Kelly's Blog

Food Waste Friday #1

2012-01-14T09:59:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Food Waste Friday!

My friend Marisa and I have been reading The Frugal Girl for a while (Marisa introduced it to me about a year ago, I don’t know how long Marisa has been reading it). The Frugal Girl does “Food Waste Fridays”, where she posts an occasionally embarrassing picture of her food waste for the week each Friday and encourages other bloggers to join her. I’ve been wanting to do it for a while but couldn’t get the guts up, but I’m doing it now! I decided to do it about a week and a half ago but my trash can was full last week (they are super strict on trash here in Oregon, no overflow or anything), so I just saved up my food waste (ew?) in my fridge. So what you will see here is about two weeks of food waste. In addition, I’m declaring “food waste bankruptcy” – cleaned out my fridge and freezer pretty completely so I have a fresh slate. I have some pantry items that are on the edge, but I’ve been eating stale cereal for the past week or so to try to prevent food waste on those things. It really is interesting how big of a difference you can make when you put your mind to it!

Not pictured this week:

- Several leftover containers from restaurants. These were my sister’s (she’s been staying with us since she got back from Afghanistan while she job hunts) and she was in Italy for a few weeks and they got weird.

- Most of a loaf of bread. We don’t eat a ton of bread but we bought it were my parents were here and it went moldy. Sad

- Hamburger rolls from when we first moved in and I had made a bunch of pulled pork. We had two packages and I guess there were two buns left at the end and they were also moldy.

- A tiny bit of skim milk – again, my sister’s and she left for Italy around the beginning of the expiration date.

- Eggnog – Geoff purchased with the intention of drinking and never even opened the carton.

- Parsley – I don’t even know when it was from, it was all dried and weird. Maybe there is something I could have done with dried parsley? But it certainly wasn’t properly dried.

- A weird malt cranberry drink I bought. I thought it would be tasty and festive for the holidays. It was festive perhaps, but it sure wasn’t tasty. I just faced facts that no one (including myself) was going to drink it.

Pictured:

- One picture is my special “s’more stash” for camping. It is a divided container that holds chocolate and graham crackers (and sometimes marshmallows, but they were in a separate container and they’re still ok at the moment). The chocolate was all oxidized (I tried it and it was weird) – I tried to pull it out a bit so you could see it. And the grahams were mushy. I made a s’more in the microwave – yuck. It was all crumbly and weird.

- Caesar salad & dressing – this was also from when my parents were here.

- 2 packages of awesome meat – sad. But it was super freezer burned. I made Geoff a steak from the same set of meat and it was YUCKY. So we decided not to take our chances with these… why waste cooking time, materials, energy, etc. when we know it will be bad?

- Buttermilk – not sure when this is from, got stuck in the back of the fridge.

- Fig spread – I never ate this. Totally my fault. It’s way past the sell by date.

- Onion – it was a little weird to begin with, I should have prioritized using this or made sure I cut the weird parts off from the beginning. I think it contaminated itself.

- Random cup of ranch dressing – no explanation.

- Pomegranate – this was my sister’s. It got super moldy and weird. But this was the first time I tried pomegranate, SO GOOD!!!!

Seems like I had a lot of large quantities of food. I guess I need to work on that. Here are some highlights of the past few weeks, since I’ve been thinking about this stuff more:

- Used up a bunch of cheeses in macaroni and cheese (had to cut a few moldy spots off, but I’ll take it! – I guess I should have counted the moldy spots above)

- Been eating tortilla chips like crazy to use up the giant Costco bag I bought for New Year’s Eve (also been eating up the dips that went along with it as well as some other dips we had on hand, which gets rid of them and uses up sour cream and cream cheese)

- Geoff ate a frozen lasagna that had been in the freezer FOREVER (and by “in the freezer”, I mean has traveled with us… probably since we sold our house in 2009. Ew. And YAY GEOFF!)

- Ate leftovers from going out to brunch this weekend (again, YAY GEOFF)

- Ate a bunch of meatballs leftover from NYE and froze the rest in nice portioned packs!

- Ate up some super-special chocolate sauce/topping we have had for a while (there was one moldy bit that needed to be scooped out, so I think we saved it in the nick of time!)

- My stale-cereal binge

- Geoff’s been eating up his frozen fruit smoothie things (and using up some of my sister’s skim milk, as well as the cream and his own milk in the process!)

So I think pretty good all in all! I’m looking forward to doing this and seeing what we can do about food waste!

I'm awesome at blogging!

2011-11-03T07:23:00.000-07:00

Don't y'all know it? Ok, here's some highlights of the past few months.

June - Went camping on the coast the first weekend of June, ran in the Great Urban Race (by ran I mean walked... dressed up as Lady Gaga... there were four of us... we came in second in the costume contest!) the second weekend, and then did Relay for Life the last weekend of June

July - My mom came to visit, so we had a great week with her... went camping one weekend in Eugene, played bingo, and just generally had a good time. Also went to the coast for my friend Beth's 30th birthday celebration. Geoff also changed to a new job (still at the same company).

August - Geoff has been going to school for a couple of years at various Portland Community College campuses close to work and where we live. But he was going to be starting at Portland State (downtown Portland) in the fall. We lived south of the city and worked east of the city and had previously been able to carpool, but now we were throwing in a trip to the city which also eliminated our ability to carpool. Since all of these places are 30 - 45 minutes away from each other and our second "car" was a Ford F-450, this picture was starting to look a little weird. So we sold the truck and put the RV up for consignment at a dealer (it's still there). We moved in with Geoff's parents. His sister was still in town for the summer, so we had a great time. We worked on a ton of outdoor projects while it was still the summer - cleaning out the garage, cleaning out the shed, etc.

I think I've oozed into September a bit here. :) So let me close out August - we volunteered for Hood to Coast (didn't run it this year!) and went to my friend Addy's wedding.

Ok, so onto September - kicked off my beloved Northwestern football season! That's about the highlight of September.

In October, we went to visit Geoff's grandparent's house in Mt. Vernon, WA, which is always so much fun! We pressed apple cider, watched football, and ate a lot. We celebrated Geoff and Claire's (my friend's 2 year old) birthdays the 22nd and 23rd (not-respectively... or something. Geoff's is the 23rd and Claire's is the 22nd). Many people contributed to Claire's cake... my mother in law baked them, Geoff iced them, Claire's aunt Beth (of previous 30th birthday party fame) and her friend made the little people in front of them (see pic below), and I just sort of coordinated the whole effort and let Claire sit in my lap and stick her hands in cornstarch and help me roll out the fondant (while eating a little too... see other pic below). A good time was had by all. This past weekend, we went to Houston for my cousin's wedding. It was GREAT to see my family - cousins, aunts, uncles, grandfather, parents. Haven't seen some of them in years. We had just the best time!!!

November promises fun!!! I switched to a new job myself (also within the same company) effective November 1. We're moving into a townhouse (renting) beginning tomorrow. I say beginning tomorrow because we get the keys tomorrow but we're going to take a week or so to move - no rush! But it will be very close to work, so I will basically have no commute and Geoff will just have to get to school 3 or 4 days a week depending on his schedule. Not too bad! My sister is returning from Afghanistan 6 days (or possibly less!) from now. She goes to Dallas first to see my parents and then here for Thanksgiving! YIPPY!!! Then next month my parents come for Christmas.

Very excited for the coming months!!!

Ugh.

2011-06-09T08:12:00.001-07:00

This is not okay. These people are not “justified” because of what some bank “told them”. They are obligated to the contract they signed to pay for their home. http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/09/real_estate/foreclosure_squatter/index.htm?iid=HP_LN&hpt=hp_c1

And it’s REALLY lame that your payments used to be $1000 but tripled to $3000 because you were too stupid to refinance and now you’re paying NOTHING while you “work with the bank to find a payment plan that works”. How about you still pay your $1000? How is NOTHING okay???

May

2011-06-08T14:04:00.000-07:00

I've had a couple of comments about how I have new posts on my blog - which are now a month old!

May was filled with a lot of travel - our trip to Georgia was lots more fun than expected! We got to see our friend William, spend a ton of time with family, had some awesome meals, and did a great quick daytrip of Atlanta on Saturday. We went to the Coke museum, the aquarium, and had a behind the scenes tour of CNN. It was super fun!

The past two weekends (Memorial Day and the weekend after) we went camping. We went to Seven Feathers RV Resort for Memorial Day. That's my favorite park, and I believe it's Geoff and his mom's favorite as well. We had so much fun even though it was rainy all weekend long! This past weekend we spent a gorgeous weekend at Fort Stevens State Park. My friend Laura, her sister Beth, and Laura's daughter Claire came and hunt out with us during the day on Saturday. We went to the beach, had a campfire, and chatted. I also invited myself into a camper - my mother-in-law is thinking about buying a camper of her own, and the folks across from us had the same brand she is looking at. She has never been in one, so I politely invited us in (after stalking the people all afternoon waiting for them to return!). In my experience folks are ALWAYS happy to show off their "home". Turned out, they are looking to go to full timing in the next few years when they retire. They had seen our fifth wheel and had already Googled it, so when they learned it was ours they asked if they could check it out. Geoff gave them a nice long (probably 30 minutes) tour. They seemed to really like it, so it worked out well that we could both check out each other's rigs. The weekend before (Memorial Day at Seven Feathers), we saw some people that had the same brand camper we used to have, and our friend Bill (he and his wife Cindy have a trailer also and camp with us often) invited got to chatting with them and they had been Googling our fifth wheel as well. So he invited them to check ours out. They came over and loved it as well. So much fun! Ours is a smaller manufacturer so it's fun to introduce people to them. Anyway, we had a great time at Fort Stevens but probably won't go back with our current camper. Most of the older state parks in Oregon just aren't set up for rigs as big as ours, and it's not pleasant to get in and out of there.

Those are really the highlights of May - have some good things coming in June so hopefully I'll be inspired to blog more. We are playing bingo tonight, I'm super excited!! We most recently played at Seven Feathers Memorial Day weekend, but I really like our "home" bingo hall better. We know our announcers (bingo callers and attendants), we know how all of the games work (no staring at a sheet or the board to try to figure out if we have the right patterns or not), etc. It's just really fun at our own place!

Oh and last week I bought a box (~140) of nail polish from someone on Craigslist. I got a GREAT deal and it's been so fun to look through the polishes. Quite a few gems in there!

2011 Thus Far

2011-05-02T13:33:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the wonky formatting in the previous post, if it isn't obvious, I used the "post via email" option. I thought it would be easier, but probably won't do it again due to the formatting.

Ugh and I keep thinking of other things that happened - like in December 2009, Geoff and I took a whirlwind trip to Houston to help my borderline hoarder (like ALMOST could be on the show Hoarders, maybe not quite though) grandfather move into his retirement community. It was 5 straight days of 12+ hour workdays going through his house as quickly and efficiently as possible. My parents came down to help, and we had some help from my uncle as well. My cousin and his girlfriend innocently came by to pick up a fridge and some furniture on their anniversary - and ended up staying and helping us out straight up until they had to leave for their dinner reservation. It was SO kind of them (especially the girlfriend!! - now fiance!) to stay a disgusting, mold-filled house full of trash to help us sort through Goodwill/keep/trash/recycle/etc. It really meant a lot to me and Geoff. They apologized profusely for having to leave and for not knowing ahead of time (this was on Sunday, and they had to work the next day), otherwise they would have helped us out on Saturday as well.

Also at some point Patrick came to visit Portland - it was late 2010 because we went to bingo! But I have to stop thinking about what else happened last year otherwise we will never get into this year!!!

January 2011
Started off with a Murder Mystery Dinner Party at Dave and Busters with my sister and her boyfriend! The New Years Day we went to the Northwestern bowl game in Dallas!!! Yay for parents who live where your team's bowl game is! We were able to rearrange our tickets and because they actually cost LESS than our original tickets back did we even got a discount on our change fee! The Wildcats lost but it was still a great time and we got to see some college friends. We also got to meet up with my college friend Russ, his wife, and his new (probably 4 months at the time?) baby! They took us out for a fantastic lunch a Greek cafe close to my parent's house (so nice of them to drive out closer to us to meet us even though THEY were the ones with the baby!). 2011 definitely started out with an exciting bang!!!

February 2011
Ugh. February. We were planning a trip to Disney World with my friend/bingo partner/doggy daycare manager Chelsea and her boyfriend Peter. We actually DID go to Disney World, but two days into the trip I got sick. So sick. :( High temperature, feel totally rotten, stay in bed all day kind of sick. Yuck. Thankfully we were there with Chelsea and Peter so Geoff could go to the parks with them during the day. I was able to go to the parks Saturday and Sunday, but Monday (Valentine's Day - everyone went out to a romantic dinner but me!), Tuesday, and Wednesday I was in bed all day. Wednesday night I started getting concerned - we had to fly back Friday and I wasn't going to be able to fly the way I was feeling. So Geoff stayed home from a special luau dinner show even thing that we were going to go to in order to the doctor with me. A very nice man came and picked me up on a complimentary bus and took us to urgent care. We had to wait forever (like 2.5 hours?) but finally a doctor came in, said "you have some sort of tonsillitis, no strep test cause adults don't get strep, but I'll put you on an antibiotic". Fine. Happily, they had the antibiotic on site so we didn't have to track down a pharmacy. I started taking that and started feeling a bit better. Thursday I spent a couple of hours at the parks with everyone, just taking it real slow and easy. Friday night we flew home - with a stop in Dallas in which my parents were able to meet us at the airport and my mom brought me birthday brownies! - and then I slept in late Saturday, my birthday. Starting Thursday, I had NO VOICE. I have never had no voice like that before - I would open up my mouth to talk and words would not come out. I could whisper, but it wasn't until Monday at work (which thankfully was President's Day, so there were very few people at work), that I had any voice whatsoever to talk with! Even then it was awful. I would have had to miss a whole week of work, so I guess it was good that I was on vacation, but ugh!! What a vacation - sick the whole week!! So that next week I started feeling better and my antibiotics finished on Friday the 25th. By Monday the 28th I still wasn't feeling right, so I went back to the doctor. This doctor actually ran a strep test and SURPRISE - I had strep. He thought it was SO weird, because he had just been looking at my throat and saying "do you ever get acid reflux? because this looks more like some irritation than strep throat". The nurse then knocked on the door and said the strep was positive. He was shocked - they had only done the strep test because it's standard for them with sore throats. I asked what the percentage of tests are false negatives, and he said "are you an engineer? only engineers ask me questions like that." Why yes, yes I am. So he googled it for me - only 2% are false negatives. But we did a culture just to be sure - it really was strep, I found out a few days later. So he put me on a 2nd course of antibiotics - this one only for 7 days instead of 10 days. I got to feeling a bit better again (never 100%), and then again about 2 days after the antibiotics wore off, I felt worse again. Having been through this song and dance before, I went straight back to the doctor. Strep AGAIN!! It was so weird... they asked if I worked in childcare or was around kids or what. Nope, none of the above. She said "we never see antibiotic resistant strep throat!" She put me on a third course of antibiotics. I don't know if I had strep all 3 times, or if it came and went, or if I just kept having it... who knows. But that one finally did the trick and about 6 weeks after getting sick, I got fully 100% better. Thank GOODNESS!!! So half of February and basically all of March was shot.

The other thing that happened in February is my sister went to Afghanistan. After grad school, she started a program to be a Human Terrain Analyst. She trained for 6 months in Leavenworth, Kansas, and then left in February for Afghanistan. I am SUPER excited for her and proud of her.

March 2011
Since I was sick all of March (more or less... and I was able to go to work but just didn't have much energy for anything else), I decided to become the master of care packages for my sister!! I have sent her some themed ones - Under the Sea, Easter, etc. and some random things that she has requested (clothes, etc.) I am now a pro at filling out a customs form and mailing to APOs. I know everything you could every want to know about how the military mail system works and what to send, what not to send. In fact, I've had so much fun doing this that when she comes back, I plan to do an "adopt a soldier" program for care packages. It's been just awesome, and having her there helps me learn and appreciate a lot more about our military!

We also went to the Portland RV Show TWICE in March - this time it's not us in the market for an RV, it's my in-laws. They went from wanting a Class A (like a big bus type) to a travel trailer (pull behind a vehicle) to back to a tiny trailer (a really short one that you pull behind a vehicle). That's kind of what my MIL wanted all along, but my FIL wanted something a little bigger. But when push came to shove, he realized he doesn't go very often and it makes more sense for her to have something she can tow easily and setup quickly on her own. It did take 2 RV shows to figure it out, but now she's in the market for something like the Rockwood Roo 21BH - has bunks, a U-shaped dinette (more space), plus a fold out bed for when it's nice out. Really great little camper. So she is working on getting her beloved Mustang ready for sale - it's a new season of life and while she's loved the Mustang now she is ready to love a camper of her own! So that was fun too.

April 2010
April brought our first camping trip of the year - to the coast on what turned out to be the nicest weekend of the year!! It worked out nicely. The only bummer came when Geoff opened the emergency exit window, and it somehow slid off it's track and popped off. In the process of trying to put it back in, he accidentally shattered the window next to the emergency exit (they are adjoined). So our camper has been out of commission and we have been living at my in-law's house for the past two weeks. Luckily they have plenty of space and are kind enough to let us stay there. Also, my FIL is out of town for work for several months so it works nicely that we are at there to stay with my MIL and give her a bit of company (or, she is annoyed that people are invading her house during her special time alone!). Plus they have an extra fridge in their garage, which is great because there is a refrigerator recall that we decided to have done as well (might as well since they have our camper anyway). So that should be done in about 2 more weeks - the problem with such a high-end / specialized camper is that everything is custom and so service takes a bit longer. That's ok, I think it was still the right choice for us.

Which brings us to May... this weekend we are headed to Atlanta for my brother-in-law's graduation from Georgia Tech! We'll get to see Geoff's brother for the first time since right before Christmas, plus his grandparents for the first time sense then too. It will be a quick trip but should be a fun weekend.

And now you're caught up on my life. :)

Wrapping up 2010!

2011-05-02T13:26:00.001-07:00

September 2010

In September we met up with my sister and her friend Molly in Vegas to celebrate my sister’s birthday. We stayed in the Palazzo. The highlight of the trip (for me at least) was going to a live stage show of The Price is Right. It wasn’t the taped version, but it was a Vegas replica. In order to maximize the number of people that got to play, they called all new people up for each game (like the 4 people guessing the price didn’t get to stay up there, they had to go back to their seats each time). So the Showcase Showdown people were selected just for the Showcase Showdown. None of us had been selected throughout the entire game, and had pretty much given up hope. But then my sister was called to come on down!!!! I had read on Yelp that the Vegas Price is Right prices, specifically in the Showcase, were VERY LOW. The Showcase (there was only one, both contestants bid on the same one) contained a car, two vacations, 1000 shares of Yahoo shop, and a couple of other things. I showed her numbers on my hands, I think I had her bid $12K and the actual retail price was about $13K. Of course the other lady bid like $25K or $30K since it SEEMED very impressive, and my sister was the “big winner”. What the audience didn’t know, but they had told her in the 90 seconds between when she was called up and had to bid, was that she was bidding on these items but unless she came within like a penny (or who knows, maybe it was $100, I don’t remember), she would only win one. So they decided she won the Mexican cruise. She went for the cash out option and got $300. Certainly not bad, but it seemed like she was winning thousands and thousands of dollars, and she won $300. Lots of people kept coming up to her and congratulating her on her new car, and she was like yeah… I didn’t win a car. They were all mad! It was pretty funny. The guy who got to play Plinko (who was a really sketchy guy… he was in Vegas without his wife and gave a really sketchy story about where his wife was? But he didn’t speak great English, so that may have been party of the problem) won about $800… my sister was like how is the Showcase EVER worth less than Plinko?! Again, how can you complain about winning $300… it was just the whole ridiculousness/cheesiness of the whole thing that was funny!!!! Definitely a great time was had by all, in spite of or more likely BECAUSE of the cheesiness. I would recommend for sure! Other than that, we just had fun eating, hanging by the pool, and shopping. I probably played a few penny slots but none of us are big gamblers. Oh and we watched Iowa football (Christine and Molly both went to Iowa) – we couldn’t get anyone to tune to a Northwestern game (which was on Big 10 Network or another obscure network) without agreeing to spend like $100 on food and beverage. No thanks. All in all, a great weekend! (and I did get to spend my gift card that Geoff gave me on the most fantastic purse I have ever owned)

October 2010

October was the month of the cake! My friend Laura’s daughter was having her first birthday, so she asked me to do her cake. I hadn’t made a cake in a couple of years, so I had to “practice” :) First I made a going away cake for someone who was leaving our group at work. Then I made a birthday cake for a friend who invited me to a Girl’s Weekend at the coast for her birthday – that was tricky to keep a surprise! It was a three tier cake, and I had to drive separately because my cake took up so much room!!! Then I had to get some of the other girls to take Kim on a walk so I had time to assemble the cake!!! Then was Baby Claire’s birthday – her birthday is the day before Geoff’s and her party was on Geoff’s birthday. I decide to make Geoff a surprise cake that looked like a big plate of noodles with meatballs (chocolate cake mixed with chocolate icing and rolled into balls) and spaghetti sauce (strawberry filing poured down on top of the cake). So I spent a lot of prep time early in the week making what I could ahead of time for the cakes – one for Claire’s party, one for just Claire to eat, and one for Geoff. Luckily Geoff had class on Thursday night I made his cake and the strawberry filing, then hid the cake in the storage underneath the camper and the strawberry filing in the back of the fridge. Friday morning Geoff and I “moved” – aka parked our camper outside at Ryan and Laura’s house. We would stay there for the weekend to make it more convenient, since Geoff was smoking ribs and chicken for the party and I was doing cake! So Friday I took half a day off of work and went to Laura’s house to finish Geoff’s cake before Geoff got there, then start on Claire’s. I finished Geoff’s cake and hid it in Laura’s garage. Geoff also left work a bit early, but luckily I was done before he got there! Geoff, Laura, and I all worked on Claire’s cakes the rest of the day – instead of finishing them Saturday morning like we planned, we stayed up until 2 AM working on them. There are pictures of all of these cakes on Facebook. It was a lot of work, but we had a great time doing it!!! Oh, and Geoff was COMPLETELY surprised – his parents actually came to Claire’s birthday party so they could see him on his birthday, and I went out to the camper and got my strawberry filling, poured it over his cake, and brought it in from the garage to surprise him. I think a lot of people were more impressed with the spaghetti cake then Claire’s cakes – I assume because it looked like something other than what it was? It was about 239852398 times easier that Clarie’s cakes.

October also brought my high school friends Kathleen and Stacey visiting! They came to Oregon for a wine tasting trip. They stayed at our house Saturday night (we had agility class but just left the door unlocked for them and arrived home about 30 minutes after they got there). Then Sunday we all went wine tasting together and then picked up pizza for dinner. It was a ton of fun!!! It was the longest I’ve been able to really visit with them in about 10 years, so it was great! We went to some wineries I’ve been to before as well as some new ones, including one that had just opened several days before that they heard about in a previous winery on their trip. It was really fun to see them!

