Killing time during a Sunday evening thunderstorm

Now you see them...

What did you do on Sunday evening?? Watched the amazing display of lightning and heard the dazzling array of thunderclaps, whilst enjoying the pelting rain, is my sincerest hope! It was a delightful evening - though i will admit to still being a little leery of thunderstorms (but only when i'm by myself at night in the dark!! I think that's justifiable - i don't freak out or anything but i'm not always enamoured by the idea of being zapped right down from the crown of my head to the tip of my toes with a huge voltage of electricity, which would burn holes in my shoes and cause me to quiver and have frizzy hair!) However, i was not alone on Sunday eve as i was accompanied by some very good friends of mine who dragged their Settler's game out of semi-early retirement and dusted off the cover and cracked out the little men for a round of nefarious dealings and underhanded techniques. Yep, it's been a while since our last game and so i was quite rusty - witnessed by my score of 5, but possibly this was worsened by playing by candlelight (for atmosphere but not so good if you have to find out if you have a tree or a rock on the board), and a total lack of concentration on the game due to a fixation with the weather! But it was fun times all around - Alvar beat us all soundly and made us realize we have to sharpen up our gaming skills and hone our minds to better defeat our tabletop competition!

Now you don't... Settlers by Candlelight...

Secrets and Surprises

Some of the little culprits who aided and abetted our scheming!

What do you get when you put three responsible women in a kitchen with a table piled up with 75 balloons and a birthday on the way?? Add into the mix three rather hyper children, a room longing to be filled with balloons, and lots of hot air and you have the recipe for a fun time!! Somehow my dear friend Carina's room became absolutely crammed with these colourful globes of air which would randomly pop for no good reason at all, causing palpitations and frights to all who were involved in the process!

REd is pretty....oh so pretty (scary!)

Oh Deer....

Now, i've had a few days off this week, mysteriously, all the shifts seemed to have dried up this week or have fallen into the black hole that sometimes nursing shifts fall into, but this has left me with gaps of time in my life schedule (or shedule, depending on how you like to pronounce things). These gaps of time have afforded me the occasions to indulge in some thinking, sometimes about minor things in life but occasionally about deep and meaningful things as well - maybe i'm finally becoming a daughter of my mother at the age of 30, a slow learner.

Anyhow, my big think for today or actually last night as i was careening down country roads in the pitch-black darkness surrounded by disorienting fog, was this, i hope i don't meet a deer. But then i thought to myself would a deer really like to be wandering around at 11:34 pm? If i were Bambi, i would think it would not be too easy to see the grass and leaves and other such floral delectibles that i would like to indulge in. Or do deer have night vision? They seem to like to creep out in the early mornings and at twilight, but where do they go in the middle of the day? (prime eating time in my opinion) Do they just sleep the night away in the woods in a little thicket (that's a real Disney word - Carina's looking at me like i'm from Mars currently because it took me a little longer than normal to come up with that word - i was stuck on nest, copse, glade...and finally with a triumphant cry, remembered that word!) So that's been my deep thought for the day - crazy or not. Doesn't it make you want to think too? Maybe someday we will fawnally come up with a good answer. But at this stag in the game, there are no clearcut antlers so the buck stops here! Heehee!

Fog bound

Brrr... shiver... my fingers and toes are still a little numb and tingly from spending the greater portion of the late morning and early afternoon outside... doing what you may ask? Cheering on the kids at the Timothy play day... It was sorta a chilly misty event, children blundering into each other in the fog as they tried to compete in blanket waterballoon tosses, shoes throwing, soccer ball kicking, sponge relays and all other assorted fun games! Aaah, the good old days of Field Day - i reminisced about this with Laura - and i remembered how much fun it was to walk around free from school for a day, garnering up ribbons on our shorts and eating ourselves sick with candy - especially licky-sticks.. those were my favorite!!! I had one a few years ago and sadly it didn't quite meet my memory's standards, but things change as you get older. That and Nerds. I still like Nerds. How you would get a double pack and sometimes there would be a few of the wrong colour on the other side and how that always seemed kinda fun.
And our hill at school - running up and down it... and the log - sitting on it and having long chats and playing clapping games whilst we waited for our groups to finish. It was more about individual competition then, which can be a good thing - a little competition is healthy for the soul and body - i speak even as one who didn't always do so well on sports days except for running and standing long jump - i usually did pretty good in those, until the year we had to put a hop, skip and jump in there for Triple jump and then i fell apart, too many things to coordinate at once! And having Mom and my younger siblings come and cheer us on for the day - that was always supremely fun. Hence why i dragged my sometimes lazy butt out today and went to cheer Esther and her compatriots on. To Field Day!!
p.s. whilst my fingers are now warm, the rest of me is still pretty much cold, so here's also to a cuppa hot chocolate!

What to do?

