Why hello there, long lost friend!

Oh hey!  I still have a blog here floating around in cyberspace!  I can't believe it's been nearly 3 years since I last posted here.  Haha, oops!  So much for regular posting!  No promises that I'll actually keep up with it this time around, but I figured I'd check in and make a post.
Sooo...what have I been up to?  Well, pretty much balancing being a wife, a momma, and working.  I'm still with the same company, although I'm in a different department now that suits my skill set much better.  I've still got my etsy shop, although I don't do much with it.  As of late, I've been doing more in the realm of designing stuff for shirts for hubby's high school swim teams.  Those have been so much easier and faster to do since he bought me a heat press 2 seasons ago!  Speaking of which, his boys team won the state meet this past year!  What a ride that was!
As a family, we've recently taken up the sport of archery, and we've discovered that we love it immensely!  We don't have any plans to hunt, but tournaments are a whole lot of fun!  There's a range nearby that we've joined, and we try to get out there at least a couple of times a week.  It's a great excuse to get outside and just spend quality family time together.  A huge plus is that there's no phone service out there, so we get to truly unplug for a few hours whenever we go out.  I suppose that I'll probably start adding archery updates to this here blog if I start posting regularly again!
Sadly, I didn't get around to planting my garden this year.  The winter and spring was so wet and cold this year, and the weather didn't cooperate enough for me to want to get outside to actually plant anything at the right times.  I'm missing all my fresh veggies this year!  Hopefully next year I'll have more ambition, and more cooperative weather to get out and plant something!
Well, I suppose that's really all I have to share right now.  Until next time (which hopefully will be sooner than 3 years from now again)!

An unintended blogging break

Well, well, well...it certainly has been a LONG time since I last posted anything!  It was unintended, that's for sure!  Summer was great, and after vacation life got somewhat turned upside down.  To make a long story short, I was laid off from my job that I had held for nearly 10 1/2 years.  It created quite the upheaval in our lives, but it turns out that it was a blessing in disguise.  To tell the honest truth, I wasn't happy where I was.  It was time for a change.  While the change didn't happen the way I wanted to, the steps were all God-ordained and orchestrated.  I had a lead on a couple of jobs at the time of being let go.  One of them fell through, and the other one took a bit more patience!  I feel so fortunate that while I had applied for unemployment and got that ball rolling, the timing worked out where I didn't even get a single check!  It was a very trying couple of weeks.  I sent out probably close to 30 applications/resume's.  During that time, I also had the blessing of being able to do some real, much needed deep cleaning on the house!
In my days at home, I also faced rejection after rejection of the applications that I had submitted.  Talk about a blow to one's self-worth!  I am so blessed to have an amazing, loving, supportive husband who stands by my side and is my biggest cheerleader.  Truth be told, while it was quite the stressful time for us, we were also both completely at peace in our situation.  The day that my severance pay was up was the day that I got a phone call from the other lead on a job that I had been waiting for!  I started at my new job the next morning.  Several hours after that phone call, I received another phone call for an interview, and in the following weeks, received at least half a dozen more phone calls for interviews.  Truly, when it rains, it pours!  I've been at my new job for 2 months now, and I'm absolutely LOVING it!  It is a position that is completely different from my previous job.  There's nothing much that I'm doing in this job that really fits into my skill-set from my previous job, and I'm perfectly ok with that.  With as much as I don't do so well with change, this is a completely welcome change for me.  I gained many, many computer skills in my previous position that I can easily keep up on by just tinkering around on the computer here and there.
While my dream is still to be able to be a stay-at-home momma, right now it's just not feasible financially for us to do so.  Hopefully someday that dream will still have a chance at coming true.  Through everything that has happened over the last few months, I know that ultimately God has a plan for our lives and orchestrates our steps.
As far as posting here, I hope to be able to get back to more consistent posting again soon!  Once the hustle and bustle of the holidays have passed, things should settle down and I can get a more solid routine going again!  Until then, from our family to yours, I hope you have a very merry Christmas!

Here fishy, fishy!

