April and Taxes

The end of March is but a breath away, and with April comes Canada's tax deadline. We took our taxes in two weeks ago, and left them with our person to be done in our absence. We have always sat and waited with him, answering questions and the like as he has done them int eh past, and to be honest I am a little worried that he has yet to get back to us. I have left him two messages now, and still no word.

I will call again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next until i can get ahold of him.

My husband and I count on our tax return for different things each year. Getting aninsurance quote is of no use to me without knowing what is in our price range. I also want to remove our sunroof and replace it with a nice SOLID piece of roof so that I no longer have to worry about the drip drip drip as the ice melts on the window in the winter.

Annnnd. I want to repaint the living room, kitchen and hallway. And by repaint I mean, finally paint, becuase we have lived here for nearly six years and have yet to paint the house in OUR colors. I absolutely HATE the colors (dark and light grey) that the previous owners painted the house. Its so SO dark!

So. In conclusion. I need to know what our return is so that I can plan accordingly!

A Plea

I have a new blog. Not really really new, it is a few months old, but nonetheless, newish.

Socks N Paws, is my website devoted to socks, all things sock, wonderful and great socks.

But I need your help. I need you to send me socks photos of your wonderful socks!

Please send all photos, along with the name you would like to be known by and the website I can link to you, to me at blueapintred at gmail dot com.

And remember, Happy Socks make Happy People!

Lucky Us

Ten years ago we were in a car accident, on our due date with our first baby, and totaled our car. Lucky us, we had another car, a tiny red ford, and none of us were seriously hurt.

A few weeks after we started using the wee red ford, the ..uhm...something blew, and that car was dead. But, My husbands parents bought us a car. Lucky us.

Since then we have moved on to a bigger car, one that fits us as a family, and so far we haven;t had to worry about things like mechanical breakdown insurance, becuase, Lucky us, we live three doors away from my in laws and my father in law helps us with the regular maintenance on the car. We get our oil changed, at just the cost of buying new oil, in his garage, we fill up our tires with his air compressor, in his garage. So Lucky us.

I DO worry, however, now that our car is ten years old, that something big is going to happen to kill the car past what my father in law can fix, butttttt. I try to not worry about it as much as possible.

In other news. I bought new socks yesterday, they are a purple paisley design. I will be putting them up at my Sock Love website, Socks n Paws, tomorrow, make sure you stop in and take a look around!

GRR

So my hair is really pissing me off. You see, I don't spend any time at all looking at hair loss treatment reviews becuase even thought I lose tonnes and tonnes of hair a day, I have so bloody much of it, I don't care! My pony tail is about three inches around, If I don't dry my hair before bed, it is still wet when I wake up. It takes SO long to wash, condition and dry it every day and OMG the tangles.

Add to that the fact that it is so thick that when I leave it down it makes my head look stupid small, I just hate it!

And lets not even get into the curse of natural curly hair! I know, I know, people with curly hair want straight and people with straight want curly, but holy hell, if you lived ONE WEEK with my hair, you would never, ever beg for curly hair again.

I have so much hair that when I try to use a straight iron on it, my arm gets too sore to finish before I am HALFWAY done!

I wish I could cut it all off, but no part of me wants to go through the annoying in between stage EVER again.

GRRRR!

How cute is this picture? I was watching her struggle to stay awake, but in the end, she failed. How is it that kids can fall asleep at the drop of a hat, I mean, no kids will ever need natural sleep aids, for heavens sake, even a cranky baby will drop off into oblivion within minutes of you taking them for a car ride!

I wish we, adults, could fall asleep as easy as kids can. My husband suffers from insomnia, and i read on twitter of a lot of other people who don't sleep well and it is sad. I tend to fall asleep really easily, but on the odd night that I can;t I know how annoying it is to lay there awake, knowing you need to sleep becuase if you don't your whole next day will be ruined!

People always talk about bottling up a childs energy and selling it to make a fortune, but the same could be said about their ability to fall asleep so easily!

Did you know

I was talking about weight loss over at one of my other sites, and was reminded by my husband that there are somefood that burns fat. Food that takes more calories to chew and digest than they give you.

