Suck it up

Michael and I had a couple of friends over a few Friday's ago for a wine and beer night and I thought that I better do a quick vacuum in the living room.  I realized that the suction on the vacuum was not very good and it definitely wasn't performing very well.  I don't know how long vacuums are supposed to last.  I have purchased 2 vacuums in my life and they happened to be the exact same model.  So the following Monday, I bought a new vacuum.  I was pretty excited to get home and use it.  Since I did not want to take out a loan to buy a Dyson animal hair vacuum, I went with the Bissell Pet Hair Eraser instead and it still seemed expensive to me.  Ok, keep in mind that I just vacuumed a few days earlier.  I started the bagless vacuum up and no kidding, the thing was fully of dirt and mostly cat hair in less than a minute.  Pictures below to prove it!  Gross, but cool!  One of my cats is white so you can't see shedded hair over the whittish carpet we have.  So I continue to vacuum and empty canister after canister of cat hair and dirt.  I vacuumed the whole house, couches, edging the floor and ceiling and all, and I ended up dumping 12 canisters!  Isn't that gross?  You probably think I live in a dirt house.  Apparently I did.  The canister isn't very big and it doesn't take that much to fill it up, especially when it's fluffy cat hair.  I was surprised of how much actual dirt we had upstairs.  Yuck.  But now I have a fully-functioning vacuum again.  Who knew I would get so excited about this purchase and drag you through the whole experience?!  Have fun looking at the pictures of the vacuum and clean carpet.  Exciting, huh?

This is the only time Powder's not scared of the vacuum, when it's in the box.   

Fuzzer on the vacuum box trying to break it into it because he wanted to vacuum

Here's the fully assembled product!  I guess I didn't realize you need to put these things together.  What's that you say??  Oh,  yep, we do have purple textured walls! 

Full canister #1

Brand new clean carpet again!

Weekend Recap

Friday:

Michael and I went out to dinner at M&S Grill.  We love this place.  Have you ever heard of McCormick & Schmicks?  It's the same people, just a different restaurant.  We decided to go there a week early and celebrate for our upcoming anniversary.  We've been craving an appetizer for months that we had there a year ago.  It was the cold crab legs served over ice.  They are so delicious.  We look at the menu and it said crab cocktail and asked if it was the same thing and our server said yes.  We ordered it, despite the $19.95 price tag.  Remember, this is an appetizer!  It came to our table and it was not what we wanted.   What we were served was a lump of crab with cocktail sauce poured over it in a little fancy dish with little baby forks.  It still tasted good but not what we anticipated.  I got a Caesar salad and Michael ate bread until our dinner came.  We both ordered the filet mignon.  I love filet mignon.  It's the only steak I order.  We also got mashed potatoes and Parmesan crusted hash browns a la carte.  We were stuffed and couldn't think of dessert.  We pretty much always get creme brulee when we go out to a nice place like this but not this time.  If you haven't been there, I recommend splurging a little and having one of the best steaks!

Saturday:

I woke up early and started prepping the kitchen to paint.  We have been doing some updates to our house.  We put a new floor in the kitchen and we are painting the kitchen and hallway to the living room.  (Yes, we would have painted and then put down the floor but it's not a perfect world)  I painted from 10-5:30 pm, with a quick break for Jimmy John's for lunch.  We ended up running out of paint and I ran to Menard's to get more so we could continue the next day.  I had to quit painting for the day because Michael and I were going out to see Cheech & Chong.  The comedic duo have been touring this year after have been "broken up" for about 27 years.  They finally reunited this year for what I would assume be their last tour.  That is part of the reason Michael and I wanted to go as this was a one-time chance to see the legendary pair.  Tommy Chong is now 70 and Cheech Marin is 62.  I tried to imagine what the crowd was going to be like before we got there.  Whatever I imagined, I was wrong.  The crowd looked so "normal." I guess I would have thought it would have been a bunch of hippie stoner types and it wasn't.  While they were there too, it was more like your mom and dad and a very good mix of older and younger.  There were some characters in the crowd but overall you wouldn't be able to judge who or what was playing by the crowd if you didn't see their names on the marquee outside the Orpheum Theatre.  The show itself was like a variety show.  There were skits and reenactments from their movies, songs that were performed and some stand up.  Chong's wife, Shelby opened for them.  After the show, we even had the chance to meet the duo!  They were so quiet and soft spoken when we met them and it was weird to think that they were the same people we saw perform.  