November 2010

When we were in Vegas, I saw that I was missing a fabulous Groupon – a 14 day trial membership to ClubSport, a gym I have always been interested in! I knew that it was nice and had a rock wall, but didn’t know too much else about it, so the Groupon would have been a perfect way to check it out. But I didn’t see it until the day after it ran. But in November, someone at work realized he wasn’t going to have time to use his, so he was looking for a taker. Lucky me, I got to be the taker! Geoff was super jealous… until a couple of days later when the guy emailed me and said that his wife also wasn’t going to be able to use hers, and was I interested in that one too? Yes please!!! So Geoff and I went and checked that out (ok, so we might have started in October, but most of the 14 visits occurred in November). WE LOVED IT. It was soooooooo nice and made working out so much more fun!!!! Each treadmill and bike (our primary cardio choices) has an individual TV, which is great especially for Geoff, who likes TV more than anyone I know (except maybe my mom!). I enjoy the TV too, but will often read instead, especially on the bike. There is an indoor pool, an outdoor pool that has a cabana so you can get lunch and drinks, 3 NBA size basketball courts, 2 smaller courts, racquetball, squash, the largest rock wall in the Northwest, a restaurant and bar, nice locker rooms with towels/shampoo/conditioner/body wash/shave gel/blow dyers/q-tips/you-get-the-picture provided (and the women’s has a lounge area with a TV, comfy couches, and lemon water), a spa/sauna/steam room in each locker room), 3 fitness studios, and I think that’s it. Actually there is other stuff like physical therapy, an “Edge” room for more intense classes and personal training, a small store with fitness clothes and stuff, and a spa area with massage and pedicures. They have all sorts of events and activities and parties going on all the time too. Anyway it’s a really nice gym!! It’s great for kids too, they have kid-oriented classes and camps, and for the smaller kids there is a GREAT kids club area where parents can get 2 or 3 (can’t remember) free hours of childcare a day. I have read yelp reviews from new moms that are like I LOVED that time to take a shower and just a bit of me time a day! Plus the outdoor pool is just a recreational pool (no laps or classes), so I imagine that will be a GREAT place for kids. It opens May 21^st so that will be our first chance to see it in action. I’m super looking forward to it. Oh, so I guess I just gave away the fact that we joined – we got a really great discount through our company, and we got a lot of use out of our Groupon, so we decided to join. It’s more than our old gym was, but we have enjoyed and used it a lot more than our old gym too. I think it’s worth it – we look forward to going to the gym!

My sister came and visited us for Thanksgiving – it was the third year in a row she’s come for Thanksgiving, and it’s always so much fun. We got her passes to the gym (negotiated that when we joined!) so she was able to check it out. We also did some shopping, volunteered on Thanksgiving day, and some general hanging out. It was just kinda a low key fun weekend!

December 2010

I eluded to my online nail message board earlier in this “year in review” – well in December one of the gals organized a “Portland area meetup”. So 6 of us got together at a Starbucks to meet each other, chit-chat, and trade nail polish. It was quite a site to see us each with a box of colors that we didn’t love, and we swapped with each other for colors we’ll love more!! I know it sounds really really lame to first HAVE a nail polish message board and second of all meet up with them, but I don’t care. Nail polish has turned into an awesome hobby and it was fun to meet up with others who share the same hobby! The same gal is organizing another meetup as we speak!

December of course is also Christmas (stick with me, you’ll learn a lot – ha). We travelled to Dallas to see my parents and sister. It also worked out well because my aunt and grandmother came in from Albuquerque to visit, and my cousin came up from Fort Hood with her family! I had met her husband once before (before they were married), but had never met her little girls (almost 5 and almost 3 at the time). It was so much fun! We hadn’t spent any real time together in 10+ years so it was just great! The other highlight of the trip is that we took the dogs – that’s right, we got these carriers called SturdiBags – I found them on clearance at PetSmart (they are no longer carrying them) and had a 15% off coupon to go with it! So even though they are expensive, we got a great deal on them and everyone we asked about which carrier to use recommended a SturdiBag!! We got them about 3 months in advance and started throwing treats in there and getting the dogs used to them. They travelled like pros!!!! We had to take their collars off and pull them out of their bags to go through security, then stuff them back into their bags. No problema. A little fussing from Jax but really not a big deal. Overall they were VERY calm on the trip there and back. I would do it again any time. Oh, and they travelled under the seats in front of us as one of our carry ons, not underneath with the baggage. I don’t think I would do that. Yay for small dogs! It was a great Christmas with the family and our little dogs!

WHEW!!!!! 2010 is done – that is my year! I’ll start in on the first part of 2011 later today!!!

2009 - 2011, continued

2011-04-29T07:29:00.000-07:00

March 2010
I know I already covered this, but I didn't remember anything. I do now. March was my first "hunt" for nail polish with my MIL. She has two boys, and she loves to hunt. So what did she get to hunt for growing up? The latest Hot Wheel collections. She also is a knitter, so she has gone on hunts for "retired" yarn colors before. But she was VERY happy to have the opportunity to hunt for nail polish, even though she didn't really know what she was looking for. :) We went to a local store called the Dollar Shoppe, lots of TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Big Lots, Dollar Tree, etc. Those types of stores have great old drugstore brand (Revlon, Sally Hansen, etc.) nail polish for about 50 cents a bottle!

Also, we started agility classes for the dogs. I thought it would be fun for Jax since he's so athletic, and Geoff decided to take Roxy too even though her legs are about an inch and a half long.

We already covered April, so I'll skip that.

May 2010
In May I came up with the genius idea to get inflatable kayaks. I have always loved kayaking, we live right on a river, and there is at least one place we camp that has a great river available for kayaking. Plus we were going to visit my sister in Monterey where there is fantastic kayaking. So I got two 2 man kayaks, complete with life jackets for the pups. They have proven to be SO much fun!! I spent much of last summer kayaking - there are several put-in points on the river, so I typically will just drive to one, kayak down, and pull myself out near where we live. I deflate my kayak, carry it back to my house (although later I got a little cart to carry it, way easier, cause they are heavy), and then when Geoff has time get him to take me back to my car (or if I went with someone, the second person just takes us back to the first car). In all honesty though, sometimes there is so little flow in our river I could just put in and get out at the same place!

We also did the Portland Doggie Dash in May... super fun event with vendors and dog contests. We did about a mile and a half walk - that's all Roxy can handle! Jax could handle the longest run they have as an option.

May was also when we took the camper down to California for my sister's graduation. We met up with my parents (they stayed with us), and my aunt, uncle, and grandmother rented an Airstream at the same RV park we stayed at. It had a great dog park complete with agility equipment and we had a fantastic trip. After the graduation, Geoff and I had an extra ~5 days and we pondered what to do - Vegas and Disneyland came up as options. Then we realized we could go to San Francisco and eat at really expensive restaurants and it would be way cheaper than either Vegas or Disneyland. So that's what we did. We found a nice RV park overlooking the Pacific and just drove into San Francisco for a fabulous dinner each night. It was GREAT. Plus, I was driving my sister's Civic back to Oregon (to store it for the summer while she went to NYC for the summer), so we had that car to drive into SF with - made it way easier than the giant truck. We had three fantastic dinners, each easily ranks among the top 10 dinners of my life. I love food. :)

June 2010
This is another month that I remember absolutely nothing about! Such a disappointment. I guess you can't have an awesome month EVERY month. ;-)

July 2010
In July I started playing BINGO!! The gal that manages our doggie daycare, Chelsea, and I got to talking one day about cruises and how she played bingo on her cruise and loved it. I had been secretly Facebook stalking Chelsea for months, convinced we would be good friends (creepy much?!). Anyway, she mentioned bingo and I asked her if she'd ever been to Sunset Bingo, a local bingo parlor. She said she hadn't, and I hadn't either. So we decided to go together. Neither of us knew at the time, there is a LOT to learn about bingo!!! It's not just straight lines and four corners - there are seven ways to "regular" bingo! Then there are specials and rules about when you can call BINGO and you have to figure out what to buy and all of this craziness. It was soooo crazy, but so much fun. We got really into bingo and were going once a week for almost the rest of the year. We have only been ONCE so far this year, but we're going again tonight. Bingo will never get old! And it's not super expensive either - $6 will buy you about 2.5 hours of fun! We've come a long way and know a lot about bingo now... we're pros now. ;-) Oh, and in every state but Nevada (except for at Native American casinos), bingo is non-profit! So when we play, we are contributing towards local ameteur sports (like my boss's kids are fencers and part of the money goes towards fencing!).

July also brought a BBQ with my friend Laura and some of her girlfriends. We are coworkers and she has a general "no friends that are coworkers" policy but she decided I was an exception. ;-) So she invited me over and we have become quite close since then. It helps that we see each other daily for work!

We also had our first agility trial in July. It was a VERY hot weekend, but we had a nice sun shade and great setup, and our dogs did their best in a "fun" match (not judged seriously). My MIL and SIL came out to watch it, it was a super fun day!!

August 2010
The only notable event in August was our 3rd wedding anniversary. Geoff and I follow the traditional wedding gifts, which is really fun and about the only traditional thing we do. It just makes it really fun to have to try to put a modern twist on traditional gifts. So the "theme" was leather. We actually came up with very similar ideas - he got me a leather luggage tag that contained a gift card for my favorite handbag "store" (there is only one store in the US and it happens to be in Vegas, where we were going to be going in September). I got him a leather wallet that contained a bunch of different gift cards - Chipotle, Best Buy, movie tickets, etc. It was really fun! And we went to dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in Portland.

...Part 3 to come later....

2009-2011 in review :)

2011-04-28T17:05:00.000-07:00

Late 2009
So the last little bit of 2009 after we sold our house - the highlights I remember are moving into the camper, getting Portland Trailblazers season tickets, my 5 year college reunion at Northwestern, my sister visiting for Thanksgiving, and my first Christmas not spent with my parents. Oh, and at the VERY end of December, I believe the 29th?, we drove up to Washington to buy a new (used) truck.

January 2010
Why did we buy that truck? To buy a new RV of course. :) We made a hectic-crazy road trip down to Tucson, AZ in our new (used) truck. It's a 2008 F-450... man is it a BIG truck. A very very kind friend drove along with us - and we drove about 25 hours straight through to Tucson. It was the 3 of us, Jax, and Roxy, towing our "old" (2008) camper that we were going to be trading in in Arizona. We left Portland around 6 AM Wednesday, January 6th, and arrived in Tucson on Thursday around 11 AM. We checked out the RV, did a full pre-delivery inspection (PDI), and then signed our paperwork. They had a great setup - they allowed us to pull our old camper with the door aligning straight to the new camper. Geoff stood in the old one, passed stuff to Rick (our friend who made the trip with us), and Rick passed it to me and I scrambled to find a "safe" place to put it so it wouldn't get damaged on the trip back. After the "move" we were on our way - we went to Phoenix to visit some friends - Hart, Becky, and Patrick. We went to dinner at my FAVORITE restaurant, Los Dos, and then the dogs got a nice break running around in Hart and Becky's backyard with their dogs. Then back on the road. We made it back by about midnight Friday night - a fantastic ~60 hour roadtrip. And the craziest part was the boys never let me drive! I think by the time they did all the driving there, they decided that they were going to drive it back themselves. So I did my part by sleeping a lot and being "ready" in case they needed me. ;-) Our new RV is beautiful and I still to this day love living in it.

One other highlight of January was couple's weekend, an annual trip to the beach with friends. It was there that I read through a backlog of Real Simple magazines and saw an ad for OPI matte nail polish. I owned about 7 bottles of nail polish at the time, including 3 OPIs, because a friend had told me in college OPI was "the best". But I thought the matte looked cool, so I went to Ulta when I got back from couple's weekend and purchased a bottle. That led to me googling better application tips for nail polish, which led to me finding that there are nail polish blogs out there, which led to me finding a community named MUA (Makeup Alley) nail board, which led to a love of all things nail polish. My nails have not been unpainted a single day since late January 2010. I LOVE nail polish... this is easily my longest lasting hobby. I know it's weird for nail polish to be a hobby, but it is. More to come.

Feburary 2010
We had some friends over for the Super Bowl - our first guests to the new RV! Geoff and I took our first trip to Seven Feathers, which quickly became our favorite and is rated among the top RV resorts in the country. We spent a glorious 3 day weekend there, and I towed the RV back the entire way. It was my first towing experience with the new RV. The following weekend (my birthday), Geoff was on men's retreat, so Geoff's mom and I towed the trailer down to Eugene to Armitage County Park, which quickly became another favorite of mine. They have the county dog park right there, so it's great to let the dogs go play. It's a public park, so PLENTY of space, plus fire pits, and then have wireless, which is always a plus for me. I LOVE towing the trailer!!!

March 2010
I honestly remember nothing significant about March. The Blazers wrapped up their regular season in early April, so I do remember Blazers games getting a lot more intense as we got closer to the playoffs. But that's about it.

April 2010
I remember being sick on Easter. Sad! I had painted my nails a beautiful pastel manicure for the occasion! Also, we took our trailer in to have some warranty work done on it, so we lived at my in-laws for a couple of dates in late April.

I thought I'd finish this all in one post, but I am going to stop here and finish May 2010 - April 2011 tonight or tomorrow. :) I will keep chugging along on this!

Just a quick hello

2011-03-29T09:31:00.001-07:00

I haven't blogged in over a year - that's sad. I will never know what happened in my life in 2010! Maybe I'll go back and try to do one highlight from each month. The reason I'm blogging now is because I am working on coming up with a goal list - something along the lines of 101 things in 1000 days... except for mine won't be 1000 days. It will be about a year and a half I believe. One of the items is going to be blog 100 times. 1 down, 99 to go. I expect my first few entries will be sort of awkward but then hopefully I'll get back into the swing of things!

House

2009-11-01T20:09:00.000-08:00

So the very last day our house was on the market was the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. Our contract with our realtor was up and we decided not to renew... it was on the market for a year and nothing was happening. That day, we were headed to Geoff's aunt and uncle's house for wine tasting and a BBQ. I made the bed and straightened up a bit, and Geoff laughed at me while I did it. "Why are you bothering? No one has looked at the house in months." I thought, well, yeah, but it's Labor Day weekend and a nice day, someone might come out. And it's the last day we'll have to make our bed for a loooong time!

Someone DID call and want to look at our house that day, which we laughed about and then didn't think anything of. We made plans to schedule a fence replacement that week and our realtor called about taking down the sign and lockbox. But then on Tuesday... we got a call that the people that looked at our house LIKED it... so much that they wanted to make an offer. They looked at 18 houses over the weekend and ours was the only one they had any real interst in, and were confused and disappointed that it had disappeared from the MLS. They had originally planned to make an offer on Wednesday, but the whole expired listing thing threw that off. So they came back Thursday to look at it a second time. On Friday they made an offer, and by Saturday they accepted our counter off. Sunday they came a third time so they could show their daughter (who is 8) the house. 2 months later, it seems like it all happened very quickly, but Geoff and I were "cautiously optimistic" throughout the entire week so it went by veerrryy slowly.

They still had to have their inspection and all of that, so I remained cautiously optimistic and didn't start packing or anything. But the inspection was okay and their repair requests were reasonable. So the last week of September we started packing and planning. We always knew that if we sold our house, we'd live in the RV, so we started arranging for that. We found an RV park we could stay in, arranged for doggy daycare for the dogs, and got ourselves a storage unit. Everything really fell into place perfectly - we hadn't gone to schedule the fence repair yet, we had already ordered some things for RV "upgrades" (like additional storage and little things to better use our space - originally just for camping trips!), and who knows what else.

We moved Saturday, October 17, closed Monday, October 19, and went to Chicago/Northwestern for my 5th year college reunion Wednesday, October 21. It was CRAZY for 2 or 3 weeks there getting everything all finalized, but we're back and have been in the camper for exactly a week now. We both are really loving it. The park where we're staying is really nice and it's in a great location. So that's one piece of big news... we've sold our house and are living in the camper. The only horrible thing is the speed limit in the park - "walking speed". Do you know how hard it is to drive "walking speed"? A friend who came to visit stalled his car trying to drive so slowly! Ha...

A fun night

2009-09-08T20:35:00.000-07:00

Tonight Geoff is out, so the dogs and I went for a 2.5 mile walk, which is the farthest Roxy has ever gone – she did GREAT! The longest she has done before this is just one mile, so it was significantly more. It’s been kinda rainy the last couple of days so they’ve been cooped up, so I figured they could handle it. Another dog upset Jax at the beginning of our walk and he kind of grumbled the whole way through. Weird, and very unlike him. Maybe he was mad we were walking and not running – but Roxy can’t run, at least not very far. Anyway, she just trotted along and was quiet, and Jax was a puffer, but it was a lot of fun overall. I was happy to see Roxy have so much fun. Then we chatted with our neighbors for a bit – they LOVE our dogs… and then we came inside. I had to make a phone call so I gave them a bone – a real treat. They get a bone every night but always in their crate. The only other time they get a bone is like on a Saturday morning when we want to sleep in… we let them out to potty about 6 or 7, and then leave them out of their crate on the floor of our room with a bone. Anyway, so they still have their bones and they are just chompin away… well Roxy is. Jax is sleeping/resting. But they are quiet and happy. I cleaned the kitchen & downstairs bathroom, swept, and mopped, all while they just chilled. I can’t really clean upstairs without taking them upstairs, so I’ll just wait until Geoff gets home. But definitely my kind of night!

Update...

2009-09-07T14:48:00.001-07:00

DOGS
The dogs are doing great! We take them to the dog park regularily and they love it - they are learning more and more about how to interact with other doggies and humans. I taught Jax to high five yesterday (his newest skill), and they're both great about "crate", "off", "sit", "bed". They're not always great about "come" or "stay". They're a lot of fun... Jax is an excellent running partner. Roxy is too short to do much running, but she thinks she can so I take her occasionally. They get more well behaved every day.

HOOD TO COAST
Hood to Coast was a blast as always. :-) We had a great time and everyone had a lot of fun. Christine, Patrick, and Kathleen all flew in so it was a little hectic getting everyone from the airport, hosting a team dinner, and then starting the race the next morning, but we worked it all out. I had a couple of blisters and my calves are STILL a bit tight, but it's definitely always a highlight of the year.

DALLAS
We went to Dallas for about 5 days the weekend before Hood to Coast to celebrate my dad's 60th birthday! We had fun at the party and hanging out in Dallas... not so fun was the very early morning runs to train for Hood to Coast. We also went out to a nice dinner with my parents and sister to celebrate our 2nd wedding anniversary.

CHICAGO
We're going to Chicago for my 5th year college reunion / homecoming next month. I CAN'T WAIT. Geoff's never been and I haven't been in 5 years (yes... I can't believe it's been that long), so it's going to be extra special!

COLLEGE FOOTBALL
Has started! My favorite time of the year! Blankets, laziness, and football... what more could you ask for?

CAMPING
Lots of camping coming up! We camped with Geoff's brother and parents in early August when Trevor was in town for a week, and we'll be camping the next 3 weekends in a row. We're doing a quick weekend trip with Geoff's mom this weekend, then going to the coast with my coworker and her family and friends next weekend, and then we're going to try an overnight backpacking trip with the doggies the next weekend! It will be interesting to see how they do, especially Roxy and her tiny legs. Since she's still a puppy, she can't carry anything yet (her bones/joints aren't fully developed), but Jax can!! We'll take one week off from camping, and then we're camping again the second weekend of October - again at the coast. And I'm going CRABBING!!! That's right, me on a crab boat. Look for the footage on Deadliest Catch. ;-)

Those are most of the highlights... a few projects in the works as well... once those get going I'll post about them too!

Happy Labor Day everyone!

Part 3 of 3: My weird dream (now dreamS)

2009-09-04T07:55:00.001-07:00

So here's the original dream (at least as much as I can remember over a month later):

Geoff and I had stolen something from Verizon for my father-in-law Gary. I don't know what it was, but we had each stolen separate things. We were sleeping one night and I woke up about 4 AM and thought "we have GOT to hide the evidence!" I wanted to burn it, but I couldn't - because I think we actually NEEDED the "evidence" for Gary. Geoff's was already hidden, but for some reason I couldn't hide mine in his place. The only place I could think of was under the mattress, but I kept thinking "that's the first place they'll look!"

I was still pondering where to hide it when there was a knock on our door. A man had arrived with two dogs, each in individual crates. I don't know what breeds they were but they were about the size of our dogs (this dream happened a couple of weeks after we got our dogs). He said that they were from the shelter and desperately needed to be adopted. So Geoff and I were looking at them and playing with them and thinking about adopting them when I realized "OH NO!!!! HE IS FROM VERIZON!!!! HE'S COME TO GET US!!!" So I said "c'mon Geoff, we gotta get outta here" - but then I just ran out. I didn't wait for him or our dogs or anything. I started running down our cul-de-sac towards where it turns off on the main road, when all of the sudden Melissa (who is a girl I knew in college, but was never close friends with and haven't spoken to in years - so random!) comes screaming around the corner in a pizza delivery car and says "GET IN!!!!!!!" and so I hop in her car. She flips a u-turn and goes flying out of the neighborhood. WHEW!!! Finally relief!!

But then a few minutes into the car ride, I realize Melissa works for Verizon too!!! So when we're at a stop light, I jump out of the car and roll towards safety. I start running away, when all of the sudden Grandma Katie (Gary's mother!) comes up in her car and tells me to get in. If you can't trust Grandma Katie, who CAN you trust? So I get in, and she drives off... and I wake up.

The end!

Now for a couple of funny dreams this week:

About 5 AM yesterday morning (this wasn't a dream, I was awake for this):
Me: Geoff, wake up, what time do we have to leave?
Geoff: Leave for what?
Me: To go to the mountain!
Geoff: Why are we going to the mountain?
Me: To run Hood to Coast!
Geoff: We already ran Hood to Coast.
Me: No we didn’t!
Geoff: Yes, we did.
Me: Are you sure?
Geoff: Yes. It’s Thursday, September 3rd.
Me: Are you sure?
Geoff: Yes.
Me: Okay, good.

Middle of last night (this was a dream):
Me: Geoff, wake up!
Geoff: What, why?
Me: Jax is out of his crate! How did he get out? Oh no! The crate door is still closed! JAX IS MAGIC!!!!!

When our alarms were going off this morning:
We hit snooze a couple of times each on our alarms, and we listen to different radio stations, so our room is interesting in the morning (why two people who get up at the same time have two seperate alarms I will never know) - it goes off with Christian music one minute, then 3 minutes later death metal (or whatever it is Geoff listens to), then 4 minutes later Christian music, then 3 minutes later death metal, etc. This goes on an obnoxiously long time, and yet neither of us care!

Right before the first alarm this morning, I had a dream that both Geoff and I lost our jobs. Then when the alarms went off, I thought "oh no!! we lost our jobs! we have to find new ones!" and then I'd fall back asleep. Then the alarm would go off and I'd think "oh no!! we lost our jobs! we have to find new ones!" and then fall back asleep... and so on. That was interesting.

Part 2 of 3: The case of the missing wine!

2009-09-03T08:23:00.000-07:00

The night before the last time we went camping (yes... almost a month ago... remember when I was supposed to write this entry?) I couldn't find my wine.

I like to go wine tasting, and I like to buy wine - MORE than I actually drink wine at home. I can't help it! These friendly Oregon winemakers and their sweet stories... I have to buy it! Anyway, so a couple of years ago I bought a second wine rack because I had too much wine. I used it for a while, and then decided that I didn't need it anymore so I gave it to Goodwill. Then came the Astoria Crab, Seafood, and Wine Festival... then Memorial Day wine tasting - yup, more wine buying. So at home I have my wine rack, plus a box of wine, plus one of those little reusable bags with six slots for wine bottles. That was all sitting next to my wine rack.

Then we got the dogs - the night before they were being delivered (gosh they sound like a UPS package!) Geoff and I were "dogproofing" the house and we moved the box of wine up to the office and the reusable bag... well... somewhere. I THOUGHT we moved it to the office.

