PACKING, YET AGAIN

So here we are in the final stretch.  This is Tuesday and we leave around 1:30 pm on Thursday.  I am mostly packed, with just a few things left to sort out..  Night before last my ankle went out on me.  Who knows why!!  So all day yesterday I was hopping around with the help of a left over crutch.  Bill spent one night there barfing.  And thats only the second time in his life he has ever barfed.  I think he ate something off the stove that he shouldn't have.  Typical Bill.  Typical me for leaving it there in the first place.  He is to take care of all insurance matters, house, condo, cars, trips, health etc...  When I asked him about our trip insurance (we buy general trip insurance from BCAA for the year) and if it was up to date etc...he answers "I don't know."  What the hell?!!  This is happening more and more with him.  I think the time is coming when I am going to have to take over everything.  He's quite capable, he just doesn't want to.

Today Monte drove us down to the noodle house for lunch and then to Costco.  He is so despondent and quiet.  Its worrisome.  Then Bill got a haircut...had to find a new hairdresser in our salon.  Eileen, my hairdresser and Bill's had a brain aneurism and is in the hospital indefinitely.  Poor thing.  I guess she lost most of her memories, but they are slowly coming back.  Now we are home and doing some final things.

I will be trying once again to post pics here when we are on the cruise ship.  I will also try to put some on facebook and if none of that works I will email to those whose email addresses I have.

VIETNAMESE BEEF BRISKET SOUP

HOUSE HOT POT

DEEP FRIED SPICY GREEN BEANS AND SQUID

TEMPURA PRAWNS

ITINERARY FOR THE NEXT WHILE....ENDING IN A FEW EXTRA DAYS IN HONG KONG

When I get back I shall be making butter tart square trifle...thank you Cookie!!!  I will post pics and Cookie you have to be here to try it.  So the next time I am on here it will be from either the airport or from Singapore!!  TTYL

JAUNTS AND DINNERS

We finally gave up waiting for younger stronger peeps in the house to take the tree down to the garage. Bill brought in the box and we took it apart and packed it up.  Its now out in the shed waiting for next year.  Took long enough.  I had two dinners to do this week and we couldn't have a dead tree filling up the hallway.

Last Sunday we went up to Squamish and toodled around.  Such a beautiful place and we had so much fun,  we went to a local grocers and got a picnic and went looking for a spot to eat.  We ended up at the little tiny airport, in the snow, sat in our car and had a lovely lunch.  I will post a few pics below for those that I am not facebook friends with.

Tuesday night we had Andrew's dad Al and his sister Katie and his brother Joel over for Al's 59th birthday.  We always enjoy having them.  The visiting gets really interesting and good.  I made a meatloaf and recorded each step...for no reason whatsoever other than to bore you with the pics!  Then last night we had Bill's nephew and wife over for a roast beef/yorkshire pudding dinner.  What a wonderful evening that was.  I love those two people.  And now today I am making beef soup.

For deserts I deconstruct regular desserts into trifles.  Last nite I made an apple pie trifle.  I baked a carmel coffee cake and made vanilla pudding.  I also whipped cream and added cinnamon to the cream.  I also crumbled ginger snaps.  I used two cans of apple pie filling and layered it all up to the top of my trifle bowl.  It was really good.  In the past I have made lemon pie trifle (using meringue cookies, banana cream pie trifle (using graham wafer crust broken into pieces), chocolate trifle (using one bite brownies), pumpkin pie trifle, (using graham wafer crust pieces), black forest cake trifle..I used cherry pie filling and chocolate cake and vanilla pudding and whipped cream.  Its fun finding new trifle ideas. If you think of one put it in comments and I will make it and take pictures and credit you with the idea!

ALWAYS START WITH THE ONIONS

ADD THE CARBS

THEN THE SEASONING

THEN THE EGGS

KETCHUP AND WORCHESTER 

MIX

THEN I TOTALLY MISSED A STEP HERE.  YOU MIX BROWN SUGAR, BALSAMIC AND KETCHUP AND POUR OVER THE TOP AT THE LAST TEN MINUTES OF COOKING.  THIS LOOKS BURNT BUT IT ISN'T, ITS THE BALSAMIC TOPPING THAT IS DARK

A REALLY TYPICAL BRITISH COLUMBIA SCENE

MOLLY IN HER NEW LIFE JACKET GETTING READY FOR A TEST RUN IN THE BATHTUB

HER LITTLE LEGS WERE PADDLING AWAY LONG BEFORE SHE HIT THE WATER

NOT HAPPY IN THE WATER!!!!!!

