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.