Dog Days

I always find this sooo funny...so again here is another picture of Bailey and Jon cuddling after I get up in the morning.

Couples Shower

On Saturday August 23rd we celebrated James & Quinn's upcoming wedding with a couples shower, which was at James sister & BIL's house. This was the first couples shower I have been to and was a great reason to get together and have a few cocktails. None of the shower games, awkward thank-yous, and punch, but a full night of of chatting, drinking and a lot of laughing.



I would have to say the presents received at a couples shower are a lot more fun than a traditional wedding shower. The happy couple was donned with a new tool box & tools, DVD's, a digital camera, some more traditional gifts, and some dogs toys & a BIG bag of dog food. Yup, that's right...Dog food. But they did have it on their registry, so it was exactly what they wanted. :)

River Rafting Weekend

Instead of playing in the Dustin Raley memorial kickball tournament this year our team decided to do a weekend away at a cabin. Jill's parents were nice enough to let us borrow their place in Antigo, Wi for the weekend and the best part of it was it was near the Wolf River and many different rafting excursions.

We had looked online to find the place we wanted to go to and then the big plan was to go rafting on Saturday morning. However, when we arrived at The Wolf River Inn, we were surprised to find that they were closed for the season. I guess the river was too low for rafting. She said with the weight of the raft and 2 adults into we would have to portage (carry the raft) more than we would actually be riding. Instead she said there were some places up the road that were still doing individual tubes, since they are lighter and float easier. So that's what we did.

(This is the before & after pics but I have them backwards - After & Before)

In typical fashion, we had shirts made for the weekend and even managed to fit in a pickup kickball game, even though it was getting a little too dark to play. Here are some additional pictures from the weekend.

Girls Night part 2

Saturday night was the big night I was excited for as we had plans for drinks, dinner, dancing, more drinks, and more dancing.....and then a sleepover! (LtoR - Tina, Kristin, Me, Kelly, Nikki, & Rachel)
The evening started at Kristin's parents house with apps & drinks on the patio. Since we were having a sleep over tonight we were talking about those old school games we used to play including Girl Talk & Perfect Match....and ta da we were able to find these games at the Hansen household. That game is definitely coming with us to the sleepover.

I had a little gift for my girlfriends....4 cans of spray paint. I had Kristin open and right away they all knew what I intended our later evening plans to be....Painting the Rock. We are such geeks.

When it was time for dinner Mama Rachel corralled all of us into her van and drove downtown to Pullman's for dinner. As we passed our HS the rock was painted with class of 1978...so needless to say there are some other geeks out there that still enjoy paint the rock. :)

After dinner we took the trolley from Pullman's to downtown, which worked out great since we had already planned on taking a cab home and then no one had to worry about driving. Again, we were being geeks and taking an abundance of pictures, but we were laughing the whole time.

Our first stop when we got downtown Appleton was Deja Vu, the martini bar. We found a table and were looking at the extensive drink menu when this heavily intoxicated guy came up to us and said "hey, do you know who I am?" We kind of ignored him at first, but again..."Hey, do you know who I am...I'm famous." Okay, really...sorry we don't know who you are. "Oh come on, Average Joe Hawaii, yup I was on that show." He says this puffing out his chest and giving us the big drunk smile. Of course, it slipped out of my mouth "that show is still on?" He did not find that too funny and since we did not find his fame impressive he went onto the next table. After a few of us got our drinks, a friend of Mr. Average Joe decided he would sit down with us and then accidentally pushed on the table spilling some of the drinks, after this I think Kristin coaxed the friend to leave as well. No more than 2 minutes later...Kristin leans on the table and again the drinks spill all over. Man and we hardly got to take a drink yet. I went to the bar to grab some more napkins and gave one to Kristin.....this is when she picked up her drink to wipe underneath, tipping the glass just enough to dump more of it on her lap. Hysterical laughter now is coming from Kelly, Tina, and I. I just had to take a few pics.
Okay so maybe we have had enough of the martinis....the rest of the evening downtown was spent mainly at The Bar dancing, a few fish bowls, and doing a lot of shots. :)








