The Blue Nile

Stephen and I went on a date last Friday night that was quite different than our past dates. Since we like to try new things, especially food, we went to a little Ethiopian restaurant called the Blue Nile down town on State street. I had no idea what to expect, but it was really different than anything I've ever had.

In Ethiopia the whole family eats off of one giant plate with this spongy bread called injera. They used it to pick up the food to eat with because they don't use any utensils. The bread has a bitter taste to it because it is fermented for three days which somehow helps create the sponginess. Then they feed each other instead of themselves. Some of the food reminds me of Indian food but only in texture. Its really spicy and mushy which makes it hard to scoop anything in your bread to eat it. I probably would never go back there because I only liked, maybe, half of what was on our plate, but it was a really fun experience. If I had known the bread was fermented beforehand I would never had eaten it, so sometimes it best not to know what you are eating until afterwards.

After dinner Stephen took me to the Jordan River just past our house so I could catch a bullfrog! I couldn't believe Stephen would actually take me to catch frogs, but to catch my own bullfrog is on my bucket list, so we went a hunting, but didn't see anything except a bunch of crawdads. I think we may have gone at the wrong time of the season. Stephen said he told one of his buddies at work what we were going to be doing that night, and his friend totally thought Stephen was joking.
 Friend: "No really what are you guys doing tonight?"
Stephen: "Really, my wife actually wants to go catch frogs."
Friend: "Dude, you married one of the biggest Idaho girls I've ever heard of!"

Haha, I do have to admit I took that as a huge compliment. I am proud of being a little ol' farm girl from Idaho. Sometimes its hard being in a big city where most people don't really understand where you come from, but I am proud of my roots and will always go back to them. I can't wait to have kids so I can teach them things about the great outdoors and take them camping and fishing and frog hunting.

Tidbits

I haven't had a lot of time to update this thing so here it goes in a nutshell.

• A few weeks ago I went to Twin for a weekend visit while the boys went on a boys trip rafting the Salmon river. I couldn't wait to go home and see my mom and sisters--I had, had two bad weeks at work and needed a break. We decided to do a girls weekend while our husbands were gone, and I think that was one of the best girls nights I've been to if I don't say so myself. We had a day with all the kids playing in yard in the sprinklers and day with just us girls crafting and decorating cakes. I didn't have a lot of time to show the girls how to decorate very well, but they all did an awesome job on their cakes. Mine looked really bad a: because I didn't feel like frosting a cake, b: the icing I made was too stiff, and c: I made mine look horrible on purpose so the girls would feel better about how their cakes looked............ok that last one was only a half truth, I just really didn't care about my cake but the next time we do this we will take a whole day and I will teach them all some  sweet decorating skills, and our cakes will look awesome!

 You gotta love baby bums!

 ...and Becky bums!

 Becky was so proud of how well she iced her cake so smooth.

  I was showing Becky how to do a rose, but her plastic tips don't work too well for this.

 My cute mom!

 We didn't have time to decorate the cakes before everyone had to leave, but they sure looked good.

•  That same day we did our cakes we found out that Aunt Kathy was in the hospital and it didn't look good. Mom was on the phone all night with her siblings and debating whether or not to wait until the morning to drive to Boise. You feel so helpless in moments like these especially when they are not anticipated. Later that night Mom left for Boise alone because they were going to take Kathy of off life support as soon as Michael flew in from Arizona. She past away early Sunday morning just a few days after her 60th birthday. I drove back to Twin a day and half later to pick up Trish and drive to Boise for Kathy's funeral; she had a really good turn out and the family did a wonderful job on the service. My favorite part was when Grandpa said he could imagine that Kathy's calling in heaven was to help the children who had prematurely left this earth. Aunt Kathy was a great mother and  grandmother to all her children. I will miss you Aunt Kathy.

• I've been working at my job just shy a year now and I have to say I didn't think I'd still be working by now. After all the drama with work a few weeks ago I decided that it was time for me to leave for good and find something else to do for a while. I decided I'd stay until the end of the month, but then something happened and it looks like I'm stuck here for a while longer. With work, if you lose a big account to another rival company you can get fired for losing the company money. I had a few "complaints" from a large account that I was half in charge of two weeks ago. The guy talked to me about a few things, but also talked to my boss about a few more things he didn't mention to me. I got a few phone calls and texts from my boss explaining the situation a day later telling me to shape up and make sure I was doing a good job at this particular account because he threatened to drop us. I didn't feel that anything I was doing was the cause of this decision, and told my boss what I was doing at the account and that I felt good about all my plants.

