Bike Season!

The kids rode their bikes to school this morning. You know what that means right? There is hardly any snow left and very few waterlogged sidewalks! They were so excited that I said yes when they asked, they didn't know what to do with themselves, lol. It was a mad rush to find their helmets and get them adjusted but they managed to get off to school in lots of time, only to arrive back home 5 minutes later because Beth's head was cold and she wanted a toque. A toque and a bike helmet...had to re-adjust the straps of course.

Chris happened to be at the school this morning and saw the girls arrive. He has been wanting to get the girls new bikes, and me being as cheap as I am, have been making him hold off. So what if Beth's bike used to be pink but is now so old it's pale white? Who cares that she has a banana seat older than me? She loves her bike. And Katie's bike, well who wouldn't love a bike that was made out of old parts from the dump? Seriously, we call it the dump bike. When our last renters left, one of the random pieces of junk they left behind was a bmx bike frame. I wanted dh to take it to the dump with the other junk, but he thought he could salvage it. While he was at the dump with the other junk, he found a rim that would fit the bike so he brought it home. It fit perfectly and the tire was even good, so he went back to the dump to search for more treasure. He found another rim and tire which also fit and the tire was also still good. A little WD40 on the old chain and the dump bike was good to go.

Apparently when they arrived in style on their old banana seat and dump bikes this morning (sporting the only helmets this town has ever seen, and jeans tucked into their rubber boots, never mind the toque under the helmet) dh was quite embarrassed, lol. He phoned me from the school to tell me the girls arrived on time and that they needed new bikes. We're moving this summer, to a town that is notorious for bikes being stolen. Can't we hang onto the banana and dump bikes for a while longer since they will most likely just have new bike stolen if we buy them?

Just wait til everyone sees Anna on her Super Bike (she named it herself). It's an old plastic one, with the handle you can push to help them along. And it only has one pedal, and that's a piece of wood that the last owners had put on. The one pedal thing doesn't seem to slow her down.

Old Videos

While going through my picture files I found some short video clips I had taken a while back when I had my nephews over for a couple nights. Enjoy!

Generation gap

Anna has just proven to me that she is growing up in a completely different world than I did. I'm sure we've all noticed that kids today have things very differently than we did as kids, for instance the first thing my kids do when they see a stuffed animal in the store is press its stomach or hand or foot to see if it talks. Or when you take a picture of a child they immediately run to see what the picture looks like on the other side of the camera, even if you are using a 35mm, and they don't understand why you would have such a weird camera without a screen to get your instant photo gratification.

So today's proof of a generation gap was the following:

Anna and Beth have been playing together very nicely this morning (both were home sick from school and preschool). They were imagining they were friends and were having a sleep over at each other's houses. They even asked the imaginary moms for permission. They were playing in their room with the door closed, but we can still hear the game. Well, Chris called Beth to tell her he is ready to glue gun this craft she brought home from school, and we hear Anna say to Beth "I'll pause the game". The door opens, out they come and Anna stops, looks into the room, and says "Pause!" Because the game might have gone on without them had it not been 'paused', lol.

Test the Nation

Apparently there was a show on CBC last night called Test the Nation. I didn't watch (I was busy painting once the kids were in bed) but I did the online test today. It's just an IQ test, not country specific or anything so try it out and post your results in my comments section...if you dare, lol.

Take the Test!

It asks you to guess your IQ before taking the test, and I know I am a well-rounded, above average intelligent person (and so humble too I might add), so I guessed 130. I've taken online IQ tests before and generally scored around there. I think I should have gotten a couple extra points for guessing so close to what my actual score was, lol. Anyways here are my results:

And some interesting facts from the Test the Nation site:

