John's latest pictures

Here are some of John's latest pics, caught him before he deleted them. We need to teach him to take some time when he takes his pictures.

The second one is a self portrait while laying on the floor in the hall way.

Just a quick note

To say I am not feeling very well been fighting a fever and a cough the last few days, I even had to stay in last night and not go to Olympians which I teach. Hope to be back soon, I am so far behind on housework and Mt. Washmore.

John's Pictures

I was going to up load some of John's pictures but alas I went to his camera and he had deleted all the good ones and replaced them with pictures of the floor, couch and feet and every conceivable angle and distances.....trust me not very exciting. I'll try again later.

An Unexpected visitor

There is nothing like an unexpected visitor. We have had two this week and they are the most unfavourable kind. I guess some details would be in order. It has been pretty cold here, -10C or colder (not sure what that is in degrees F). Earlier this week I went down to the basement to get something for dinner prep and noticed the most unusual hole in the bag of noodles. I called Michael into the kitchen and show him, he confirmed my thoughts- bite marks. Oh no!! We have a critter, that is just too creepy. We went downstairs and looked around, first we sorted through all the food and threw out all the cartons that had been compromised and put the rest into resealable plastic tubs. Now it was time to find out where the critter or critters got in. We have a very well sealed, dry basement so this took a little off guard. There were only 2 entrances that we could think of, the dryer vent and the air exchanger vents. After close inspection it was discovered it was the air exchanger, Michael went out to check the outside vents sure enough the grate had fallen off. So now we know how they got in but where and what were they. Living in the country and with the drop in temperature we suspected that it was likely field mice looking for warmth and food. Michael went and picked up some traps and a grate for the vent. When he came back we set the traps, with peanut butter, and tuck taped the hole in the vent tubing.
With that part of the problem solved Michael thought we had better look for a nest- oh yuk!!! the thought still gives me the creeps. The basement has been needing a good cleaning, we now have instant motivation.

update:
Well, two field mice and a whopping decluttering marathon the basement is about 1/2 way done. We've already taken a load to Value Village ( a Canadian chain of thrift stores). We have a load ready to go to the dump, another load ready to go to VV, a load of clothes that I will give to Red Cross and recycling coming out the wazoo ( is that a word). Here we recycle everything, anything paper, plastic, metal, glass and even tetra paks so that can really amount to a lot of stuff. I wished I'd taken before and after pictures, it is a very freeing feeling to get rid of all that stuff that I won't use again, especially the stuff that someone else might be able to use.

Our Budget

I've joined the "Financial Shape in 2008 Challenge" over at Crystal's blog Money Saving Mom . Michael and I have been thinking a lot about then next step. Last year we paid off all debt, except the mortgage, what a freeing feeling that is. We also made a couple of serious upgrades to the house, paying cash for them. Our next challenge is to save our Emergency Fund. We also want to budget for a couple of larger items this year one being my sister's wedding and the other a move (we can always hope!!!) neither of these things are hugely expensive but we want to have the extra so that we can have fun while doing them not thinking about what everything costs as we go.

The first thing Crystal wanted us to share was our budget and while I don't think Michael would want me to share details we do live by one and are living slightly below our means. I personally like knowing where all the money went. We are fortunate because he is on salary with paid overtime, so we can base our budget on the salary and save anything comes in for overtime. Last year he worked a lot of overtime because they were short staffed. He has just recently taken a transfer to a new unit, and we aren't sure about the amount of overtime if there will be any, so sticking to the budget is all the more important this year.

One tip that has worked really well for us is to take bills, like property tax, that only come in once or twice a year and divide it up into 12 or 6 equal payments and each month put that amount away in an account so when it come time to pay them all we have to do is to transfer the money to our chequing (the Canadian spelling for that word) account and write the cheque. The amount of stress it saves is incredible. Maybe everybody knows this already but it made a real difference for us.

Everyone loves a man in uniform......

......Until they have to do his ironing. I've been putting off doing Michael's ironing since before Christmas. It has finally made it to the top of my TO DO list for today. I resolve that I will not let my ironing get out of hand. Anyone want to come and help. The wool pant are my most favourite thing in the whole world....can you hear the sarcasm in my voice.

Matthew's Begets song

http://

I wonder how long it would take Wallace and John to learn this song, they both seen to be very good at memorization.

ht: Amy