So we were packing up to go camping and I was looking for the bag of wine because it had a specific bottle I wanted to take with me. It wasn't in the office... and it wasn't in the dining room, which is the other place I thought we might have put it. I searched the ENTIRE house. I was going crazy... who LOSES wine? That's just weird. It's not like keys or a remote... it's WINE. I searched and searched... then I thought "well gosh... maybe we left it in the camper the last time we went? yeah... that must be it." So I gave up and went to bed.

For a few minutes. Then I realized "NO, it's not in the camper. The last time we went camping was 3 days after we got the dogs and I know I didn't take any wine on that trip. Guess again." So I got out of bed and went downstairs... and on the way down I had an epiphany - the wine was in the closet under the stairs where we keep the Christmas decorations and the vacuum cleaner. I have no idea how I remembered or WHY I thought it was a good idea to put it there in the first place - but I went straight there, and sure enough, there it was. I went back upstairs saying "I FOUND THE WINE!!!!!"

And thus the case of the missing wine was resolved!

Blog 1 of 3: The men in the elevator

2009-08-07T09:39:00.000-07:00

Since we're camping and I have some time, and because my sister pointed out that I haven't blogged in 22 days, here is the first in a series of 3 funny stories from this week:

Overheard in the elevator...

Man 1: So how old is your kid?
Man 2: I don't know.
Man 1: Uh... you don't know?
Man 2: Well, he's like 25 or something. My wife keeps track of that.

HAHAHAHA. Good one. Then they went on.

Man 1: Oh I know what you mean... I think mine are 19 and 21.
Man 2: You still got them at home?
Man 1: Just one.
Man 2: Yeah, I got one and a half at home.

Then the elevator ride ended and that was all I heard. The end.

(somehow this didn't translate very well to a blog... it was much funnier at the time. I hope the next two are funnier)

Doggies

2009-07-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

Soooooo we got some doggies. I don't remember how, but I started looking at petfinder.com a few weeks ago, just for fun. Then as I did it more, we thought, hey, we really could get a dog! So we went to a few adoption events this weekend and found one that was great. But it's super clingy so they wanted a household that would adopt 2 dogs or already had one at home, so it wouldn't feel so alone. Since we'll be gone all day anyway, there are other advantages to having them at home, like the fact that they'll have each other to keep each other company during the day. That is the VERY BRIEF summary of how we came to adopt 2 doggies! They were delivered to us last night. Here is something Geoff wrote about our first night together (but first, pictures):

Roxy

Jax

It went pretty well!!! The lady was a little late getting to our house. She had to deal a little with Roxy. Turns out, she hasn’t been spayed yet. I have to take her to the doctor today so that we can get her spayed.

Initial introductions went well. In a complete switch from what we saw on Sunday, Roxy was acting like a complete spaz while Jax was much more calm. Roxy was jumping all over Jax, so we got her some toys to play with. Holy cow. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. We had brought the beds down for them to see, and Roxy, with the toy in her mouth, did a full on nose dive into both beds. She would then get up, which is work because she has short little legs, run around the house and at full tilt do it again. We filled out the rest of the paperwork, paid the lady, and she left.

Jax really took that hard. He seems to be VERY nervous in new situations, and around new people. We would walk into a room that he was in, and he would sprint out of it. If a loud noise, like the A/C coming on, happened he would jump and run around a little bit. Eventually, Kelly got onto the floor with him and let him sniff her and figure out what is going on. We went outside later that night so that they could go to the bathroom, and he sat down, Kelly sat next to him and started petting. He seemed to enjoy this and started to calm down some. We went upstairs later, and he decided that he wanted to start sitting in Kelly’s lap. He was still very skittish around me though. But I had to try and restrain Roxy anyway. Eventually it was time for bed. We managed to get Jax into his crate with no real problem. Roxy though, is a pain in the butt. Eventually, we decided to just leave her out of the crate and let her sleep on the floor. Since she always wants to be around Jax, we put a bed next to him, and then put a bed next to me, since she seems to like me. She finally collapsed around 11, and started to fall asleep.

We went to bed around 11:30. Roxy was near the corner of the bed on Kelly’s side. At 2:30, Kelly woke me up. “The dog is chewing on something!” I turned on the light, and the Roxy had moved to the other corner, near my feet. She was licking her paws or something. So I went back to sleep. When I woke up, the dog had moved alongside me, next to the bed, and next to her bed. It was kinda funny.

We took them outside to go to the bathroom this morning, and fed Jax (Roxy can’t have food because of the surgery). Roxy was all over the place already, so we took them for a quick walk down the block and back a couple of times to tire them out. It didn’t really do anything. I get the feeling that if we want to tire them out, we are gonna need to do some major running and playing. Fortunately, we are training for hood to coast, so that will help. We gave Jax a Kong when he got into the crate. He seemed a little disinterested in it, but was happy to get in more so to get away from the ever playing Roxy. Then, I managed to get Roxy most of the way into the crate with my hand, and then scooted her in the rest of the way with my foot. Hopefully with food and crate training, she will realize that it is not a bad place to be. We put a Nylabone in there, as well as a squeaky pig that she seems to like. Hopefully that will keep her entertained enough until I pick her up.

They are at home now. Hanging out. We are going to take Jax to Petsmart later today to look at baby gates for keeping them contained during the day. Should be interesting…

Jake is 5!

2009-07-13T11:12:00.001-07:00

My beloved Jeep Liberty, Jake the Jeep, turns 5 years old today! He came to me with 107 miles 5 years ago and had ~50,700 miles on him this morning when we drove him to work. I really thought there was a blog post with pictures of him with me from 5 years ago today, but when I looked there was just a comment that I FINALLY got the Jeep (it had been a couple of weeks since we first went to the dealer to get the Jeep). I know I have those pictures at home, so maybe I will post a picture of Jake then and Jake now. Like you care.

Since I had graduated from college the month before I got him, I was eligible for all sorts of special incentive programs from dealers. I paid 1% below invoice and got a 5 year zero interest loan - that was Jeep's "recent college grad" program at the time. Not a bad deal. So many times over the years I've been tempted to pay off the stupid loan, but it just didn't make any sense because it was 0%. I finally caved late last week and did it - it wasn't *technically* due until the 27th but I couldn't wait. It was only about 2 weeks early, and now Jake is all mine!! (okay, ours. :) Jake was just MY first car that I bought brand new all by myself, so I'm a little more possessive about him) Now hopefully Chrysler (Fiat???) sends the title. :-)

Geoff gave Jake the BEST birthday present ever yesterday - we took him through the car wash, and then Geoff gave him his first wax! He also vacuumed him out, cleaned all of the inside of the windows, used leather cleaner/protector (I do that every couple of weeks), and cleaned all of the dash & other surfaces. Geoff claims he hasn't looked this good since the day I picked him up all the showroom floor. That may be true... he's a little rough around the edges now, but I love him even more than I did on that fateful day 5 years ago.

Okay I'm done being a spaz about my car.

I can't resist...

2009-06-19T13:35:00.000-07:00

I just can't resist a couple of good ones from CNN today:

"Although prices may fall further, low mortgage rates and President Obama's $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit make current prices attractive, especially in heavily-beaten down areas, such as California, Arizona, Nevada and California." (courtesy of Patrick)

and from the frontpage blurb right now:

"Apple fans in the U.S. and seven other countries lined up this morning to be among the first to get their hands on the new iPhone 3GS, billed as the fastest, most feature-laden iPhone yet."

No, really, CNN? I thought they would slow it down and remove features for the latest release.

Classic.

A trip down memory lane!

2009-06-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

I just cleaned out my basket of old purses and wallets to take them to Goodwill. I thought I was just going to have to sort through the purses and wallets themselves to determine which ones to give away and which to keep, but then I realized there was stuff INSIDE of them. A lot of stuff. So I cleaned them all out (most of the purses and all of the wallets are going to Goodwill), then realized how blog-worthy this was. Here's a list of the highlights of what I found, followed by a picture of my junk!

- $7 in bills, plus about $1 in change
- 2 high school student IDs
- 11 pens
- what I’m pretty sure is my first ever Max ticket, dated 7-5-2003
- 8 lipsticks / lip-glosses/chapsticks
- Numerous feminine hygiene products
- A mouse
- Lots of movie tickets, the oldest one dating 12-6-2003 (Bad Santa)
- 1 AA battery
- A necklace
- 2 hair clips
- 2 hair ties
- A checkbook
- 2 CDs
- 5 moist toilettes
- A coupon for Chevy’s
- A Beer Garden ticket from Senior Week in college
- An ipod clip/holder thing
- Gum (weird, because I haven’t chewed gum in years)
- A warning I got from a kind Indiana State Trooper on 1/1/2002 coming back from Campus Crusade for Christ’s Christmas Conference in Indianapolis (excessive speed, but it doesn’t say how fast I was going. It was the first time I’d ever been pulled over and I cried. I have only been pulled over once since then and I didn’t get a ticket then either, but at least I didn’t cry that time! The second time I didn’t get a cool written warning like this one)
- Silica Gel
- A toothpick
- My keychain from college, including my good ole Dominick’s Fresh Values card (which I’ve probably had since high school). Cool thing about that card is it works at Safeway too!
- My Order of the Engineer ring I got when I graduated from college and became an engineer

Speech

2009-06-11T15:08:00.000-07:00

This morning I was emailing my family about how it bugs me when people don't say words correctly - like my coworker Cindy who says "supposively" instead of supposedly. Or this other woman I know who says "ridicalous" instead of ridiculous.

A few minutes ago, Cindy came over to my desk with a piece of paper with the word "motorcycle" written on it and asked how I say that word. I said "motorcycle." She then told me about someone else who says "motorsickle." Naturally, I said to her "YOU SAY SUPPOSIVELY!!!!" :)

That led us to our other coworker's desk where we launched into a conversation about who says what how. My coworker said "well I say bag weird"... but that's just because she's from Wisconsin and has that long A sound that so many Minnesotan/Wisconsinite folk have (where it almost sounds like they are saying beg instead of bag). So that didn't count - that's an accent rather than a true mispronunciation. But I mentioned my dad says "oll" instead of oil, and my other coworker's husband says "ung-en" instead of onion. Several other things came up too! Interesting.

(Haha - blogger corrected my spelling of Minnesotan and Wisconsinite. I love that those words are in the Blogger dictionary!)

Livin' in a digital world...

2009-06-10T07:04:00.000-07:00

Last night Geoff brought in the mail like he always does. We were going through it and he said "here's something from Comcast wanting us to switch our cable and internet to them." I responded "oh just delete it." What?!!? Delete it?! Yeah, I meant recycle it.

Then this morning Geoff's alarm clock went off, and I feel a tap on my back. HE TRIED TO SNOOZE ME! He realized it quickly and rolled over and snoozed his actual alarm clock.

Ooops. :)

So-So

2009-06-09T14:07:00.000-07:00

When I was little I had an imaginary friend So-So. When we moved from Houston to Chicago, we couldn’t take him with us. So he stayed behind and lived in the Houston Galleria. Gaggy (my grandfather) would always tell me about how he saw So-So in the Galleria when he and Mimi (grandmother) went there. He seemed to like the ice skating rink. Then one year So-So got packed away with the giant Galleria Christmas tree, so I only got updates on So-So sightings at Christmastime.

This weekend Geoff's family went to Houston to see my sister-in-law Rebecca graduate from high school! While there was some shuttling to the airport, part of the family was dropped off at the Galleria to kill some time. And GUESS WHAT - they saw So-So! Even though he's packed up with the Christmas tree in some storage room somewhere, he just happened to come out to use the bathroom. And he says hello. Yay!

Another softball story!

2009-06-09T14:03:00.000-07:00

I forgot about this one until just now... one of the girls asked me how old I was (for about the millionth time - they seem to be obsessed with how old Geoff and I are). I said "27". She said "you don't seem 27!" I asked her how old "I seem" and she said 38. Thanks a lot, kid! Even SHE seems to think I'm prematurely old. Then she asked how old Geoff was and I said 23. She said "so he's 4 years younger than you!" I said yes, and then she said "isn't the boy supposed to be older?"

Oh, and for reference, these girls are between 7 and 10. The majority of them are in 2nd grade. (including the girl who got busted for singing about boys with their pants unzipped and the girl who thinks I seem 38).

3 things

2009-06-09T07:24:00.000-07:00

Here are my three amusing stories:

During softball on Friday (our last game!) two of the girls were playing one of those little clappy hand sing songy rhyme thingies. Great description right? I don't know what they're called, but like Miss Mary Mack. Anyway, moving on. So only one of the two girls is singing, I guess she's teaching the other girl this song. She sings something about kissing a boy, and I kind of raise my eyebrow, but I'm mostly paying attention to the batter that's up. The next thing I hear is something about "and has his pants undone!" and then her mom screams "HANNAH!!! I have talked to you about this song before! If I hear it out of your mouth ONE MORE TIME, I'm washing your mouth out with soap." HAHAHAHAHAHA. Love it!

After softball, I go home and check my email. I have two emails about orders at Amazon.com. I did recently place two orders, one for myself and one for father's day. But I click on these and they are for XBox Live points. I'm like "Geoff, did you order XBox live points?" and he looks at me like I'm crazy. Then the email immediately after those two is one from Amazon saying they've detected suspicious activity and have therefore cancelled my account. WOW! Within half an hour, they figured out that something wasn't right. Very impressed, Amazon. They have already processed it on their end, so they recommend calling my credit card company (an obvious next step), so I do. Before I do that though, I check my online account balance which doesn't show these Amazon transactions and also take a moment to fret about the Amex people yelling at me for storing my Amex info in my Amazon account. So I call Amex and the nicest young chap answers the phone. He says immediately "oh yes, I see them right here" and tells me the dollar amounts of MY Amazon transactions. I tell them those are legit, and he looks and says that he can see the XBox Live ones coming in but that they're not actually here yet. He says no problem, just keep an eye on my online statement and when I see them, there is a button to click to dispute a charge. YAY! I don't have to talk to actual people anymore. Then I ask him if I need a new card or anything, and he says "well, your stuff was just stored in your Amazon account, right?" I say "yes, stupidly". He says "oh no no no, that's actually very safe! No problem, and you don't need a new card because they don't display your card number on your account". YAY! I hate getting new cards. End of phone call.

Saturday I check my statement because stuff usually posts the second day, but I see nothing - hmm, maybe Amazon or Amex were able to get rid of it somehow. Then I check Sunday, and sure enough, $49.99 times 2 transactions. Dang. So I use the dispute charge option and fill out a couple of little forms, and I'm done within 10 minutes. It says it will be 6 - 8 weeks to resolve but they try to get it done within a month. Oh well, at least it's only $100.

Monday morning - two $49.99 credits on my Amex bill!!! SWEET - way to go Amex AND Amazon. Amazon for figuring out something was weird and putting a stop to it right away and Amex for crediting me so quickly and making it so very painless. The only problem I had then was that I could no longer track my two orders on Amazon since they cancelled my account, but mine came yesterday and I assume my dad's probably did too. YIPPEE! Three cheers for fantastic customer service!

My last story is a VENT. We listen to 105.1 The Buzz in Portland, and they do this movie guessing game where the host thinks of a movie and people call in and guess yes or no questions to figure out the movie. After the guesser's yes or no question is answered, he or she has one chance to guess the movie. It's a pretty entertaining game, but I get SO ANNOYED at these fools who ONLY have a guess that corresponds to an answer in the affirmative to their questions! Here's an example of how it goes:
Guesser: "Is Tom Hanks in it?"
Host: "No"
Guesser: "Ohhh.... okay.... thanks, bye"
Host: "Did you have a guess about the movie?"
Host: "Well I thought it was Castaway...."

Okay people. OBVIOUSLY you thought it was something that had Tom Hanks in it. But considering there are like a gazillion movies in existence and there is a 99.99999999999% chance that the answer to your question will be no, especially towards the beginning of the game, HAVE ANOTHER ANSWER!! Surely you can think of SOME movie that doesn't have Tom Hanks in it. I realize it may take you a second to think of, which is why you should be prepared. ANY other movie will do, and having A guess will give you higher odds of getting the right answer than having no guess and looking like a ninny! UGH. It's just unbelievable how person after person calls in and doesn't have a guess besides the guess the corresponds with an answer in the affirmative to his or her question!

Yesterday we knew that the movie wasn't a comedy although some people think it's very funny, there was no blind guy in the movie, and it wasn't made in 2009 (although when that person asked the question, he said "is it recent?" and they said "define recent" and he said "this year" and they said not this year... leading one to believe it was made in the last couple of years). We probably had some other clues too but I was too busy yelling at the radio to pay attention. Finally some guy calls in and says "is Hayden Christensen in it?" and they say yes, so he guesses "Jumper" which is correct. But I'm willing to bet that if they'd said no he would have awkwardly said "oh.... well I thought it was Jumper...." just like every other fool that calls in.

Anyway, I actually LIKE the game, it's pretty fun to try to figure out what the movie is (even though I've seen approximately fourteen movies in my life), which is why I listen to it, but ARGH!!!! People of Portland: have another answer.

Golden Girls

2009-06-02T20:04:00.001-07:00

I KINDA remember Golden Girls growing up - my mom watched it so I'm sure my sister and I did occasionally too. I have a stronger memory of the spin-off Empty Nest. I know for sure I used to watch that. There was another spin-off, Nurses, which sounds familiar and I'm sure I watched it, but don't really remember.

Flash to 2005 - I don't rememeber if it was summer or Christmas, but I suspect it was Christmas because I don't think I went home that summer. My mom and sister were watching a ton of Golden Girls and Golden Palace. I'd never heard of Golden Palace before then, but apparently it was yet another spin-off developed with Dorothy wanted to leave the show. I know this because my mom told me at the time and also because I recently read the wiki for both Golden Girls and Golden Palace. My Golden Girls knowledge has gone up exponentially in the past week. (also this is how I know that it was 2005 that Golden Palace was on, the wiki informed me that was the first time since 1993 that Golden Palace was seen on American TV)

Side note: my grandmother had a friend who was a splitting image of Dorothy. I always called her Dorothy but that wasn't her real name. I have no idea what her name was, although my mom would know.

Back to the story. Anyway, so I was somewhat familiar with the Golden Girls. I had definitely seen them growing up and a few times in syndication, but that's about it. Last week I was feeling like watching some TV and Geoff was doing something else. That's a VERY rare phenomenon, so I took the opportunity and flipped through channels. I saw the Golden Girls was on, so I turned it on. It just so happened a new episode was starting, so I burst (loudly) into the theme song. Geoff was in the room and he looked up and was like "what ARE you singing??" Then the actual show came on and it was SO funny!! I don't remember it being that funny, and I kept laughing. YES, I laughed during a TV show. Those ladies are hilarious. So then Geoff was even more in awe that something was making me laugh (TV and movies usually don't make me laugh. It's very awkward when everyone else is cracking up and I'm sitting there all stoic-like). So then he started watching too and laughed right along with me.

I was talking to my sister the other day and she was watching Golden Girls too - turns out my mom bought a couple of the seasons on DVD and sent some to my sister. I guess we're a Golden Girls loving family.

Since it was so much fun to watch, I set the DVR to record Golden Girls. Last night while Geoff was in the shower, I turned on an episode. He happened to turn off the shower right about when the theme song started, so he could hear it. I, of course, was singing at the top of my lungs, and halfway through the theme song (right around "and if you threw a party") he burst into song WITH me!!!! I couldn't stop laughing... apparently I sang it enough times that he learned the words. He then watched the entire episode with me, which was his first full Golden Girls episode. I gave him the low-down on all of the characters - Rose is the wingnut, Blanche is the man-lover, and Sophia is hilarious and Dorothy's mom. He was like "what about Dorothy?" I was like I dunno, she's just Dorothy. There's not much to say about her. And I filled him in on the little details like Rose being from St. Olaf, Minnesota and ALWAYS having stories about "back in St. Olaf"...

Good times, good times. Gotta go, gotta watch some Golden Girls! ;-)

Ha

2009-05-29T13:27:00.000-07:00

Last night Geoff and I stopped into Ross (Dress for Less). While we were there, this 3-ish year old was licking the mirror. The mom was dealing with her slightly older child who was in tears and telling her mom that she didn't love her (the child was saying "you don't love me!"... or rather "yoooooouuuuuuu ddddoooooooooooonnn'tttttt looooooooveeeee meeeeeeeeee!"), so she missed the licking situation.

So today during lunch I said to Geoff "what would you do if you were in Ross and your kid was licking the mirror?"
"Tell it not to - what would you do, cut its tongue off?"

I thought this was funny. You probably had to be there. But at least I'm getting into the habit of blogging daily, even if my blogs are weird.

Interesting

2009-05-28T15:46:00.001-07:00

I have read this somewhere before, but I don't remember where - people are all about letting other people know what a great deal they got on something. I was thinking about this the other day when I was wearing a new pair of shoes (that I got on clearance at REI). I got two compliments on them the day I wore them and both times I FORCED myself to just say "Thanks!" instead of "Thanks, they were on clearance at REI!" I don't know why this is, but I know I'm not the only one with this "problem". Just an interesting thought....

Take a good look folks...

2009-05-27T21:14:00.001-07:00

This is the last I'll ever see of my wedding dress*! That's right, it's all packed up to be sent to Brides Against Breast Cancer tomorrow. I am soooooo excited, I've wanted to do this since pretty much right after I got married - and I'm just now getting around to it. I mean, talk about laziness. Oh well, at least I'm doing it now. My closet, the environment, whoever wears this dress next, and people with breast cancer all thank me. Or at the very least, I thank myself. I'm SO excited about this. I know I already said that, but I can't help it! I think it's cool! And I love getting rid of stuff.

*okay, so that's really just my slip and my shoes in the picture - but my veil, bra, and DRESS are below it, I promise!

Musing

2009-05-27T15:35:00.000-07:00

I'm glad I didn't go to Johns Hopkins... because I would have cringed every time someone said "John Hopkins", and then my face would have been stuck in a permanent cringing position.

Slightly worrysome...

2009-05-26T15:24:00.000-07:00

So I called my doctor today to make an appointment. I haven't been to this particular doctor in a while, so I wasn't sure if they had my new or old last name. They were looking it up and couldn't find me, and I was thinking "uh-oh"... they finally found me and asked if my birthday was 3/12/1970. Um, nooooooooooo, it's not. So then they asked about my street address. Yes, that's correct. Then they asked about my phone number. Nope, not mine! Not even a former one of mine. Then they asked for the last 4 digits of my Social - those matched. Okay, weird. So they went and cross-checked with an old system to "make sure they got the right patient". After all of that they finally came back and asked for my "new" phone number. I gave her the correct phone number and she confirmed/updated my marital status / employment / address / emergency contact stuff.

The icing on the cake was when at the end she asked "okay so what's your new birthday?" HAHAHAHA. As though it's changed at some point in the last 27 years. I should have made myself 5 years younger. ;-)

Wine weekend!

2009-05-26T15:21:00.000-07:00

Once again, it was wine weekend! Geoff, Momlie, Geoff's aunt Gayle, and I all went wine tasting. We visited 4 wineries - 2 that we've been to before and 2 that were new! The last one was really great... the wine wasn't the most magnificent ever, but there were 3 different wineries pouring wines there and there were also different artisans - a goat cheese lady with some of the best goat cheese I've ever had (in several different flavors, no less), and a chocolate lady with some amazing chocolates. YUMMMM. Really interesting place, I enjoyed it quite a bit. After wine tasting, we went back to Momlie and Gary's house, where Gary and his niece Meghan prepared a GREAT dinner of chicken, salad with a yummy avocado/cilantro dressing, watermelon, and potato salad. Delicious. After that we all visited and chatted a bit and then Geoff and I helped get Momlie and Gary onto Facebook! Fun. :)

MEXICO!