• I was called into the greenhouse last week so my boss could talk to me. I had no idea what it was about and showed up in the conference room along with another guy I work with who is in charge of the other half of that big account. When I saw him my first thought was, "oh, they're finally deciding to fire me; that guy must have dropped us and gone with another plant company". But much to my surprise I was told that the guy told my boss that he only wanted one person watering his plants and wanted me, in particular, to be in charge of all his buildings in the area. He told my boss, "I either get Christine for all my buildings or I drop you." I have to admit I was a little relieved, but at the same I was thinking, Crap! Now how am I supposed to quite? Haha, it felt good to finally receive a little recognition for the work I do for my customers, but I still want to be doing something else I enjoying doing more like landscape design. So I decided I'd stay with this job a while longer and see what it gets me.

• Lastly, I have to complain about my house. Stephen and I have been working on our living room for two months now from ceiling to floor. This project, I thought would only take a few weeks and here we are going on three months. So I told Stephen our goal is to finish the room by the end of the month. We have had a lot of set backs because of unforeseen damages, costs, and time loss. We have been out of town almost every weekend it seems so it feels like we get nothing done. We both hate having to come home from work every night to work on the living room. I can't hardly stand living in this mess. I don't cook, clean, or do laundry any more like I used to because all that comes last on the list of things to do. I am so sick of painting and sanding I don't care how the room looks anymore as long as  it just gets done so I can put up furniture and pictures and make my house feel like home again. I've even let my yard get out of control with weeds because we've been so engrossed in the living room!  There are so many flaws because a: this is our first house and first time having to fix things ourselves, and b: I refuse to paint the walls for a fourth time.....even though they need to be. I only ask you if you come to my house, not to point out any of the flaws with the painting on the walls, the textured ceiling, or the wood floor because I already know how horrible it looks! But I'm willing to live with it because its my house and I can, and I'm sick of painting. The end.  

Another Cat Story

Toby and I have a love-hate relationship. Seriously, I love him when he is nice and cuddly and when I hear the pitter patter of his little paws as he runs throughout the house, or when he crouches behind a corner of a room and does a sneak attack on my leg as I walk by and scares me to death. I love it when he touches his nose on my nose when I get home from work because he missed me. but I hate it when he jumps on my leg cutting gouges in it just to play with the string tie on my pants or when he farts in my face when he's laying on my lap (seriously, he is the stinkiest kitty I have ever seen in my life and they smell so  bad). He claws my couch and jumps on the dining room table when he knows he's not supposed to, or pees on the floor right next to his litter box, and meows at our bedroom door at 5:00 in the morning waking me up two hours before my alarm is supposed to go off.

But this story takes the cake. A few weeks ago Stephen was out of town for a few days for work. Toby is not allowed in our bedroom, but I thought since Stephen wasn't home I'd let him sleep with me this one time. Toby sleeps all day like any other cat would do, so when its time for me to go to bed he is wide awake and ready to play, in other words, very annoying. So I got ready for bed and tried to get him settled down. He laid down on the bed at my feet and soon fell asleep. He did pretty well, but, again, at 5:00 in the morning he gets up and pounces on top me meowing and cuddled up by my face and went back to sleep.....or so I thought. I started to fall back asleep when all of a sudden Toby pounces on my face and rips my earring out of my ear and SWALLOWED IT!!! I couldn't believe what just happened. I probably wouldn't care about the earring if wasn't the earring he swallowed. Not only was this pair of earrings one of the most expensive pair I owned, but they had sentimental value because they were given to me by my dad.

That cat ran for his life because he knew I would skin him alive if I ever caught him. I chased after him throughout the house for a few minutes seething with anger and tears. I let him go and went back to my room to calm down and try to get a little more sleep before work. I cleaned out his litter box so I could check the new stuff when I got home for my earring, but unfortunately I never found it.   

2012 Watson Reunion

It had been four years since I last went to a Watson reunion, so this was Stephen's first time meeting the extended family on my mom's side. We both had a blast. I even made a whizzy this year which was my first one in the adult group. We had a garage sale scavenger hunt, played all sorts of pioneer games, some of the family did skits from real stories about great grandma and grandpa watson and Gold, the pony express came riding in to deliver letters, lots of food, candy, naps, and fun!

 Here comes Elmer, Elmer's got a gun.....

 Grandma and Grandpa Watson

 Dad and I dressed up for the pioneer day, so we had to take a picture. This is my favorite.

For those of you who don't know what a whizzy is, it is a Watson family tradition for everyone to make a "whizzy" or some sort of craft for less than a dollar and wrap it up. We play like a white elephant exchange, so you open a whizzy and people can trade gifts so on and so forth. The Watsons are all pretty talented with wood working and sewing, so most of the whizzys are shelves, chairs/benches, tables, blankets, etc...that someone made so these whizzys are gifts that you would want to have not like a white elephant where you are trying to get rid of something you don't want.

