3 weeks

Yikes, it's been 3 weeks since I last posted. Well, all in all not as bad as a certain sister of mine who will remain nameless who hasn't updated in almost 10 weeks! And in my defense, we've been a little busy.

The weekend after Echo's surgery I had Friday off to spend with him and I used that day to work on the deck a little more. I got all of the railing posts notched out and mostly installed which is great. It's getting a little crazy at how long I've been doing this stuff with not much to show for. We are pretty bad with "decisions" on it though and we've changed our minds about what to do for railing/benches a few times already. We are no longer doing bench seating around the one side and decided to do just railing. As far as spindles or balusters go, we are thinking of the black aluminium balusters sandwiched between two pieces of cedar with a top 2x6 for the handrail. I think it'll look good, and considering that I have little-to-no experience with building decks, etc, the whole deck looks nice so far.

On Saturday the neighbours and I rented an auger to dig the rest of the post holes, and set the posts for the fence building the next weekend - conveniently the weekend that we were in BC! That was a most-of-the-day affair, and was burnt to a crisp by the end... call me a red neck. literally!

On that Sunday it was Mother's Day and Marnie and I hosted brunch for my mom and Marn's family. It was a nice visit, even with my mom's broken toe! She broke it the day before carrying laundry down stairs, so she was pretty much out of commission for the next few days.... anyway, most people reading this know the story already, or read it on Adrienne's blog, so I won't go over it again. We had frittata (?), swarties, scones, fruit salad, fresh squeezed OJ, coffee, tea, etc.... in other words, way too much food. But it was delicious!!

The Wednesday after that I was up bright and early and left for Calgary to get some work done in that office. I spent Wednesday and Thursday there, then left early Friday morning for Vancouver where I met up with Marnie. We had a mini vacation for the long weekend, then I was back to work in Vancouver for (Tuesday), Wednesday and Thursday again.
For the long weekend, we had a lot planned, but unfortunately we weren't able to do the best part -- fly to Tofino (on the west coast of the Island) in the new plane and back.
Friday afternoon Adrienne picked us up and we hung out with her and Parker until Maddie got out from school. We got her then right off to see the movie Shrek the Third. It was ok, not great, but the kids liked it. After that it was off to Chuck E Cheese (Parker's pick) where the kids had a blast and the adults got a little competitive on some of the games... Food and atmosphere are not great there, but the kids all enjoy it as they get to run around like mad and win tickets for plastic $0.05 toys.
We had booked Adrienne's timeshare in Victoria for Saturday night stay and had fantastic weather on that Saturday for the ferry ride over. We walked around town and checked things out, but not before Parker opened his presents and ate birthday cake. We thought it was cute how he wasn't 4 until he blew out the candles.
Sunday, however, was crappy but we still went into town and toured around. We left earlier than we would have if it was nice out.
Monday was set aside as the day we were going to try and fly to Tofino, but the weather wasn't looking good. We couldn't go due to the heavy cloud cover. Erin, Marn's friend, called us in the morning to ask when we were going to be there to meet us at the airport. She said the weather was beautiful, clear and sunny and couldn't believe that it was crappy in Vancouver. Yes, we were all sad that we weren't going to be there to enjoy it!
We managed to go up for about an hour flying around the city during the later half of the day as the clouds started to break up. But it was so late that we couldn't really go anywhere "fun". We had fun anyway - how often do you get to go flying in a (family member's) private plane? That was the best part of the trip for us. So cool!
Tuesday I got sucked in to working for about 6 hours. I sort of knew this was going to happen as I had changed our Internet provider on the Friday and they were still working out some bugs with the connections for each office.
The rest of the week was spent hanging out and having fun - aside from my working. Marn and Adrienne hung out a lot as it was more of a vacation for her. I turned my work trip into some vacation as a bonus. ;) We might just have to move out there once we find out in a few weeks that we won the lottery dream home!

We boarded Echo for most of the week we were gone, and he had a great time. When we finally did get home Sunday morning after 3am, he was excited to see us, of course, but was extremely tired. He basically wanted to go back to sleep after about 10 minutes of visiting with us. We also got to see our yard completely fenced in - it looks so bizarre! It's so nice to let Echo out and not worry about him terrorizing the neighbours. Although we still have to watch him out there. He's a digger, and has already dug two holes, one large and one small), and pulled out a plant that was just finally making a recovery from the winter! ggrr!!! NOT happy about this behaviour...

The whole next day he had to rest some more as we were gone for most of the day again. This time, back to Angus Glen for the 2nd Annual Booby-q to benefit "the weekend to end breast cancer" and help raise money for the team walking in Michelle's honor. It was fun as we got to catch up with friends and meet two of the new babies in my group for the first time. We also found out that a friend is pregnant again for number two... the first is only 8 months old, and they were married a month after we were! crazy!

Sorry, no pics of the fence, but I'll take some this weekend as well as how the deck is coming along.