Birthday & Father's Day Wishes...& an Engagement!!!!!!!!!

Happy belated birthday to Karissa; hope you had a fun birthday on your vacation!!!

Happy birthday to my Mama Sue, who's birthday is tomorrow.

Happy Father's Day to all those Dads out there, but first of all to my dad who passed away over 3 years ago. I sure miss him. To our dads and daddy friends: John Arnaud, Dale Bokn, Kevin O'Brien, Doug Hunter, Ben Sander, and any other dads!

And even better news......I have an engagement to announce!!!

Our friend Ryan Suda proposed to my sister, Wendy on Tuesday, June 3rd after 2 years of dating!!!

I'm super excited for this one, it's gonna be a blast. They haven't set a date just yet but are leaning towards August or September 2009. So I'm gonna be a busy lady over the next year helping with the plans!!! Congratulations to Wendy and my soon to be Brother-in-Law!!!

Mother's Day Pictures

All these pics and only one MOM! :-( Wendy was the only one in any of them. My mom had to work and couldn't come to DL on that day and Derek's mom and grandma said they weren't "dressed" for pictures....PJ's are totally picture clothes!!!

This one is my favorite!


My dessert I made: Angel food Cake with Pinapple "Fluff" and fresh strawberries, blackberries, and kiwis! Ummmmm...delicious!

Fun with Miranda!!!!

Derek's high school friend Miranda came back to DL to visit her parents and she hung out with us for a couple of days. Miranda was a year ahead of me in school, but I didn't really know her that well since Derek and I didn't start hanging out until my junior/senior year. I enjoyed getting to know her and hear about all her Iraq stories. She was over there for 3 years working for a contracting company. She now lives in Baltimore.

We all know how exciting DL can be and boy, did we show her a good time!!!! Or not, there just isn't a whole lot to do around here, so we basically just hung out at home watching tv and movies and went out to eat. She was here on the weekend of the UND Sioux-Relay for Life fundraiser, so we had a few drinks and she got to see the cake I made! Click here to see it! It was pretty entertaining and I'm sure she went home with tons and tons of memories!!!

We did get to show her the old back west part of my hotel that hasn't been rented out since 2003......but it is being used as a "Haunted Hotel" for Halloween. A couple of guys here in DL put it on last year and all their stuff is still in there. So we went back and had a peek. I just took pictures of the "Ring Room" cuz that one freaks me out the most. The model of the girl actually moves back and forth. You think it looks scary in daylight, huh? Try seeing in at dusk with no lights on back there or at night. I hate going back there!



Hoping the Holy Bible will save her from the creepy girl!!



Like I could blog without posting a picture of myself?!?!

I'm not dead...yet?!

I've been crazy busy lately!!! Work has been a freakin' zoo and I don't seem to have a lot of free time after work these days. I've got lots of posting to catch up on, but unfortunately, I'm not gonna do it right now. So you'll just have to wait for all our fun Devils Run pictures!!!

Good news!! Our computer is finally fixed! Kevin redid everything and then it had a bug, so he had to do it again after I brought it home. Then it was making a horrible racket when running and it was discovered that one of the fans in the brand new power supply was cracked. Amazingly enough, R&R Computers (run by freaky ass white trash people who scare the ever living shit out of me) actually exchanged the power supply for a new one and Derek put it in all by himself! So our computer is running quite smoothly now. I've had to install all of our extras and still need to get our previous computer "backup" from Kevin.

Enough for now, hopefully I'll get to posting some tomorrow. That is if I can get Derek off the computer? I'll probably have to fight him for it!

Ta Ta For Now!!

I'm on Cake Vacation!!!!

That's it! I stressed over this cake all last week and boy, am I glad it's done!

Donna Wolf is a friend of mine and she is a really big coordinator for her Relay For Life team. They had a benefit on Sat. May 17th called "Shooting for a Cure" with some of the UND Sioux hockey players (Jean-Philippe Lamoureux, Ryan Duncan, and ol' school boys - Jeff and Jay Panzer) who came to DL to help with fundraising by taking pics with fans and signing autographs. Well, Donna said she was expecting a lot of people and after seeing Ali's Birthday cake, she thought it'd be cool if I could make a UND cake. I thought it would be cool too...little did I know it would end up being the largest, most stressful, most procrastinated cake I've done yet!?!?!