I wasn't trying to be creative here with the branch.  It's the best picture I got and the branch happens to be in the way.

Our new "friend", Gary, who we met on the street

Toasting a shot.  Who's 3rd glass is that you say?  Well it's new friend Gary's glass!

Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin

Ok, I had to pose next to this ad at the bus stop.  I don't know what it's for as there weren't any words on it and I thought it was creepy that a little boy is sitting in a towel on the couch.

Sunday: 

I woke up early and started painting.  I painted for a couple of hours before my sister and her family came over.  They arrived at our house at 11:30 am and we all went to Michael's cousin, Jason's house.  They live in Roseville, just minutes from us.  Every year they have a pumpkin carving party.  This year they had 200 pumpkins to be carved.  Jason and Amy gutted out all the pumpkins starting Friday night.  They spent 12 hours doing it!  It definitely made it easier for us to just show up and carve.  They had tons of patterns and carving tools of all sorts.  I hadn't carved a pumpkin since I was a kid so I was a little worried going into this since I do not have much creativity in these bones.  Then after I saw there were patterns, I was all about it. We all had fun carving.  Our friends Tanya and Chris came over to carve also.  Amy also made a ton of food for the event.  There were sloppy Joe's, hotdogs, BBQ sausage, fruit, chips, cookies, cupcakes and candy.  Everyone really enjoyed themselves and I can't wait to carve my pumpkin for next year!

My sister Jamie

Jamie's pumpkin

Keith's pumpkin he helped carve with him mom

The Seaberg family

Here's my pumpkin.  Squint and take a look at that scary monster!

Michael's own designed pumpkin

Tanya and Chris 

Chris's flame pumpkin

All the chaos!  It was so much busier than this at one point.  People just kept coming and going.

Master carver, Tanya and her pumpkin of Barack Obama

Obama!  

I'll be going over to Jason and Amy's later this week and I'll update you with the display of lit pumpkins later!

 

Thoughts for Thursday-Nutritional Labels

Every time I buy or at least pick up a product at the grocery store, I examine the nutrition label. I look at the calories, fat, fiber, sugar and servings per container for everything. I don't always buy stuff that is nutritious or healthy for me, but I am at least conscious of what I am putting in my body. I do eat cookies and the bad chips every once in a while. I do pay some attention to Partially Hydrogenated Oils (PHO's), which is the same as trans fat, but I do not go out of my way to avoid it as I probably should. It takes 57 days to digest PHO's as it is not natural. Food producers use it because it is cheap. I do stray away from aspartame and Splenda as much as possible though. If I see something has aspartame in it, I do not buy it. There are many studies out there that state that aspartame is very bad for your health. Splenda too, but it hasn't been on the market as long as aspartame so it's hard to determine the health effects at this point.

Do you read the nutrition labels? To what extent? Do you know how to read the label? How conscious are you of the food you put in your mouth? Be honest!

Here are some other TFT:

Michelle-Expensive Clothes

Ang-Optimism

Kristi-Caffeine

Saturday and Sunday-Mother Nature

This past Saturday, I was inspired by my friend Kristi to take a trip to Tamarack Nature Center in White Bear Lake.  I hadn't been there for since at least my early 20's and it is something that was on my list of things I wanted to do this fall.  I went by myself and it was a beautiful sunny, but windy day.  It was a good feeling to just think and get away from everything. (even though you can still hear cars from the freeway)  Here are some of my favorite pictures from the day.  I apologize as some of them may be the same as Kristi's.  

