Monday Update

 I added 3 days to the Year of Celebrations December this past week...

Slowly getting sections done. These are always fun to work on and I just love the Christmas colors with this one. 

We all had a fantastic weekend. Mom and Jeremiah went to a family Christmas party with mom's extended family. Jeremiah gets to attend because he's just that awesome. So Fred and me planned on a date day/night. We decided to go geocaching. Then the weather forecast had a lovely day full of 45 mph wind. We still wanted to go so off we went...

Spike got to come along of course. Our goal was these 42 geocaches that were in the shape of a puzzle piece. Each cache had a puzzle to solve to get where it was hidden. They were a lot of fun to solve. We were able to get all of them and the smiling faces are showing that. That means found. It was a fun day. Yes cold and windy but we still had a blast. Spike got to meet his first cow and didn't know what to think. Especially when it moooed loudly so Spike gave a low growl in return. We decided to spend the night at our cabin because it missed us. We had a lovely evening relaxing and watching movies together. It was perfect and a great reboot for the upcoming few weeks of craziness. Jeremiah and Mom made it home safe and had a great time as well.

Well busy busy in the next little bit to scramble and finish everything that needs done before the big guy (Santa) can come visit. Here's hoping we can all pull it off. Stay strong. Smile. Love Yourself.

Monday Update

 Hello to all my favorite readers. Well hello to any of my readers I guess haha. I'm back. So far so good. I got two stitching days last week. Wednesday and Thursday. I'm sure not back to my normal stitching non stop like winter time but I've accepted that. I've been doing a lot of surveys and making great money. I've made almost $700 this year already from surveys. Recently completed one where I was forced to taste test these mixed drinks from Seagrams haha. I'm supposed to get paid $200 here in a few weeks!!! Plus the drinks were delicious. I got one today to be a tester for a deodorant and I can get paid for my answers. I think it was like $20. Awesome. Anyway back to stitching... which is why you're here right?

I worked on Beer Dragon since I just LOVE that piece. Here it was before...

 

 I added 4 hours and 25 minutes into finishing up this page...

Very close to finishing up the page as you can see. This one will stay out. I really just love stitching on it. Plus no way could I put it down with that little bit to go on the page.

Fred and me had a fantastic weekend. Friday we headed down to our cabin. Saturday we went geocaching. I loaded a ton of pictures on my Facebook for my friends there. Here was our focus for the day Saturday...

They started doing Geoart. It's basically geocaches in the shape of something. This one is a fish as you can see. The targets are the posted coordinates on the geocaching website. Each one of the 22 caches is a puzzle. Since it would be hard to get the roads to match a real art design. So the question boxes with the smilies are where they actual hidden items were. We had a blast together. It was hot but we still enjoyed our day together very much. Only cost.....tank of gas. Memories made were SOOOO worth it. Here are a few of my favorite photos of the day...

The top photo you can see the geocache hanging on the left of the post toward the bottom. Tiny little green capsule that screws together. Inside was a log all rolled up. You write your name in this case THF which stands for Treasure Hunting Family that sure won't fit on that tiny paper. Get a point for logging the find. The third photo you can see the same type of little capsule hanging down from the wooden post. The tiny tiny little nano we found several of too. Hides perfect in metal signs. 

We ended the day with 30 new finds. We now have 1,718 finds total. We ate at a delicious brewery and headed back to our cabin for the night. Sunday we came home after just laying around and being lazy for several hours. It was a wonderful weekend. We have promised to not wait so long to have another geocaching day again. We really enjoyed ourselves.

So in between my fun weekend, laundry, household chores, and surveys. I've been sticking to the new healthier me as well. Guess what?!? Today I weighed myself and I've lost 2.5 pounds. I can't believe it. I'm so proud of myself. I've stuck to my plan mostly. Yesterday was the first day I didn't hit my goal of 5,000 steps a day. But that's okay I still got 3,494 steps on a bad day. I've stuck to my calorie intake every day. Today I added an aerobic exercise for half an hour. I'm really doing a lot better than I thought I would be. Yeah I hurt. But my arthritis hurt before hand anyway. At least this hurt means I've been working my bum off. Literally haha. I'm not going to bed hungry. I'm not forcing myself to do things I don't want to do. Well I didn't exactly enjoy my 30 minutes sweating exercise today but I knew it would benefit me more than annoy me haha. I'm finding the will power to take better care of myself. Damn it makes me proud of myself. 