ANDREW    JOEL     KATIE      AL

AS BEAUTIFUL AS HAWAIIAN SUNSETS

Tonite April and Aryn have asked me to join them for dinner at a place called GRUB.  I can't wait!  Ape and I looked it up and the food looks amazing.  In the reviews a few said its a true hipster place so I can't wait to go see.  I shall put a few pics here..TTYL

CHARMIN VS EVERYTHING ELSE

Bill and I just had the hugest....not exactly an argument, but a very heated discussion.

And its about toilet paper.

I think, because I am the one that uses it the most, I should have total control over the kind we buy.  Yes, men do use it once or twice a day, but women use it every time, thus we use way more.  And as such, we have a much more invested interest in the type we buy.

That being said, in our house, I will only allow charmin.  It is thick and doesn't tear, you use one third the amount compared to any other, and you can get it wet (upon rereading this I had better add "wet with tap water") and wash the rim of the toilet (which is necessary when you live with men) and it won't rip.  Win win all the way around.

I was just in the loo and it came to my attention that it was NOT charmin on the newly replaced roll.   It was thinner, not as strong and I had to use three times the amount more than usual.  What the hell?  This may not seem like a very important detail in one's life, but it is in mine.  How did this happen???

Then I remembered that Bill did the last tp shopping.  So I came storming out and confronted him.  Apparently, Costco (can be an unreliable store on occasion) didn't have any.  So he bought a different kind, like 36 freaking rolls of it.  Ahhhhgggggg!   If we can't get it at Costco we go to SuperStore, I yelled at him.  You DON'T buy 36 rolls of some other crap!!!!!  My life shall be hell about six times a day for the next FOREVER!!!!!

Cookie came over yesterday and we had a wonderful time!  We went shopping.  And shopping, other than xmas, is something I haven't done for some time.  It was so much fun.  I bought duvets, butter dishes, phone receiver for my iphone,  etc..... We met Monte, who has come home for another week, for coffee and then home to a delicious dinner.

Lately Bill and I have gone back to taking a flushing niacin every evening.  Its very healthy and all that but it makes your whole body go beet red and get very hot and prickly for about a half hour.  Not very comfortable at all.  We were telling Cookie about it so she decided to try it out and took one.  About a half hour later she started to prickle, then she got hot and turned red, and prickled even more.  It was so funny to watch her reaction!  Monte and his friend were here and we ended up looking it up on google and reading about the pineal gland, which niacin effects,  in the brain etc...such a strange evening but oh so interesting!

A BOX OF PURDEY'S CHOCOLATES THAT TELUS SENT ME CUZ I AM SUCH A GREAT AND AWESOME CUSTOMER.  I PROMPTLY GAVE IT TO APRIL, MUCH TO BILL'S CHAGRIN

THIS IS A HIBISCUS WE HAD TO BRING IN OUT OF THE COLD.  THE ONLY PLACE IN THE HOUSE THAT WE HAD A LITTLE ROOM FOR IT WAS IN THE BATHROOM

ITS SHOWING ITS GRATITUDE BY STARTING TO FLOWER AGAIN

LOSER TOILET PAPER

THE ONLY KIND OF SELFIE I CAN TAKE

THIS CHRISTMAS TREE HAS BEEN HERE FOR A LOOOOOOOONG TIME WAITING FOR SOMEONE YOUNG AND STRONG TO TAKE IT DOWNSTAIRS FOR US

A LOOOOOOOOOOOONG TIME

So now I am off to the fat lady store to buy a belt.  TTYL

SUCH A WEEK!!!

Well, we got Monte home and on his own!  He was so much more ready this time around.  He is doing really well now, thankfully.

Not much to report tonight.  I have been working on my photos.  I have been using a thumb drive to transfer pics over to the new computer.  I have so much more control that way.

April is in the kitchen right now cooking us all dinner!  Yay!!!  She makes the best food.  Its super tasty and alway healthy.  I will take a pic of it.  She cooks themselves an awesome dinner every single night. I used to cook and bake all the time but when he and I were hitting the 300 pound mark I quit.  Now our dishwasher is always full of bowls instead of plates and we are definitely not skinnier!

Now its a few days later......just got back from a walk in the woods with our dogs and a stint in Starbucks, reading our books.  Unless its raining hard, we are trying to get some mileage in from now til the end of the month.  Lots of walking coming up in our next few months.