2009-05-22T11:23:00.001-07:00

Mexico was FANTASTIC. For future reference, I highly recommend travelling when the CDC recommends avoiding all non-essential travel to a certain country. We had our own rows on the plane going down and coming up we had two to a row instead of the normal 3. At the resort we stayed at, there were 3 resorts owned by the same people right on the same strip of land. They had closed 2 of the resorts and consolidated all of the guests into 1 - and it STILL wasn't full. It was absolutely fantastic. I also recommend NOT going to Mexico this June or July! They said everyone had rebooked for then... I imagine having to sit two to a seat on the airplanes, never finding a seat by the pool or tube for the lazy river, and having to wait in line for dinner.

The resort we stayed in is Mexican-owned, and there was a large percentage of Mexican folks staying there. Crocs are apparently the national shoe of Mexico - 95% of the Mexican people were wearing Crocs. When you'd get in the lazy river, there would be dozens of pairs of Crocs sitting near the entrance. So interesting and amusing! There were regular Crocs, Disney Crocs, Dora Crocks, Croc sandals, and every other kind of Croc you can imagine in every color you can imagine!

Here's the lowdown... I'll try not to go into TOO much painful detail like I usually do.

Sunday: We arrived and had a nice dinner by the pool at a restaurant named Samba. I had a very Mexican meal - cheesburger and fries. :) We enjoyed a short dip in the dipping pool on the patio of our unit.

Monday: We went to a nice brunch in the morning and then Geoff and hit the lazy river while Oma and Opa went to an owner's meeting (they are timeshare owners where we stayed). We read, relaxed, explored, and enjoyed fun in the sun. Oh, and we went shopping at the Mega (the supermarket).

Tuesday: It was overcast, so we headed downtown to Puerto Vallerta. We walked around for a bit, I was interviewed by a German student studying Mexican tourism, and then we went to Hard Rock Cafe! We had a delicious lunch (okay, so not very Mexican) and Geoff was finally able to "replace" his beat up holey Hard Rock Cafe London shirt. :)

Wednesday: Relaxed poolside, went to the water slide and in the wave pool.

Thursday: Another relaxing day in the sun and then we went to the Mexican Fiesta on the beach! We got to see the Mexican Flyers, eat a ton of fabulous food, watch contests and music and other great entertainment, and see a mama sea turtle lay her eggs. Soooo much fun.

Friday: Another day of lots of pool time! We had a nice dinner at a restaurant in the hotel and Opa and I shared a bottle of Mexican Merlot. Played some cards (Hand & Foot) too!

Saturday: Spent the morning and afternoon by the pool and that night Geoff and I got to go on this amazing boat ride to a fantastic dinner and show called Rhythms of the Night at a place called Las Caletas. It was so beautiful - we had dinner right on the beach about 20 feet from the water and dined just as the sun was setting. A fantastic last evening of our vacation!

Sunday: We woke up early so we could spend a few more hours near the pool. Oma and I went around the lazy river for a good hour and a half or so... capping a great week of stories! After that we packed up and headed out - Swine Flu free. :)

I think I've done a pretty darn good job of keeping the blog short! YAY for me!

A venting day :)

2009-05-07T11:31:00.000-07:00

UGH! Today is one of those days, you know?

- Work is not going right. I am getting questions that are making me feel as though I'm not doing my job correctly, and that's annoying. I'm TRYING not to overreact, because it's quite possible people are just asking questions, but it doesn't feel that way. I think this is my own issue though, otherwise I would ask if there is something I can do to improve.

- One of our softball parents was rude to us yesterday, making us feel as though we are inadequate as coaches - not giving out information we don't have, etc. I don't particularly care what the parents think of me, but I DO want them to have a positive experience so I feel bad if they feel they are not. This is one area where Geoff and I differ - he cares more about people's impressions of him, whereas I am a pleaser - I could care less what people think about me, but if they are not happy I get VERY unhappy. I dwelled on this for most of the night last night and continue to dwell on it today. This is why I'm bad with conflict - because I don't like it when people feel I have disserviced them in some way, and it's hard for me to deal with it. Thanks to my college mentor, I am WAY better at it then I used to be.

- KFC was kind enough to put a coupon out for folks to print to try their new grilled chicken. It used a coupon printer called Bricks (that I use frequently) to print it. Bricks is awesome because it lets you print 1 or 2 coupons per printer and prints a new code on each coupon. This prevents people from just printing a million coupons and abusing them. I printed the coupon Tuesday through Bricks (yesterday was the last day to print it, although it can be used for a few more weeks). Today, I got an email with a PDF attachment of the coupon. UGH!!!! That is coupon fraud, people. Not only is that punishable by law (as it clearly states on the coupon), but it truly does encourage stores and manufacturers not to offer coupons anymore. And if they do continue to offer coupons, they are much less likely to take internet printables. This is frustrating to NO END to legitimate coupon users like me. PLEASE read all of the fine print on your coupons. If it says one per person, do that. If it says one per household, do that. It typically says one per item, and you can use it as many times for as many coupons as you have. But each coupon is different, and you need to read the print on each one (this goes for all coupons: internet printables, manufacturer's coupons from the Sunday inserts, and store coupons). Down with coupon fraud!

Okay. Now that I have finished venting, a few highlights in my day:

- My manager noticed my long face, and asked what was wrong. I explained my frustrations and he said if there is anything he can do, let him know. He said he'd be happy to call the other group (that was asking so many questions) and talk to their manager or whoever for me. I told him that wasn't necessary, but still. That was awesome. He said it comes with having a wife and 4 daughters - he can spot a funny look miles away! :-) BEST. MANAGER. EVER.

- Mexico in 3 days.

- My coworker just send me this GLORIOUS article on KFC coupon fraud. Yay yay yay!!! KFC is saying NO to the PDF coupons (which all have the same barcode as opposed to the unique barcode on each Bricks coupon). Of course that doesn't stop someone from making a new PDF, but it's a step in the right direction!!!

Packing funnies...

2009-05-06T11:32:00.000-07:00

So much to blog, so little time...

I've been busy at work - because we're going to MEXICO next week. That's right, a whole week of fun in the sun! We're going with Geoff's grandparents, who are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year with trips with their whole family. They're going all over the place, and lucky us, our trip is to Mexico. YAY, I love Mexico.

As I said to Geoff, the last few days before vacation are no fun - you're at work trying to finish things up, but your mind is already by the pool relaxing with a magazine. But the week is half over now...!

I do have a couple of other things I want to blog, but while I'm thinking of it, here are a few funnies:

Kelly:
are you planning to exercise in Mexico or not so much?
Geoff:
a little, but not a ton
Kelly:
but are you gonna bring your running shoes and whatnot?
Geoff:
no, probly not
Kelly:
Ok
But a workout tank?
Geoff:
yup, and some shorts
Kelly:
Ok

(some time goes by...)

Kelly:
Do you want to take your camera or just mine?
Geoff:
i would like to take my camera, yet
yes
Kelly:
ok
should we take joby????
Geoff:
yes
Kelly:
LOL okay. Joby can come!

(some time goes by...)

Kelly:
will you shave in Mexico?
Geoff:
yup
Kelly:
ok
I am making a packing list.
in case you couldn't tell.
FlyLady is helping!
Geoff:
you are making "the list" aren't you?
Kelly:
I started out by myself.
LOL yes.
Maybe a little.
And then I remembered she has a packing control journal
http://www.flylady.net/images/PackingCJ.pdf
So that's making it even more fun!!
Kelly:
hair dryer
ok.
I checked.
the rooms have that.
So yay.

Then today....

Geoff [11:29 AM]:
do you want to stop our mail?
Kelly [11:29 AM]:
Do you?
I thought about it.
Okay
let's do it
done
Geoff [11:31 AM]:
done?
already?
Kelly [11:31 AM]:
yes
Geoff [11:31 AM]:
did you have to call someone?
Kelly [11:31 AM]:
no
ew
phone
gross
Geoff [11:31 AM]:
lol

I thought there was another, but I can't find it now. Anyway, just thought they were kinda funny....

Common

2009-04-28T09:23:00.000-07:00

Three scenarios:

1. Easter weekend, Geoff and I are sitting in a restaraunt having dinner and a woman comes up to us and says "how's Gigi?"
We both stare at her as though we have no idea what she's talking about (we don't).
She's like "you two are the ones who adopted Gigi last night, aren't you?"
"Nope... sorry..."
"OH MY GOSH, you look JUST like the couple. I could have sworn you were them. My goodness. Well you should adopt a dog anyway!"
Ummm.... okay. And she kept touching me. That was weird.

2. A couple of weeks ago at work, this woman stops me in the hall and says "can you believe how rude that cook was to you this morning?"
"What?"
"The cook!! I couldn't believe what he said to you!"
"I don't know what you're talking about..."
"Oh, I'm sorry, you look just like this gal who ordered breakfast this morning and the cook was mean to her."
"Haha..."
And then AGAIN last week she stopped me in the hallway and said "YOU'RE the girl the cook was rude to!" and I said "no.... you thought I was her before... I'm still not!"

3. This morning I was getting coffee and the coffee lady said "I have to tell you something... you look JUST LIKE MY SISTER. Ever since the first time I saw you, I thought you looked like her. In fact, I had to do a double take because I really thought you were her!"
And I was like "alright, people keep thinking I look like someone else. Where are all of my lookalikes?"
She said "oh, well my sister lives in Texas, so you never would have seen her..."
"my parents live in Texas..."
"Oh how funny! Well, yeah, you look just like her."

So apparently I have at least 3 twins (unless they're all the same person) running around out there. So strange... and just in the past month or so. WHACK.

Weekend

2009-04-27T13:24:00.001-07:00

My coworker Cindy is in the same golf class I'm in (I roped her into it). She also owns an RV, and we were chatting about going RVing somewhere towards the end of April or beginning of May. We were planning to go somewhere in the Gorge, but her husband was a bit concerned about how windy it can get in the Gorge, especially with towing a trailer. So we looked around for some other places. I remembered reading some great reviews for an RV/Golf resort (before I golfed) so I looked into it. Sure enough, it still had great reviews and now I could actually take advantage of the whole golf part! Cindy & Geoff both liked the idea too, so we (okay, Cindy... I hate the phone) called to make reservations. The owner pointed out that it was Crab Festival weekend, but she still had just two spots available! So we snagged them! I also recalled a really great restaurant that Geoff and I had a great dinner at a while ago, so I looked it up. As I was browsing the website, I found that they had Friday night trivia in their lounge. Recalling my bar trivia days my last semester in college, I thought that would be GREAT fun. I called to confirm that (a) they would still be having trivia with the Crab Fest going on and (b) they would be televising the Trailblazers playoff game so Geoff could watch. Yes on both counts! We were set for a great weekend.

Friday we headed out about 4 and got into town just before 6. We were originally scheduled to not have a sewer connection for the weekend, but I inquired about cancellations and sure enough they did have one! So we got a sewer connection for the weekend which also gave us a better site - it now faced the golf course, right on hole 9. :) We got set up and then headed out to Baked Alaska. Their food was still excellent and we had so much fun at trivia. We never won (we played all 3 games) but still had a great time! When we got back, Cindy and her family had arrived so we chatted with them a bit and then went to bed.

Saturday morning was GOLF TIME!!! Cindy and I played our first-ever rounds of golf. The first hole was very painful and slow, which is what I guessed that all of the rounds would be. But somehow we improved quite a bit and started having tons of fun! We could actually get the ball down the course and would typically get 2 or 3 over par on each hole. I know, not great, but we had started with like 10 or 12 strokes on the first hole. We weren't keeping score anyway. At the 6th hole it started to rain, so Cindy and her husband decided to call it a day. I wanted to play at least the 9th hole, so Geoff and I walked through the 7th and 8th and played the 9th. I lost my first ball on the 9th hole. SO sad. :( Geoff lost about 6 or 7 balls on the course, so I was really excited to have kept a ball the whole time. But I did find another ball... it was yellow instead of pink, but it'll do. Anyway, it was soooooo much fun. I now officially love golf.

After that, the 7 of us (Geoff, me, Momlie, Cindy, Bill, their daughter Emily, and her friend Tabby) all headed out to the crab festival. Once we FINALLY got on a shuttle bus and got there, it was great fun. I had the most delicious fish taco and had fun looking at some of the crafts and trying wines. Probably the best wine was a raspberry juice / white wine mix - very tasty! I also tried several other unique wines, like a white port. So different! It was great fun, but then about 4 it started to get a little rowdy and crazy, so we headed out. I can't imagine what it gets like around 7PM or so! Crazy. SO much fun though. After that Geoff and Bill decided to play another round of golf, so Julie, Cindy, and I sat outside to watch them until it started to rain again. Then we headed inside and chatted and made dinner (Costco hot dogs - they recently started selling their food court hot dogs and buns - YUM!!!). We had lots of fun conversation and laughing - it was a great weekend.

Late breaking news: 2 kids in my mom's school district have Swine Flu, so they're shutting down the entire school for the rest of the week. This whole Swine Flu thing is getting interesting!

Golf!

2009-04-27T13:21:00.000-07:00

I have taken up golfing. This started about 3 and a half weeks ago. Geoff went golfing with some friends, and the next day we were talking with some other friends who said they love golfing and that I should start playing too. I like the IDEA of golf, so I decided maybe that was a good idea. I looked at the Portland Community College classes online, and they had a golf class starting that day or the next day... so I signed up! Now I'm officially taking a golf class and have been going to the driving range somewhat regularily. I LOVE IT. It is hard, but so much fun. And I'm getting better and better. Yay golf.

Talk about weird...

2009-04-17T21:45:00.001-07:00

I just googled something and came up with my own blog. What a freak.

For the record, I googled "the fondue cookbook" "dutch cheese" and my blog was the third of the four sites listed. Ha.

Ahh, Destin

2009-04-17T10:55:00.000-07:00

You all know I was born in Houston... we moved to Chicago in August of 1987, weeks before I started kindergarten. Since we no longer lived right near my grandparents, we started an annual spring break vacation to Florida. The first year my family of 4 drove from Chicago to Disney World and my grandparents drove from Houston and met us. We spent a week at Disney World and had a grand time. The second year (I was in 1st grade) we stayed for a few days at Disney World and then went to Destin, Florida. We stayed at the Silver Dunes in unit A104. I remember the unit number because I was in room number 104 in first grade (that might beg the question of how I remember my first grade classroom number, but whatever). When I looked up Silver Dunes today, I was pleased to see that they had pictures of the units up on their website. It looks just the same today as it did then - which is somewhat frightening considering it has been 20 years since the first year we stayed there. The wicker furniture in the living room is definitely the same. Maybe it's been recovered, but that's about it. I'll have to check some old pictures... perhaps I will post some if I can find some.

I remember many great things from Silver Dunes and A104 (although I REALLY think at the time it was called 104A, it feels very unnatural to stay A104 and I don't think we did then). Some highlights:
- watching Duke in NCAA playoff games (my mom's sister and my dad's brother both went there, so we were always rooting for Duke)
- my mom reading her first John Grisham book there (it was The Firm, and it was left in the unit either by the owner of a previous occupant, and it actually mentioned Destin in the book)
- peeling raw shrimp and getting my eyes swollen shut from a terrible allergic reaction (to this day I'm still VERY careful when I peel raw shrimp... I wash my hands like a million times afterwards)
- all of the sand that was always in the bathtub (probably the fault of a 7 and 4 year old...)
- the very clear sliding glass door... one time a bird crashed into it. ha.

And from Destin...
- The Back Porch. OHHHHHHHH what glorious wonderful fried shrimp. YUM. It's actually the first place I ever had shrimp.
- The teeny little candy house where we would go and pick out one little chocolate shell or other equally delicious chocolate shell.
- In 1995 Hurricane Opal hit and ruined Silver Dunes. They have obviously rebuilt, but the next year (1996... it was the same school year since Opal was in October) we took our newly purchased 1989 Coleman Sequoia pop-up camper all the way down to Destin and stayed in an RV park. There were TERRIBLE thunderstorms and my sister and I clutched each other closely... we thought we were going to die for sure.
- The awesome looking waterpark that was never open because it was spring break and spring in Destin is really not that warm.
- Later on when Destin expanded and started growing more towards Sandestin. Sandestin used to be a resort fairly far away from Destin itself, and eventually it kind of became one with the city.
- Staying in Maravilla Condos one year while Silver Dunes was rebuilding.
- Reading Crime & Punishment. Ahhh, high school English.
- Silver Sands Outlet mall. They added this later, but I remember going to a J.Crew there. I bought 2 pairs of shorts.
- Getting accepted to Northwestern!! I was online (good ole AOL) in March of 2000 and chatting with my friend Jenni. She said that she had received her acceptance and asked if I had. AHHHH, no I hadn't. We had specifically asked our next door neighbors to check our mail for us and call if anything came from Northwestern, but no call yet. Jenni informed me that there was a website for admitted students and to put my name in there and see if it worked for me or not. I remember her saying "don't worry if it doesn't work... it might not mean anything!" But I tried it... and it DID work. I screamed. Literally screamed, and it was 11 PM. I woke up my dad and my grandparents... but that's okay. I got into Northwestern. :)

Good times with my grandparents in Florida for spring break for pretty much all of elementary school, junior high, and high school. Yay.

Farmer's Market!

2009-04-15T14:53:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning we went to the Portland Farmer's Market for the first time ever. We went with Geoff's parents and it was SO fun. :) There were so many great things... a pesto guy, a pickle place, lots of produce stands, a peppermint stand, lots of honey places, eggs, fish, etc. It was AMAZING. I loved it so much. AND I had my very first tamale ever. It was from the Salvador Molly's lunch cart. Yum. I was making the Pioneer Woman Meal of Love (well, an adaptation) for Easter dinner the next day, so we bought almost all of our produce from the Farmer's Market. Here's what we bought:

- salad mix
- a shallot
- garlic
- red onions
- red potatoes
- sour cream
- butter
- eggs
- honey
- hazelnuts (not on the Meal of Love list, but oh-so-delicious. there was a lady handing them out as samples)
- peppermint candy (ditto above)
- tortilla soup (ditto above, and this is my favorite thing we bought. YUM!!!!!!!)

I think that is all we purchased, and we're already planning on going back this week. We learned that if you see something you like the looks of, you must buy it IMMEDIATELY. I kind of had that thought, but I figured we could make a loop around and then make our purchases... so not true. I missed out on parsley and chives taking this approach. But now I know! Plus the Beaverton Farmer's Market opens in a few weeks and apparently it's even bigger, so we're going to hit that up too. YAY!

A quick funny... while we were there, Gary grumbled "couldn't you just buy all of this from Safeway?" Now you have to understand Gary... you know he's having a great time being there with all of us, but (a) it's not necessarily what he would have selected as a family activity and (b) he just loves giving us a hard time. Minutes later he found a vinegar lady and he stopped by her stand and sampled all of her vinegars and seemed genuinely impressed. He even BOUGHT vinegar. Me being me, I of course had to say "don't they have vinegar at Safeway?" :)

Friday night

2009-04-14T14:56:00.000-07:00

Friday night I was antsy... I was NOT in the mood to be sitting around, but Geoff was really excited because the Lakers were playing the Blazers. Understandably a big game. SOOOOO I got the bright idea to clean the oven. My mom came to visit about 3 or 4 years ago and tried to get the self cleaning oven feature to work but couldn't. She told me at the time that I needed to buy cleaner and just do it the old-fashioned way. So about 6 months ago (yes, 2.5 years later) I took the first step in that journey - I bought some Easy Off oven cleaner. But then I was worried about the smell while we were selling our house and all that so I avoided it. Friday night it was nice enough to have the windows open so I just opened them up and did it! IT WAS AMAZING. I had noooooo idea the cleaner worked so well, the oven looks brand new. It's very hard to get in the back of the oven (I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, normal people probably HAVE cleaned an oven), but it turned out so well. I did the "fast method" of heating the oven up to 200 degrees and then applying the cleaner for 20 minutes for the main part of the oven. For the racks, though, I let them sit out overnight with the chemical on them. They also just wiped right up in the morning. Now that I know it's so easy, I'll definitely be doing that more often.

While I was cleaning the oven, I had to put newspaper down on the floor (per the can's instructions). When I did that, I saw the weekly Michael's coupon for 40% off one item. I had thought earlier in the day about doing some origami, and decided that since I had a coupon, I might as well run up to Michael's and buy some origami paper. So I did. And then I did origami. And it was fun. :) I have done origami two nights so far and I'll do it a few more times I'm sure. Easy entertainment, for only $2.99 after coupon!

More on the weekend later or tomorrow...

Great news!

2009-04-08T14:58:00.000-07:00

Apparently the latest style is NOT MAKING THE BED!!!!! I'm so excited. I HAVE been making my bed every day for the last 6+ months while our house has been on the market, and I HATE IT. Geoff and I both hate it. Seriously, it is my least favorite chore, well below taking out the trash, cleaning toilets, and whatever other gross thing you could think of. I don't know why, but I hate it. Now the beds shown here are like "prettily" unmade, but I think that's tolerable. I just detest making it so much. Ugh. Just the thought of it makes me shudder.

I always knew I was hip. :)

Little of this, little of that

2009-04-08T13:29:00.000-07:00

Alright, here are a bunch of random tidbits for you:

- There have been FOUR people who have seemed overly perfumed/cologned today. I'm very sensitive to smells, but there usually aren't a lot of smelly people at work. Today's an exception. Ick.
- This is our FIFTH day in a row of beautiful weather. YAY!
- There was a guy in the elevator today who had a salad topped with tofu and cheddar Goldfish crackers. Interesting combo.
- The pollen is killing me. I can barely see because my eyes are so watery / itchy. I don't remember the last time I had to regularly take allergy medicine, but I have been taking Claritin every day for about a week.
- I'm taking a golf class! I'm very excited, I just signed up for it and it's one hour a week for 5 weeks, beginning tonight!
- Geoff and I are coaching softball again. I don't think I mentioned that before. We had our third practice last night. So fun... that age group is really cute. We have two returning players from last year, and everyone on our team seems to be able to hit really well! We have a bunch of girls who played t-ball previously, whereas last year we had mostly newbies. The parents seem to know more about softball too, which is helpful from an assistant coaching standpoint.
- I'm planning to go to the Portland Farmer's Market this weekend. I've always heard great things but have never been, so I'm looking forward to going.

Here is the story about my lifetime of allergies. I just feel like this should be documented. You don't have to read it, but I'm writing it anyway!

When I was 3, I was somehow "diagnosed" with having allergies. I don't really know what led up to it or what led my mom to get me tested, but I know I was 3. We had a dog then, his name was Dusty. I was allergic to Dusty so he had to go away. He went to my dad's cousin Dick's house, where he was later run over by a bulldozer and killed. Or something - I dunno... my dad makes things up. Seems like I've also heard a story that he ran into a street and hit by a car. That was probably my mom's version (aka what REALLY happened).

Anyway, starting when I was 3 I had to go to the allergist's office once a week for shots. All I remember about that allergist's office is that when you were done, you got a little token to put into a gumball machine and you got a little ring or bouncy ball or something. As a 3 year old, I'm sure that was the highlight of my week!