When we got home it was time for PJs, pizza, and a game of Girl Talk. How old school, but we had fun attempting to play and answer the silly questions. When Rachel went to lay down that was when we knew we had to go do the rock or she would never make it. We all jumped into Tina's car and off to the HS we went. Sometime between when we went out to dinner and the time we arrived someone else had come and painted the rock as well...however, they did not put very nice things on there so it was a good thing we were there to bring it back to being a spirit rock. Kelly had the white so her job was the under coat, but since it was just painted it was running everywhere. As we were doing this cars were slowing down to see what we were doing. We got about half way done when the school alarms and lights started going off and flashing. It totally scared us since we were not expecting it, so we all screamed, ran, jumped back into the car, and off we went. I felt like I was 16 again. We were going to go back to see what happened since it was weird that the alarms went off, however, when we drove around the block there were fire trucks and police cars coming down the street. Not sure what happened, but I don't think it was related to what we were doing, something else had to be going on at the same time.

Girls Night

This weekend I went back to Appleton to have a girls night with my high school girl friends. On Friday night upon my arrival in town I met Kelly & Rachel at Rachel's new house, which is in the process of being built. The painters had been in that day and upon request they painted the whole house a neutral tan color except for Lily's bedroom. Rachel wanted to paint her bedroom to match her current bedding and furniture...which was a bubble gum pink color. How girly, but I know it will look cute. The funny thing is that we did not start painting until 7:45 and there were no lights at their house yet...so we painted until we could not see anymore. We must be coming to the end of summer because it seemed to get dark real fast.
Since both Rachel & Kelly did not have their kids for the night we went back to Kelly's to have some girl talk and watch a chick flick. Rachel picked up Kristin and 4 small containers of killer ice cream and Kelly & I stopped by her mom's and were able to snag 4 pieces of Diane's' killer double chocolate cake, which she baked & frosted earlier in the evening. She said she made sure to give us 4 "diet pieces" so we would not have to worry about the calories....yeah diet, I am sure the love handles will love this.
These type of nights are my favorite....catching up with great friends, eating yummy food, and watching a sappy chick flick. Before we knew it is was 2 am and both Rach & Kel had to get up early. Whoops.

Heidi Newfield concert

On Wednesday night Amanda, Sarah, and I hit up the Cabooze for Heidi Newfield's CD release party. Heidi used to be the lead singer of Trick Pony and now has gone solo. This is her first solo CD.


I would have to say the concert was a great deal, as you get in for $10 and then get her new CD as well. One of the songs from the CD currently on the radio is called Johnny & June and everyone was singing along when she got to that one. She also threw in a few of her old Trick Pony favorites. After the concert she stayed to sign everyone's CD. The line was so long that we decided to wait at the bar until it slowed down a bit. Well in the mean time...we met some really nice bar tenders whom we were trying to convince that we bought the bottomless bottle of beer that night and they should refill it for us. Quinn (the main bartender) said he could not do that for us but he would do whatever else we needed...little did he know that we were just talking about Sarah's original plan to get married on 8/8/08 but that she had not found the man yet and he was a pretty good catch. So we had just hooked him into marrying our friend - YEAH!

He said it was pretty cleaver, so he ended up giving us free shots. What a nice guy.


By this time the line had died down and we were the 2nd to last people in line. Originally they said no individual pictures with Heidi since she was on a tight schedule....but we were able to get a couple of quick pics while she was signing our CD's and then when she got up to leave we asked for a group photo, she said sure, but we had to go to the back of the bar so that we would be the only ones to get one. YEAH!

By the time we got back to our house, Jon was fast asleep....but not for long.

Happy 2nd Anniversary

On Tuesday August 5th Jon and I celebrated our 2nd Wedding Anniversary. To celebrate ewe took the afternoon off and went to a Saint Paul Saints game. There are only like 4 afternoon baseball games all summer long and one just happened to be on our anniversary.

