cut his top lip open. There was blood everywhere...... okay.... not everwhere just mostly on my white top. The good news... he'll survive, it barely slowed him down. The bad news, and the evidence of my not getting the mother of the year award.........

That's right. My boy is crying because he hurt himself, hubby is mocking him and I'm taking pictures. But of course we made sure he was okay first.

MOTHER OF THE YEAR HERE I COME!

A little thing I like to call....

Me and Kirsten time. It's a legally binding contract that I have with my best bud. No really... I have the contract on my computer at work. I'm not exactly sure of the actual legality of it, but there sure is a lot of legal mumbo jumbo in it.

But I digress. Unfortunately this little thing we call life has gotten in the way of "our time" lately and we really have had to fight to schedule it. Between work, kids, kids work (hers, not mine), hubbys, hockey and dancing, it's been tough and I'll be the first to say it, I miss it. Whether it is just sitting at her kitchen table drinking coffee or partaking in a little thing we like to call playing with paper. Luckily, my hubby is pretty much done reffing hockey for the season and was able to stay home with Linden on Friday night and Kirsten and I were able to spend some time playing with paper.

However, since I don't get to do this often, my creativity seems to have faded and I was having a hard time thinking of any ideas. So I popped over to Kirsten's scrapbooking blog and took a peek at one of the challenges she had posted. And I give her full credit for this layout because I basically stole her idea. And here it is in all it's glory

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As a sidenote: I ABSOLUTELY LOVE this picture of my boy. And I can't even take credit for that either. Hubby took it one day while I was at work.

So hopefully now that hockey is over, I'll get more opportunities to scrapbook becaues I really do enjoy it. (I think it plays well into my self-diagnosed OCD)

spring is in the air

And I am loving it. Not only does it mean that sometime in the near future winter will end but it also means that I can again open my windows. I'm one of the weird people who love the smell of fresh air and as soon as it's not minus 1 million degrees outside, my windows are open.

What else does the coming of spring bring.... SPRING CLEANING!!!!!

And I do love to spring clean. Out with the old and in with the new. On my agenda for my spring cleaning this year is to convince hubby that he needs to clean out his closet and dresser and get rid of all his old clothes that he doesn't wear. I swear he had shirts he has never ever worn, but heaven forbid I throw them out or rather donate them to the second hand store. We usually do the later. So that covers the out with the old. What's the in with the new you might be asking yourself .

Well here it is, nothing fancy, but we decided that we wanted a new bed. Did we need a new bed? Probably not. But we both have been wanting to get a king-sized bed for a while now, so yesterday we drove into Winnipeg in father in law's truck and proceeded to buy a new bed. I can't wait to sleep in it tonight.

So today has been a combination of my usual cleaning routine, laundry, taking apart the old bed, putting together the new bed, getting odd little jobs done around the house, and all this while hubby is away at a hockey game. I do get more done when he's not around. My dad came over and installed our new thermostat. Our new one is digital and programmable. I'm so excited to see if it saves me the 33% on my hydro bill that the package says.

Well, the bathrooms are not cleaning themselves......... someone should definitely invent a self-cleaning bathroom. I would totally buy four of them.

The thing about small towns is......

Mechanics can pretty much charge whatever they like and get away with it. I just finished paying $300 to have one window fixed in my car and an oil change. And why did I pay this outrageous price, because I had no other choice. My usual mechanic is unavailable until April and well, having your driver's door window fall down into the abyss of the door in February is not such a good thing. So, being that it really did need to get fixed, I took it against my better judgement to one of the dealerships in town. It just so happens that we take all of our vehicle from work there and both of my in-laws work there also. Therefore one would like to think that they would get at least decent service.



I guess I made the fatal error of mentioning that I had another vehicle that I could use since my parents are out of town. It took a week to get it fixed, now granted two of those days the world (well my world at least) stood still because of a freak warm spell and rain in February, but really how long could it possibly take to replace 2 plastic clips? Which I might add, better be coated in gold if I ever take the door apart to look. Seriously? $68.00 for a little plasitc clip!!!!!!! And explain to me this, 1 window, 2 clips, 2 different prices for each clip! Something sounds a little fishy to me. Especially since I could probably go online and find them for, oh I don't know, $5.00.



