Dear Blog.....

I have neglected you something terrible for almost a year. And the worst part is I don't really have any excuse. Life is no busier than it was before. If nothing else, now it would be easier to sit and write for a short time. I hereby declare that I will try and blog a little more frequently. Well, really, any more than 1 blog per year, is more frequent.

I sincerely apologize for any hard feelings and will try to do better.

Sincerely,

Me.

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.