Man, I am so not good at this whole blogging thing when life gets busy!
Today, I have a story about paybacks...and an apology to my parents for everything I ever did as a kid!  I know they were snickering "paybacks" watching this all unfold over this past weekend!
This past weekend was Viking Fest...the smalltown festival that every small town has every year celebrating whatever it is that they celebrate, complete with the carnival rides and games.
Well, hubby is the president of one of the local Kiwanis clubs, and his club had a booth at Viking Fest this year, serving roast beef sandwiches.  He had signed up to work the booth for the weekend, and I figured I'd tag along and help since a) they needed help and b) if I wanted to see him at all over the weekend, then this was how it was going to happen.  The boy tagged along because everyone in the Kiwanis group loves him, and we weren't going to leave him with someone else over the weekend.  We do things together as a family, including service things like this.  Being 4 1/2 years old, it is a whole heckuva lot to ask of him to be in the booth all day, so we got him a ride bracelet for the carnival so that we could take breaks with him and let him be a boy and have fun.  It's a whole lot cheaper to get the ride bracelet for unlimited rides than it is to buy ride tickets at $1 apiece, and the "cheapest" ride being 3-4 tickets.  Carnivals are such a ripoff!  I digress...
Anyway, I took the boy over to the carnival first thing when it opened.  We had already been working at the booth for 3 hours, and he was getting squirrely.  We walked over, and he saw the fish game...I told him "NO FISH!!!"  He replied, "ok, momma" and went on his merry way to go on all the rides his heart desired.  After about an hour or so, it was getting to be lunch time and I decided that we should probably go back to help in the booth again since they were probably going to be busy.  He agreed and back to the booth we went.  After about an hour or so of him yelling "Roaf beef sammiches!  Get your roaf beef sammiches!" out the window of the trailer, a fellow Kiwanis member (and one of the boy's favorites) said he needed a break and took the boy with him over to the carnival to burn off some more energy.
Remember my "no fish!"?  Well...imagine mine and hubby's surprise when the boy comes running back to the booth with a bag of fish in hand, and our friend laughing his butt off about it!  We both let out a groan and a huge "NOOOOOOO!!!!!"  This got everyone laughing at us.  It was now our turn to be the parents that their kid brought back a bag of prize feeder fish to!  Being the good and loving parents we are, after our shift was done for the day, we took him up to the pet store to get all the necessary equipment for a fish (or two).  When we got to the register to pay for everything, we were informed that the tank we got was much to small to house the fish.  We got a long story about how it's a myth that feeder fish only grow to the size of their environment, and blahblahblah.  (I beg to differ because my sisters and I did the exact same thing to my parents, and we had 6 feeder fish in a 10 gallon tank, and they lived for 15 years.  When one died, the rest would get just a little bit bigger)  We honestly didn't really care because we didn't want fish in the first place.  Goldfish, while relatively easy to keep, are dirty!  We were then informed that we could surrender the fish to them and get something else.  We were steered toward a betta fish because it can live in the size of tank that we bought very easily, they don't get much bigger, and they are relatively low maintenance.  Hubby agreed...he had had a number of betta fish, and goldfish growing up and said that hands-down they were easier to keep.
In honor of our good friend, say hello to Mr. John...

The only problem was that unbeknownst to us, Mr. John was sick.  We got home that night and put the fish in his new tank, and gave him some food...only he never ate the food.  We chalked it up to a little bit of shock being in a new environment and him getting used to a new home.  A few hours later, and he still hadn't eaten and I also noticed some sort of cottony fluff growing on his tail.  A google search and several websites later, I discovered that a lot of fish fanatics say that bettas are finicky and not easy to keep.  What do I know...hubby then told me to stop googling things and to ignore what people say on forums.  You sure do find a whole range of stuff out there!  Anyway...we went to bed that night, and when I checked on Mr. John in the morning, he had more fungus growing on him and wasn't looking too good.  By this time, hubby was already back at Viking Fest for day 2, and the boy and I were going to join him there a bit later in the day.  I decided to make a trip to walmart to get some fungus treatment for the fish and pray that it would work.  I warned the boy that the fish was sick and that this might not help.  Sure enough, by the time we got home that evening, Mr. John was no more.  The boy was a little upset, but not inconsolable.  We promised that we would get him a new fish the next day.
Fast forward to the next day after work and we're back at the pet store, dead fish in hand (bowl), and we're looking for a new fish.  While bettas really are relatively low maintenance, they do enjoy water that's a bit warmer than the room temperature that water is in our house.  We tend to keep our house on the cool side, and with a fish that apparently likes water in the 70-degree and more range, it wasn't going to happen unless we had a heater for the tank.  After asking many, many questions, and scrutinizing over every betta they had in there, we left the store with a new fish, a small tank heater, thermometer, and fungus treatment (in case this fish got sick).
Say hello again to Mr. John...

The boy decided that he wants to name every fish he gets "Mr. John".  4 days later and we're still going strong with this Mr. John.  He's happy and healthy and has a voracious appetite!  I'm not sure if it's sad or if it's funny when the boy mentions on the way home every afternoon that he has to go check "to see if Mr. John is dead" and then very happily yells "Nope! He's still alive!".
So...we're now fish owners for the time being.  As much as we love animals, we don't plan on adding any more to our family any time soon!  A dog and a fish are more than enough!
Also, to my mom and dad...I'm sorry for bringing home those fish from that halloween carnival all those years ago!

A new blog...

I always seem to have several ideas floating around in my head to blog about. At the same time, I always second guess how much I really want to put aspects of my life out there for all the world to see. I have another blog, but I've become pretty guarded about what I put there because that one mainly keeps our family that we don't see often updated on what's going on. Maybe that's pretty selfish of me, and the point of having a blog is for people to read it, but it is what it is. So, I made the decision to start another blog to post about crafty stuff I do, pinterest projects (I'm SO addicted to pinterest!), and other random thoughts that I have about life in general.
So, I guess I begin (again) with a little bit about me...I'm married to the love of my life. We've got a fun-loving, sweetheart of a 4-year old boy, and a 6-year old lab/blue healer, who thinks she's still a puppy. I work outside the home as an office manager, a job I've had for nearly 10 years. On the side, I am a Creative Memories consultant and I run a tiny etsy store. In addition to that, I'm also involved on the worship team at our church. I play the piano and sing, and occasionally lead. Somehow, I find time to attempt to cook (mostly) wholesome meals, keep the house clean, have enough clean dishes to eat off of, and a pile of clean clothes to wear! In my spare time (haha!) I love to get my craft on. My family is the most important thing in my life, and I don't know what I'd do without them. I struggle sometimes with feeling like I've failed my family because I never quite get everything done like I think it should be. At the end of the day though, all that matters is that I love my family, and they love me enough to see past what perceive as my shortcomings and that's enough for me.
Here's to another blog, and hopefully enough time to keep up with it!