But really, the price is not the best part of the story. The best part is this. Turn the clock back to Friday. At this point they had had the vehicle for 1 week already, and it was getting to the end of the day. The service department is not open on weekends and because of the civic holiday would not be open on Monday (yesterday). So the outlook of having my vehicle back for the weekend was getting kind of grim, because as previously mentioned I had another vehicle to drive, therefore they could take their sweet time. But I digress. At approximately 5 o'clock, while sitting down to have a quick supper with the hubby before he went to hockey, the phone rings. It is one of my co-workers informing me that the shop had called and if I could get there before 6, they would leave my keys at the front desk. I thought it a little odd that they phoned my work, considering I left a message at the service department that morning to call my cell phone. But I didn't really care, I was just happy to get my car back for the weekend. Now, fast forward to Tuesday. Around 11 o'clock this morning I call my house to listen to any messages left on our machine. There is one from the service station saying that my bill is ready and if I would kindly come pay it. The punch line of this was, they couldn't be bothered to look up my home phone number to tell me that my car is ready, but they sure had no problem calling when the bill was ready.

Gotta love small towns!

And the road was paved with good intentions....

.... but really, are good intentions going to help me in my weight loss goal? I think not.

I had the best of intentions of going to the gym to get a good cardio workout in, but unfortunately that was not to be the case. You see, my office has two pass cards for the local gym which are there for us to use. Well, technically I think they are for the officers to use, but I digress and I refuse to pay $200 for a membership. (PS: Kris if you're reading this, send that letter!!!! You know which one I'm talking about) Oh look, apparently I took a left turn without signalling. Anyway, since these passes are for everyone and anyone they stay at the office with all the keys to the cars. I went to pick one up this morning, not just needing to go to the gym but also wanting to go and for some bizarre reason, they were both gone. Now one might question as to why I want to go to the gym when I have a treadmill in my basement. Well here is the answer..... it's old.... does't have a timer or any features for that matter .... and most of all, to adjust the speed is more of a workout than actually running on the treadmill itself.

Why the sudden interest in exercise? Well, our office is having a Biggest Loser competition of it's own. We started January 1st and are going for 4 months. I did fairly well the first month with a total weight loss of 6 pounds. February however, not so good. I'd like to say it's because hubby has been busy with hockey and between work and dancing and hockey I just haven't had the time. But really that's just a poor excuse for being kinda lazy. We're no busier this month than we were last. I just have to make a point of going to the gym EVERY night that I can. Whether I have to go straight from work before hubby goes to hockey or whatever, but it needs to be done.

So basically this post has absolutely no point other than a means for me to give myself a stern talking to about being lazy and lethargic and to give myself the kick in the butt I need to get moving. The weight isn't going to just fall off. Is it? Maybe if I wish REALLY REALLY hard I will wake up 5 pounds lighter. And while I'm at it, I wish for a money tree and for the ability to turn everything I touch to gold.

How do I do this again?

So I have been introduced to a new blog that I have become a daily reader of. This particular blog is written by a co-worker's hubby, who is now a stay at home dad of two little boys. Well, before the boys were born and him and his spouse moved to our neck of the woods, he was a professional journalist, so one can only imagine how well this man can tell a story. This made me very aware of the fact that I have been somewhat neglecting my blogging duties by being merely a passive participant instead of an active one.

So here I sit on a Saturday night, Valentine's day nevertheless, alone (well, not quite alone, I have the dog, the cat and Linden here, but they are all sleeping), trying to figure out if I remember how to do this thing we call "Blogging".

Well, between both me and hubby working full time, both of us instructing dancing, bowling and hubby reffing hockey, we haven't had alot of spare time and therefore nothing really "Blog" worthy has happened. I'm just writing for the purpose of writing and hopefully this will ignite my spark to do this on a somewhat regular basis.