When I was 5 we moved to Chicago. My allergists there were Dr. Dold and Dr. Hart. They were on the 4th floor of a 4 floor building that had black and white stripes in Arlington Heights, Illinois. My favorite nurses were named Karen and Laura. I remember that whole thing very clearly because I went once a week until I was about 13. I got between 2 and 4 shots a week. The nurses gave them to me, and then I had to wait 30 minutes for them to measure the reaction and make sure I was okay. During the 30 minutes I had to be seen by one of the allergists, just a quick 5 minute check in. That might not have been every time, maybe once a month or something. Then they'd measure me with this clear plastic ruler to see how big the reaction to the shots were - if it was smaller they could up the dose for the next week to start building up immunities. I was/am allergic to dogs, cats, rabbits, pollen, mold, etc. "Environmental" allergies, if you will. I also had to take Seldane and Sudafed - one Seldane (a big white round pill) and 2 Sudafed a day. Wow - just looked up the wiki on Seldane and it was removed from the US market in 1997 for potential to cause fetal heart conditions. AWESOME!!! :) Actually if I remember correctly, at some point I started to take Allegra and I believe the doctor told me that Allegra does the same thing as Seldane, but it comes in the form that your body had to metabolize Seldane into and was therefore safer. Something along those lines. HEY. I just looked up the wiki on that and it confirms what I just said!!!!! From the wiki - "The older antihistaminic agent terfenadine was found to metabolize into the related carboxylic acid, fexofenadine." (Terfenadine = Seldane, Fexofenadine = Allegra). INTERESTING. There was also a green and red capsule pill that I took for some period of time that started with an E, but I can't remember the name of it. I did NOT have to take the Sudafed when I took that... I think that they would switch me between the Seldane & Sudafed combo and the "E" drug (no it wasn't Ecstasy, get your minds out of the gutter) as I would develop tolerances for one or the other. I'm not sure, I'll have to see if my mom remembers anything about the E. ;-)

Okay. I'm back. Sorry for that offshoot into the history of allergy medications.

So somewhere along the line, when I started junior high I started seeing the allergist less and less often. I think it was a combination of being more busy and just not needing to go as much. But I really do think that having all of those shots all of those years (by my calculations, an average of 3 shots a week, 50 weeks a year for 10 years is 1500 shots!!) really helped. Because I was so young when I started, they helped me build up tolerances/immunities (okay, I'm not sure of the actual correct medical word there) that still help me today. I consider my allergies to be very mild now. Not to cats - cats are horrible for me. The worst allergic reaction Geoff has ever seen me have was to cats (although the worst I've actually ever had was to raw shrimp in Destin, Florida, circa March 1989). But I can handle dogs reasonably well, and I'm pretty okay outside. I still like to go outside and weed / do other yardwork BEFORE Geoff cuts the grass because fresh cut grass make my eyes itchy (he's the grass cutter instead of me for that same reason), but all in all I'm okay.

Until last week. UGH!! I have been taking Claritin daily for the last week. I always have it on hand in case I'm going to someone's house that has a dog, but rarely take it. The last time I took daily allergy medicine was at least 12 years ago. It's weird, I don't know what's going on in Oregon right now but my allergies no likely!

And that is the story of my allergies. I'm sure this won't be interesting for anyone other than me and my mom (my partner in crime at the allergist for 10 years), but it was fun for me to remember it all! And apparently share my medical history with the entire world. Wait for the day I tell you all about my Crohn's history......... :) Hey, my entire blog could be dedicated to Crohn's like this guy's! (I have to admit, I am a regular reader of his blog!)

Best part about being married!

2009-04-06T21:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, so the title might be a bit of an exaggeration, but reason #8926 being married is awesome: I can use the name on mail addressed to me to determine if it's worth reading or not. Sorry, but if you don't know me well enough to know that my name changed a year and a half ago, you're not worth me reading your mail. :) That means Verizon, Washington Mutual, and random Century 21 realtor are all out - and that's just from today!

I know this wasn't worth a real blog, especially when I never blog. But I always think of these amusing little anecdotes and think they would be blog-worthy, but it seems like I shouldn't blog them because they're just a small snippet. If I ALWAYS blogged them, I would have an actual blog worth reading!

A visit from the ergonomist!

2009-03-31T09:07:00.000-07:00

I just had an ergonomist visit me to make sure my monitor/keyboard/mouse/chair/desk were all set up correctly. They were not. :-) My body is basically positioned totally differently now than it was. Different to get used to, but I'm all about making things better for myself in the long run. Here are some of the highlights:

- She immediately noticed my keyboard wrist rest and tossed it aside. She asked why I was using it, and I said to rest my wrists on. She said NO, it is simply to remind you to HOVER. Your wrists should be straight and you should not be resting on anything.
- My monitor was actually at the proper height - to test that, she had me close my eyes with my head straight, then open them and point to what I saw first. It was in the center of my monitor about 1/3 of the way down the screen, which she said was good.
- My keyboard was totally in the wrong location. I had to pull it VERY close to my body, right at the edge of my desk, and center the alpha keys (NOT the keyboard itself, with all of the "extra stuff" (arrow keys and 10-key pad)) right in front of my body. She also put down the little tabs that raised the keyboard up, I didn't need those at all. In addition, I have to turn my wrists out a little which she said wasn't good, so she ordered me a new split keyboard that will put my wrists into a more natural position. It also won't have a 10-key keyboard, because the extra stuff on the right side of the keyboard is making my mouse have to be too far away from me. So it will basically just be the alpha keys with the mouse right near it. Since I said I used the 10-key a lot, she also ordered me an extra 10-key keyboard that I can either swap out with my mouse as I need it OR put on the right side of my keyboard and learn how to 10-key with my right hand (or put my mouse over there and mouse with my right hand). Lots of keyboard changes.
- With the mouse, the main thing was just moving it in closer to me. I do use my wrist rather than my forearm to mouse, especially when I'm in a rush, but I already knew that (and in fact told her that right off the bat). It's something I'm working on.
- My chair was too high! Your legs are supposed to be at a 90 degree angle (knees at the same level as your bottom) and mine weren't. Also I told her that I often tuck my feet up on my chair legs, which she said is HORRIBLE - cuts off your circulation at your knees. I have a foot rest but I wasn't using it much - she said I need to be using it to help keep my thighs parallel to the floor. So she lowered the chair and pulled my footrest in, and now I'm at the right angle. In addition, she moved my arm rests UP and IN so that they would help keep my arms at a 90 degree angle and leave my shoulders more relaxed. She said it's important to keep your arm rests as close to your keyboard as possible so that your forearms are primarily resting on the chair arm rests and then you just have to keep your wrists up (hovering) and flat/straight while you are typing.

Those are the main things - check out your workstation, some of these are good easy changes to make things easier for you. It feels very different to be in the position I'm in right now, but I'm sure as I get used to it I will feel better and better! Yay for ergo health. :)

My bunnies are delicious!

2009-03-20T10:10:00.000-07:00

Costco has a variety pack of these snacks (along with these) on coupon this month, so I purchased some yesterday to try them out. Just now I said to Geoff "oh my goodness, my bunnies are delicious!" He laughed and said "don't tell that to a lot of people without explaination". :)

Clarification and Fidgy

2009-03-12T14:53:00.001-07:00

Per one of my comments, it may not have been clear in my previous blog that the unexpected visitors on Saturday were with a realtor... so that's how they got in the house, he just keyed his realtor code into the lockbox to get the key. Obviously a slightly confused realtor... but a realtor nonetheless.

I think I've mentioned before where I do this thing where I "fake die"... I don't know why, I certainly wasn't attention-starved as a child or anything. I don't know why I do it, and yes I recognize that it's stupid and could turn into a "boy who played wolf" situation, but anyway... that's not the matter of discussion here today. Just remember that I do fake die.

As we've kind of been looking at some houses / properties, Geoff and I have talked about how we would mow several acres if we had them. One suggestion was a goat, which I thought sounded pretty fun. One day Geoff said "how do you feel about a Tennessee Fainting Goat?" I asked what that was, and he told me that it was a goat that essentially faints when it gets scared. It uses that as a defense mechanism. I said, "YOU MEAN A FAKE DYING GOAT?!?!? OF COURSE I WANT ONE!!!!!!" :) Then I asked him how he knew about them, and he said it had been an episode of MythBusters. There is a hilarious YouTube video of them here... they really are the funniest looking things.

Then we were talking about naming the goat (I have no idea why) and I said FDG (Fake Dying Goat). Then I said Fidgy... and asked Geoff how he'd spell that, and he said Fidgy. So then I said it could stand for Fake Insecure Dying Goat, Yo. FIDGY!

And that is the story of why I want a Tennessee Fainting Goat! (although on Sunday it came up when we were at his parent's and we learned that sheep are easier to care for and as effective as goats at keeping grass down, so I may never see my Fidgy dream come true)

The oh-ten crisis

2009-03-10T10:43:00.000-07:00

I can already see it coming... I hear it all the time and I even did it once myself. People are so used to saying oh-eight and oh-nine that they are starting to say oh-ten. But it's NOT oh-ten... at least not if you're being consistent. (by the way, I'm talking about years... 2008, 2009, 2010... maybe I should have started out mentioning that).

If you're currently saying double-oh-nine or oh-oh-nine, then oh-ten is consistent. But if you're currently saying oh-nine, then you should be saying just "ten". Or perhaps twenty-ten... two-thousand ten perhaps?

It's gonna become a problem, folks... mark my words, soon you'll start to hear it too!

Saturday morning

2009-03-09T13:41:00.000-07:00

So this past Saturday, Geoff and I both woke up about 9:00 and were just chillin' in bed, talking about what to do with our day, etc. Thank goodness the TV wasn't on...

As were were chatting, all of the sudden, I hear voices! I say "SHHH!!!" and listen for a second, and then I say "GEOFF, there's SOMEONE IN THE HOUSE!!!!" He quickly jumped up, threw on some clothes, and headed downstairs. He's like "um, hello!!" Here's the conversation as I heard/remember it:

Geoff: HELLO?
Realtor: Oh, there ARE people here!!!
Geoff: Yeah, we didn't get a phone call...
Realtor: Well I talked to Karolyn yesterday.
Geoff: I have no idea who that is.
Realtor: It's the co-listing agent.
Geoff: There IS no co-listing agent!
Realtor: Hmm... (rifling through papers)... no, that's the last house... (rifling through papers)... hmmm... well are you 12345?
Geoff: No, we're 6789, that must be the house for sale down the street.
Realtor: Oh... well you were the only house with a for sale sign that we saw... gosh you have such a beautiful home... I love the layout.
Geoff: Well you're welcome to stay! Give us just a minute or two, we'll be out of here!
Realtor: Oh no no no, we're leaving right now. SO sorry about this.

They went back and forth for a few more minutes, with the guy commenting again on how much he liked the house and Geoff again offering to leave but the realtor insisting that they would leave. I sure do hope they liked it well enough to come back.

YIKES!!! What a way to wake up on a Saturday morning... so strange.

COMPETITION!

2009-03-06T15:15:00.001-08:00

My family emails every day - I think I have mentioned this before, the Family Chat Bin. It contains me, my mom, my dad, and my sister. Yesterday my sister emailed and said that she got hit by a car while she was walking. She said "I'm going to take some Tylenol and rest a bit." Then in the next email she was like "I'm fine." Then the next email was like "I feel a little banged up." Then "I think I was just more shaken up than anything."

Yesterday afternoon I was shopping at Walgreens (one of my favorite places!) and was busy with all of my coupon matchups and whatnot when she called. I didn't answer. She called again last night and said "you can't answer the phone when your sister gets hit by a car?!" I said "I was in Walgreens and it sounded like you were fine! You were all back and forth about it!" She pretended to be mad but I could tell she wasn't.

Later in the conversation, the subject of my blog (or lack thereof) came up. I said I have nothing to blog about. She said I could blog about her getting hit by a car. I said "what am I going to say? My sister got hit by a car. The end."

She said I better figure it out, because otherwise she is going to start a blog and steal away all of my readers. It's true... she's funnier than me, everyone knows it. I better step up my game!

I don't know anything

2009-02-27T08:54:00.001-08:00

I kind of grew up a suburban girl. My family went camping and stuff, but it was always car camping, or in the later years, pop-up tent trailer camping. When I was first moving out to Oregon, a guy told me about "all the great hiking" and I thought "ew. Hiking? I barely even know what that is. It's certainly not something I've ever done or would ever want to do." I never knew anyone who owned a pickup truck, I didn't know anything about farms or gardens or animals, and I just didn't know anything.

Oregon is not like Chicago. Even though I still live in a suburb, it's just DIFFERENT. People here go hiking and like to be outside. On a sunny day, the streets are packed with runners and walkers and bicyclists. People drive trucks. I LIKE trucks. I know people that own trucks. I wouldn't even mind owning one myself. People own goats and horses. It's just a very different life.

To be fair, part of this is attributable to the fact that I'm now an adult and want to know about things like growing vegetables in my backyard (my parents did have a garden at one point). But I still think that the majority of the difference is the Oregon vs. Chicago thing.

Case in point today: Geoff and I are going up to his grandparent's house this weekend and are going to be running in this race. I am QUITE excited about this race because I've been working on speedwork for the past month. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that Momlie sent an email and said "have fun, but don't bring back any smelt!!!"

And then I had this conversation with Geoff:

Kelly:
Oh.
smelt is a fish.
I didn't know smelt WAS anything
I thought it was just a word.
Geoff:
hashahahhahahah
Kelly: Don't laugh.
It's not nice!
Geoff:
sorry, that is kinda funny
Kelly:
Nooooooot funny!
Geoff:
a little funny
Kelly: Maybe a little.
Kelso Washington is apparently the Smelt Capital of the World.
Geoff:
really?
we aren't runnning there
Kelly:
wiki says so!
I know.
Geoff:
WIKI FTW!
Kelly:
ftw?
Geoff:
For the Win

See. I didn't even know smelt was a fish. I just don't know such things. If it involves nature, I'm pretty much an idiot... unless I learned it in Oregon. :-)

Our new couch

2009-02-04T10:13:00.000-08:00

I love my one post per month trend for 2009, don't you? :-)

Little by little Geoff has been adding things to our living room to make it more "home theatre" like. The latest update is a Blu-Ray player, and sure enough he now only wants to watch movies downstairs. I prefer to watch them upstairs in our room... it's just more comfortable. A few weeks ago Geoff decided that this is because our couch is not spacious enough and we both can't "lounge" on it. After some persuasion, I agreed that he might be right. We also had staged our family room for our house being on the market (aka put the two comfortable chairs we have in there) so there is no other seating in our living room so it's kind of awkward when people come over to visit. We agreed that it might be time to go shopping for a sectional.

A couple of weekends ago we went to a million furniture stores… the Furniture Depot (a store that I LOVED where I bought all of my furniture when I first moved to Portland... the guy there, Carl, was just awesome) shut down a year or two ago so we couldn't go there. Instead we checked out all of the others on TV Hwy (where the Furniture Depot was) and then there is a cluster of stores on a street named Cornell. Most of them have Stanton furniture (which is a brand our current couch is - they are AWESOME), so it's just a matter of picking the right place you want to order from.

We were up on Cornell driving around checking out some places on Saturday (Dania, Dania Home, Ashley Furniture) and we went into a new store called Urban Home. I didn't want to go into it because it was pretty empty and I could see this saleslady staring us down. But Geoff said "give it a try" so we did. Sure enough she jumped on us the minute we walked in. She took us all around and showed us all of her stuff. We didn't really like anything so we left. She said "well if you find something you like, come back to me because I can get ANYTHING and get it for less!!!"

Sunday we checked out some places but they weren't that great. We had really liked one at Dania Home the night before, so we went back to look at it again. It was a floor model, so it was an extra 20% off the already clearanced price. I said "let's go back to Sharon (the saleslady at Urban Home) and see if she can get it cheaper". I really didn't think she'd be able to, but figured it was worth a try. We walked right up to her and she gave us a blank look for about 1.8 seconds and then recognized us! I asked her if she had Stanton and she said of course (I figured she did, they're a local place). After some going back and forth (certain colors are cheaper than others, etc), she's ordering us a BRAND NEW ONE for the same price as the floor model! The couch comes with an ottoman (at first she was like "there's no way that the ottoman was included in their price" - but when we told her that it was a floor model she understood), and the ottoman at Dania Home was a different color from the couch. The Dania couch was cream and the ottoman was brown - but Sharon is getting us a matching ottoman AND including some pillows. The ottoman is really exciting because it lifts up and you can store blankets (or whatever) in there. So if you're local and need furniture - go to Urban Home! Sharon is awesome. :-)

Here is a picture of the couch we are getting. Same colors (this is the stock color, which means they have pre-cut fabric which makes it cheaper), but the chaise lounge will be on the opposite side on ours. We are also getting the ottoman shown in the picture here - I am SO excited about the ottoman.

Edit: The first link to the couch seems to be a little weird. If it didn't work, you might try refreshing the page or clicking here: http://www.stantoninternational.com/Portals/0/UltraPhotoGallery/675/7/large/STANT_348_GAL.jpg
It does work, but it's just a little finnicky.

Now I am on a mission to find the perfect ottoman tray to turn it into more of a coffee table. We went to Pottery Barn, JC Penney, JC Penney Furniture, Macy's, Target, and Pier 1 a few weeks ago looking for one but we couldn't find any. I have a gift card to Pottery Barn so my preference is to buy it there. I don't shop there much otherwise so this is a perfect thing to use it on. I'm leaning towards this Bradford Tray (I didn't see it in the store, but I might try another so I don't have to pay for shipping. I'll call around).

I was also on a pillow mission but I think that is done now. I adore this really bright pillow from Crate and Barrel and some of these various colors to go with it, but c'mon, who pays $30 for ONE throw pillow? I am going to keep my eye on those to see if they go on clearance. In the meantime however, we found some GREAT pillows at Costco. They're not completely the color scheme I was envisioning, but they are quite a few different colors and they're really nice pillows. Plus they were the most reasonably priced of anywhere we looked (Target, Kohl's, Nordstrom Rack, Ross, etc.). I had no idea throw pillows were so expensive. That is lame. My fabulous mother-in-law is going to teach me how to make pillows too so I can make my own fantastic brightly colored pillows. YAY.

Back to the sectional... two days after we had made the purchase, we got a thank you note in the mail from Sharon at Urban Home, thanking us for our purchase and choosing Urban Home instead of Dania Home. THAT is why I love doing business with local shops! (I'm not by any means opposed to large corporate conglomerations, but local is nice sometimes) I love Sharon.

Then this morning Geoff sends me this article. The gist is that Stanton (which is located in Tualatin, about 25 minutes from where we live) shut down for Christmas break and never restarted production. YIKES!!!! I had commented to Geoff before we bought from Urban Home something along the lines of "I hope this works out, with places shutting down right and left these days, you never know who's going to be in business tomorrow". I meant the STORE though, not the manufacturing plant. Geoff called Urban Home and they said that someone DID buy Stanton and they are back in production. Geoff asked if that will delay delivery of our couch, and they said they don't expect it to but they will call Stanton to find out for sure and get back to us. So we'll see. Maybe we'll get a couch, maybe we won't. :-)

This is a long entry for a couch, a tray, and some throw pillows. But what can I say... I'm REALLY EXCITED FOR IT!!!!! Geoff said "you're going to have buyer's remorse for sure" (I always do... I so despise spending money). But I didn't! I had no idea I wanted a new couch, but I really do! I'm so excited!!

And if this one doesn't work out, there's always this couch that Geoff found.

I must be rubbing off...

2009-01-26T15:45:00.000-08:00

Geoff just called to tell me he called Verizon and "did some stuff". I got worried until he told me what he did:

- saved us $3 a month for the next year on our Verizon bill
- got us free DVR for 3 months
- got us free HBO and Starz for a month
- got us more HD channels every month
- got us faster internet every month

YAY!

Christmas in review!

2008-12-31T07:51:00.000-08:00

Alright already, here's the recap. :-)

Sunday (the 21st): Anxiously watched the news and the airport website all day (couldn't go to church because they were ALL CANCELLED - for the second week in a row). Essentially every flight was cancelled. I think there may have been 12 that took off that day. In good news, there are 4 non stops to Dallas on American Airlines daily (the ONLY flights that American flies out of PDX) - and 2 of them actually flew (late, but whatever... they left Portland). Got a call about 9 PM that we needed to go down to Sheridan (about an hour or so south of where we live) and rescue Geoff's uncle and cousin who were stuck on their farm. Got home around 2 AM and went to bed around 2:30 AM.

Monday: Left for the airport like 4 hours before our flight (which was showing on-time, a good sign). It took about an hour to get there, which wasn't bad at all. Again, since American only has 4 flights a day, it only took us about 5 or 10 minutes to get our bags (okay, one bag and one cardboard box... we are classy) checked. Southwest, United, Alaska, and Northwest all had lines winding around the entire airport - literally, they were winding around the check-in area up and around through the security line and then back and around and even OUTSIDE. So then it was on to security. We got in line and then Geoff said "I don't think this is security... I think this is the line for Alaska". So he did some investigation, and sure enough, it was the Alaska line. There WAS NO SECURITY LINE because no one was going anywhere. So we casually walked through security and headed to our gate. Definitely didn't need to be there early! We had a 12:55 PM flight and the 9:30 AM flight was at the gate next to us just chillin'... oh well. Around 11:30 they put them (the 9:30 peeps) all on the airplane, de-iced them, and said they'd leave the instant the Port of Portland opened the runway. To their credit, the Port WAS working very hard - in the first picture below you can see these guys trying to put CHAINS on a luggage conveyor belt... I thought that was hilarious. And in the second picture you may be able to make out THREE plows and graveling trucks out on the runway (there was a fourth that wasn't in the picture). But the snow just kept falling and they couldn't keep up. So the 9:30 people were all on the plane ready to go... and the Port decided they weren't going to open the runway. They kept all of those poor people on the plane and told us that our flight would be leaving around 2:15 PM, when the Port said they were going to open the runway. Geoff went to go find us some lunch around 1... and about 5 or 10 minutes after he walked away they called all of the flight attendants back to our gate and then said "alright everyone, the Port is opening the runways, so get on as fast as you can so we can get out of here when they do!" Geoff had heard them call the flight attendants back so he was already on his way back when I called him (sans lunch) and we loaded up. They said because of the slush on the runway they had large weight restrictions so it was either people or fuel they had to sacrifice - since it doesn't make much since to fly an empty plane nonstop to Dallas, they chose to take off with minimal fuel and make our "nonstop" a direct by putting us down in Reno and filling us up. The fine people on the 9:30 flight (who had been sitting on their plane since 11:30) left about 30 minutes before us, around 1:30, and we left about 2. After a quick stop in Reno, we were 3 or 4 hours late arriving to Dallas, but we didn't care in the slightest! We were so glad we made it. :-) (and there were over 100 cancelled flights on Monday too!)

Tuesday: Slept late and then did some shopping. I seem to not remember this morning very well... my mom had a doctor's appointment and my sister, Geoff, and I all woke up while she was gone. I had oatmeal for breakfast. We went to Costco and Walmart for some groceries, then came home and started making stuffed shells for dinner with my aunt, uncle, and grandmother. They came over about 6:30 and we had a nice night visiting with them.

