The Anniversary Card

Today, my husband and I are celebrating our wedding anniversary.   It’s been a wonderful, crazy, insane, wacky, tearful, joyful, happy, sometimes stressful, always exciting 27 years.  How do we do it?  Well, the truthful answer is… the hard way!  And that’s an understatement. 

It takes hard work, a lot of prayer and a good sense of humor to stay married these days.  And, we’ve managed to hold it together for a long time. When someone asks Tom how long we’ve been married,  he’ll reply “ONE HUNDRED and twenty seven years.”   This always gets a chuckle.  My standard reply is “Three of the best years of my life!  I’ve been married 27 years, but three of them were really good!”    Yes, we crack each other up.

September is one of our busiest months.  So, we usually end up working long hours right through our anniversary and we celebrate later with a weekend trip instead of a present.   Many times, we don’t even have time to stop and get a card.  A few years ago, after the kids left for school, we ran to Target to grab a card for each other.   We were standing there side by side reading cards and started laughing at the irony of the whole situation.  There we both were, trying to buy a sentimental card at the very last minute.  I just handed Tom a card and said “Read this!  This is card that I was going to give you.”  He handed me one and said “Here’s the one that I was going to get for you!”  We read the cards, shared a quick kiss and put them back.  We laughed all the way to Starbucks and spent the card money on lattes.    You can’t do that in the early years, but it makes for a very funny story when you’ve been married for a long time.   

This year is no different.  We have appointments all day.  We’re planning to celebrate Saturday night when things slow down a little.   Unfortunately, we woke up to a sick child, so the day started off with a quick trip to the Doctor to make sure she was OK.  This gave me an opportunity to grab a quick card for Tom.   (Surprise!)    But, when I got home, I was juggling a sick child, a work phone call and trying to sign the card before he saw it.   So… when he opened it, he chuckled when he saw that I had signed it “I love you!!!”  followed by my full legal, contract  signature.  LOL !   Like he wasn’t going to be sure exactly which Kathy the card was actually from???   Hey… I’m nothing if not thorough! 

Just because we don't have time to celebrate today doesn't mean we won't celebrate.  Life is good when you can laugh through the craziness.  And let me tell you, that’s a good thing at my house because it definitely gets crazy!   Happy Anniversary Honey!  You’re my lobster!

The Chocolate Mousse Explosion

Saturday night, my husband had a craving for something sweet.  Yes, I do realize that sounds very funny!  It’s usually me, the menopausal woman that has the cravings.  However, when he said he wanted something chocolate, I thought that I many have died and gone to heaven! 

So… we made chocolate chip cookies, and homemade hot fudge sauce and store bought vanilla ice cream. Well, this wasn’t quite what he had in mind. So, he decided to make some chocolate mousse.

We have one of those ISI whipped cream dispensers (with the CO2 cartridges) that are used to make fresh whipped cream.  So, Tom decided that he would make chocolate mousse in it.  We’ve done it many times, and it is wonderful.  So, after carefully measuring all the ingredients and putting it together, he gave it a few shakes to charge it. He squirted it out onto a spoon to taste.  It LOOKED wonderful!  However, one taste made it very clear that he had left out the sugar.  It was like eating Hershey’s cocoa straight from the container.  Bitter, bitter, bitter.   

Unfortunately, once the CO2 has been used to charge the dispenser, you can’t really open it to add anything.  But, Tom was going to try!   He put paper towels over the dispenser and tried to let off some pressure a little bit at a time.  He kept telling us that it was just not going to work.  But, of course we all wanted to see what would happen.  Rachel decided to pull out he iphone and record the experience.

So… Tom put it in the sink and let off a little steam.  A big wad of mousse came out under the paper towel.  It looked disgusting!  But before we could finish commenting, it EXPLODED!  It sounded like a cork popping off of champagne.  It scared the bejeebers out of us!  Chocolate went everywhere!  Brittany fell in the floor laughing.  She was covered in tiny little splashes of chocolate all over her face.  It was everywhere.  There were chunks of chocolate all over the counter, on the cabinets, on EVERYTHING that was sitting on the counters, on the ceiling, the lights, the chairs, the floor, the kids, the boyfriend, etc.  It went pretty much everywhere, EXCEPT the sink (of course!). 