We had dinner with Christine and Jay last night.  They were in the condo in Maui early in Dec.  It was so cool to hear all their stories and see their pictures.  They are such a fun cool couple.  I think we are going to try to get together for dinners with them more often.  Poor Christine, I practically invited ourselves over to their house for dinner.  They are living in an amazing older big house that I would love to see.  Christine has an amazing decorator's eye and I want to see what she has done there.  So....bless her....we are having dinner there on March 30!!  Yay!!!!

Haven't seen anything to speak of of Aryn.  She is busy with her work and her Bradley.  We talk occasionally on the phone and catch up.

I've talked with Kevin occasionally.  He is so funny.  And he is a total godsend on the occasional times I can't figure out my laptop.  Mostly googling problems fixes things, but there are some things about the working guts of computers I need help with still.  And....then....we get to talk reality shows.  He likes them like I do and we compare notes.   We don't always agree.

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 THEY HAVE CHANGED THINGS HERE...NOT SURE IF THE PICS WILL BE RIGHT

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Now I am off to do laundry.  And...I am going to tackle our pantry cupboard.  It is in the most shameful state possible.  I will take pics and post the progress.  I am going to enlist Bill's help.  We will fight, oh yes, we will.  And I will be right and he won't be.  LOL!!   TTYL

100 DAY CHALLENGE

Well, now that I am done with the poetry, I am needing to put in place a new challenge.  I have a new laptop.   Before I transfer everything over to my new one, I need to delete thousands of pics off the old one.  This is way freaking harder than you think.  It sounds easy, but it just isn't, therefore I keep putting it off.   So.........first of all my 100 day challenge will be broken into segments, as I don't plan to take the old computer with me on trips.  But, for every day I am home...for the next hundred days, I will delete 200 pics off of that computer every day.  I have 37,011 pictures on the old computer.  I am ashamed. On my new one, I am only keeping the ones that are keepable, labelling and putting in events.  So, 200 per day for 100 days is 20,000 pics gone.  It will be a lot easier to organize the leftover pics.

The last few days have been interesting.  We took Monte back to port Alberni as planned on Dec. 31st. We stayed two nights in our fave hotel and met with Pat, the man who will be helping Monte over the next couple months.  We also had a meeting with his case worker there who will get him set up with the psychologist etc...On the second evening we went out for dinner and I could see Monte ramping up in agitation and anxiety and felt pretty strongly that he isn't quite ready yet to be totally on his own.  Until his medication evens out in the next while he is still at some risk of having anxiety get the best of him.  I suggested, and so did Bill, that he come home again for a week..just to give him a little more time.  Plus in Port Alberni he has an appointment on the 9th that gets the ball rolling with all kinds of help if he needs it.  So, he is back with us for another week.  He is so much easier to have around now.  A lot calmer.

The first morning in the hotel there, we were having coffee in bed, doing emails etc...and we received a short email from a friend of ours in Bamfield that Ted, our dear friend, was in the hospital with cancer.  I called the Port Alberni hospital and found out he was in that one.  In the afternoon Bill and I went in to see him and found a very sick friend.  He never did wake up and I would say he isn't going to last more than a couple of days.  Such a shock and so hard on his family.  We stayed with his sons (4 grown heart broken men) for several hours.  These people have meant so much to us.  Ted is 83 and ready to go but he leaves behind sons, one in particular is  going to break.  He is so fragile anyway and has suffered a lot of losses in his life.  He just isn't ready to live without his dad yet.  I feel so bad for him.

Bill has two friends.  Believe it or not!!  They are both in their late 80's.  He has never had "friends" before and this is such a funny thing to watch him experience.  Every week, on Thursday, they meet at a pub for lunch.  Bill, I swear, would miss his own kin's funerals not to miss lunch with these guys.  Well he talked one of them into buying a macbook laptop.  Last week he asked Monte to go with him to lunch to help Claire get on Facebook.  So he did. It was very successful.  Last night Bill phoned Claire to confirm today (as if they wouldn't meet somehow) and Claire asked if "that Monte" was coming with him and if he was could he show him how to get out of Facebook!  hahahaha....so funny.....so Monte said of course he would go.  Poor Claire is stuck in Facebook...jeez!

THE TRIP OVER TO PORT AND BACK IS UNBELIEVABLE BEAUTIFUL

Now starts the mass of appointments.  Hair, teeth, doctor, eye doctor and probably a funeral, a trip to port etc...I must get my google calendar out and make a plan.  I also need to lose a few pounds to get ready for the 24 hours of flying and airports that is going to happen on Feb 1st.  Getting to Singapore is harder than getting to Australia.  I shall be back here for another update in a couple of days.  TTYL