Wednesday: Geoff and I did some errands on our own... we went to Walmart again and several other stores. We needed to get a few last minute things for dinner and were looking for a secret gift that we had just thought of (we never did find it... several stores carried it but were out of it). We also stopped by my aunt and uncles to get some fresh rosemary for our prime rib on Christmas night (my aunt grows it). We went to the 7 PM church service and saw the pastor who married us. She is so cute... she SCREAMS with excitement every time she sees us. We love her. Then we had Honeybaked Ham for dinner... yummmmmmm.... :) Then Geoff put the rub onto the prime rib (actually I think he did that BEFORE church) and got it all ready to go.

Thursday: I got up early (after I went to bed at 1 and got up at 4 and 6 to "moisten" the prime rib) and tried to convince Geoff to go for a walk with me, but he was too sleepy! So I asked my dad instead! I wanted to see if Starbucks was open, but they were not. But Albertsons WAS open, which was good because I needed a meat thermometer. The prime rib has to be cooked to a pretty specific temperature, and my mom's meat thermometer wasn't accurate enough. So I got that. The walk was so fun - we only saw about 3 cars the entire time, and EVERY car waved to us! WAVED! From a car!! AND when we were waiting to cross a street (waiting for the light to change), a car came up to the GREEN LIGHT, and stopped and waved us across. On a major street! It was so awesome! I couldn't believe it. By the time we got back the rest of the family was mostly up and so we opened presents! Lots of fun things... the best part was probably a trowel. I think it was gifted to me by my sister. Geoff and I are planning a backpacking trip for our anniversary this year (have I mentioned that?) so we are starting to collect the items we need for it. And who DOESN'T want a trowel for Christmas? We both got lots of great backpacking gear... plus cooking stuff (including several PINK SPARKLY SPATULAS!!!!!!!) and Riedel glasses and tons of other goodness! Then we had our traditional Christmas breakfast casserole... yummmm... and then got the beef in the oven! My mom has only one oven and was worried about timing everything, but I knew it would turn out alright. The only problem was that we were doing twice baked potatoes, and they don't get that firm outside without being cooked in the oven on high temperature. So we had them in the oven pretty much all day but they never got super crispy. But they still worked out alright! The prime rib was DELICIOUS, as was everything else, and everything was timed pretty well. We had my aunt and uncle and grandmother over again and had a lovely Christmas evening.

Friday: SHOPPING! Well, first I went on another walk with my dad. Then we (sans Dad) went all over the place to do some shopping and found quite a few excellent items. We also went to REI to get iodine tablets and deet for my sister who is going to Cambodia/Thailand/Vietnam in January. I heart REI. And it was PACKED! We also went to Target where Geoff and I found the secret gift we'd been looking for before - a new remote control for my parents, who always seem to have remote issues. We took a quick break at my parent's house since we had so many leftovers to eat, then we went up to Allen (a little north of Plano, which is north of Dallas) to their outlet mall... it was GREAT! There was a Columbia store which was like a goldmine... I got a new running shirt and a new fleece, and Geoff got a new waterproof breathable jacket (which was on his backpacking gear list). We got to the Coach outlet and there was a line... TO GET IN THE STORE. Yes, seriously, a line of about 75 people waiting to get in. Of course we waited in it. :-) It actually went quite quickly, but there wasn't anything we couldn't live without in the store. There was also a Le Creuset store which was really cool! They were having a 25% off over $25 sale, and they also had Riedel glasses. The Riedel set that I had received for Christmas was actually too long to pack in our suitcase, so we exchanged it for a set at the Le Creuset store that was shorter (I know, strange). We looked at the Samsonite store since my suitcase that I got at KMart my sophomore year of high school for a band trip has seen better days... but they were still super expensive (they had a bag very similar to one that they sell at Costco for $100 that was $215. And the one at Costco is Samsonite too!). That about sums up our shopping trip... and by the time we got home, my dad was sick. :-( We had been planning to head to Houston the next day and he just thought there was no way he was going to be able to go, but said he'd decide in the morning. Oh, and we had fondue for dinner... yum!

Saturday: Got up early and headed to Houston! Our first stop - Spec's Liquor Warehouse. Now, like all of you, I'm pretty sure Geoff was thinking "we're driving 4 hours each way, and we're going to have about 6 or 7 hours actually IN Houston. Why are we spending part of that time at a liquor store?" And then he actually set foot in the store. I have been there once, and it is the most magnificent wonderful place. The FIRST thing we saw was an ENTIRE AISLE of Riedel glasses! We were both in awe... Williams Sonoma has a lot of Riedel glasses, but they have about 20% of what Spec's had. Spec's had all sorts of crazy glasses... about 50% of which we'd never even seen or heard of before. They had black ones (which we had seen) which are meant for tasting parties. And they had TINTED glasses, one "party" set of pink/yellow/green/blue tint, and one set of just pink tinted glasses. Plus just all sorts of other types within various Riedel lines. We drooled but did not purchase anything. They also have a fantastic fine foods - cheeses and meats and mustard and who knows what else. I tried a glass of champagne with an edible flower in it - the flower tasted like a cherry (okay, I didn't taste it, but my sister did). We walked up and down the aisles of liquor and then got the aisles of wine... Geoff found an $800 bottle of wine! They just have an unbelievable selection of everything. We got a couple of things - including two tiny bottles for Geoff's bottle collection. Okay. Enough about liquor! Then we went to a Mexican restaurant for lunch - ew. We've been there before, but they seemed to have one guy who was the host/bartender/server for the entire place - very short staffed. So we had to wait forever and lunch just wasn't that good. Very disappointing. After lunch we headed to Mimi and Gaggy's to see Mimi and pick up Gaggy to take him to my aunt and uncle's for a visit. We had a GREAT time there - we got to see my mom's brother and his wife plus all 3 of their kids, plus another one of my uncle's and his son (his wife, my mom's sister, passed away last year). It was so much fun, we haven't all been together in a couple of years (other than briefly at my aunt's funeral and at our wedding). We had a great time visiting and laughing. Then it was time to head back up to Dallas.

Sunday: We all slept really late and then did a little bit more shopping... we also visited my aunt, uncle, and grandmother one more time and then went out for Mexican food (goooood Mexican food!) And I got to have my beloved Steak N Shake cheese fries... don't ask me why I like these, but it dates back to Christmas Conference in Indianapolis my sophomore year of college, the first time I ever went to Steak N Shake. YUM. And speaking of Christmas Conference, my youngest cousin is headed to the southwest region's comparable Winter Conference in Dallas tomorrow. I'm so excited for her!

Monday: Got up early for our flight and headed to the airport - again, check in and security was super quick. American Airlines will be hearing from me... this was by far the best Christmastime flight experience I've had, in both directions! My family and I have definitely had terrible experiences in the past (which American has heard about too), but this was outstanding. So incredibly pleased. Geoff's mom picked us up from the airport and that ended our Christmas adventure!

Why can't my blogs be short and sweet like normal people?

2008-12-16T23:41:00.000-08:00

Kelly: Longest blog EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Patrick: wow thats like a novel
Kelly: I know.
Why can't I write short stuff like normal people?
Patrick: ha i wasnt mocking
gives me something to read
since i dont read books like a normal person
Kelly: LOL

Tough break

2008-12-16T22:26:00.000-08:00

Well it's been an interesting couple of days!

Saturday Geoff's brother Trevor got home from college so we were planning to go visit with him and his parents on Sunday. Snow was predicted for the weekend, but Saturday was beautiful and so was Sunday morning when we woke up. It started snowing about 9ish? at which point we turned on the news and heard the standard Portland once-a-year snowfall story about people are cold, stay off the roads, etc. We did look online and saw that the 6 PM church service (that we were planning on going to) had been cancelled - so had the 11 AM by that point. We then dragged ourselves out of bed and went to the gym. We ran 7 miles as we watched the snow pick up a little and by the time we'd finished up, showered, and headed to Geoff's parents it was definitely coming down. We spent the afternoon chatting and about 4:30 I commented to Geoff that we should head out before it got dark - but for whatever reason, we decided not to. About 5:30 we all decided to go to a movie. So we got in our car (we had the Tahoe) and Geoff's parents got in their car and we headed out. Just a block or two from the theatre, Geoff braked before a stoplight and just didn't stop. We slid quite a distance... right into a Toyota Tercel. No one was injured and the Tahoe actually came out without a scratch. The Tercel didn't fare as well, but I think it was mostly just bumper damage that looked bad. The driver was very kind, we exchanged information and headed on our way. We skipped the movie and instead headed carefully home. It obviously could have been a lot worse, but it was still an unfortunate situation.

Monday we decided not to go into work (the snow all turned to ice by Sunday night and the roads were all literally just ice rinks... they don't believe in snow plows or salt here like normal people... hurts the salmon). My whole group was out except for one guy. He decided to come in, and told me today that he was one of very few people in the building - the cafeteria was a ghost town even at noon he said! He went home around noon. I just stayed online and worked from home, plus got tons done around the house. I made two meals (used up several things from the freezer which was great) and did 4 loads of laundry, plus cleaned out a closet and packed up a bunch of stuff from Goodwill. That is one thing I love about working from home - I tend to get so much more done, work-wise and home-wise (I know it sounds like all I was doing was stuff around the house, but I was doing work too, plus worked way longer than my normal work hours. It just feels easier because you can keep switching off).

Today we got up and made the slow trek into work. Actually, Monday afternoon was quite sunny which helped some of the ice go away! So this morning wasn't too bad and we got caught up at work. Geoff and I had lunch in the cafe and when I got back to my desk I had a voicemail. I checked it right away (shockingly, I never do that) and it was our realtor. He said - there's a problem... call me back ASAP, I'm going to call your cell phone and Geoff's cell phone too. So as I was reaching to call him, Geoff IMed me and said "got a call from the realtor, need to leave now, I arranged for job coverage for this afternoon, a pipe burst and I need to go home to fix it". He asked me to go with him, so I cleared my afternoon schedule and got ready to go. Our neighbor actually saw the problem and called our realtor to get in touch with us quickly. We had to drive home painfully slowly - it's still icy out and we didn't need another accident! When we got home our neighbors were standing in the driveway - we thanked them PROFUSELY. The neighbor across the street (who we know, but not very well) heard water and walked around looking for it. She saw water coming out of our garage so she asked our next door neighbor if she had our number. She just got a new phone so she didn't, but thought to call our realtor! GREAT NEIGHBORS. She also called the water district who had already been out to shut off our water line (which is way out of the way - on the other side of a fence... hard to explain with the way our house is set up, but it's really annoying). So thankful. So we opened up the garage... not nearly as bad as either of us were expecting. About 1/4 of our garage was WET... every single one of the tools in our tool chest was soaked, Geoff's golf clubs, etc... but nothing horrible. We had the extra seats from the Tahoe in there, extra paper towels / laundry detergent / etc. - several things like that, and it was all dry dry dry! Geoff went upstairs - nothing was wet there! The pipe that burst was the one that went out to the hose in the front yard, so our neighbor showed us how to shut it off. I remember the previous owner showing me where to shut that off and telling me he did it every winter, but I haven't done it ever and this is my 4th winter in this house - stupid, stupid me. There is also one to the backyard hose that I've never shut off - I showed Geoff where that was and we shut that one off too. Turns out three of our other neighbors have had this exact same pipe burst in the past couple of years, including the neighbor who originally found ours. The other three neighbors have one story houses though and the water guy says he very rarely sees it on the two story houses (ours is 2). Anyway! So we got that shut off, and Geoff called the water guy to come back and turn on the water (you need a special tool to do it). Then he started hacking at drywall. :) Cut a chunk out and found the hole immediately - it was quite large!! At this point we called his stepdad, who is good at these sorts of things. He said he'd come over to help but that it was going to be a bit because he was finishing up something. So we started working on drying - we dried out all of the tools (put them on towels in the family room), wet vacced the floors and walls, got things outside to dry, I ran to the camper to get a couple of space heaters we had in there, etc. Gary got here about 3ish and had brought Trevor and his girlfriend Kristy. He gave his professional assessment and then we all headed off to Home Depot for copper pipe, drywall, etc. They make these super cool things now that allow you to connect two pieces of copper pipe without having to solder! Exciting since we were up near wood, insulation, etc - all sorts of fun flammable things. Not to mention the whole part it about it being WAY EASIER. So we got back and Geoff cut out the bad piece of pipe - and the connector thingy wasn't big enough. UGH. Another trip to Home Depot! HD seems to almost always come in two's - the first time to get what you think you need, then another time to get what you ACTUALLY need after you realize the first stuff just isn't quite right or you need more or whatever. I always anticipate this and try to really think through all of what we might need, but it just never works. So anyway, since we were going back, Gary mentioned the drywall, and that there were some more pieces we might want to replace since they could get moldy. Geoff cut a hole out of one - and it just crumbled into grossness. So we tore down several sheets and then headed back to HD. Gary had his big work truck which was awesome because it fit the drywall easily! So we got back and plugged in the second connector we bought (the idea was to cut another piece of pipe out and connect that to the main pipe with a connector on either side) and it STILL wasn't big enough!!! Well we occasionally borrow things from our next door neighbor and this had come up in conversation earlier, so Gary suggested going over there to see if they happened to have some copper pipe. Geoff did that, and they didn't have any but the other neighbor (the one who originally discovered our problem and who had the same problem) DID! Our neighbor has yet to fail us on needing any tool type thing that we need, and even in this case he could recommend someone who had some. So we fixed that and tested it out and were good to go. We got everything all back in the garage, re-aimed all of the fans and heaters, and left it to dry until the weekend, when we will drywall it. We through a load of laundry in and then went to Kmart (since they have Craftsman stuff now) to buy new liners for the tool chest (ours were all wet and gross so we threw them away). I relined the tool chest and put away all of the tools (I will NEVER complain about organizing) while Geoff did some things inside. I also really wanted to put Jake in the garage, so I very carefully managed to get everything back in it's original position against the wall. :-) It worked fine, and I still even have the heaters and fans set up! Plus it's cleaner that way, and I sleep better when things are clean. I'm a freak, I know. So we're all set for now - and again, it could have been way, way, way worse. Minimal impact and all contained in the garage, plus it was a nice sunny day!

Things I am thankful for:
- fantastic neighbors (next door Christie and Gary, across the street Brett and Joy)
- Gary, Trevor, and Kristy
- towels. yes this is odd, but when I moved to Oregon I had 4 bath towels, 4 hand towels, and 2 washcloths. They were two sets, one I think was from high school that was still at my parent's house and I grabbed before I moved, and one was from college. I still have them all. I bought a set of blue and a set of yellow for the guest bathroom in my apartment - it had a yellow and blue theme. I still have those, and they are the SMALLEST bath towels ever. I do use them at the gym though, they're small and compact. Then a couple of years ago, a friend was having a garage sale and had all of these towels she wanted to get rid of, so she gave me some. I remember being SO excited because I seemed to always need "dirty towels" (this was right after I moved into my house and I never had enough). Then I married Geoff - this was a double towel bonus, because he came with towels PLUS we received towels as a wedding gift. Then we purchased the camper, and Momlie provided us with some towels to put in the camper. Many of those live in the camper, but at any given time a lot of them are at our house because they've been brought home to be laundered and then they live in the "take to the camper" bag until we actually go to the camper. So I was SO excited to have an occasion to use all of my towels acquried from many fabulous different sources... all of whom hold special places in my heart. Yes, I'm a freak. This we know.

I miss the rain.

2 quick funnies

2008-12-16T08:49:00.000-08:00

Ever since I've had Jake, the thermometer switches into Celsius every so often (couple times a week). I usually look up, see that it says 7 degrees, and switch it back to Fahrenheit. This morning I looked up and it said 20 degrees. I reached up to change it... and realized it was 20 degrees Fahrenheit!!! Definitely not used to that in Oregon. :-) It's kinda fun! I'm glad I'm not walking to class a mile away on the lakefront anymore, but it's a nice little blast from the past.

And now I'd like to share a couple of pictures of Geoff in an -20 degree rated sleeping bag at REI. The REI guy dared him to stay in there for 30 minutes... he lasted about 2!

Haha - it gets better!

2008-12-11T20:54:00.000-08:00

So tonight my sister and I were talking about the TV quiz from last night. I notice it was called "TV Sitcoms 2" so I google looking for #1. Turns out there are sitcoms and dramas and movies and lots more, oh my!!!! So now Christine, Patrick, Geoff, and I are all having fun doing Sitcoms 1. HIGHLY recommended! The best part is - 3 of the ones I guessed yesterday (Mr. Belvedere, Perfect Strangers, and The Adams Family) are on there. Hehehehe!

By the way, these quizzes are all at: http://www.theidquiz.net/

Sitcom Drama!

2008-12-10T21:51:00.000-08:00

Patrick sent me a little TV show quiz and said he got 49 / 50 right. The game was tiny pictures of a still shot of a particular show and you had to come up with the title of the show. I got 11 / 50 (ALF, MASH, I Love Lucy, Will and Grace, Growing Pains, Friends, Who's the Boss, Mad About You, Saved By the Bell, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Murphy Brown). Then I asked Geoff for help. He immediately got Two and a Half Men, Frasier, Third Rock From the Sun, That 70's Show, and The Fresh Prince of Bel Aire (I tried to get that but I didn't put THE).

So here's where it starts getting a little ridiculous. I try to think back to my childhood and remember shows my mom would have on - Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, etc. There were several shows with black families on there, so I kept yelling "227!!!" "Different Strokes!!!" I remember watching 227 a time or two when I was younger, but I don't ever remember seeing Different Strokes. Geoff, youngin' that he is, doesn't remember either. Then I saw who I SWEAR was Archie Bunker from All In the Family, but it wasn't. Geoff googles "sitcom with two black kids" and it comes up with Diff'rent Strokes... I of course yell "Different Strokes!!!" again, and Geoff was like "get over it already!" But I pointed out that it SAID Different Strokes... so we put that in and it was RIGHT! Does the guy from Diff'rent Strokes look like Archie? Then Geoff gets all google happy and googles "sitcom in the navy" for McHale's Navy which he claims to have heard of, "sitcom with George" for The George Lopez Show, which he also claims to have heard of, and sitcom with USMC for Gomer Pyle which neither of us have ever heard of. I somehow come up with Coach just on my own, and Geoff says "who's that guy stuck on the island?" and I say "Gilliagan?" and he gets "Gilligan's Island". And since I had mentioned Taxi, Geoff somehow identifies the people from Taxi (I thought they were Three's Company) so we got that one too. We're up to 23/50. WITH Google and the two of us combined, we're still not half what Patrick got.

Here are some that we have WRONG (what we guessed which is the WRONG answer and what the picture looks like) - edited later to add in the real answer now that Patrick sent me answers!

Donnie and Marie - no idea what this one could be, that was my guess but it's wrong. Two people that look SUPER happy and are sort of posed together but not in any setting. Looks like an American flag behind them. - this is Bewitched

Different Strokes - A black family, looks like a mom and a dad, maybe an aunt or a much older sister, and 4 kids. - this is Moesha

Mr. Belvedere - A man with glasses and a guy sipping coffee in a radio studio. - this is WKRP in Cincinnati

227 - Two black men standing next to each other - this is Good Times

Growing Pains - Two white boys (okay, one may be a girl) that are sort of hugging in front of a railroad crossing sign. - this is Silver Spoons

Prefect Strangers - A guy who I swear is Balki (Geoff says "who's Balki?") sitting on a couch talking to another dude. - this is Three's Company

Law and Order - 3 guys, 2 sitting on a red couch and one sitting on the arm of the couch. This is definitely a current show, but I can't identify it. - this is Entourage

The Adams Family - Geoff says "who are these Frankenstein looking people?" and I say "the Adams Family?" but that's not right. There is one normal looking woman in pink and 4 freak looking men/boys. All in front of a Model T lookin' car. - this is Munsters

Barney Miller - 2 guys in suits (one a uniform type thing) in front of encyclopedias. - this is Night Court

227 - Yes, again. Mom, Dad, and 5 kids? - this is A Different World

Taxi - I also guessed The Mary Tyler Moore show for this. Two women, one with red hair and one with long blonde hair. - this is One Day at A Time

227 - Times 3! 2 black teenagers and 1 white teenager in a school setting. - this is Welcome Back Kotter

Reba - A redheaded woman, a black man, and 2 other white women. - this is Designing Women

Seinfeld - Geoff guessed this, I knew it wasn't that, but it's also at school - an adult holding a baseball with 4 students around him. - this is Head of the Class

Hope you've enjoyed some laughter at my expense, epecially hearing what I think about some of the shows and then what they REALLY were!

A note of clarification, I am not trying to say that I think every African American family looks the same. I can just think of only a few black sitcoms, so I kept trying those.

Hey, this is my 500th post ever. YAY! :)

Tuesday

2008-12-10T08:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I ran 6 miles with Kristie after work. Today I feel quite good! Because of previously mentioned worthless weekend, I never did get in a run this weekend, so I had to make up for it yesterday. Half marathon is only 5 and a half weeks away! Geoff wanted to join us, but ended up having to work late which was a huge bummer.

Guess we can forget camping this weekend!

2008-12-09T14:55:00.000-08:00

I'm not afraid of camping in the snow, but the part about "wrapping your pipes" reminds me of last Thanksgiving when we were camping and woke up to find that we couldn't use any water in our trailer. Plus we couldn't even pack up to go home because the hose was frozen to the camper and to the spicket. Yeah, gonna avoid camping this weekend! But I DO need to make summer reservations... Oregon state parks fill up SO quickly!

Issued by The National Weather ServicePortland, OR 1:05 pm PST, Mon., Dec. 8, 2008
... TURNING EXTREMELY COLD WITH VERY LOW SNOW LEVELS THIS WEEKEND OVER SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON AND NORTHWEST OREGON...
THE COLDEST AIR OF THE WINTER SEASON WILL BE SETTLING IN OVER SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON AND NORTHWEST OREGON THIS WEEKEND... BRINGING VERY COLD TEMPERATURES TO THE REGION AND SNOW LEVELS POSSIBLY NEAR THE VALLEY FLOOR.
THE INITIAL SURGE OF COLD AIR WILL SPREAD INTO SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON AND NORTHWEST OREGON FRIDAY NIGHT AS A STRONG COLD FRONT MOVES THROUGH. WHILE AIR AHEAD OF THIS FRONT WILL BE RELATIVELY MILD... VERY COLD AIR BEHIND THIS FRONT HAS THE POTENTIAL TO DROP SNOW LEVELS QUITE LOW... NOT UNLIKE A SNOW EVENT THAT OCCURRED IN MID NOVEMBER OF 2003 WHICH DROPPED SEVERAL INCHES OF SNOW IN THE PORTLAND METRO AREA. WHILE THIS KIND OF DETAIL IS NOT CERTAIN AT THIS POINT... THE SNOW LEVEL AT THE BACK EDGE OF THE COLD FRONT FRIDAY NIGHT COULD TURN OUT TO BE QUITE LOW.
THE COLD AIR WILL CONTINUE TO STREAM ONSHORE DURING THE DAY SATURDAY AND ANY SHOWERS WILL LIKELY DROP SNOW TO THE 500 OR 1000 FEET ELEVATIONS. THE ONSHORE FLOW WILL LIKELY LIMIT THE POSSIBILITY OF THE SNOW REACHING THE VALLEY FLOOR DUE TO A SIGNIFICANT OVER WATER TRAJECTORY OF THE AIR... AS THE WATER TEMPERATURES OFF THE COAST REMAIN IN THE LOWER 50S.
IT APPEARS A REINFORCING SHOT OF ARCTIC AIR WILL THEN SPREAD THROUGH THE GORGE AND DOWN THROUGH WESTERN WASHINGTON INTO NORTHWEST OREGON SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY... AND BRING THE COLDEST AIR TO THE REGION IN QUITE SOME TIME. AT THAT POINT... MINIMUM TEMPERATURES COULD FALL INTO THE TEENS WITH DAYTIME TEMPERATURES STRUGGLING TO REACH FREEZING. THE POSSIBILITY OF ANY SIGNIFICANT SNOW ONCE THE MAIN SHOT OF ARCTIC REACHES OUR AREA IS UNCERTAIN AT THIS TIME AS IT IS DEPENDENT ON WHETHER ANY ORGANIZED SYSTEMS WILL SPREAD OVER THE AREA... BUT THE POSSIBILITY DOES EXIST.
BE SURE TO TAKE PRECAUTIONS THIS WEEK IN ADVANCE OF THE ARRIVAL OF THE VERY COLD AIR... SUCH AS WRAPPING PIPES... COVERING FOUNDATION VENTS... DRAINING OUTDOOR WATER PIPES... AND PROTECTING VULNERABLE OUTDOOR PLANTS.

