Musings of a lazy Saturday.

After reading my title, I realize that it really wasn't a lazy Saturday per se. Just a Saturday in which we did not have a single plan. Those Saturdays don't come around very often, in fact the next one is September 19th. Anyway, back to my musings. I really wanted to call them random musings, but my dear husband advised me that since I was thinking about them, they really weren't random at all.... so here are my random musing in a very orderly fashion.

1. "Country lawn" -vs- "Town lawn": All of my life, until this past fall, the only reason to rake leaves was to jump in them. Now we seem to have taken on a whole new process to keep our lawn "acceptable". We raked in the fall, so that the leaves did not get matted down and kill our grass. We raked today to get the rest of the leaves, but also to remove some of the dead grass. I have also found out this week, that we should fertilize and put down an inhibitor of crab grass. What!?!? Shouldn't we let mother nature take over? I also like the look of dandelions. I don't think our neighbors would be very happy with a dandelion yard, but we need to find some environmentally safe fertilizers if we are going to use them. I don't want our rivers any greener than they already are. Ok... some of these thoughts may not have made sense, but how did our "farm lawn" always turn out OK?


2. Cleaning: I decided to go through our upstairs closets today. We had some things that really didn't belong there, as well as just overall clutter ( I know you are all thinking just wait until you have lived there for years). When I got done with the upstairs, I decided to go into my craft room, which I cannot seem to get organized. As I was picking up, I realized that I was "cleaning" some of the same items that I had already "cleaned" from upstairs. Why is it that when cleaning, I decided that getting the item into the correct room was good enough. I only ended up dealing with it twice!

3. Mini meatloaves: It has been about a week since I have cooked. Brian has decided that he can cook again for me and to my delight has been doing the cooking this week. For those of you that don't know, a while back I had complained too much and he decided I didn't get to enjoy his cooking any longer. Today, since I figured it was my turn to cook, I made mini meatloaves. They were quick and super cute.


Enough rambling for one day. Hope that you all had an enjoyable Saturday as I have!

Have you thanked your laboratory professionals this week?

I know teachers get a day in September to be appreciated, but did you know that lab employees get a whole week. Yes, that's right, I have spent the last week being wined and dined... well maybe not wined. We had lunch every day that was sponsored by one of the companies that service our instruments. We also had prize drawings in which items were donated by a variety of vendors; I won a frisbee and a little tin bucket with a cross stitching pattern in it.

We also raise money for our Sunshine Club during lab week. The Sunshine Club send flowers to employees when there is an event in their lives, i.e. birth, surgery. To raise money, each department puts together a basket full of goodies in which employees buy tickets in an attempt to win the basket. I was lucky enough to have my name drawn for the "baking basket". It was full of goodies..... if it only came with a skill set.....

Flip Flop Weather!

I am soooo excited to say... I broke out my flip flops today. I had forgotten how good it felt going to the gym and then to change into my flip flops to go home. Yipee for spring. One thing this picture reminds me.... I need some new flip flops :)

What really happened.....

Well, for the second time since we moved into our house in late July, I have flooded the laundry room. Somehow a kitchen rag was stuck in the sink that our washing machine empties into. Since the drain was blocked, the water had no place to go but the floor. As for the Listerine and other "treasures on the warming machine", I had just gotten back from Target an hour earlier and when the flood occurred, tried to get everything out of the bags and on the dryer. At least it wasn't paint tinted water like last time.

Can you make a story for these pictures?

Rum anyone?

One thing that Jamaica is famous for is their Appleton Rum. We were such good participators that we earned A LOT of rum.

How we won the bottles:

1. Lovers Game: It turns out that one of our fellow travelers submitted our name into a drawing for participants in the "Lovers Game". It just so turns out that we were selected (much to my chagrin). The Lover's Game was like the old gameshow "The Newlywed Game", in which they take all of the ladies back and ask the guys questions. The ladies then come back and they have to try and get the same answer. Then they do the same routine with the guys in the back room. We didn't win the contest, but we still got our bottle of rum!

2. Returnee dinner: We received a bottle of rum just for showing up- again! Here we are during the cocktail hour of the dinner.
3. Beer Chugging Contest: The object of the game was to drink a bottle of Red Stripe as fast as you can. They then took the top few and made them do it again. Both Brian and I made it into the second round, but I was the one who ended up with the rum! To be fair... let me add that the second round for the boys involved drinking the beer out of a straw.













4. Relay: This was before Brian graced us with his presence on the beach, so he wasn't there. It was a compilation of activities with a team of 17 people. Activities included, rolling a basketball between the teams legs (hard to image... sorry no pics right now), passing a tennis ball with your elbows, jumping to a coffee can with a tennis ball between your thighs, a volleyball game, free throws and darts. My team won, well actually smoked the other team, so we each got a bottle of rum.


5. We earned so many points over the course of the week, that we got our last bottle. Points are accumulated by participating in activities. We played volleyball everyday and I did water aerobics in the ocean, we were part of a fashion show with our togas (more later) and a variety of other activities.


You are maybe wondering where the bottle of champagne came from. If you are not wondering, I'm going to tell you anyways. As a welcome to the resort the first night, we had a bottle of champagne paired with cheese and crackers waiting for us in our room. It was great, but since we weren't in our room very often, we didn't drink the champagne and decided to bring it back with us. I guess we will save it for a rainy day!

Canopy Tour

We made it back to snowy MN on Saturday night. We were both sad to see the sun and beach go away but as an insightful travel companion said.... "All good things must come to an end, otherwise they wouldn't be good, they would be normal". One of the highlights of the trip was the canopy tour we took. We got on a bus and drove about 45 minutes to what they called the Jamaican Jungle. We got all harnessed up and put on our helmets and gloves. and started the first hike.
We luckily didn't have to hook ourselves up to any cables, the employees did that for us! We got to sit back and enjoy the ride. We went over streams and valleys and at the fastest speed got up to about 40mph. It was quite exhilarating!

We were able to pic some oranges right off of the trees and try those, they were juicy and delicious.