Merry Christmas 2013, Everyone

My very first gingerbread house and I made it all from scratch. I just had to share.

Games Night is Always Lots of Fun.

A new Easter flag to welcome our friends to Games Night!

Well, Games Night has come and gone for another year and I think it was a great success despite the fact that I was suffering with a miserable cold. Luckily, I had made most of the preparations and gathered all the games and prizes the previous week so all that was left to do was clean the house and prepare the meal. This being Easter weekend there were bunnies everywhere.Everything was done nice and early, and because it was such a beautiful day outside, Hubby washed Black Beauty (again!) so that he could show it off to our friends. It does look great when it is clean and the sun is shining on it.

Every one arrived shortly after 3:00 and Hubby took the guys out for a spin around the block in the new truck (so much for it being clean, sigh). When they got back we put out some snacks and got everyone a drink and the we got right into the games!

It was a beautiful day so Hubby decided to
wash Black Beauty, (AGAIN!).

It is a pretty truck, especially when it's
gleaming in the sunlight!

The first game was the Elimination Game. Last week I mailed each of the four guests ten playing cards and I gave Hubby his own set of ten right before the game. There were two cards left over in case anyone wanted to trade. I had a matching set of cards in a bag and, one by one, I pulled out each card and the corresponding card was eliminated. After each group of ten cards there was a small consolation prize and the person with the final card got to select a prize from the Prize Basket. All the prizes were wrapped so that nobody knew what they were getting but these guys have all been here before so the knew to go right for the packages that felt like boxes of chocolates! Everyone loves chocolates, right? The other prizes included shower gel, packs of Kleenex, a novel, a puzzle book, lottery tickets, etc. There wasn't anything really expensive, it was all just for a laugh. The winner of the Elimination game, not surprisingly, managed to find the biggest box of chocolates!

The Easter Bunny Girls.

The dining room / games table is all
set for a night of fun!

A close-up of my beautiful birthday orchid.

Home-made butter tarts were just part of the dessert menu.

Here are the games and the prize basket.

The Elimination game is under way!

The winner of the Elimination game gets to select the
first prize from the basket.

The next game was trivia contest. I found a great and timely quiz on the CBC website about the recent demise of the penny. The quiz is just below and I'll put the answers at the end of this post if you want to play.

PENNY TRIVIA
1. Four of the five designs that have appeared on the reverse side of the penny have included maple leaves. What was the fifth design?
A portrait of a rock dove
A rendering of the Atlantic puffin
A view of the St. Lawrence River
A sketch of the Canadian Rockies

2. About 35 billion pennies have been minted since 1908. If they were stacked on top of each other, this would be the equivalent height of this many CN Towers:
100
1,000
100,000
1,000,000

3.The federal government announced plans to withdraw the penny, owing to production costs. How much did it cost to make one penny?
1.6 cents
2 cents
3.1 cents
5 cents

4. The net cost of redeeming the six billion pennies expected to be turned in over the next six years will cost the federal government:
$10,500
$125,000
$3,000,000
$38,300,000

5.How many pennies can you cram into a four-litre pickle jar?
344 pennies, or $3.44
4,992 pennies or $49.92
12,280 pennies or $122.80
175,333 pennies or $1,753.33

6.This country has also eliminated the single-unit coin from circulation:
New Zealand
France
Spain
All of the above

7.The last penny was produced in May 4, 2012 in which city?
London, England
Ottawa, Ont.
Winnipeg, Man.
Calgary, Alta.

8.A rare Canadian penny sold for $402,500 US at auction in January 2010. The penny, one of three ever made, bears this unique feature:
A misspelling of the word "Canada"
A small dot below the year
Renderings of both King George V and Edward VII
A hexagon shape

9.The letters KG appear on the penny below the maple leaf. This stands for:
King George, in honour of the monarch who preceded Queen Elizabeth
Kingston and Gatineau, to mark Canada's bilingual tradition
George Edward Kruger Gray, the artist who designed the maple leaf twig design for the penny
Kilogram, a reference to the metric unit of measurement standard in Canada

10.Pennies produced from 1982 to 1996 were unique in this respect:
They were made of copper-plated zinc
They were no longer round but rather had 12 sides
They didn't have "Canada" printed on them
They were extra lucky

After that we tried playing a game called "Don't Fall" but Larry got a perfect score of eleven on his first try so we stopped there and moved on to the Memory Test. This proved to be a lot harder. Everyone got to study a plate that held 13 items for 30 seconds and then the plate was taken away. The most anyone could remember was 11 of the 13. More surprisingly, when we we repeated the test later in the evening with the same items, most people did even worse!

Larry played this winning entry in the "Don't Fall" game
in his first try!

This is the Memory Test Game. The best anyone
could do was 11 of 13 items.

We stopped for supper at that point. We had Cabernet Beef Stew and Home-made Cheese Biscuits for the meal and pumpkin pie with whipped cream, key lime tarts and butter tarts (all home-made as well) for dessert. Nobody went away hungry!