I just loved this tree

Sunday was a gorgeous unseasonably warm day so Michael and I decided to take the motorcycle out for one of the last trips of the season.  We just went down to Vadnais Lake by our house but I am so glad we did as we were lucky to see some Trumpeter Swans stopping there during their migration process.  First of all, they are huge!  They are the largest native North American bird and weigh 20-35 lbs and some males can have a wingspan up to 10 feet but average is 7 feet.  The Candian Geese looked small next to these guys and the ducks in the picture below look tiny.  They were almost extinct at one point and there are current conservation efforts to save and maintain the species.  I was so fascinated by them, I ended up taking lots of pictures.

Less Shampoo and Conditioner for me

8 inches...that's the amount of hair I got cut off today.  I decided on Saturday that I wanted my haircut after seeing a cute haircut online so after work today, I did it. I took a picture of me before work this morning and after my cut.  Look at the hair, not the weird early morning expression!

Crazy McCain Rally Lady

As I watched Thursday's political episode of Saturday Night Live, they did a skit about the lady in the video below.  I hadn't heard of her before then so I had to look her up to see what she is all about. She calls Obama an Arab and then goes on and on about how bad he will be for our country.  WHAT? The point of this post is not to tell you who to vote for because I don't care who you choose to elect.  My point is to PLEASE be an educated voter.  PLEASE be knowledgable about what you are speaking of and what the candidates are about.  So many times it is the focus that the younger people are not paying attention but as you will see, it can be the older people too.  Watch the video below (with subtitles) if you can, as it is painful to watch the uninformed woman that we get to claim as one of our own as she is from Minnesota.  Geez.  The Saturday Night Live parody video is below the real video.  It's about 7 minutes but worth watching the whole thing. 

Thoughts for Thursday-Tattoos and Piercings

Many of the people in my generation have tattoos and piercings. I find it rare to know someone in Generation X and Y that does not have a tattoo. I got my first tattoo when I was 22 years old, which seemed old back then to get your first one. I got mine for a great reason...in spite of my boyfriend at the time who just broke up with me who thought tattoos on girls were unfeminine. I ended up getting a single small tattoo on the left side of my lower back that was a Kanji symbol, which is Japanese script dervived from Chinese characters. The character meant "Ambition". That was 1999. Fast forward to 2004 and that is when I extended my tattoo art. My first character was transformed into a bigger version of "Ambition", along with 4 other Kanji symbols across my whole lower back. The remaing characters are as follows in this order: "Persistence/Strength", "Female/Woman", "Loyalty" and "Discipline". I got these tattoos to remind myself of how I want to live life or how I strive to live life with the "Female/Woman" as the center of all of them. Here are a couple of pictures of me actually getting my tattoo and then the finished result, which I didn't have any older pictures of so I took the last picture shown last night. Michael was there to help me get through all the pain and we just started dating shortly after that. You can laugh at the picture of me crying. It wasn't funny then but it's funny now.

Now to piercings. I got my ears pierced when I was 9 years old, which was really late compared to all of the other girls my age. From 7-8th grade, I pierced my own ears multiple times, with 4 in one ear and 2 in the other. I wore 2 in each ear for quite awhile. I then got my belly button pierced when I was 18 years old and that lasted 6 months before I took it out. My final piercing came at 19 years old when I got my tongue pierced. I had that pierced for 5 years before finally taking that out.

My questions to you are....

Do you have any tattoos? Where is it on your body? What is it of and when did you get it? What was the reason, if any, behind it? Do you regret having getting a tattoo? Would you get another? It is ever too old to get a tattoo? If you have a tattoo on your lower back, it is considered a "tramp stamp"?

Have you ever had any piercings? How many and where? Do you still have them? Would you consider a piercing now?

Do you think the piercings were a phase as it seems to have declined in popularity? Do you think the same of tattoos?

More Thoughts for Thursday posters:

Michelle Leigh on Plastic Surgery

Ang on Road Trips