Awesome Things Happen.

Every once in a while awesome things happen. Awesome things like marrying a super great guy whose extended family regularly rents houseboats for a family vacation.

SIGH.

I don't think any amount of words can do justice to the awesomeness that is living on a houseboat on Shuswap Lake for a week. Close your eyes (actually that won't work because you need to be able to read this description to imagine it...), imagine gracefully floating down the warm, clear, calm waters as the sun beats down on your body from a gorgeous bright blue sky punctuated only by an occasional eagle or pure white cloud. Imagine that sun makes you too hot, so you simply stop your floating house (complete with tv, fire place, bbq, dishwasher, double fridge, two bathrooms, 2 state rooms, 2 bunk rooms, and stereo system), and jump off the side. Or slide down the slide that is attached to the second floor of your floating house. After cooling off in the warm, calm waters of the lake, perhaps you take a spin on the speed boat that has been graciously brought by Uncle Richard, go for a tube ride, or try your hand at water skiing or knee boarding. If you are like my husband, perhaps the size and speed of the speed boat is not fast enough, so you rent a seado and rip around the lake. Its realistic to suggest that after all of this time in the water you may be feeling hungry, so you enjoy some snacks, some beer, a bbq dinner, and some fresh corn on the cob. As the sun sets, and your hair slowly dries in a stringy mess, and your bathing suit becomes damp, the air cools down and you become chilled. You climb one of the two staircases to the second floor and joyfully lower yourself into the hot tub that has been warming on the roof. You watch the stars come out, the bats swoop around, and you look down across the lake to the twinkling lights of others just like you enjoying their houseboat vacation.

Can you imagine it?
Perhaps some pictures would help.

second story hot tub. 

Selfie! (Arron want's a selfie stick for Christmas)

One of the many, many, many, gorgeous views as we travelled. It looked like this (or similar landscapes) no matter where we went or which direction we travelled.

Nicer than my own kitchen...... 

MMMM. BBQ. So much BBQing happened. 

Relaxing with my awesome birthday present.

There were great places for adventuring. Hiking, cliff jumping, kayaking, exploring. 

A little bit of cliff jumping.
"By taking a video of this, I am in no way supporting your decision. I'm just taking evidence so search and rescue knows where to start looking!" 

Arron teaching Grandma how to drive the sea-do. 

CONSTANT lovely views. All the time. 

My favourite photo from the trip. It perfectly sums up our week. Boats, water, mountains, beach, relaxing.

Left to my own devices every day. And totally loving it.

Summer vacation is great! Seriously. I'm loving it like I have never loved it before. There are many reasons for this.

Reason one: I have a perma-friend who is LEGALLY attached to me and promised last July to be my partner. So that means that Arron has to do things with me whenever I need a partner. Well, not all the time, he has no interest in manicures and pedicures, but he is very good to travel with and help me with my crafts when I need power tools or big muscles.
Reason two: I get paid through the summer for the FIRST TIME EVER. Seriously. Being a teacher rocks. I love it. And I extra love that the school I am at now does a 12 month pay scale instead of a 10 month pay scale.
Reason three: As much as we want kids, we don't have any yet. Which means MAJOR freedom for both of us (especially me since I am not working full time). I can take off and work in Barkerville for a few weeks this summer, go visit my family in Kamloops for a few days, volunteer at camp etc.

Because Arron still works full time, I am left to my own devices every day.
Bwahahahaahahahahahaha.
 He has been fantastic at coming home and calmly taking in what I have kept myself busy with. I painted and redecorated our bathroom one day. I painted and redecorated our bedroom another day. I moved all the furniture in the house and steam cleaned the carpets. I sold my car. I turned an old antique door into a headboard. I made a set of really cool stools for my classroom out of old spools he brought home one day. Tomorrow I'm cooking 16 freezer meals. He's really great at humouring me when I start a crazy project and has learned that my crazy craft ideas almost always turn out great. As long as I feed him and make sure he has clean underwear he is happy. (The week of the headboard craft I did forget to do laundry and as we were both going our separate ways for the weekend, he to Bella Coola and me off to volunteer at camp, he was dismayed to find that he only had one pair of gross tighty-whitey panties that I put in his drawer as a joke. He was sad. I felt bad, but also laughed really hard when he found the underwear.)

Some days I plan activities to do such as visiting stores downtown that I haven't been to, or trying out a new ethnic food at the farmers market (does Bannock count as ethnic food because it's not my ethnicity?) One day I decided that I would bike the entire River Valley Trail in Williams Lake.  This is a 12 km trail that goes from the Lake of Williams Lake (called Williams Lake), to the Fraser River.

