Our Beautiful City, Underwater

So Friday June 21st, our city, and those surrounding us, experienced a natural disaster.  The Elbow and Bow rivers flowed over their banks and into our city.

I dropped my son off at daycare on Friday morning and drove the short distance to work.   I took the route I normally do and had to drive through 6 inches of water at one point and was horrified to see the river coming up and spilling onto the road.  They closed that particular stretch of road within 20 minutes of me passing through.  I got to work and heard about the road closures and immediately left again.  Mama bear instinct kicked in and I became panicky until I could get DS from daycare.  His daycare was in an area unlikely to flood, but the roads to get to his daycare were all being shut down, one by one.  Here are some of my photos I was able to snap:

You can see some of the houses covered in water

That's DH wading through a "pathway" that we normally jog.  The above picture was from Friday, and we were back down checking it out on Sunday and there is no longer water blocking that pathway

The following is where I normally jog and that is a bridge I have run over hundreds of times. 

It's so absolutely crazy to watch your city destroyed by water.  It's been surreal.  We are lucky that the waters seem to be receding, and we are gearing up to put in as many volunteer hours as needed to get the city cleaned up.  

I'm back to work today but will be going home and gathering up what I can to donate to flood relief.  If you want to make a donation, you can donate to the Red cross

New Family Member!

We are pleased to announce that our family has grown by 4 paws!

Meet Jake the Dog:

His Mom is a pure bred golden retriever and his Dad is a maremma x husky.  We think he's going to be a pretty big boy!

Here's a shot of Jake the Dog and Owen the Human:

And for those who don't get it, we named him after "Jake the Dog" from Adventure time:

Growing a Garden

We had a busy busy busy Father's Day this year!  Hubby never wants to do anything that I consider conventional, like attend an amusement park or take Owen to the zoo or something like that.  He doesn't want to go fishing, or drinking beer with his buddies, nope, he wants to be outside and working on our home.

So for Father's Day 2013, DH built me a raised garden!  I've been trying to try for years to grow a garden full of veggies that we could eat, even if we only got a carrot or two.  Most of the time I get started and then forget all about my garden and it gets neglected and dies out without ever producing a single edible plant.  C'est la vie.  This year will be different because now I have a raised planter to keep out the animals and (hopefully) ants

Before:

And After I painted it with some left over stain and paint I had kicking around:

Notice the little rocks that we painted and labelled so we know what's where and what's what!!

Now, to keep them watered and my fingers crossed that we can get something edible this year.

My Garden is growing!

So for the third year (not in a row, I didn't bother last year with a crawling colicky infant) I am planting a garden!  I'm super excited because this year we are going to tear out some old and ugly bushes in our backyard and build a raised garden.  Now if only the snow would GTFO we could get on working on it!

In the meantime, I've decided to plant and grow inside so my plants are ready to transplant and (hopefully) flourish once the weather and temperature is good enough to move them outside.

My peas are outta control!  These things are growing like weeds.  I had to make a make-shift cage for them because they have grown so well they are toppling over themselves.  I used wooden skewer sticks to prop them up.  Here are my moster peas all tangled up:

My salad mix is also coming along wonderfully.  Here they are sprouting!:

Flying Shark!

So for DH's birthday I bought him one of those remote control helium sharks.  He loved it!  It was so much bigger than I thought it would be and a lot of fun, but Owen broke it shortly after it's take off!  Here's a photo of the beast in our living room:

Hilarious!  But Owen didn't like it at first and would run away crying from the thing

Blurry, but you get the gist :-)

My Garden!

This will be year 3 (attempt #3) to grow a garden in which we actually use the food grown and consume it.  The last two years I got started WAY too late and nothing grew in time for us to eat anything.  The pumpkins never came up, they just sort of "meh'd" in the backyard and then withered with the first frost never to be seen again.

So I have a little indoor greenhouse going and it's actually working.  I'm surprised with how delighted I am that my plants are growing.  I'm giving them love every day and the results are amazing!  My peas are nearly 12" high already!  I don't know what I'm going to do with them as I'm not going to be able to plant them outside until at least the end of May (it's still possible to get snow where I live in June)

Jogging my way to 5 K!

So DH and I have signed up to run the Color Me Rad run.  If you've never heard of it, google it!  Here's a promo photo from them:

I mean, how awesomesauce does that look?

So let the training begin.  I recently hit the "being able to run for 20 minutes at one go" milestone *Yay!!* and I'm so stinkin' proud of myself.  It's such a big life goal for me to be able to compete in a 5k and then a 10k and I'm so close to being able to accomplish it this year!

I'm also hoping that all of this running helps me drop the 12 lbs I put on with my whole thyroid fiasco (quick recap: viral thyroiditis this summer resulted in an overactive thyroid for a brief period, followed by months of underactive thyroid to now, finally, back to normal).