So have a great week. Take care of yourself. Find time to stitch. If you don't find time to stitch find time for whatever makes you happy. Smile. We all deserve it.

Bash Fun with Several Posts Coming Soon

We went to our 5 night camping event last week. What a blur of fun! We are part of the setup crew so we head over Tuesday night. The real event starts Thursday for the public. It's located in Wauseon, Ohio at the Fulton County Fairgrounds. It's a fantastic location to support the seriously thousands of people who show up. We get people from other countries even! It's always a blast. They have had 15 of these events throughout the years and we have attended all but the first one. The first one we attended 14 years ago had an area with bon fires in the evening. It was deemed the adult party area. In the morning they said it was a wasteland of chairs, coolers, a car that got left behind, and no people anywhere. So they said it was like Area 51 and aliens had taken everyone. So from then on it was nicknamed the Area 51 part of the event. A college friend of ours was in charge of the area and my husband joined in to help take care of the fires. A few years ago our friend stopped attending the event and my husband took over as the head fire guy. He has 2 other friends help him out as well. There are 4 bon fires to keep going after all.

The theme is always a bird and then a theme to decorate around. This year was Raven and Medieval the main banner is at the top of this post. I love medieval stuff. Right above here is the banner to mark off our area.

Instead of our tent this year we borrowed our friends pop up camper. We've had so many hot hot years for this late July event. So for our first year with AC we were really looking forward to staying cool in the heat. Of course Tuesday night we had sweaters on haha. Never fails we finally have AC and it is cool. We did need it later in the week though and I swear it was the best Bash sleep I ever got. Plus our friend stayed in with us when he got there. We already told our friend we plan on using it every year now haha. We told him now we have joint custody of the camper haha.

This is my hot hubby lighting the fires. They use a propane tank and a flame thrower to light the fires. Awesome right?? They really get the fires going strong. Sure looks cool!!

Friday there was a poker run. You go around to 7 local businesses and collect stickers with a bar code on them. When you turn it in they scan them and the code generates a random card from a deck of cards. Winners are chosen based on your hand. Here is the sheet ready for the stickers...

The coordinates are on the other side. The top section already has a sticker on it on the above photo as you can see. The 3rd stop was a putt putt in the middle of a corn field. So as adults we wouldn't play would we? Well of course we would haha. We had a blast.

I even got a hole in one once but we won't mention my other scores of 400 that I just lied about haha. A few times I gave up after I got over too high to count haha. Stop 5 was a delicious restaurant that just opened. They reported they made $5,000 just from noon to 2 that day. So nice to pay back to the local places for allowing us to crash their small town.

The weather was fantastic the whole time. Never too hot. We did get a bit of wind and a few rain drops in the middle of the night one of the nights. Nothing like the storms we have got the past years though. We met new friends. We seen old friends we hadn't seen since last year's Bash. We made countless new memories. Like Rachel said no stitching because I was having way too much fun to do any.

The only problem with Bash is how much I hurt after. I wasn't feeling well at all when we got home. Think I was a bit dehydrated and got warm tearing everything down. Monday it developed into a just overall ick. So instead of doing my Monday blog update I chose to rest. I stitched and finished up my July #24HOCS homework. So now I have a few more updates to post next. July Smalls SAL. WIPocalypse. July Recap for #24HOCS and the August challenges have been released too. So some more posts to come soon.

Friday Update

I think it would have looked bad to have a Monday Update on Friday so you get a Friday Update instead haha.

First I have a finish to report...

I was able to get the stitching finished up on the very last day of July. But I had to wait till Wednesday morning to get it assembled. So close. At least it's finished. It's cheating and on display until I finish August....hopefully before September this time haha.