I came up with my whizzy about a month ago just out of thin air. I thought some cute clay garden stakes would be fun to have out in my garden, so I made it my whizzy. I thought it was a great idea, so I stuck with it, but by the time I had finished my whizzy I didn't like them. I was really disappointed they didn't turn out the way I had them pictured in my head. I even contemplated whether or not I should even bring them, but I didn't work on those for hours and hours after work for nothing. I thought if no one else liked them I would take them and put them in my own garden. Turned out that everyone loved them much to my surprise. They got traded a few times and broken in the process, but I ended up winning the prize for most creative whizzy and the grand prize for best over all whizzy this year. I even had a few people tell me they would pay me if I made them some garden stakes and that I should sell them on Etsie!

On top of all that I guessed the exact number in order to be the first and last to choose a whizzy so I could get whatever gift I wanted at the end which makes the whizzys so much more enjoyable because I didn't have to sweat over which whizzy I would end up with. I chose one of grandpa's boxes that he made, because owning a box that grandpa made is something pretty special in our family, so everyone wanted them and some people get a little jealous, but hey, what can you do?

 My cute little garden stakes.

 Grandpa's box that I picked to take home.

Meet Toby

So we have only had our little kitty for a week and already we have made some big mistakes. First off, a few days after we brought him home,last week, I noticed that he was acting really strange one morning; he wasn't his usual self. He kept walking like he was flat out drunk--stumbling over losing his  balance, walking really slow, and walking into corners all the time, his meow wasn't even the same, and he had diarrhea really bad. I got worried because I had never in my life seen anything like this before, so I called up the vet to make an appointment. Well they didn't have an opening available for a few more days and after I told him what the symptoms were, he told me to take him to an animal hospital right away. So we rushed our little lame kitten to the hospital to see what was going on.

After about 45 minutes of being poked and prodded the doctor came in and told us that our kitty had gone blind. I was crushed. We had a normal, healthy kitten four days earlier, and now he's gone blind?! What happened? So it turned out that it was our fault that Toby went blind. We made a trip to the grocery store the day after we brought him home and picked up some food and other stuff for the kitty along with some dewormer because we hadn't taken him in to get his shots yet. You are supposed to put the dewormer in his food and he wouldn't know the difference. I thought a deworner was a great idea since I caught ring worm as a child from my cat, and I didn't want that to happen again. Anyway, it turned out that we O.D.ed him on the medication and one of the side effects is temporary blindness (even though the bottle never listed side effects of any kind that I saw).

I went to bed that night so sad for my little kitten, but thankfully, a few days after he was diagnosed Toby got better and regained his sight. A few days after that, we noticed that Toby was a boy and not a girl as we had been calling him. So we changed his name from Tessa to Tobias or Toby for short. We sure love this kitty!

I debated whether or not to post this video, but while we were waiting in the hospital Stephen and I could not, for the life of us, stop laughing at the cat because he was so funny walking around stumbling over. The funniest part was when we walked into the corner of the room and just started banging his little head against the wall over and over (I didn't get my phone in time to get that in video). It really wasn't funny because were sad, but we couldn't help but laugh at the same time. This way you can kind of get an idea of what he looked like poor thing.

Meet Tessa

This is Tessa our newest addition! I took her home from the Franklin farm on Monday. Stephen and I have been talking about getting a kitten, but never got around to finding one until David asked me if I wanted to take this one home after I caught her for Courtney to hold. She's super cute and cuddly!

Grandma Pettingill's Funeral

Grandma Pettingill had been sick for many years with Alzheimer's disease. She past away last week while the girls were in town for a visit. The first thing that came to my mind when I received the news was, "yay, she can finally be with her daughter Alene again after 75 long years". She is no longer suffering and she's happy. I do have to admit that I cried secretly in my car on my lunch break after I got off the phone with Joseph because I loved her so much and I have some great memories with Grandma spending the night at her house in the summer, having BBQs on the back porch, looking at all her beautiful porcelain dolls she painted.

One of my most cherished memories I have with Grandma Pettingill was when I was about 10 years old I took a little trip with her to Franklin to the farm shortly after Grandma Stockdale died. I remember feeling so special that Grandma wanted to just take me on this trip. I packed my clothes and made sure I had my Dopey with me so I could go to sleep. I can't remember very well what we did during the day besides go through Grandma Stockdale's things with Grandma, but I remember being afraid to go to bed that night because of all the box elder bugs crawling around the walls and windows. I had Dopey in one hand and Grandma's hand in the other as we slept in the same bed upstairs.

Grandma was such a neat lady and so beautiful; I always looked forward to visiting Grandpa and Grandma. I remember all the Christmas Eves we had at their house singing carols and sitting on Santa's lap. I couldn't wait to open my gift from my grandma because she always put something on the bow that we could keep as an extra gift--usually it was something that she made in ceramics. I will miss her dearly, but only for a short moment in time.

 My ancestors from Franklin, ID who homesteaded the Stockdale farm as directed by President Brigham Young.

 Becky's attempted glamor shot, haha sorry Becky I couldn't resist!