Musical fun

This is a song we are learning to play in orchestra. When we finally get it right it will be a knock your socks off number. This recording was taken from the M and C soundtrack. And well you are looking at Russel Crowe :) consider that he learned to play violin for this movie and this song. He and the cellist play it together at the very end of the movie.
The whole score is actually ten minutes but this is just the fun part, we get to strum our violins like ukeleles.

When Pops comes to town!

Okay so I have been meaning to follow the advice on Addie's blog way back when about posting large pictures and it totally worked. But goodness me I didn't think it would be monster large. So anyway, I really really hate small pictures especially when they were taken with a crummy camera, such as mine. So I am going to start posting pics in monster size so you can actually see details and who is who. This is all just kind of a big experiment.

My dad came to visit for a week and we took him all over Arizona. He had such a nice break from shovelling and battling the snow.




This picture was taken at Canyon lake. It was an absolutely perfect day and I am so glad we got to do a little bit of hiking. We had a bbq with 1/4 pound black angus beef burgers. Pops totally approved.



Then we went to the ghost town in Apache Junction for ice cream. My dad was mostly interested in looking at all the old cars behind the buildings.




Then of course we took him to see the Mesa temple. We were once again fooled by the too good to be true oranges on the trees. They taste like lemons or worse. But we did find one tree that had sweet ones and picked it dry. (You are allowed, we asked.) My dad really wanted a taste of an orange right off the tree.

Probably the highlight of my dad's trip to Arizona was the Pima air and space museum. He and Dan took the whole day to tour and they absolutely loved it.



Well I sure loved having my dad here. He said him and Arlene are definetly going to retire here in AZ. I have got my high hopes way way up! Just hope he doesn't mistake the diaper cream for toothpaste next time!! ha ha ha

Its gonna take a few posts to get all the kinks worked out with this new bigger is better pictures business. If anyone has any advice for me, that would be great!!

test

This is a test because my blog was disabled for the past 3 days and afer extensive research I finally figured out how to get rid of all the error messages and refresh the pages. So here it goes>>>>....

It worked!!
This is the information that made it work again:

Clearing your cache:

1. On the internet Tools menu, click Internet Options. It will display first in the general tab.

2.On the General tab, click the Delete Files button. This will delete all the files that are stored in your cache.

3.Click OK or delete. This will delete your history and internet pages and passwords that your computer has memorized. It will not delete any files on computer hard drive.

I have to store this info on my blog because its happened to me twice now, the first time took a month to finally correct itself.

Happy New Year!!

We had an exciting weekend starting out with a party at the Riggs to ring in the New year. The Riggs are so awesome, they have invited us for a party on almost every holiday this past year. They set the clock back a couple hours so the kids could join in and yell and dance at the strike of "midnight." It was super fun. We ended up staying till midnight anyway because we wanted to play "ticket to ride" which is my favorite board game ever (even though Im really terrible at it). We had seriously overindulged ourselves on appetizers and mexican food. Well, Dan and I had gone to Baja fresh for lunch that day as well. There was all you can eat salsa including mango salsa so of I course I practically drank it. Not to mention 3 extra helpings of cilantro. Well after all this in one day a person's stomach can only handle so much. Needless to say I threw up 60 times that night after we went home. (Yes its true that jalepenos hurt just as much coming back up as going down.) I'm certain you wanted to know that. :)

Here's to ringing in the "new year!" Dan's toast was simply brilliant: "Heres to all the throwup and diarrhea we'll have to clean up after our kids this year"! :(

At the "strike" of midnight, of course Dan is being his usual goofy self.

So anyhow after all that we had planned to go sledding at Mt Lemmon on New Years Day but I wasn't sure if I could go because of my "weakened condition". Well I felt better by 11 am so away we went. We couldn't find a single place to buy sleds in our town so we ended up buying a dingy at Toys r us then we found another sled at a sports store for 20 DOLLARS!! I almost cried when I remembered all the sleds we gave to our neighbors after we left Canada. The dingy worked real well until it popped, but the bottom stayed full so it still worked. There was alot of families out sledding and it was simply perfect weather for it. Dan's thermometer watch read 51 degrees.

You can't tell from this picture but they actually got serious air on this jump. Poor little Maysa went flying about a foot into the air. I probably shouldn't tell this next little story but when Dan was pulling these kids in the dingy he pulled them around a corner so fast that the dingy flew up in the air and did a complete 360. Somehow the kids were still in when it landed and no one had hit their heads. Well Sierra begged him to do it again so he did with just her in this time and she ended up hitting her head on the ground but came up laughing and begging for more. Thats when mean mommy had to intervene. I prefer my kids without broken necks thankyou very much.

This sled was awesome, we had to let a bunch of other little kids on the hills use it too because they begged and we are nice.

This is the caravan going home, the dingy popped and all the kids mittens were completely soaked.

This tree and I hung out together all day, I had fun just watching the kids because I still wasn't feeling wonderful.

Maysa really wanted to take her snowman home with us.

Isn't she cute, she did a good job building this snowman all by herself. Elena had to wear my winter boots because she outgrew her old ones, I was shocked they stayed on just fine. She ended up wearing my gloves too because hers got all soaked.

A great day to start out a Happy New Year!