Camping

2008-12-09T08:32:00.001-08:00

Geoff and I are thinking about going camping this Saturday night, just a quick one-nighter. At the local state park we like to go to, winter camping with full hookups is $18 a night. However, there is a reservation fee of $6! So usually in the winter I like to avoid making reservations... who camps in the winter? Not that it's that empty, but there is usually at least a spot or two available. One day this will probably come back to bite me, but for now, I'm going to keep playing with fire...

Last night Tiffany and I went to a Big Ten Holiday Charity Bash. The bash was a bust. :( It was advertised as all you can eat with a flight of beers at one of my favorite breweries in town. Awesome we thought! But the food selection was limited - tortilla roll ups, a cheese/salami/olive tray, meatballs, chicken skewers, and sausage. Not so much all you can eat... especially since they'd only had half as many people last year so they quickly ran out of food. They brought more in but it was about an hour later. And the company was... interesting. I knew 2 or 3 people from my own alumni association, but really, a lot of Northwestern alumni are a little odd. And Tiffany was the only OSU person there, so we sat at a table with some Illinois and Indiana people. Anyway, it was a fine evening and we had a good time people watching, but we won't be back next year!

9 more blogs!

2008-12-08T08:00:00.001-08:00

I have to write 9 more blogs this year to surpass my number of blogs from last year - that means you can call look forward to a blog at least every other day. Okay, let's be honest, you all know me - it more likely means that I'll be blogging 8 times on New Years Eve. :)

This was a FABULOUS weekend. We didn't do anything productive, but Geoff says it was fun to solidify our relationship. I said "was it wiggly before?"

Friday we went to REI after work - we are planning on going for a backpacking trip next year for our anniversary (romantic, huh?), so we're starting now in acquiring all of the things we need so we can take advantage of sales as we see them. REI has a couple of good promotions going on right now - 20% off any single outlet item purchase (online only) and $20 off a $100 or more purchase in the store or at regular rei.com. So between all of those promotions and both of our memberships (we used to just have one, until an REI employee pointed out that you get twice as many coupons by having two memberships, and the coupons can be really valuable!), we BOTH got backpacks and sleeping bags this weekend. More on that in a minute. After that we had a holiday party to go to, so we went home and got all gussied up and headed to that. It was a lot of fun - there was a couple there that we met last year at couple's weekend (our annual trip to the beach with 4 other couples) so we chatted with them. We're looking forward to seeing them in about a month for this year's couple's weekend! Then we went to a coffee shop where a coworker's son was playing the piano. He was GREAT! After that we went to Fred Meyer because that's fun on a Friday night (apparently it's the new teenage hangout, we saw a lot of teenagers sitting around on couches in the furniture department... odd!).

Saturday we slept in late and then went out for a delicious breakfast. Then we went to a second REI because the one near us didn't have the backpack I liked in my size. Instead of a backpack, I found a sleeping bag there. They had this really fantastic women's sleeping bag that I wanted (and it was PINK!!!) but they didn't have it in long and I was too long for the regular size bag. So the REI guy suggested the same bag in men's... the men's regular is just a hair longer than the women's long and slightly more spacious (same in the hips, little wider through the shoulders). I reluctantly tried it out (it was blue :( ) and it was great! As much as I didn't want it... it really was just as good. So I got over my childish self and got the blue bag. Then we went to Sleighbells, which is a really fantastic Christmas shop. It was NOT such a fantastic experience though, because it was so crowded. I couldn't even really stand and look at any ornaments because I was afraid someone was going to push me into them and I was going to break them all. But we ended up with an ornament and then high-tailed it out of there. YIKES! After that we went to a third REI (yes, I know, we are freaks - and those 3 used to be the only ones in Oregon so when I went to all 3 in one day or weekend... yes I've done it before... I could say I'd been to every REI in the state. But now there are 3 more - 1 more in the Portland area, 1 in Bend, and 1 in Eugene). At this REI I got a backpack - they had the one in my size. A second driver for getting it now is that my sister is going to Cambodia in January and needs a backpack. She doesn't really have any use for one long term and hasn't been able to find one to borrow or buy used. Since I want one anyway, both my parents and my sister said they would chip in for a portion of the cost so that my sister could use it in January, and then it would be mine until the end of the time. It's a win/win! So then we were done with our whirlwind REI weekend. Oh - and I forgot to mention, Geoff got a backpack and a sleeping bag on REI-outlet.com, and he's happy to say that BOTH of those items cost less than my backpack alone. Usually I'm the deal finder, but he did really well with his backpacking gear!

Sunday morning I worked all morning placing POs for 2009 - fun. But I'm now 90% done with POs for 2009, I just have a couple of more that I'm waiting for more information on and then I will be DONE! :) Then we went to Geoff's parents for lunch. We had grilled cheese and tomato soup, which is pretty much my favorite lunch ever. Soooo good. After that we worked on the puzzle (and by "we" I mean all 4 of us for about 5 minutes, and then Momlie was dedicated for the next 2 or 3 hours while the rest of us sat around worthlessly!). Then my trouble-making father in law was like "why don't you two buy a new truck and trailer!". His real thought was that if we ever DID want to upgrade that now is really the time to do it - the obvious reason of the economy situation, plus we don't have kids or any other responsibilities. It really seems silly now because we JUST got both the Tahoe and the Tango, but it is a good time to be a buyer. We can't upgrade the trailer without the truck - we're pretty much maxed out on towing capacity with the Tahoe. So it'd have to be both... well, or we could do the truck with potentially the trailer down the road, but certainly not the other way around. Anyway - we went and looked Audi's (Geoff's little dream quarter-life crisis car, I guess) and Dodge trucks. Both were fun, but of course we did not end up with a new anything! It was fun to look and test drive though. The deals on trucks right now are pretty good, but not good enough to make me want to buy one. And our trailer is PLENTY big enough for us and whoever we want to take with us - it would be nice to have something like the 329 Bunk House DS (http://www.pacificcoachworks.com/) so that Geoff's mom (our main guest) would have her own little room and space, but it is far from a must.

Anyway! Just a fun weekend. I'm REALLY excited to go backpacking... if we get all of our stuff together we may even go this spring or this summer on a smaller trip and then the "big" trip for our anniversary. I checked out 2 backpacking books from the library too, there are so many great backpacking trips in Oregon. And once you have all of the gear, it's a rather inexpensive vacation. YAY! :)

2 more weeks until "winter break"...

Thanksgiving

2008-12-05T08:57:00.000-08:00

I meant for this to be a longer post earlier this week, but it's not. :) Thanksgiving was great - my sister came up on Wednesday with 3 other people she knew from school in California. Of course traffic was terrible, but she finally made it and we had a great dinner at Chevy's (her fave).

Thanksgiving morning we Turkey Trotted at the Oregon Zoo - what a beast! It was only 4 miles, but the first half was downhill (brutal for my knees) and the second half was uphill (brutal for any normal human being). So all in all it was pretty much horrible... except for the fact that I love running and I love races and it was really fun, especially at the end running through the zoo. :) After that we went home and showered, then headed to Geoff's parents for Thanksgiving dinner. It was lots of fun, great food and good times with family and friends.

Friday morning we slept late and then did a little bit of shopping. We had lunch at Burgerville so my sister could have a pumpkin shake and sweet potato fries. Then we headed out to the campground! We tried to get a fire going but never did get it really started, so we just went inside and watched TV on DVD.

Saturday morning was WINE TASTING! My most favoritest day of the year! Well, one of them anyway. And it did not disappoint - we tasted some fabulous wine and snacks and had a great time talking to the people. A fella we knew from when he poured at a previous winery opened up his own place starting last weekend and it was great! I hope he does really well. We'll be back there for sure. Saturday night we got a great fire going and had our traditional marshmallow roasting competition.

Sunday morning we got up early and packed up and headed home, then my sister headed back to California. Geoff and I went to his parent's house and started a 2000 piece puzzle of Las Vegas.

Monday night, Geoff didn't have basketball (Thanksgiving break) so we had Rick and Tiffany over for Trival Pursuit: Pop Culture. It seems like that game is brand new, but I bought it at Fred Meyer the Christmas I was an intern which was 2003! Crazy. With a game like that, it's important to remember when it was made so you don't guess something that hadn't happened yet.

Speaking of games, how cool are the new Monopoly and Life games that allow you to just swipe a debit card when you make a transaction, so you don't spend half the game counting cash (and by cash I of course mean small colored pieces of paper)? I love it! I just can't bring myself to pay $40 for them though, so maybe they'll be on sale one day. :)

The rest of the week has been fun... had a great run on Tuesday and we're headed to a holiday cocktail party tonight. I have a fair amount of work to do over the weekend, but only 2 weeks of work left until we head to Dallas for Christmas. Yeah!

Weekend

2008-11-23T20:02:00.000-08:00

Wow, what a weekend. Friday night we swam... Saturday we watched the Northwestern game until we were interrupted by someone who wanted to come see our house. So we went to the gym and ran 4.5 miles (less than was on the schedule this weekend, but I haven't run the last 2 weeks due to illness).

Today we wrestled through some of the issues I've been struggling with. For the last several months (at least, maybe longer), I have been struggling with some potential theological differences with our church. I don't ever expect to have 100% the same theology as any church, but there are some things I can live with and some that are just absolute dealbreakers. Some of the differences that I knew I had were tolerable... but there was one issue that I didn't know where I stood, but I knew where the church stood. I realized it was time to draw the line - make a decision one way or the other, and if I disagreed with the church I couldn't continue to go there (not so much a matter of going there, but really making it my church home was not going to work out). Geoff knew where he stood on the issue but didn't really know the church's stance on it. Part of this came to light at my children's ministry training last week - although it's been coming up for a long time before that, and is perhaps part of the reason we haven't really made this church our own. Me committing to the children's ministry is a commitment to the church and we need to decide before that. We've talked about it a lot the last couple of weeks and yesterday decided to at least try a different church today. This sounds dramatic and uncharacteristic of me, but what can I say, I'm struggling. And it was a big deal.

The church we decided to go to today had a 6 PM service that we chose, so we had the morning to ourselves, which was weird. We went to his mom's house for lunch (which was fun, we talked through some of these issues a little bit, had some chili, and discussed Thanksgiving and wine tasting). Then Geoff and I decided it was deal or no deal time. Or something like that. Anyway, we decided to work through my issues so that we could make a decision about church. We talked and prayed and poured over Scripture and struggled. Well, I struggled. Geoff was trying to make his point - which isn't to say that he necessarily wanted me to believe what he believed, but wanted to show me why he believes what he believes. I eventually agreed with him - which really is best anyway, because even with one of us having what is to us a very strong theological difference with the church, we really shouldn't be calling it our church.

We tried the new church tonight (not really new... we have been before and weren't huge fans). It was perfect. NOT that the church was perfect... but that the worship experience was perfect for our day today. It was a perfect feeling of freedom and peace saying "yes". I don't know for sure that it was "yes" this is the right church for us but it was definitely "yes" that we are to find a new church home. Everything about the entire experience... from music to preaching to communion to community... spoke volumes to me and Geoff and met us where we are in life.

What a struggle being in Oregon has been for me... my whole childhood I went to the local Methodist church, simple as that. My parents do that to this day... wherever they move, they find the Methodist church and that is that. I did that my freshman and sophomore years of college... and then I changed to a church that many members of my campus fellowship went to. An AMAZING new experience for me... culturally and Biblically and musically and in many other ways. I would never again be content to find the local Methodist church (which is not to say there is anything wrong with that!). When I first moved here I searched for a church and after a few very failed tries, a coworker recommended her church to me. I went and there was an Asian woman leading worship... I thought YES!!!! A culturally diverse church, this is what I need! I don't know why I didn't take a look around that room, that church is classic white suburban. :) And unfortunately, that's pretty much what you get in Portland... I miss Chicago. But at any rate... I called that my church home from my internship through the first several years I was here. I was involved with the young adults ministry, I was a member of a women's small group and on the leadership team for the young adults. That church is in fact where I met Geoff. But at the time we met, he was not in a place where he could have called that his church home (ironically, he probably could now, but there are other reasons we won't go back to that church). So we started looking for other churches... but it was hard because he worked most Sundays. When he changed jobs this winter, we fully dedicated ourselves to finding a church together. I had been mostly attending the church we've been going to together most of the year for most of 2007. In February, his parents asked us if we wanted to find a church together with them. So we spent several months trying out churches and just after Easter ended up in this most recent church - which I (and Geoff when he could) have been basically going to since December of 2006. There's a lot to love - loud, powerful worship, great preaching, Biblical conviction. God is doing great things there, and bringing people (especially young people) en masse. God is DEFINITELY using that church. It's sad and hard and difficult to leave (I would like to pause here to acknowledge that I know that's not correct to say X and Y and Z, that I should say X, Y, and Z. But I do the X and Y and Z sometimes because I think it emphasizes each word. Maybe not, but it's my blog. Writer's privilege or prerogative or whatever it's called). But Geoff's parents recently felt called back to what had been their church home for many years, and in a way, that gave us a freedom to make a choice as well.

So it's the end of an era I guess... I was sad most of today realizing this, but like I said above, felt a strong peace about it tonight, so I'm no longer sad. I pray that we would finally have a church home... I haven't felt like I have since college, and maybe before. I long for a church where we go to worship on Sundays and say hello to our friends and welcome new people. I long for a place where I can work in the nursery and know the parents and know the babies and just love on all of them. I long for a church where I can be a part of a strong women's group and learn how to be a better wife and sister and daughter and friend. I long for a place where I can find somewhere to use my strongest gifts - leadership and administration. I long for a place where I can serve others. I long for a place where I can meet a group of couples who are in the season of life my husband and I are in... where we can challenge each other and fellowship with each other and encourage each other. I long for a place that I can call a pastor and ask him a theological or Biblical question. I long for a home... it's been a long time, and I pray it's coming soon.

End of heavy blog. (Geoff and Momlie were making fun of me today for saying things like this all the time - like "and that is all". I feel like I'm supposed to write a conculsion (is this a 5 paragraph essay?) and sometimes I just can't. My blog is a brain dump... and I know you dearest readers will love this... these types of blogs are the ones that tell you who I am.)

Big Things!

2008-11-20T21:31:00.000-08:00

For some reason, big, weighty things have been on my mind lately. They may not be big and weighty to the rest of the world, but I'm a simple girl. I don't think much. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's true. I guess I should revise that to I don't think about the world much... I think about simple, easy, industrial engineering and Excel type concepts. Not world peace.

Things on my mind lately:
- The role of women in family, the church, and the world
- Pirates
- Gay marriage / abortion / polygamy
- Health

These are just not things I think about often. I just accept the world around me and carry on. Perhaps I'm apathetic... but it just seems easier. I guess that's why apathetic people are apathetic, right?

I had book club tonight. It was one of the most fun book club nights in recent memory. We all got to read our own book and give a "book report" on it. I read a Nelson DeMille book... I love Nelson DeMille. Everyone else read these big weighty things. One person read The China Study and stopped eating meat because of the health benefits talked about in the book. One person read the US Constitution. One person read The Hundred Year Lie (which several other girls had read) and totally changed her diet, lotions/shampoos/soaps, clothing, etc. because of toxins and is thinking of going to Texas to get a toxicology report. One person, expecting a baby girl, read The Female Brain which discusses how a woman’s mind develops and changes throughout her life and various stages of her life, from conception to post-menopause. One person read a book I can’t remember the name of that completely changed the way she interacts with her dog and now the dog acts completely differently and they have had a much more positive experience with the dog since then. I’m telling you, the list went on and on like this. And I read about a wealthy lawyer on Long Island who lives next to a mafia don. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but it’s interesting.

I’m not sure if those two topics (my weighty “mind issues” and a book club full of women who read serious books) have anything to do with each other. But the book club got me thinking (and actually trying to avoid thinking, especially about The Hundred Year Lie) and then I was thinking about how much I’ve been thinking.

I do believe that Americans do not eat what our bodies have been eating for the past thousands of years, just in the past 50 years we have radically altered our diets… I have thought for some time that it’s much better for us to eat whole grains, plants, etc. But how realistic is that? Even if you eat that way at home, what about when you’re at someone else’s home, or dining out? And what about the expense? And what about the fact that there are so many things that could kill us anyway, so should we enjoy our food instead of spending our time worrying about how that Diet Coke we just drank is going to kill us? One thing I AM big on is balance… so maybe you do better where you can, but don’t worry about what you can’t change because... you can’t change it. :)

Philosophical rambling blog over.

Ugh

2008-11-20T12:48:00.001-08:00

It has been a long hard week. Last week I was sick and this week I have been mostly better, but work has been crazy. Demanding, draining, busy, boring, and probably a few other things all at the same time. We have had people here from out of town the past 3 days to figure out some complicated methodology for spliting money up... ick. Plus we've had to "entertain" them after work. And the end of the year is always busy for me at work - right around Thanksgiving is the busiest, then around Christmas it slows way down. I told Geoff I'm looking forward to the following:
I am looking forward to book club (tonight)
I am looking forward to the afternoon off (probably going to do that tomorrow)
I am looking forward to sleep (tonight)
I am looking forward to swimming (Friday)
I am looking forward to football (Saturday)
I am looking forward to running (Saturday)
Goodness is to come.
Relief is to come!

What'd I say I was going to blog about? Children's Ministry was one of them I think. I signed up to help with Children's Ministry at church and there was a training session on Sunday. HARDCORE!!! It's actually quite sad. Lots of rules - stemming from the "society we live in". Unfortunately, we have to think about things like custody battles - Mom has custody and Dad wants it, Dad knows Mom goes to Church X so he tries to pick up the kids from their classroom. So now the drop off parent has to have a nametag, pager, and wrist bracelet to identify them - and you can't pick up your child without all 3 things. I was reading the information before the session and it said only women can change diapers and take children to the bathroom. I was getting kind of huffy about it... then the woman in charge said "statistically, men are more likely to be pedophiles, that's why we have that rule". Well of course I'll get on board with statistics. She said every rule they have is because they've had a bad experience with it in the past - which is sad because it's a very new church. No child can be alone with an adult - you can have 2 kids and 1 adult, or 2 adults and 1 kid, but not 1:1. This is to protect the child, obviously, as well as protect the adult from false allegations. You can hug children under 5, but kindergarten - 5th grade you are supposed to be teaching appropriate physical boundaries. If a kindergartener scrapes her knee, you can give her a hug - but only if you're a female and so is she. Things like that. Middle school and high school - basically no touching of any sort. There's a hall monitor in the hallway during Sunday (and midweek) services at all times. Adults can't use the children's bathroom, and you can only take children to the bathroom if you have 2 or more children with you - and you can only enter the bathroom if it's entirely empty (the hall monitor checks before you go in). There are special needs children and children with cancer and children dealing with divorce and money issues and everything else - she reminded us that no matter what problems we have in our lives, these kids have those same problems and concerns too. You have to have 4 references and a criminal background check, and be a certain age. The goal is to absolutely protect the children first - no matter how inconvenient it may be for any adult (parent, worker, etc). It's a great thing, it's just a little bit overwhelming and sad to think that we need these things. A far cry from when I helped out in the nursery as a junior higher... never would have happened today.

I think that's all for now. Maybe more tomorrow!

Famous!

2008-11-18T07:47:00.001-08:00

I've got several blogs brewing in my head right now - one about my new plan that I like to call the New New Deal and another about my experience at church on Sunday - but for now this one will suffice.

The show Little People Big World is filmed roughly 10 minutes from our house - because that's where the people live! It's been on for about 3 years I think (when Addy lived with me in 2005 and 2006 she was already watching it) but Geoff and I just recently started watching it. I'm not sure what exactly made us start, but we enjoyed seeing our local stores and restaurants on the show. On one episode they were at Taco Bell and we were both like "which one is that?" We looked for clues around the Taco Bell (since there are about 4 very close to us) and figured it out based on a stereo store next door to it. They go to a grocery store we go to often (we have never seen them there in real life though) and they also go to one of my favorite restaurants (they were actually there when we were once, they came in with their film crew and everything). They also go to the same Home Depot we do... actually it's surprising that we've only seen them out and about once, because we seem to shop and eat at the same places quite often.

So last night I'm falling asleep and Geoff is watching the show. All of the sudden he kind of quietly says "honey?" to see if I'm awake... and I say "what?" I know that he's going to point out to me that they're at Wendy's or something and it's the Wendy's near our house or work. But no... he says "I think I just saw our HOUSE." WHAT?!?!?!?!!? So he rewinds... and they are at a soccer game. Well there is a soccer field very close to our house, and we are recognizing houses that look oddly familiar. It's definitely our neighborhood. Then sure enough, in two seperate shots... we can see our house!!!! We are FAMOUS!!!!! :)

Oh and by the way, even though we kind of started enjoying the show for looking for places nearby us... we do actually enjoy watching the family and their interactions with each other and others. But it's still fun to see our house on TV!

I'm alive!

2008-11-14T12:59:00.001-08:00

No, Google Reader isn't just not sending you my feeds, I actually haven't been posting. I have been sick since Saturday - I think with the flu? I was pretty much down and out for the weekend and stayed home from work Monday as well. I've been getting progressively better throughout the week. Today I'm at about 90 - 95%. I'm hoping to be 100% better by tomorrow. So this week has been pretty much a bust.

Other than that, things have been great. Running was going really well, I haven't run at all since last Wednesday so I'm hoping I'll be able to run tomorrow and get back into it fairly easily. The Turkey Trot is coming up in 13 days and I want to stay on schedule for my half marathon training. I officially signed up and bought plane tickets for the half marathon, so I am set!

I have a big Walgreens trip planned today... hopefully they'll have everything in stock. The most exciting thing that I think I'm buying is a new hair dryer. I think I told you this before - but I have one of those travel ones that folds in half to travel. About 6 months ago (yes, embarassingly that long ago) I folded it in half and it kind of made a cracking sound, and now it doesn't go into it's normal L shape anymore. I have to hold it into it's L shape to blow dry my hair. Since I'm cheap, I haven't bought a new one. But today is the day. Let's just hope they have them in stock! There are 3 Walgreens within a 1.5 mile radius from our house, so hopeully someone has them. One is brand new - I'm not even positive it's open yet, but I'm pretty sure when I went for a run a couple of weeks ago I saw it open. I am a freak.

These things are the reasons why I cannot run for President. Someone would find this blog in some cache somewhere and be like "this freak thinks a trip to Walgreens to get a good deal is exciting... she cannot POSSIBLY run our country". Other than that though, I'd obviously be a fantastic candidate. ;-)

So true...