I've explored a bit of the River Valley Trail on a few walks with visitors, but the idea of biking the 12 km intrigued me, especially since I bought a bike this spring at a garage sale. I figured 12 km, 24km round trip would not be  a problem. I used to bike 16 km a day when I lived in Wells/Barkerville full time, and that was an 8km uphill bike ride to work (and a lovely 8km coast back home at the end of the day.) In retrospect, I should have remembered a few things before embarking on my journey.

1. I *USED* to bike 16km a day. That was 3 summers ago. I haven't biked since then. At all. Like not even at the gym on a fake bike.

2. It's stinking hot in July in Williams Lake. Although mornings are cooler, starting at 30 degrees instead of its normal 35 degrees, it's still hot.

3. Water that flows FROM Williams Lake going TO the Fraser River, will be flowing downhill.

4. "Valley" That means that the very nice, relaxing, effortless, bike ride down into the valley, will be a very frustrating, sweaty, hot, angry ride back up to the main land.

5. Thinking you know where the trail back up to your car is, is not the same as actually knowing where that trail is.

6. Not knowing where that trail is will result in carrying your bike up a bluff, over rail road track and through a hole in a chain link fence only to realize you over shot your car by a good 2 km.

7. There is no cell service in a deep valley, so even though I was going to call Cariboo Search and Rescue to come get me, I couldn't.

Anyways. I did it. Going there was cool, coming back was miserable.
Would I do it again? Maybe. There is place you can drive down to at the 5km mark, so I could maybe be tempted to do a 10km round trip, but probably not the full 24km ever again.

For the rest of the summer I'll stick with my arts and crafts and the houseboating adventure we have planned for next week.

At this point, when I got to the river I was thinking, "Wow, that was an exceptionally nice bike ride. It is going to TOTALLY suck going back"

Made it to the river. See how calm and cool I look? 

It's a really nice trail. Very well maintained, signs, markers, maps, information. Its a great trail. 

This is to show the difference between the river valley and the main land that I would eventually have to get back up to. 

This was at my most miserable moment. Or so I thought when I took the photo.

Yeah Right Pinterest (part two)

One of the many tasks on my list for this summer was to prepare a bunch of "freezer meals." These are fully (or nearly fully) made meals that you pre make and store in the freezer until you are too lazy to cook a meal, or have company and want a nice meal, or just don't feel like doing groceries. Last year I did this during my last week off before work and although I griped and complained at the time about how much work it was (about 5 hours), I was SUPER thankful throughout the year to have 19 meals in my freezer ready to go. It seriously is so handy.

I decided yesterday, that today was going to be my freezer meal cooking day and set aside the bulk of today to make some meals. Yesterday I went through my recipes from last year and kept the ones we really liked (chicken florentine, broccoli & cheese soup, balsamic and brown sugar pork chops) and turfed the recipes that garnered a rating between 'meh' (tropical chicken) and 'that legitimately fully tastes like barf' (beef stroganoff). I picked some new recipes that looked good, made sure the dishes were done and the house was clean, and made sure that I had zero plans for today.

It's currently 11:45am and I am done.
14 freezer meals in two hours.
I should pretty much have my own Pinterest website.

WOW! After anticipating a long, hot, sweaty, exhausting day, I prepared 14 meals (and did the dishes and cleaned up) in one hour and 58 minutes.  I liked freezer meals before, I LOVE them today! And as I enjoyed half a cup of broccoli and cheese soup as my reward for working so hard, I saw in myself actual learning on this project. I learned how to make things go quicker, and  how to get things done more efficiently. Here's what I did differently to save myself 3 hours of work today.

1. I did all my shopping yesterday.
2. Any meats that needed pre-cooking, I cooked in the crock pot last night so they were ready for me this morning.
3. I did a tally from my recipes of how many cups I would need of each vegetable and then cut up enough for ALL of my recipes at once.
4. I didn't pre-cook all my meats like I did last year. That was unnecessary work.
5. I worked on two recipes at a time. One that required sauteing, or cooking, or simmering, and one that didn't. That way between stirring and frying, I could mix spices and things together for the other recipe.
6. I pre-labeled all my bags last night and put all my ingredients on the counter so I didn't have to search for them today.

The only down side is that Arron and I made a deal that because I would be cooking ALL DAY, he would make dinner for us when he got home from work and now I feel like if I make him cook I'm kinda cheating on our deal.

If you are interested in recipes, send me an e-mail and I'll get them to you.