• The average IQ is between 90 and 109. If you score 132 or more, you can call yourself a genius. (Ohhhh, I was so close. Can you imagine how difficult I would be to live with if I had actually scored 132? I'd be making my kids call me Mommy Genius, or Mommy G for short!)
• Researchers have shown that each year of schooling is good for about 3.5 IQ points.
• Conversely, dropouts lose IQ points. Swedish researchers found a 1.8-point IQ loss for each year of high school missed after dropping out.
• People with high IQ tend to live longer and suffer less from certain diseases like depression, dementia and schizophrenia, but they also tend to suffer more from obsessive-compulsive disorder.
• Women with a higher IQ are 40% less likely to marry.
• Caffeine can improve your IQ score (doesn't make you smarter but makes you more alert and increases short-term memory).
• Wine drinkers on average have a higher IQ than beer drinkers. Studies show a slight advantage to wine drinkers — but do wine drinkers have higher IQs because they drink wine or vice-versa ? It may be that some people with high IQ reach a high social status and then choose to drink wine to fit in. (see table below for alcohol consumption data of high IQ countries).
• IQ is not influenced by family size or birth order.
• Workers distracted by phone calls, e-mails and text messages suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana, a British study shows.
• A chemical found in strawberries and other coloured fruit and vegetables has been found to boost the memory. Fisetin, a naturally occurring flavonoid, stimulates the signalling pathways that enhance long-term memory, according to the Californian and Japanese researchers. The catch - lead researcher Pamela Maher said it would take 4.5kg a day to achieve a beneficial effect.
• A recent study has shown that it is possible to increase one’s IQ by regularly playing puzzle games.
• A drop in IQ has been found to be an early predictor of Alzheimer’s disease—up to a decade before the onset of the health problem.

The kitchen cupboards are coming along.

I've painted all the trim and most of the doors. I had a problem with the doors turning out slightly yellow, which didn't really matter UNTIL I put them up next to the trim and then it just looked wrong. We think it was because we stripped the doors down to the wood, but did not strip the trim, and somehow after 1 coat of primer and 5 coats of paint, the wood color was still seeping through. I ran out of paint anyways so we got a new brand, and repainted one coat on the yellowed doors and then they looked fine. Since we had a bunch more doors stripped already, I just used about 3 coats of primer on them and then painted them. They are still drying so I don't know if they will be white white or yellow white yet, lol. The bottom sets of doors and drawers we decided not to strip, just to sand the edges to give them a cleaner look. The doors have all been painted now, and just the drawers are left to sand and paint. Hopefully tomorrow will be the end of kitchen painting.

We'd like to get the house listed soon, so once the kitchen is done we can paint the ceilings in the front and back porches. Before we moved in they must have had some water leakage problems. I remember when we bought the house the shingles were only a year or so old, so that was probably when they fixed the leaks. We never had any leakage at all, thank goodness, but we do have the water stains from the leaks. The real estate agent we had over a couple weeks ago thought we should paint the ceilings so it doesn't look like there is a leakage problem. I wonder if we can just paint the water stains or if that will look funny, or if people looking would even notice even if it did look funny? Hmmmm.

My new kitchen table!

It looks big. I hope it's not too big and makes my kitchen too much smaller than it is already. I really like it though. You can see the doorless cupboards in the background.

Six years ago today!

At about this time I was already in the hospital being induced. I wouldn't go into labor for another 6 hrs or so from now, and Beth was not born until just before 1am on the morning of the 15th, but she was on her way!

It's hard to believe my little girl is turning 6 tomorrow!

Mother Nature is a big ol' B%&#!

It was beautiful a few days ago, everything was melting. Of course I complained a little bit about all the water and mud, and the extra 3 laundry loads of jackets, splash pants and the like, but come on already. It was melting a few days ago and today it's -15 C with a windchill making it feel like -26 C, and it's getting colder as the day goes on. What the?

On the plus side, since it got colder yesterday, our wayward cat came back home. He went out a few nights ago, and wouldn't come in when I went to bed so I left him out. We didn't see him again until last night. We even checked his hiding spot (an abandoned old building near our old house) a couple of times with no luck. I guess the cold got the better of him. The girls were sure happy he came back home!

And in more exciting (to me only I'm sure) news, Chris should be home with out new table in a few hours. We had bought the floor model (big price drop for the floor model), and today the store called to say they had a new one boxed in the back and would prefer we took that one if it was okay with us, since then they wouldn't have to unpack it and put it out as a floor model. Fine with me, I'll take a brand new table over a floor model for the same price as a floor model any day, lol. It had better be easy to put together though, my kitchen is already a mess with no cupboard doors and I don't need to add a half assembled table to the mix.