Celery for sure is one of them, and We think apples too, but the apples don't matter becuase i hate apples. I do love celery, but I am pretty sure that loading them with Cheeze Whiz or peanut butter makes the calorie count go up, quite a bit LOL.

And then there is the fact that I love to use dip - usually Golden Italian, on all of my uncooked vegetables.

But it is a very neat idea, eating foods that actually make you lose weight. Now if only we could invent a potato chip or chocolate that does the same thing, guilt free easter bunny eating FTW!

Friday mail call

We don't get mail delivered over the weekend in Canada - I'm not sure that anyone gets mail delivered over the weekend, but anyway, that means that Friday is a special day when it comes to mail.

Especially when we are waiting on things. For example, Books.

I ordered five books - or was it four? I can't even remember, and they aren't due to be here until next Wednesday, but I have never, ever had an Amazon order come the day it is slated to come, it always comes before that day, so we were really hoping that the mail would have that super special brown cardboard box that means our order has come.

It did not.

It had bills.

And two baby shower invitations which is cool 'cus I love wandering through the baby sections looking at those teeny tiny clothes and remembering my boys when they were that small.

Although....I'm not too fond of those stupid baby shower games.

A duh moment

The other day we were at the inlaws for a quick coffee before heading out for Date Night and my father in law and Micah were talking about toilets and renovations in general.

My father in law kept talking about getting new American Standard toilets for the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms, and i commented that we should get toilets that were Canadian standard because, duh, we live in Canada.

The two of them started laughing, and were in fact laughing too hard to stop and explain to me that American Standard toilets is a brand name, not a type of toilet.

I HATE when I do shit like that, my inlaws are quick to remind people of their past mistakes, so I will be hearing about this for quite some time to come :o(

A question for My US readers

Are electronics that much cheaper in the sates then in Canada/

My inlaws returned form Arizona where they spend the winter with a new flat screen TV. They went out there with the plan of buying one simply becuase they were cheaper out there. I assumed that Canada and the US were pretty on par when it came to things like electronics. I mean, geographically, we are not that far apart LOL

So. On average, what would you say a mid size flat screen tv costs out there?

also, My inlaws are planning on putting the tv up with one of those flat panel mount thingys, but only putting the TV ont he mount when the kids come over to visit. Isn't that weird? I told them that it will look ugly to have an empty mount sicking on the wall, and to just leave the TV up, but, in their weirdo religion they aren't supposed to even own a television, much less watch it, so they kinda want to keep it hidden for when churchy people come over for coffee, I guess.

Kids O_o

Kids are weird.

When i need to run to the grocery store to pick up milk or bread or some other thing, I always ask the boys if they want to go with me, and they always ask "Are we getting a toy?" When I say no, they return to whatever they were doing and tell me they don;t want to come.

All that changed last week when our little town got one of those self check out POS systems. Now the boys are checking the fridge to see if we are almost out of milk and making double the toast in hopes that we run out of bread.

They love scanning the items themselves and Logan is absolutely enamored of swiping the debit card.

Kids = Weird

Smokey's New Roomate

When I started watching my brothers kids, I set up a playpen downstairs for the baby to sleep, but when the girls started coming at 5Am, I had Micah drag the playpen upstairs and we put it int he dogs room.

The dog's room, is Smokey's and my room. I have all my sewing stuff in there, several book shelves and Smokey's extremely large kennel. And now a playpen.

There is no room for me now, in the room. I can't pull my stool out to sit behind my machine, nor can I dream of treadmills or elliptical that I could use to work out.

Other than the dogs room, though, there really is no other place for Baby B to sleep, So I will just have to put on my big girl panties and deal with it, eh?

OMG BACON!

Wow. If ever there was a time to look up a life insurance online quote, its after reading an article about this.

This being the Bacon Explosion. Its a sausage, wrapped in bacon, with bacon on the inside, topped with barbecue salt - lots of it, and barbecue sauce. I can feel my arteries clogging as I type this, and yet...I kind of want to make it!

I love bacon, I really do. I love it crispy but not burned, and never ever underdone. I hate any bacon that is smooshy. But, after a half pound few slices, the salt gets to me and I have to stop. And drink a LOT of water. I cannot imagine a family of five, like mine, being able to eat soemthing like this.

What's that saying? Ahh yes... There IS such a thing as too much of a good thing.