I can't believe it's August already. I remember in May when I thought it would be August before I knew it. Guess what! Here it is. What a blur the past few months have been. Getting the cabin finished. Enjoyed our weekends there. Now we've already had our big geocaching camping event in Ohio. It's called Midwest Geobash and it's in Wauseon, Ohio. It's just a tiny little town but boy I bet they love when we come to town. They had 1,389 people say they were coming and that's just the people who said they would be there. I know hundreds more just show up. 377 camp sites were booked in this huge fairgrounds. It's one heck of a party. People even fly in from other countries and I'm pretty sure all 50 states are represented. I know they were last year at least. We are in charge of the area where the night time bon fires are. It's called Area 51 because no one remembers it the next day haha. We have so much fun. This year was no different. Here is our camp area...

Our tent is in the middle under the one circus tent. The theme this year was circus. We had 9 different camper/tents in our section and we are all close friends so it was just a blast. I got this cool picture one day...

It was right over our campsite. X marks the spot for the place to be. Friendships. Smiles. Lots of laughs. It was a great 5 night camping trip. Next year is medieval theme and I am already looking forward to it. We have met so many wonderful people because of geocaching and this event brings everyone together for a whole lot of fun.

When Fred gets off work I bet you know where we are heading. Yep to the cabin. The work is mostly done on our cabin. I think we have just a bit more finishing touches on the deck. I know my dad always has things to do here and there but we will really be able to slow down and just enjoy our time there. Yep I have stitching packed to take with me.....just in case.

I hope everyone reading this has a great weekend.

Our Fun Weekend Away

Friday morning we hit the road for a mini vacation/weekend away. There is a geocaching event that goes on at Mackinac Island which is 5 and a half hours north of us. We normally are traveling and have been gone this time of year and miss the event. This year we didn't have plans so we said it was the perfect excuse to head up attend the event and spend the night on the island for our first time. When we go up this way we have always stayed on the main land and only went out to visit the island. So Friday night we stayed where we normally do then Saturday morning we took the ferry out to the island...

We had to really bundle up. It was COLD. If you look close there is ICE on Jeremiah's window. When the water would splash up on the window it would instantly freeze.

I'll use this picture to explain geocaching hopefully if you haven't heard of it. My smartphone has the app for geocaching on it. You pull up a map and pick the closest geocache and off you go. The name of this one was For the Birds. I gave my phone to Jeremiah and hoped he would be able to enjoy the find. Most the time they aren't very handicapped accessible. He was counting down the feet and pointing the direction the compass showed. When I spotted it I waited back and told Jeremiah have a look around. It was perfect for him. If you look close you can see the hole of the birdhouse is plugged. So that helps you tell right away it's not an official birdhouse. They put a tube with a screw lid in the hole. When you removed the lid there is a rolled up paper inside. You take the paper out and sign your team name. Ours is Treasure Hunting Family. Then you log the find and get a point for the find by your name. We ended up with only 7 this weekend because of how cold it was and we wanted to hang out with friends instead of freezing too bad haha.

This is Fred and me with our fancy hotel for the night. It's called the Grand Hotel. If you visit here in the season you have to pay $10 per person to even walk into the hotel. The rooms we heard are like $350 per person for the smallest room. There is also a very strict dress code after 6pm. So needless to say we have seen it from the outside but never visited it. They open this weekend for free to tour and only $190 for the night. So since it was our first time to stay on the island we decided to try it out. Look at our room...

There are 393 rooms in this hotel and each room is decorated different. We got to see several of the other rooms since it wasn't really open they just prop open all the doors so you can glance in. Wow! The room we stayed in was very basic compared to the others. The staff all was wearing tuxedos. Very fancy. Not somewhere we would stay again but something we can now say we did once at least.

We had a great time visiting with several friends who showed up for the event too. We had a very nice relaxing weekend and made it home safely yesterday about 5pm. It was a very nice weekend trip.

Now to start the new week. My Monday update won't be posted other than this one. I had NO stitching time at all last week. It was a very stressful week and I just didn't have the energy when I did sit down. Hopefully this week is better. Today has been run run run though of course. We are hopefully getting our correct cabin delivered tomorrow. So please send good thoughts that it's right. Plus it's my mom's birthday tomorrow. So we are going to Shipshewana Flea Market that opens for the season tomorrow. Maybe after that I will actually have a few days of nothing. We'll see. Hope you have a great week. Thanks for stopping by. I will be posting my WIPocalypse update here soon.

