They Came, They Went!

My, oh, my....it has been so hectic!  We have watched as Janet and Aunt T have been whirling dervishes, cooking up a storm.  Our newly minted son in laws did a bang up job on the dishes.

Banana and Ted came home and Meg and Derek came home.  Lack of photographic evidence, but Jeremy also came home.

We are crying!

Now we are whining!

Bronwyn came home and immediately threw herself into some heavy duty relaxing with us.

Bronwyn looks exhausted from watching her mother work so hard!

Janet got some nice Christmas booty.

She got the new Kindle, a fancy All Clad slow cooker, two cookbooks, an Italian apron and a pair of Bogs!  Janet always goes the "it's not necessary to get me anything" route, but oddly enough, never mentions anything being returned.  Whoops...make that 3 cookbooks.  Janet bought "Smitten Kitchen" for Lolo, Meg and Briana.  Meg bought "Smitten Kitchen" for Janet.  What book will they all buy the same of next year?

Derek and Phil quaffed back some beer in retro Japanese beer glasses.

You can tell by Derek's face that he really enjoys a good beer!  Kampai!

We listened to our new babies heartbeat on our portable "at home gurney".

Aunt T rolled out the pastry for our Tourtiere with Janet's pastry roll in the foreground.  She thought it was so painful, she went out and purchased a new one for Janet.

Getting ready to say goodbye.

They promised to get Banana a Mele Kalikikimaka shirt for next year!

The Wilkinsons' leave!  Noodles wants Aunt T to leave the old rolling pin so she can chew it up.

Time sure flies by when you are having fun!

We Are Getting Ready For Christmas!

Merry Christmas! We finally got a replacement tree that Janet thinks is barely better than the original, but so be it.  You know Janet, easy going, easy going.

Janet was busy cleaning the baseboards in our house - they get very dirty where we doggies shake ourselves off when we return from a rainy walk.  She really wishes we would shake off outside, but where would the fun be in that?  Janet uses QTips to clean out the corners of the wainscoting.  She started out with four and in the end only had three.....Noodles???

We had some of our Volunteer Friends over for a small partyette.  Erin and Mariem and Barb were unable to come, so it was a small gathering, but still lots of fun.

Welda on the left, 86 years old and comes to chop vegetables every Thursday for 4 hours; Doreen at the back on the right who we will miss as she has to go back to Salt Spring to sell her house; Katherine who has been volunteering here for a minimum of 10 years.

Lolo and Stevo came on Monday night with Janet's Christmas gift.  Janet was so excited!  It was the new Hali'imaile General Store cookbook.  Janet has wanted this book for at least two years.

Remember how we always say how sloppy Janet is?  She is looking at this book that she has owned for less than 12 hours and still manages to spill her lunch on it!  Bad Janet!

Janet said she was really busy at work today and they were shorthanded.  They keep milk and sugar in jugs and Janet by accident dumped a jug of milk into the 50lb. sugar bin!  She was so angry with herself.

Fortunately, Janet didn't have to dump the whole bin.  She said it was a really ugly, sticky mess.  The other volunteer on duty broke 4 cups, so this was a shift that would have cost them money.  Ouch!

It's Our Party And We'll Bark If We Want To!

Guess what!  We turned 11 years old today!  Janet We are super excited.  Janet and Phil made us special hats on Phil's fancy printer machine.

Do you think at least one of these morons has too much time on their hands?

In our party splendour.

 We had a special dinner of Chicken Tartare with Seasonal Vegetable Melange a la mode with Cookie.  Janet is pumping this as special, but it's actually what we eat every night, except we don't get the cookie on top.

Noodles, ever the life of the party, looks like she has had one too many.  See how my ribbon is blue for a boy and Noodle's is pink for a girl?

 Noodles might have had one too many, but she managed to turn her party hat into a party treat.

Christmas Is Coming

It was our Christmas Block Party this Sunday.  We weren't invited as it was held at the neighbours house.  They are leaving Victoria in the spring and wanted to have the party at their house.  It's more fun at our house as we get to socialize with everyone!

Wendy, who always has a good time; Michael and Mark.  The party was at Michael and Brenda's house.  They are moving to the interior.  Six degrees of separation - Michael is from Lethbridge!

Jeremy was home for one week from Northern BC and was working on some stuff in the basement.  The sound of one of the machines drives poor Noodles insane.

She managed to recover when we went for a walk and came home very proudly carrying this stupid piece of kelp.  Noodles always scours the curb edge down at Willows Beach looking for small pieces of kelp.  Janet doesn't like her to get the kelp as she gets very territorial.

It was Phil's birthday on Monday.  He is 64 years old!  We think he looks pretty good, even if you take into account he lives with Mrs. Major Anal Janet.Personally, we have heard Janet mutter under her breath that if that ugly mess continues in his office, his life expectancy will be a lot shorter than he anticipates.  We really hope nothing mysterious happens to Phil and Janet, is subsequently,  incarcerated.  Where will we go?  We bet Mike and Bronwyn would take us.  We really hope Phil cleans up his office!  We like our street.

We have purchased a Christmas Tree from the same tree family for several years.  A couple of years ago, Janet and Phil drove out to the farm to select our tree.  Sadly, in the middle of a field, all perspective on size was lost and they came home with a giant tree that had to be cut down and even then, fell over twice once it was put up.  This year, they had a tree delivered to the city and Janet is very unhappy with it.

Janet says it has huge gaps on the trunk....very obvious and about a quarter of the bottom is starting to yellow.  Phil is in the process of complaining about it.  Ugly, right?

Janet is Leaving!

It's Minnie again.....I kind of dissed Janet for the last couple of days as Mike and Bronwyn came home and brought Rose and Don with them.  For the last 10 days, I have slept with Janet, off and on through out the night.  We always, always, spent every morning in bed ipadding together for about an hour.  I kind of forgot about all that when there were new people in the house that I could socialize with.  I feel bad because Janet faithfully took me on my long Fairview Lake walks every second day and spent alot of time with me.  Janet was sad. 

You can plainly see how bad I feel!

Janet thinks this guy is so cute.  He lives across the street from our house.

We knew Janet was leaving because she had her suitcase out and was moving much more quickly than she has for the last ten days.  Here we are saying goodbye...kind of.  Truth be known, we thought we were going for a walk, so were really impatient in the photo.

Nice socks, Janet

Did we go for a walk?  No way!  They went for Italian lunch...whats up with this Italian lunch spot?

Here they are bonding when Bronwyn isn't looking at her iphone!

Janet had an uneventful flight back to Victoria (that is code speak that means she actually managed to find her gate, unlike a couple of trips ago where she was in the wrong terminal and added 5 hours onto her travel time).  Phil was so excited to see her, he was 25 minutes late, leaving Janet outside in one of the heavier rains Victoria has ever seen.  She was pissed rolled with the punches, as per her go with the flow mind set.  Luckily, sushi dinner was shortly after, so she was pacified.

It was dark when she got home and Noodles and Rockers were super excited to see her.  In the light of the next morning, things didn't look so good.

Phil left 10 days of recycle in the back porch.  You may wonder how much further the actual recycle bin is - about 5 seconds more time.

This is a tiny sample of the dog fur that was on their floors.

Groceries in the living room - a real classic look.

Random pieces of wood, all over the floor. That kindling has been in the fireplace for a least a month because Phil WAS going to light a fire then.  Compared to the logs allover the hearth, the kindling was nothing.  What did Miss Go With The Flow do?  Cry!