Your eyes are NOT deceiving you!

This really is a new blog entry. I know it's been almost a month, but I blame it all on my camera. I hate not being able to take pictures of what's going on in our lives and without the pictures I don't feel like blogging about it I guess. And I am really just being a big baby about my camera because it does work, it's just the lcd screen that is broken, it's like using my old 35mm again, lol.

So what's been going on at our lives?

We're pretty positive about where our transfer will be taking us the summer. It should be official by April 1st. Since we haven't heard we're NOT going we're pretty sure we are. So since we got the unofficial word a few weeks ago we contacted a realtor about selling our house. There had been a few houses for sale in town, but they have all sold which is great for us. Nothing to compare our house too for one thing, and obviously people are looking to move to this town. We have not signed any papers with the agent yet so we're not on the market and we already have one person who is wanting to see it before it's listed to buy for his company, and our agent has called back to let us know she's had a few calls asking her if anything was coming up in town so the sooner we get it listed the better. That's all great for us. We've been very worried about selling since this house was already on the market for almost 2 yrs about a year ago. No one was moving to town, but I guess now with things booming in the city people are looking for affordable small town living. Our fingers are crossed that this will be a much quicker sale, lol.

So with the house being almost listed we've been doing more home reno's. Last I blogged we had put the laminate floor in the porch and the bathroom was done except for one piece of baseboard (which is still not in, lol). Since then we have put some wallboard up in the basement to make it look more 'finished'. We've also started taking down all the kitchen cupboard doors to strip the layers of paint off and then give them a fresh coat. I've primed a few white and it's hard to believe how non-white they were before. They were a very yellowed white, so this should really brighten up the kitchen. Once they are done, we'll call the real estate agent to come back and take a look and sign some documents. Then I'll be asking you all to cross your fingers for me.

So on the selling end we're pretty much good to go, but the buying end is scary. There is not a lot available in the town we will be moving to so we've been keeping an eye on the mls listings every day and we have local spies keeping their eyes open for the Sale by Owner signs. We also have our eye on 10acres south of town that has been for sale privately. It used to have a trailer on it, so all the hookups are there which reduces the cost of putting a home there by a bit. Right now the owner has someone from Alberta interested in it, and he has first dibs, but he will know in the next couple of weeks if it's still available or not. We had been looking at an old (but nice) double wide trailer to put on the land, but the trailer has since sold and we've since talked to every mobile home moving company and none will move a double wide, so it's not like we would have had any way to get it to the land anyways. At the moment we are looking at the cost of RTM's (Ready to Move) and the cost of digging a basement. It's all so up in the air right now, and it makes me nervous. There are so many unknowns with moving a house to an acreage and digging a basement and connecting the house to power, water, gas etc. What are utility rates like on an acreage, what are taxes? We've asked around and we get different answers from everyone we speak to it seems. Sure it would be exciting to get a new house and live on an acreage but a small part of me just hopes the guy from Alberta buys the land so we don't have to ask the questions anymore. One thing all the people we ask have in common is the belief that now is the time to build an acreage because realty in the area we are moving to is taking off right now and we would stand to make a few dollars when we sold. Arghhhh!!!!

So other than eating, sleeping and breathing moving options not much is going on. We bought a new kitchen table today and Chris is going to pick it up tomorrow which is exciting. We've needed a new one for a while, a long while. I'll take a picture with my crappy camera tomorrow once it's in my kitchen, and maybe in the background you'll be able to see into my kitchen cupboards because half of them have no doors at all, lol.

It's also Beth's 6th birthday on Thursday which is also exciting. We're trying to plan a birthday party for Saturday. Of the 6 classmates she invited 2 have already told us they cannot make it, and the other 4 parents have not bothered to let us know one way or the other. Katie tells me one of the 4 told her at dance today that she is going to a different birthday party instead, but it would be nice if the parent had phoned to let me know. Oh well, we'll make sure it's still a fun day! And I'll force myself to take pictures even though I hate my camera.