Monday Update

The Spring Bell Pull won my attention for 3 days after my February Calendar finish in the last post. I finished up the I block Wednesday...

 The I block took 9 days to do. After that I got two days into the N block...

Boy doesn't look like much for 2 days but this is a typical Stoney Creek with a ton of color changes. Sure makes the end result pretty though. Here is the whole Spring Bell Pull after 35 days of work now...

Saturday morning hubby and I went up to Lansing, MI. It is 2 hours north of us. The weather was horrible. We had snow and ice the whole weekend but we had a great time. One place we drove through had over a foot of snow! But we made it there and home safely. What made us go to Lansing.... We attended a geocaching Winter Social. This time of year it's nice to have an excuse to get out and we did just that. There were probably 50-70 people in attendance. It was a nice event. Unfortunately several of our friends couldn't make it because of the weather. So it was a little odd walking into the room and only knowing one person. But I decided to have fun anyway so I started up a conversation with a nice couple and we had a great time getting to know them. The social had a lovely catered meal that was very delicious. They also had a silent auction. I'm pretty sure this was my first time participating in a silent auction and more than likely my last. It was so stressful. I decided to bid on a few things and then kept getting outbid. So I was pouting and told hubby I really want that stuff. So it was now my life goal to win them no matter how much I had to pay haha. It was fun but I don't think I should do them very often. I made myself a nervous wreck up until it was over and I had won the items I wanted haha.

Look what I got though...

This beautiful fleece camping themed blanket (it's folding in half by the way). The border is crocheted too and adds so much to it. So beautiful and well done. We also got a few other things but the blanket was my big win. It will look adorable in our cabin.

We had another friend join us after the event. We told him he was demanded to join us and he did haha. We had a room at a hotel close by and so did the friend we ran into at the social. So we made a fun evening together. We walked to a nearby restaurant and had a fantastic dinner. Afterward we gathered in our hotel room which had a living room area and watched movies together. It was a very nice relaxing weekend and a great way to reboot ourselves. Jeremiah took great care of mom while I was gone. She is really doing well. So they took care of each other really. We were glad to be home safe and sound. The weather couldn't ruin our fun.

Now it's time for a new week. I hope everyone reads this has a great one. It's going to be a busy blog week. Wednesday is a Valentine blog hop. Thursday is Gifted Gorgeousness. This weekend is IHSW.  So I'll be back soon.

July Smalls SAL

Today is the check in for the Smalls SAL. As my readers have noticed I'm extremely busy. Just got back from a 5 night camping adventure. So here is my July Year of Whimsy...

Not finished. Since I've only got 2 days worth of work into it. But I have 3 more days to finish it before the month slides away so hopefully I'll reach my deadline.

We had a fantastic time at our camping getaway. Only one complaint. It was HOT!!! We had heat warnings each day. Even though I kept drinking water I think I got really dehydrated by the time we came home. So Sunday I was not feeling well at all. I'm finally feeling better but boy it took a lot out of me. I just LOVE camping but I love fall/spring camping a lot lot more. This year we did a lot more volunteering with the organizers to help out. I really enjoyed being more involved. We also have so many new friends that we enjoyed getting to know better. There were at least 1,500 people who attended the event. I got to meet one lady who flew in from Hawaii just for this event! She took 3 planes to get there. Crazy! But so much fun to be involved. It was a geocaching event called a Mega Event. We didn't do any geocaching since we make it more of a socializing time. I'm glad it's over but so thankful for all the memories.

Okay I'm off to finish July. I'll be back hopefully soon with a finish.

Road Rally Geocaching Event

We got home LATE last night but What a Weekend!!! We were up in Roscommon (Houghton Lake) in Michigan. It's way up in northern Michigan just about an hour from the bridge. Here's some of my fav pictures...

We shared space in our friend's camper for the weekend. It was nice. One night we needed heat. The next day we needed the AC haha.

This is our game board for the event caches. When you found the geocache they had stickers that matched a spot on the board. It was really fun. I wish we would have got them all but just not enough time in our day. We didn't want to run like crazy the whole day so we stopped at 29 of the 52 caches. Here is our finished game board...