My first thought was to do a jersey cake. And I had planned on doing the newer logo with the "realistic" Sioux Indian face. But then I actually looked at my jersey....and quickly changed my mind! Much to detailed to use for my first attempt with melting candy. So I opted to make the ol' school logo they used in the late 1990's, and which I have always liked better than any of them.

I had to bake the cakes on Thursday, and frost them on Friday. I made three 11" x 13" cakes, using 2 cake mixes per pan. The board that I have the cake on is 30" wide by 40" long. It was huge! All I had done by Friday night was it cut to shape and it's base coat of frosting on! I was freaking out, that I wasn't gonna be able to do it?!

Donna wanted it at the Arcade (where they had the event) by 3pm-ish. Only I didn't get it done until Saturday at 4pm. And the benefit started ate 5pm!! I'll spare you the stressful details, but I will tell you that there were a few things that did NOT go as planned. And Saturday morning I was beginning to wonder what I had gotten myself into?!?!

But I'm awesome, as always! And was able to pull it off. It turned out fairly nice. Obviously, there were flaws that I could see, but for an amature cake...I don't think it's too bad!?! Everyone thought it was awesome and it tasted delicious...or at least that's what the told me!


I made a reversed stencil of the logo, covered it with wax paper and used melting chocolates to do the outlines.

Same thing here with the Name Logo

Now for the white candy!

This part was kinda fun! I might start making my own candies!
The bad part was that I discovered on Sat. morning that you can't add coloring to melting candy because then it turns from candy into a candy "glob"....dun...dun...dun...dunnnnn!

So this is the finished product. I ended up using black piping gel for the logos which complicated things to no end! But it worked!

I used colored the frosting to be black and green and piped it on.

Close up of the logos

The black jersey is an old one. It's my dad-in-law's. I used this for the pattern and just inverted the colors. The newer white jersey is mine. Derek got it for me for christmas in 2006 and had the 2006 team sign it. It was too small for me then...but now it fits me perfectly since I've lost a bunch of weight!

Needless to say, after I delivered this cake I went to the Tavern and had myself a drink! I'm not making any more cakes until I have a place of my own to bake, decorate, store, and wash all the dishes!

Spring Cleaning!!

We gave our garage some much needed attention the weekend before last (10th & 11th). I worked from 6:30am-9:00am and then we went over to the garage, on both days. We finished the paneling and cleaned up all the dust and dirt, moving every piece of equipment out of the way to do so.

We then moved all the garbage from the side of the garage that we had tore out to do the remodeling, to the alley for big garbage pickup. Sorry Doug, no goods here. We now have a restriction of 4 cubic feet for our pickup this year. Which is so dumb...the city bitches and moans that people need to clean up their shit, but then they put a limit on it, RETARDED!!! So I measured out a 12 ft by 12 ft square and attempted to pile everything we had in it, hoping to go no higher than 12 ft high. We had a whole stack of railroad ties and would have gone over our "limit" so we loaded them in my sister's pickup and took them to her curb since she didn't have much put out. After that we tore out all the trees and roots next to the garage. There were a whole bunch, and MY GOD for ROOTS!! Trees really amaze me. We found roots that went all the way along the side of the garage. We had to use the pickup and a chain to rip them out. That part was fun! Then Derek cut up all the trees and we took them to the city's recycling center. Lots of loading and unloading, lifting and moving, bending and...bending, you get the idea.

On Saturday we moved Derek's hot rod from Black Magic to the garage...all by ourselves. Last time we moved it we got to use a wedge bed truck and which pulled it up onto the trailer with a winch. Well, this time they were both being used so we had to push it up onto a trailer with just the two of us! And did I mention that the car is so thrown-together that the front wheels aren't connected so they each want to go their own direction. Plus I'm kinda weak when it comes to upper arm strength, so it pretty much sucked! But after 3 tries we finally got the front end on the trailer. That's right, just the front end. Cuz the car is so low that the body got caught up on the trailer. After an hour of dinking around with it and welding some pieces back together we finally got it. Here's some pics of our hard work!!

Here sits all my hard work, on this trailer...
And finally in the Garage!!!!

Derek cleaning so fast, the flames on his coat are on fire.
That's right, I'm wearing pink working gloves. I have blue, green, and purple ones too.
Trees....
Trees no more!
See, Doug, no good stuff!

Fucking Winter!! Leave Already?!!!

Remember that one time, in MID MAY that it SNOWED!!!!!!
GGGGRRRRR!

That's all I got!