Freddy was the King of backgammon and,
 of course, crokinole!

The only game I won all night was Blockus!

After supper we went back to the games. We had a game of Yahtzee with everyone and then we broke up into  a couple of groups and played crokinole and Blockus. Blockus was the only game I won all night but by then all the prizes had been given out. Oh, well. It probably wouldn't have looked good if I awarded myself a prize! We had great fun even though I didn't feel well and I'm looking forward to the next time we have Games Night, maybe it should be a semi-annual event!

(answers to the penny quiz - (1) A portrait of a rock dove, (2) 100,000, (3) 1.6 cents, (4) $38,300,000, (5) 4,992 pennies or $49.92, (6) All of the above, (7) Winnipeg, Man., (8) A small dot below the year, (9) George Edward Kruger Gray, the artist who designed the maple leaf twig design for the penny, (10) They were no longer round but rather had 12 sides)

So, Big Red is Gone, Here's Black Beauty!

So, Big Red is gone. Do you remember how excited we were three years ago when we bought her?

After the heartbreak of losing the deal on the 2010 truck we were indeed lucky to find this beauty last weekend. It took some real thought to decide to spend this amount of our savings on a vehicle but we think that we chose well. It took us a week to finalize the sale but Big Red came home yesterday and we think that it is just gorgeous. It is much prettier than the new truck we were considering and much better equipped. Oh yeah, and almost $20,000 less than the list price of the new one! I guess that the a__holes at the first dealership actually did us a big favour, and they probably didn't need our money anyway.

Big Red was beautiful when she first came home.

She was such a pretty vehicle that we had to think of it as "her". It turned out that it wasn't a good choice and it wasn't long into our relationship, that we started regretting our purchase. The issues stared early. We had an $800 brake job that was needed 4 months after we bought her, a failed 4 wheel drive system that took the dealer over 2 weeks to properly fix (thankfully I had insisted on the extended warranty!), seat fabric that was worn through to the foam, evil handling over bumps on the highway, faded and failing paint on the rocker panels and wheel wells and worst of all, rust in the rear quarter panels. It soured our feelings for this truck.

Before the disappointment set in...

So, Hubby started looking for a replacement early last year. He still wanted a full sized 4X4 pickup, primarily for winter driving even though the fuel costs are significant. It didn't help that he goes past the local Chrysler dealer on his way to work every day. Their lot is full of new trucks and they are offering huge discounts (as high as $12,000 off on some versions). He watched the inventory come and go on the dealer's websites waiting for just the right one to become available and every once in a while we would go and peer into the windows in the dealer's lots and gasp at the list prices. This is exactly what we were doing a couple of weeks ago when we came across Black Beauty!

Black Beauty, a 2011 Ram 1500 Sport

Pulling into the lot we were wondering why this new truck was parked with the used vehicles. As it happens, it was used, a 2011 Ram 1500 Sport with just 50,000 kilometres on it. It was exactly what Hubby had been looking for, the correct model and equipment and even the right colour.

We took it for a drive and it was nice. It drove well and felt solid on the road. The interior is loaded with just about everything you can imagine including automatic headlights, automatic dual-zone temperature controls, touch screen satellite radio that will also connect to a cell phone, built-in garage door openers, partial leather seats and auto-dimming mirrors. The outside has body coloured bumpers and mirrors, fog lamps, running boards, remote start, security alarm and 20 inch chrome wheels. Another very pretty vehicle, I decided to name her Black Beauty.

The interior wasn't muddy until
we brought it home!

The centre stack includes the touch screen
radio and climate controls.

The dance started as soon as we returned from the test drive. The dealer had looked at Big Red while we were out and had come up with a very disappointing offer. We went home to think things over and to do some research. Consumer Reports rated the model as above average in everything except fuel mileage. The asking price the dealer wanted was at the extreme end of the range according to the Canadian Black Book website while the amount they were offering for Big Red was thousands less than the minimum. We haggled with them for over a week, adding extended warranty again and a cover for the back end and don't forget the bloody taxes, before finally agreeing on a price. We came out at about half of what a new 2013 version would have cost. Vehicle depreciation is very scary in the first few years!

We were back to the dealer yesterday to pick up a missing spare key and found out that Big Red is already sold. The dealer was going to recondition her, fix up the paint and her other issues but they decided that that would be too expensive. So they have sold her off to used car wholesaler and we will probably never hear of her again. Too bad, she held such promise when she first came home. Maybe her problems stem from the financial crisis the manufacturers were in at the time it was made or maybe she was just a lemon. We'll never know I guess. I just hope someone buys her and fixes her back up and maybe loves her a little.

For us, I just hope that this new vehicle will last us a few years. Retirement is looming!

Poor Big Red, back on the dealer's lot.

You can see the missing paint from the rust bubble over the
wheel arch.

The new truck getting its first wash at home. You can see
why the floor mats are muddy in the shot above.

Saying goodbye to Big Red. She has been sold to a vehicle
wholesaler already. I hope she will find some love out there.

Clean again for a short while.