Last night i faced a moral dilemma... as i pulled onto Twenty Road from my parent's survey to head for home last evening, there came through the intersection before me a large pickup truck. The truck did not stop (as much of the traffic coming through that intersection does not do, so that in itself was not so unusual) but it kept driving up Twenty Road at a very erratic pace and weaving to and fro, now putting the bright lights on, now putting the flashers on. I had no idea what was going on. I maintained my distance from this fellow, not sure what to expect from him. Behind me was another pickup truck, following behind me at a discreet pace, and my first thought was of some disabolical plot between these two, to surround unsuspecting motorists, to force them off the road together and to steal their money. (Fortunately i had just been to church, so my wallet was empty). However, this was not the case, to my relief, but my next immediate thought was that this fellow was rip-roaring drunk and the other truck was a buddy of his following him home. But why you would allow your friend to drive in such an inebriated state is beyond me.
They eventually pulled off to the side of the road and i pulled on ahead and left them behind. However, my conscience could not allow me to carry on home in an unscathed manner. My head kept replaying scenarios which may be applicable to this situation. Perhaps the first guy was hurt or too upset about something and just needed a break, perhaps there's been a domestic quarrel, perhaps it was none of my business. But then i thought, if there's someone killed because of a drunk driver on this road because i didn't stop to make a difference, it would probably haunt me forever... so i took a few passes up and down the road and other than the two trucks standing there behind each other with their flashers on, and a lady talking on a cell phone, there didn't seem to be any emergencies as such. But as a single girl, i didn't really dare to go much further on my own... so i came home, told Carina the short and long of it and we ventured out together... but all parties involved were gone by that point... so who knows really if there was something funny or nefarious in the making and we may have stopped it or things may have settled down... These little moments in life occur when your life touches another and we never know what effect we will have on the other person! I'm glad i turned around and went back, and i'm glad also that there was nothing to be done for us... I hope all involved got home safely and in one piece!

Whatizit??

Well, yesterday afternoon, my parents and I betook ourselves to the field that runs at the end of their street, a field which is now burdened down by heavy bulldozers and earthmovers and which will shortly be filled with a huge number of disgustingly large houses squeezed onto postage stamp sized lots with too many bedrooms to count and families with only one child to fill all those rooms... as if there weren't enough houses already in this city, but they have to allow urban sprawl to ooze its way onto my parent's quiet little street. Why, oh, why can't the city dwellers stay where they are and leave our little paradise alone? Not only are these houses coming, but the city is planning to add sewers, sidewalks and curbs to ensure that there is an urban feel to life. Not that any of this was asked for since we seemed to be doing quite well without all these "improvements". Sometimes i can feel so angry and frustrated with the city planners who never listen to the "little guys" and simply proceed with their plans in all their concrete glory.

So we took a little wander out in the field to see what there was to see, to ponder the loss of country life and to see what changes were afoot. About a year ago, there were some people who whose job it was to find out if there was anything archeologically significant to be discovered in the field. They dug a lot of little test holes in the ground and spent some days seeking but apparently not finding the lost Incan city of gold or Atlantis or any other archeological treasures. Thus development could continue... Mom and I thought we had to take matters into our own hands and see if there was any last ditch efforts which could be expended to halt the building process... At last our search proved fruitful, there hidden in the tiretracks of a large machine lay our treasure! It just displayed a little rim of ceramic to us from the dirt grave. However our curiosity was peaked and we now would not be denied. We had to know what this thing was... Was it an ancient Indian burial pot? Was the former emperor of North America perhaps entombed here? We frantically dug on, using the only tools available to us, shards of the former pot?/bowl?/urn? We most likely botched up every single archeological dig rule - first of all stomping all over the ground in the vicinity, not using white gloves, not using a cute little vacuum, using a piece of the artifact to unearth the larger part, and not taking one single picture of the dig. However, sometimes in life, one has to break a few rules! After much blood, sweat and hacking, we managed to extract the below pictured object from the clutches of the muddy earth.

Its identity has since been made know to us, but as we carried it out of the field, multiple uses for this object filled our thoughts - perhaps it was a huge ceramic ashtray from the explorers who first discovered Mount Hope? Perhaps it was a lamp base for a huge primative searchlight used by the first inhabitants of this area to find their lodges back at night? Perhaps it was a tractor wheel mechanism - this was my best guess since it had two initials embossed on it "HI" which could have stood for Harvester International. Though HI could also be Hamilton International - which led me to believe it was part of an airplane which was accidently lost in the Twenty Triangle - slightly less well known but equally as mysterious as the Bermuda Triangle! Though this option was a little bit shady since HI can also be taken as IH which could potentially be International Harvester or Internal Hangover or Investing Hamilton)

The options were endless - we wanted to bury this object back in the middle of one of the archeological test sites and then call them up and ask them to take one last look - and then when the object was found, all the plans for housing development would have to be put on hold indefinitely as the experts were all called in to identify the mysterious thing and build a theme park to celebrate its history and then we would have so much traffic from the theme park that the initial housing development would start to look pretty good.

So in the end, we took it home, hosed it off and it is now on display on the outside table, a symbol of the past and our quest for discovery.

Mom's war wounds displayed alongside the mystery object.

Presumably the underside of the object... Happy guessing!