What a great way to spend a warm summer afternoon. The game started at 1:10 and by the time we found a parking spot the game had already begun. There was a lot of people there for the game both for corporate events and it was also Kids Day so there were buses of kids from the different YMCA's around the area as well. Since we were running a little late and the game already started I was worried the tickets would be all sold out. However, when we walked up to the ticket window area a nice man turned to me and said "do you guys need tickets" and then just gave us these 2 tickets for free. I was a little reluctant at first thinking this might be a scam, but no he was just a nice guy trying to get rid of their extra tickets. We ended up sitting next to him and his wife in the game and it turns out she was given the 4 tickets when buying office supplies from a store and she was really excited because it just happened to be her birthday on the 5th as well. I said how funny you say that because we are celebrating too. :)

After a fantastic win by the Saints, Jon and I stopped to get some ice cream at this ice cream shoppe I was told of by a friend. It was old fashioned homemade ice cream and both Jon and I got the Oreo madness sundae....it was really good and really rich.

We had a really great day ~ It's hard to believe that 2 years has gone by so fast and although Jon called them uneventful (nothing major or bad happened), it has been a great 2 years. :)

New extended family member

On Sunday morning Joel, Betty, Jon and I went out to breakfast and then stopped over to Jon's cousin Alisha & her husband Dustin's house to meet their new daughter, Grace Priscilla.

Grace was born on July 24th and was 7 lbs. 1 oz. and 20 inches long. She is named after Jon's grandma Grace (Joel's mom). Baby Grace is such a long and tiny little thing. She was awake the whole time we were visiting. From the sounds of it both mom & dad are really enjoying being new parents. :)

A day with the birds....

Saturday morning Jon and I headed back down to Bob & Valeries house to help with butchering chickens. They wanted to get an early start with the forecasted weather becoming more hot & humid throughout the day.


When we arrived Bob, Val, Kaylie, Grandma, & Grandpa were already all hard at work. I think they had only a few chickens done at that time, but there was plenty more to be done as I think we had a total of 60 or so chickens to butcher. Betty, Joel, and Megan arrived shortly after we did and everyone got down to business. Bob & Joel took care of the killing and the feathers, Grandpa transported them up to the shed, Valerie gave them their first bath, Jon burnt off all the little remaining feathers/hairs, Kaylie cut the feet off, Betty, Megan, and Grandma cut the chickens and pulled the insides out and cleaned them up, I removed the "keepers" from the guts (livers, hearts, gizzard) and empty the gizzards, and then they were put back into a cool bath. We had a pretty productive assembly line going. I think it overall only took about 3 hours to complete all of the chickens. But once they were done, they needed to hangout in the cool bath for a few hours.



This gave us some time to head back to the Weber house and relax for a bit. Jon and I played catch for awhile and then played with the baby kittens that are about 2 weeks old. We even named them.....Lily, Midnight, Mellow, Basil, Rose, and Tard. Bailey really wanted to play with the kittens, but they did not really care for her. They kept opening their mouths and hissing, but they are so little that it did not really phase the dog. Plus playing to Bailey means picking them up and throwing them around and that might hurt them.


Later in the afternoon we met Bob & Val out at the lake and Bob took Megan, Betty, and I out tubing and skiing. I absolutely love going tubing, but my arms can only hang on for so long. Bailey was super happy that we went to the lake, she hates to come out of the water. Jon will throw a ball out for her to fetch, she will bring it back to him, and then turn around and start swimming back out again before he even throws it.



After all that fun it was back to work on the assembly line again as it was time to cut up and bag the chickens into serving sizes. Its nice when you have a lot of hands helping in the process because it goes so much quicker....I think it only took about an hour to get them all cut up and bagged. Jon and I got 6 chickens, 4 of which we cut up and 2 we left whole. They will be great on our Weber grill (no relation).


By the time we got home, Bailey was just so tuckered out, I laid down on the floor and she curled right up next to me and closed her eyes.