Mary Rutherford's

I was just fooling around on Facebook and I joined a group for my home town. Among the reminisces some of the postings talked about partying at Mary Rutherford's, which is an old graveyard near town. I never would have guessed it, but there's actually a web article about the place. Who knew?

http://www.umanitoba.ca/outreach/cm/vol12/no14/hauntedcanada2.html

I guess every small town has its ghost stories.

Let's Buy a Cottage, She Said.

OK, I've admittedly had some really stupid ideas in my time. Really. It happens. So part way through the summer I started saying it might be nice to own our own cottage so we would have a place to get away. After shopping around the real estate market for a couple of months, it turns out we're really poor. So we couldn't actually afford a real cottage. At least not one habitable by humans. So once we got over the shock of being lower-class, we adjusted our search criteria and started looking for shacks on water. Any water - lake, river, tiny brook. Guess what? We couldn't afford those either. So we again adjusted our search criteria to a chunk of land (possibly) with a building on it, somewhere in the vicinity of water.

That we found.

It's in horrible shape, but it is near a beautiful lake. And as the real estate folks like to say, "It has potential". And a bunkhouse. And it's on almost an acre of land.

So... we've been cleaning, ripping down, cleaning, putting up, cleaning, running to the dump, cleaning, finding strange strange things in the woods and cleaning. Here's where we are so far.

At least it's starting to look less like a stupid idea.

I've finally got it!

Whoooo hooo! WKRP in Cincinnati is finally here! I'm off to see if I still think it's as funny as I did back in the 80's. Yeah, I know the music's been messed with, but I'm really hoping the humor still works. Let's hope it's not like seeing Night Rider now. Geez, it seemed really cool then. Now... not so much on the cool.

Anyway, "As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."

My M & M Me

If you go to http://www.becomeanmm.com/, you can make your own M & M character. Please meet Madame Cookie Space Pilot. She rather enjoys margaritas.

Girls, girls, girls

I don't care what anyone says, thirteen is a really cool age. Not quite all grown-up and not quite ready to let go of kid stuff. What are they doing, you ask? Building a fort out of blankets and chairs. Geez, don't you know anything?

Vegas, baby, Vegas!

20 years ago, shortly after we were married, I won a trip to Las Vegas by playing some music trivia game on one of our local radio stations. We'd pretty much spent what little money we had (don't we all start off with nothing?) on a huge 350 guest wedding with all the trimmings so we kind of cheaped out on the honeymoon and just went fishing up on the Lake of Bays for a week. The Vegas trip ended up acting as a kind of unexpected honeymoon for us and we had a great time.

We often said we'd go back to Vegas for our 10th anniversary and renew our vows. Only this time instead of a big fancy ceremony that's basically for everyone else, we'd have one that was much more fun, tacky and cheesy. More our style. The 10th anniversary came and went and alas, we still didn't have any money - what with the 2 kids, mortgage, car payments and my string of lay-offs. Well, the clock's a-tickin'.

We didn't make the 10th, but by golly, we're going to make the 20th. We're still not independently wealthy, but at least we don't have to save up to buy a loaf of bread any more. So 20 years, 2 kids, 2 different houses, a whole new education, several cars, about 70 lbs (all together, not each), a cat, 2 dogs, 3 fish, 2 rabbits and pet rodents too many to number later we're finally on our way. Don't ever let it be said we don't do what we say we're going to do. A little slowly, maybe, but we get 'round to it eventually.

We've booked the room, the flight and the ceremony. We considered being married by Elvis, aliens and Jerry Garcia but the big guy wasn't keen on any of those. I could have kissed (I think I did actually) him when he suggested a Star Trek wedding. He's not a trekkie, you see. That's all me. What a great guy, eh? Our friends Judy and Earl are going to join us for the actual Vulcan Vow Renewal at Star Trek The Experience. They're not trekkies either, so I could just kiss them too!

Oh, and I'm bringing home a tribble, dammit Jim. I hope customs will let it through...

Pics to follow...

We've got the power

One of the jobs our hydro workers performed this winter was to replace all the hydro poles on a very large stretch of road. Literally every crew was pulled in to accomplish the task and the scene in the photo went on farther than the eye could see. Residents were without power for only a couple of hours, which was quite the feat considering the scale of the job. It was really interesting to go out and see how it all came together.