For some reason it keeps loading sideways but you get the idea.

I just love the thick woods, ponds, and lakes we stumbled upon. So beautiful. We saw an Osprey nest...

We found crazy fun caches...

This one moved and made noise. I knew it was going to and yet when I grabbed it I jumped horrible haha. The container was hidden in the mesh outfit part. Funny part is that it blended in well enough we walked right past it the first time haha.

There was a cache in this beautiful water area. I tried to take a short cut by wading in the water...

I ended up finding a hole and going in. Good thing I packed a towel haha.

Sunday we turned in our game boards. They gave out prizes and we all had lunch. It was a wonderful time! This is my favorite caching event by far. They said something about next year being the end and I will miss it so much. They've had it 9 years now so I don't blame them for wanting to take a break though. They do so much work to pull this event together. We've went 3 times now and each time has just been amazing. One year we RACED and got all the caches. It was fun but crazy so this time we just relaxed and enjoyed our day. I gotta say I really prefer the way we did it.

Now 4 more sleepies until we leave to go camping at my family campground with friends for the 4th of July weekend. Busy Busy still. Love it! So Thankful!!

Vacation Day # 7

Today was our last day here in OBX. I can't be sad because we had such an amazing time. Plus we have more fun stuff coming up in the next two months to look forward to. We had talked about going kayaking today. We got to looking at it was $65 a person for 2.5 hours. That seems very high for a short time. So after our fun time yesterday grabbing geocaches we decided to do that again today.

I'm so glad we did! It was so much fun!!

We ended up spending 5 hours in this amazing wood preserve that I would have never known existed unless it was for geocaching. It was right off the main highway and yet we were almost completely alone the entire day. We did run into another couple geocaching so that was neat. We found 20 caches total today. So many pictures I took. I'll share my few favorites...

 

 

 

If you look to the right of me in the bottom picture. You will see a small container hanging. That is a micro geocache. We found several today just like that one. You wouldn't see it unless you were looking for it. Actually sometimes when you are looking for them they are still hard to find haha. It was a very fun filled day. Only one bad thing happened. A huge killer (okay maybe not) spider was hiding under a log we found a cache under. It was HUGE and I hate spiders! So I had the heebie geebies for a long time but I guess we were in his territory so I should forgive him.

It's been one heck of a trip!!! Tomorrow we will start the 14 hr journey home. We will stop one night on the way. I'm looking forward to seeing Jeremiah, Mom, and Izzy (our dog).

Vacation Day # 6

Today was another great day. We had a delicious breakfast at Jolly Roger. Then we went back down to Hatteras. There is a really neat museum there called Graveyard of the Atlantic. It has a lot of information and exhibits on the many shipwrecks along the coast here. I got Fred to pose for the above photo haha. Doesn't he look perfect actually? We had a really good time looking around. Then we thought we would geocache our way back. We ended up with having a fantastic day full of geocaching. We got 14 new ones today. Making our total for vacation 27 already. Here are a few of my fav photos...

We really enjoyed each geocache. The UFO house had one by the landing gear. The red chair had one under the seat. Each one is hidden so people are aren't looking don't find it. But we have a fantastic time hunting them down. Sometimes they lead you to neat things you wouldn't find any other way. Here is my fav for the day...

This was called the Cora Tree. Here is the spooky info about it...

The Cora Tree was immortalized in Charles Harry Whedbee’s classic book Blackbeard’s Cup and Stories of the Outer Banks, which claims the twisted old tree is cursed by a witch.
The legend says that Cora was an old woman who lived alone with only her baby in a shack near the tree in the 1700s. Whenever she would go to town, bad things would happen, and she was eventually accused of being a witch and set to be burned along with her child at the base of the great tree.
Just as the fire was about to be lit, Cora’s baby reportedly turned into a giant cat with green eyes and a red mouth, and it fled into the nearby woods. Lightening then struck the tree, but when the smoke cleared, Cora was gone. All that remained were the letters C O R A burned into the tree trunk, which are said to be still visible today.

No luck finding the C O R A but I did find the geocache in the tree.

We got pizza and brought it back to the room. We have planned to spend tomorrow grabbing more geocaches since we had so much fun today.