We were laughing so hard we could hardly contain ourselves. It was so hysterically funny.   Then Rachel told us that she had captured the entire experience on video.  We played it, and replayed it, again and again.  It was funnier every time we played it.  Sunday morning, I was still finding little splashes of chocolate as far away as 8 feet.  Yikes! 

Well, I guess if you can’t eat your chocolate, you might as well wear it!    Enjoy the video!  http://youtu.be/hHL1IiE9D0g

Bowling for Geese

 About a week or so ago, we made a family decision to take up Disc Golf.  Before we made a commitment to buying 4 sets of discs, we rented some to see if we even liked it.  Well, the first night out, we were hooked.  We stink, but we were hooked none the less.  So we went back to the store and bought disc sets for all of us.

We have 2 parks close by that have disc golf courses.  In the past week, we’ve played 5 times.  The first course we visited is closer, but there are quite a few holes that are in the woods.   Now, this is absolutely great for the shear reason of getting out of the sun for a few minutes.   However, the trees are obstacles with a capital O.  For my friends that play golf, you know what it’s like when there’s a tree in the way… You can’t seem to focus on anything else, and no matter what you do, you still hit the tree.  Several holes only have about 20 feet clearance in some areas between the trees.  So, given that we’re rookies, we’ve hit a lot of trees!  Tom even hit a bat house that was secured HIGH up on one of the trees.  Yes… we’ve made our mark in the bark, that’s for sure.  And… one hole is beside a lake.  Talk about a BIG distraction.  All the discs just seem to bank left towards the lake not matter how far to the right we throw them.  It’s splash or crash on this course for sure!  

So, last night, we thought we would try the other park.  It is very wide open.  This course does have some really big ‘old growth’ trees, but you can easily throw around them.  Well, let me rephrase that… some people can easily throw around them. (ha!)  Yes, we’ve managed to hit them too, but hey… we do still kind of stink. 

Now… it’s the end of summer, we’re in a big open field, so who do you think joins us?  A crazy flock of geese, that’s who!  Can you believe it?  We’re heading up to one hole and there they are… about 40 geese eating the grass right around the basket.  From the tee, we’re not worried.  Not one of us can throw far enough to even scare them.  But, we were wondering what we should do when we got closer.  We didn’t want to hit them, but they just needed to get the heck out of the way.  So, as we started getting the discs a little closer, they would move a little bit.  And as we approached the basket, they started moving away as a flock.   OK… problem solved, right?  Well not exactly… They just moved to the next tee.  And as we finished this hole and moved to the tee, they moved towards the next hole.  It was like they just wanted to lead the dang Frisbee Golf parade!  Geez!  This went on for several holes.  These discs hurt when they hit you!  So the last thing we wanted to do was hit a goose.  But they would just not move on!  We were quickly running out of daylight, so we opted to skip a few holes and move past the geese (and all the goose poop) to the last couple of holes and quit for the night. 

We decided to give this course another try this morning. It’s a lot less crowded, and gives us time to practice without holding up other players.  We made it through the first 6 holes before we came upon the crazy geese again today.  This time, though, the geese weren’t so lucky. Tom threw a disc that faded off to the left and skidded right into the flock.  One goose jumped straight up in the air about 6 inches, then they all started running AND honking up a storm!  It looked like he was bowling for geese instead of playing disc golf!   I know, I know… we shouldn’t have laughed, but it was just way too funny!   They ran straight in the direction of the basket.  So the next throw was right at them again.  We are still new at this, so we just can’t quite control where our Frisbees go!  And let me tell you, trying NOT to hit a goose is one sure way for me to hit one!   Eventually the geese saw us coming and moved on to another part of the course.  Whew! 

We sure had a lot of fun, even if we don’t yet have any skills!  We’ll know that we’ll get better, because we surely can’t get any worse!  (Just kidding!)  But, we’ve definitely decided that we really need to focus on playing golf on the golf course and leave the bowling to the alleys!  No more bowling for geese… that’s a promise!  I cannot promise that the trees are safe though… At least not yet!