Birthday

I had the best birthday party this year! We had a small group (our parents, Zoe & a couple karate students) come out the house to help with residing and yard/woods stuff. We made good progress on the siding, dead trees were cut up and cleared out, scrap wood was burned up, the yard was picked up, the shed got organized, Rae & Jo had lots of people to play with... We did lunch around the backyard fire...pudgie pies & hot dogs, with brownies for desert. The day had a great feel; lots of good energy with the group!!

Lots of Projects

Wow, time has gotten away from me again! It's late (most nights seem to be lately :), so I'll try to capture some quick updates on what has kept us running around the past couple of months.

We finished our office room at home...it use to be a hallway & bathroom, and stole some room from two other closets to make a small half bath up there. We got our office stuff moved out of the kitchen and upstairs, although we need to work on some organization (at least for my stuff). We are currently residing the house. Took advantage of the great weather this last week to get as much done as we could...we'll have to finish it as we get windows in the weather patterns. Today we were up at the cottage with Jean & Karen to redo the bathroom floor & toilet plumbing. That job went surprisingly smooth and got it all wrapped up in decent time.

Jen's been putting in some real energy with work. She's in the middle of a big, big, big project and has been working up to 12, 14, 16+ hour days. She does well with making sure to take days off at the end of the week to curb some of the overtime and that way we get long weekends for some more family-time! Her project is done in a couple weeks, so then our schedules will be back to more normal-ish.

Halloween - Rae & Jo managed to get trick-or-treating twice this year! Rae was a pink unicorn and Jo was a devil bat the first round and the second time she dressed as a sunflower. They had a great time and were SO cute!! Jen and I got to go out with our karate students...all dressed in costume. We hadn't put much time or thought into our costumes...she pulled one out from a couple years ago, and I picked one up on clearance that day. But, we were surprised to be called up on the bar as part of the costume contest...ended up in 4th place (an awesome Micheal Jackson won). Jen was an evil queen & I the evil jester. Great night - super nice to spend some time with the students in a casual setting.

Last weekend Jen & I were invited to Sensei Dave Nelson's dojo, the Broken Bokken, for black belt testing. Verna & Tyler, both long-time students of Sensei Dave's, gave an excellent review. They both have family members that are already black belts of Sensei Dave's...very neat to see other martial artist families study together. A great honor for us to be invited and take part in their testing!

I'm sure I'm leaving out all sorts of things...I'll post more as I remember & let my brain/body get some rest now before the girls get me up early in the morning.

**We seem to have "hidden" our camera somewhere with all the moving of stuff around in our house, so no pictures for now. I'll get some up here as I collect them from family & when we find our camera.