2008-10-30T11:17:00.000-07:00

Kelly:
Shoot I forgot to have my snack. Oh well.
Live and learn I always say
‎‎Geoff:
lol
you do not always say that!
Kelly:
Hahahahahaha
I was hoping you didn't notice.
‎‎Geoff:
normally you dwell on it for a week
and then live and learn
‎‎Kelly:
HAHAHAHA
‎‎Geoff:
but then come back to it for an hour or two every day!

A new low for society

2008-10-28T16:33:00.000-07:00

Certified Pre-Owned Massage Chairs. I'm all for reusing and helping the environment, but still. Scary.

Pool

2008-10-28T08:13:00.000-07:00

I love the pool. I always have - I took my first swimming lessons when I was 6 months old. Okay, so they may not have been swimming lessons so much as it was moms and their kids in the pool teaching them that water exists. But I attribute that to my love for water. I took all of the levels of Red Cross swimming lessons. I was a lifeguard. I was on a swim team. I even have the broad shoulders of a swimmer - the shoulders that made the butterfly the first race I ever won. Anyway, my swim last night was great. I just feel so at home in the water. I wondered why I don't just be a swimmer instead of a "runner", but it's just so much less convenient... you can run anywhere, anytime... finding a pool is much more difficult. But I love it all the same, and it's excellent cross training.

In VERY exciting news, our H2C team is in for 2009! Our check was cashed this morning, and although I haven't received official word from the race organization yet, I have full confidence that they wouldn't cash our check if we weren't in. VERY EXCITING.

Nelson DeMille (my favorite author) has a new book out today! It's called The Gate House, and it's a sequel to The Gold Coast, which strangely enough I have never read. As of today he has published 15 books, and I think I've read 8 of them (I think I own all that I've read). I'm reading The Gold Coast right now, it's very good so far! I will go to Costco later this week to get The Gate House. I'm SO excited. I love Nelson DeMille books. I started in 1997 with Plum Island (I read it my sophomore year of high school over Christmas break while in Colorado). I have read every one of his books that has come out since then - 4 of the 6 have John Corey as the main character. John Corey is HILARIOUS. And I've gone back in time to 3 books he wrote before Plum Island, but there are a few I've missed (including The Gold Coast which I'm reading now), so I guess I have some fun reading ahead!

An excellent weekend! :)

2008-10-27T07:58:00.000-07:00

This weekend was fantastic! :)

Friday we ended up at work late and then didn't feel like the swim we had planned - especially since the weather was so beautiful! So we opted to use our cross-training day for a walk outside instead. We did that and had a calzone for dinner. After that I decided to start a closet cleaning out project. Normally this would be super fun and I would make a big mess in the project, but with the whole house-on-the-market thing, I had to be more contained about it. Of course, it was still really fun! Geoff was on our bed watching TV or a movie or something, and I brought out an armload of clothes and dumped it on the bed next to him. He said "should I be afraid?" and I said "yes!" My plan was to take ALL of the clothes off the top shelf of the closet and put them on the bed, then be particular about what went back in (and send the rest to Goodwill). The top shelf has mostly sweaters/fleeces/cardigans/sweatshirts, plus a few workout clothes and all of my tank tops. So back and forth from the closet I went, dumping more and more clothes in a big mound next to Geoff. It was very entertaining. Then I went through the pile, refolded and re-organized everything into piles - heavy sweaters, light sweaters, cardigans, fleeces, sweatshirt, zippy thingies (like sweatshirts that have a zipper... hoodies I guess, but it seems like they didn't all have hoods!). Geoff doesn't have as many sweaters / sweatshirts so his didn't get organized, just put on the shelf in 2 piles. Then my tank tops got put in 2 piles, no real organization there either. And quite a few items to Goodwill. :) We had to run EARLY in the morning, so I stopped there and cleaned up everything. I love organizing. Oh, and I also pondered the fact that I hang my hanging tops in order by color but my folded tops are by category. That seems weird to me, and I wondered if I should change one or the other but Geoff said they are okay (well duh, of course HE said it was okay). I am a firm believer in having a system that works for the user, so I'm not going to change it even though it seems slightly weird. Maybe if we move.

Saturday morning we got up at the obscene hour of 6:30 AM. Not that 6:30 is so early for a weekday or anything, but who gets up at 6:30 just to go for a run? Ew. I ate some oatmeal and waited a bit, and we set out for a 4-miler at 7 AM. Geoff was out of control!! He really showed the run who was boss. After the run he said it was the first time he felt like he was really a runner… he just kept pushing himself a little further. I had a not-so-good run… I NEVER run well early in the morning, so that was expected for me. Mid-afternoon is my preferred running time (I think because I’ve had a chance to be eating and moving around all day so my body is just more warmed up). But we got it done! After that we went to the pumpkin patch with our friends Rick and Tiffany – they picked us up and we got the pumpkins, then ate lunch at Helvetia Tavern. Then we came back to our house just in time to see that Northwestern LOST this weekend. Sad sad day. We carved super cute pumpkins… well, everyone else did, I just picked out the seeds and baked pumpkin seeds. Then we got a call that someone was going to come to our house to look at it Sunday – PRAISE! After that we headed to Rick and Tiffany’s apartment for the OSU / Penn State game. Tiffany’s a Big Ten girl like me (OSU graduate) so we had lots of fun. They made a delicious cilantro/jalapeño dip and fed us pizza, wine, chocolate and other delicious things. We like them. ;-) Sadly, OSU lost too, so Tiffany felt my pain. After that we headed home – it’d been a looong day. I think I fell asleep in approximately 7 seconds.

Yesterday we went to church at 9 AM (we are becoming morning people or something). After that we went to Geoff’s parent’s house for lunch – his mom made us French dips and French fries. Yum! We watched about half the Nascar race and then headed home to get stuff done! Since we were coming from his parent’s house, we went to DSW Shoes (they live WAY closer than we do to it). I know several people who have had bad experiences there (mainly stemming from their poopy return policy) but I braved it anyway. I haven’t been since I lived in Chicago and it was AWESOME! They had a giant selection and reasonable prices. I was very pleased and I got three pairs of shoes. I was planning on 3 pairs, so that was fine… I haven’t bought new shoes (except for running shoes) since May of 2006. Yes. Two and a half years. I know I am a freak. I found the three pairs I was looking for in about an hour. After that we went to Costco for bananas, peanut butter, and socks. I needed new socks to go with my new shoes. When we came home we found the realtor had actually left a card – PRAISE! Half of the people who’ve called to say they wanted to come look at our house haven’t actually come in and this was the first one who left a card so we knew they’d been there! FINALLY! (our realtor can tell us later on if the people came based on if anyone opened up the lock box to get our key, but leaving a business card is immediate notification) Then I worked on Closet Project Part II. I got rid of 12 pairs of shoes of mine and 1 pair of Geoff’s – that made room for my 3 new pairs and to move some from our downstairs closet upstairs. Now I think pretty much all of our shoes are in our master bedroom closet. (Geoff has probably 10 pairs total and I have probably 25 pairs total including a whole bunch of flip-flops… we are not really shoe people – although I’m going to start making an effort to actually WEAR all of the shoes I have instead of just the same pair EVERY DAY) I went through my hanging clothes and got rid of a bunch of them – I also used up a bunch of shopping bags that I have been “collecting” since I moved to Oregon 4 years ago. I always save them because they seem useful but never know what to do with them – they were PERFECT for all of the shoes/sweaters/shirts I need to take to Goodwill. I filled probably 12 shopping bags with stuff for Goodwill, yay! Then we went to the gym where Geoff ran into an old friend he went to high school with and then we went to Red Robin for dinner. I unloaded the dishwasher and folded a load of laundry and I think that was about it.

Wow. I just wrote a blog on organizing my closet. I’m sorry friends! And I also need to take a lesson on proper use of ( ). I write a lot of sentences that are just ( ) with no other punctuation! I’m sure you noticed already, astute people that you are.

3 reasons today is a good day!

2008-10-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

1. I gave blood today! Giving blood always puts me in a good mood - even though they somehow overbooked the blood drive (I think that's a GOOD thing) and my appointment took me an hour and 45 minutes. I don't know what I love about it... perhaps the pink bandage at the end, or it could be the cookie and the excuse not to workout for the day. What's not to love? (P.S. - boys, you get a CHOICE of bandage... so you can go for a manly blue or green, you don't have to get pink. But pink is obviously the best choice)

2. Whenever I'm training for a half marathon and am traveling at the same time, I always seem to be able to recruit people to run oddly long distances with me. 2 years ago I was scheduled for a 9 miler the same weekend as a retreat I was going to. Somehow there ended up being FIVE PEOPLE (2 training for a marathon, another training for a half, me, and a guy who I think wanted to impress one of the girls) who were willing to get up at 6:00 AM and run for 2 hours through Cannon Beach. When we strolled into breakfast around 8:30 everyone else on the retreat gave us looks of insanity - understandably! This year, half marathon training takes me to a distance of 10 miles two days after Christmas. Already, Geoff (who is doing the half with me), my sister (who has always been a runner), and my friend Erin from college (running a half the week after I am) have agreed to a 10 miler with me in Dallas. SWEET! :) I love sharing the misery.

3. It's Geoff's birthday! Yaaay for birthdays. :)

Why couldn't I have said FOXTROT?

2008-10-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

We went to the gym tonight after work, and it was stinkin' HOT!!! It was a high of about 75 here today, and I guess the gym wasn't expecting that, so the AC wasn't on as much as it should have been. Not to mention the treadmills are UPSTAIRS which makes it even hotter. I thought it was just me, but Geoff and my other friend who was there (who was walking, not running) both confirmed it was stifling. So we cut our run short and went on to lifting - which was the reason we were there in the first place (the half marathon training schedule calls for one day of running AND lifting, that day was today this week. We decided to run at the gym despite the nice weather so that we could just lift while we were there too). That part went quite well. :)

I have been working on organizing all of my music on iTunes. It is a long tedious process... and I get through about one letter of the alphabet a night, if I'm lucky. Tonight I was reporting my progress to Geoff, and it went like this:
Me: "I got through F tonight"
Geoff: "Wow, X??"
M: "No, F. As in Fooey."
G: "That's P-H."
M: "Oh."

The man has a point. Who spells phooey FOOEY??? And better yet, who gives FOOEY as an example for the letter F??? I'm a freak.

Life

2008-10-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

So last night I got in the pool about 8 PM. May have been 8:01 or 8:02, but as I started swimming I noted 8:00. I swam 20 laps (500 yards) and took a break. I looked up at the clock and it said roughly 8:12 or 8:13. I was disappointed because I normally swim 500 yards in 10 minutes, so I was swimming a little slowly. So I swam my second set (again 500 yards) a little harder. I took a break and looked up at the clock - GONE! Seriously, the clock was gone. I thought "Am I looking at the wrong wall? Did I get turned around in the pool somehow? Am I hallucinating? Was there an earthquake while I was swimming?" I've been swimming in this pool for 2.5 years and never had such an issue before. Upon further review (approximately .8 second later) I saw a janitor on a ladder holding the clock. He reached up to put it back on the wall - and it said 8:12 or 8:13!!!! UGH!!!! All of that work and I have no idea if I was faster or not. I realized that I had left for the gym about 7:35, so the clock was probably originally 10 minutes fast and he was just setting it back, but it was very funny. Then I swam my third set and was excited to just be done, so I never did check the clock after that one. Oh well. :) Maybe next time!

This morning I went down to the cafe at work to get some coffee and a bowl for my oatmeal. I was holding the coffee in one hand and the bowl and spoon in the other. I have no idea what I was doing, but all of the sudden - CRASH! The bowl slips out of my hand and crashes into a thousand pieces all over the cafe floor. Thank goodness nothing was in it and that I get to work early so the cafe wasn't super busy. Embarssing though. :) I commented at the time "well at least now I have something good to blog about today".

Fun weekend!

2008-10-20T13:01:00.000-07:00

Had a super fun weekend - I wasn't feeling the best so I didn't know how it would go, but it ended up turning out really fun! Friday night we went to a local coffeehouse to see my coworker's son play the piano. He is extremely talented and it was a lot of fun. Plus I'd never been to that coffee shop before and it was a really nice place, so I think we'll be back in the future. Great atmosphere! After that we went to a pub to hang out.... we played cards and talked for a long time.

The next morning I slept until 9:30... oops! We watched Northwestern beat Purdue in the homecoming game which was tons of fun.

Sunday we ran the Run Like Hell 5K in Portland. It was my first 5K - isn't that weird? I have run 2 Hood to Coasts, 2 10Ks, and a half marathon - but never raced in the 5K distance before. It felt so short! It went by really quickly but was a lot of fun.

Yesterday also marked Day 1 of Week 1 of Half Marathon training - Geoff, Patrick, and I are all going to run the Rock 'N' Roll Arizona Half Marathon in January. At least I think we are (Patrick is already signed up). The registration fee goes up the middle of next month so assuming we are on track training-wise, Geoff and I will sign up then. The race is in 13 weeks... we are well positioned for the training plan I'm going to use (the same one that I loosely based my last half marathon training on, although this time I'm going to follow it a little more closely). Today is Day 2 - cross training. :) I'm planning on 30 minutes in the pool tonight (which feels so short, normally I spend 55 minutes in the pool, so this is great)! Geoff's going to basketball for his cross training (he plays every Monday night with men from church). SOOO excited!

I've been tagged. :)

2008-10-14T10:26:00.000-07:00

I have read people's blogs in which they've been tagged for months, and never been tagged myself. But now I've been tagged by Marisa, so here we go!

1. do you like blue cheese salad dressing? Yes but not necessarily on a salad – but I LOVE it on buffalo wings, fries, etc. Probably not as much as ranch though.
2. do you own a gun? No.
3. what's your favorite drink at starbucks? Grande caramel frappucino (although it varies slightly by season).
4. what do you prefer to drink in the morning? Water, and on the weekdays I usually have one cup of coffee.
5. do you do push ups? Sporadically.
6. what's your favorite piece of jewelry? I don’t know… my wedding ring?
7. favorite hobby? Running at the moment… but it changes practically weekly.
8. do you have a.d.d.? No.
9. what's one trait that you hate about yourself? Lack of dedication.
10. name 3 thoughts at this exact moment: My knees hurt but I’m looking forward to running tonight anyway, I’m getting annoyed with people at work for not showing up to something they were supposed to come to at 10:30, and I’m glad to be blogging.
11. name 4 drinks you regularly drink. Water, coffee, wine, and Diet Coke. That’s pretty much in order of how often I drink them. Although I easily drink more water than the other 3 combined – probably 2 or 3x really!
12. current worry right now? No worries.
13. current hate right now? People who call to say they’re going to come look at our house and then don’t.
14. favorite place to be? Bed.
15. do you like to travel? Yes.
16. what color shirt are you wearing? Grey with a black hoodie over it.
17. do you like sleeping on satin sheets? I don’t really think I ever have.
18. can you whistle? To a tune? No.
19. favorite color? Pink.
20. if you could would you be a pirate? No. That’s weird.
21. what song do you sing in the shower? Well I rarely sing in the shower but if I do it’s usually a worship song, mainly because they have easy choruses.
22. favorite girl's name? Off the top of my head, Catherine, although I don’t know that I’d necessarily name a child that.
23. favorite boy's name? Tyler? Again off the top of my head. I have thought of a few good ones in the past month or so and need to start keeping a list somewhere. Just in case.
24. what's in your pocket right now? My Amex.
25. favorite bedsheets as a child? Some ridiculous black ones with green and teal stripes on them (from my teen years). I loved them but when I got to college I had some lavender ones and realized that it was oddly easier to sleep on light colored sheets. I would never use dark sheets again (although they are still in “my bedroom” at my parent’s house, so I use them ~once a year).
26. worst injury? I fell off my bike in first grade and the whole left side of my face was one giant scab. It was very disgusting looking. The teacher (Miss Messina) told all of the other kids in the class to basically avoid me… so that they didn’t cause me any more injury.
27. do you love where you live? Most of the time.
28. how many TVs do you have in your house? Two that we use. Two older ones that we don’t use – they’re in guest bedrooms and not hooked up to cable or anything, but could be used for watching a DVD. Heck, one of them even has a VCR hooked up to it!29. who is your loudest friend? Addy.
30. how many pets do you have? None.
31. does someone have a crush on you? Who knows!
32. what is your favorite book? Plum Island by Nelson DeMille. But really, any of his books, especially if John Corey is the main character.
33. what's your favorite candy? Reeses Peanut Butter cups
34. favorite sports team? Northwestern football!!!!!!
35. what was the first thing you thought of when you woke up? I had a bad dream last night and I can’t remember what it was.

To be fair, the person I was waiting for earlier when I started this blog DID show up right after I answered that question and came through in a big way!

I tag Patrick. Because I think he should start a blog!

Progress

2008-10-13T11:28:00.000-07:00

Making progress on three main fronts:

1. Running! 7 or so weeks ago I started out running .5 miles. I increased half a mile a week (yes I know you're only supposed to increase by 10% each week....) and now I'm ready for a 5K on Sunday.

2. Picture storage! Remember how in the past several months I have promised you pictures on several occasions? And said that I wanted to start taking more pictures but needed to come up with an organization system first? Well I did that over the weekend so now I can start taking more pictures AND posting them to my blog. My goal is going to be a weekly picture update.

3. Goal setting! I have never been a big "personal goal setter" but I decided to start. I made daily goals, weekly goals, monthly goals, quarterly goals, yearly goals, and long term and/or undefined goals. The goals are in 5 big categories (career & education, family & relationship, health & fitness, personal growth / interest / recreation / leisure, and time & money management / organization / home). Then there are subcategories (for example in personal growth / interest / recreation / leisure there are 4 subcategories - recreation/hobbies/leisure, community service / stewardship, creative, and spiritual) and goals for each of the sub categories in the different time frames (not every subcategory has a goal for every time period... I'm not *that* crazy!). Anyway it's a giant matrix - 14x20 (cells in Excel). But I love it and I already feel more productive and well rounded even in just the couple of weeks since I've implemented it. I've already added and deleted a few things since I started - this is a work in progress. :) I've also already failed at a few things but I've also accomplished a ton and made steps toward some of the longer term goals. In the future I may think about posting some goals on the blog and giving a monthly state of the union... we'll see how it goes.

Quick again...

2008-10-05T20:58:00.000-07:00

Okay, so first of all I know I had a mistake on my last blog about grammar - embarassing! And no, I didn't edit it so if you didn't catch it you can go back and laugh at my expense. I was in a rush which is absolutely no excuse... I would criticize others and say that if you don't have time to write well don't write at all. So all it is is me being an idiot!

Anyway, my sister and I were talking tonight about our Thanksgiving plans. She's going to be here for Thanksgiving and is going to join me, Geoff, and Momlie on A Wine Country Thanksgiving. This will be our 3rd Thanksgiving going - our first with anyone else besides the 3 of us! So I said "oh, cool, you can meet my friend Thistle-Man". She said "What is that?" I said "Thistle Wines... it's a winery that I really like." "What??" "Thistle Man... Jon Jennison... he's the winemaker at Thistle Wines". "But what's a fransisleman?"

HAHAHAHAHA - when I said "you can meet my friend Thistle-Man" she heard "you can be my fransisleman".

"What's a fransisleman and why would I want to be that?"

I have nothing else to say... laughing too darn hard!!! :)

small update and a rant

2008-09-29T11:06:00.000-07:00

Nothing like a grammar mistake to bring me out of my blog hiatus! In the last 6 months or so, it seems to have become trendy to overuse "myself". Like "you know a ton more than myself" or "Jack, Brad, and myself went to the store". What is wrong with me or I? It seems that people don't know if they should use me or I in a sentence and so they avoid it entirely by using "myself" and thinking that somehow sounds better.

My problem with grammar is that I hear these things and I know they're not right, but I don't necessarily know WHY. So then I have to google me/myself/I and find a plethora of information. Best I can tell, myself is a "special object" to be used only when you are the subject of the sentence. Like "I walked to the store by myself". "I" is the subject, so then you can use myself.

So there's your grammar lesson for the day. In other news, someone else made an offer on the house we're had the contingent offer in on, so it looks like they will end up with it instead of us. Not too much else going on!

Airport Observations

2008-09-10T08:42:00.000-07:00

I'm at the airport right now, I have a quick overnight business trip before my NINE GLORIOUS DAYS camping at the coast. I've been here since about 6 since Geoff dropped me off before work, and my flight's not until 9:55. That's okay, I've been online the whole time getting work done (okay, and blogging).

Anyway, I'm sitting outside of Starbucks (if you know the PDX airport, right when you pass through security on the ABC side there's that Starbucks with the lounge area? Yeah, I'm there) and at a table right near me there are 3 cops. All of the sudden a 4th cop comes whizzing in on his bicycle and screeching to a halt! I seriously thought he was going to hit their table - it was kinda funny. When he got there, one of the other cops got up and left immediately, and the other 2 stood up to talk to biker cop. I was watching this all go down when biker cop looked over at me, smiled, and said good morning. Friendly biker cop!!!

Oh, and the one other thing that happened: I went to the bathroom a little while ago and just as I locked the door to my stall someone said "Kelly? Do you have to go potty?" I was thinking "WHAT? Yes, of course I do!"... and then I realized there was a little girl named Kelly in the restroom as well. :)

More house stuff

2008-09-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

So I can't remember where I left off yesterday, but we made a home inspection appointment for this week and it's only going to be $255!!! That is super exciting news. I guess that's the bonus of going to a house that's only a little over half the size of the one you currently live in. :) Sometimes they charge an "older home fee" but not in this case which is great.

Except then we found out that we probably need to do a septic inspection too, since we'd be on septic rather than sewer.
- There is a $150 fee for locating and unburying the septic system/tank.
- There is a $0.37 / gallon fee for pumping and cleaning the tank.
- There is a $300 fee for the inspection itself.

With a 1000 gallon tank that's full (just a guess, we have no idea how big it is or how full it is), this could be $820 on a house we may not even end up with! Which I realize is always the case when you're still in the inspection process, but in this case it's particularily a long shot because of the contingency. Ick. And we don't know if the seller will locate the tank for us and let us dig it up (apparently they are buried 18 - 20 inches under ground).

Then we had to read all of the disclosures (which we read before when we first made an offer on this home 4 months ago) and sign our lives away about lead paint, asbestos, and all of the other exciting things older homes have to offer. Makes me miss our more modern home already!

But then the day started looking up: our realtor decided that it really is dumb for us to have to do the septic inspection at this point with so much up in the air, so we're going to write an addendum to request that we do the septic inspection AFTER the contingency is up (if it ever is). Hopefully he accepts that. And if not, hopefully he at least tells us where the tank is and lets us dig it ourselves so we can save $150.

The good news continued when Geoff called to make an appointment with the sewer peeps. They asked how old the home is and when he told them, they said they don't need to do the $300 system inspection since it will fail anyway. I'm not sure if that's actually comforting or not, but it will save us $300 at least. Included in the pumping/cleaning fee is an inspection of the actual tank, so at least they can tell us if there's a giant crack or anything. So now we're down from $820 to a max (assuming a 1000 gallon tank that's full) of $370. Much more palitable. Although I'm still hoping he says we don't have to do this until if/after the contingency is dropped.

So that's the current update. Nothing has happened on our current house - no lookers yet. The sign is getting put up in front of our house today and we have an open house scheduled for 9/14 (this Sunday). If you know anyone who needs a nice house in suburban Portland, you know where to come... :)

Movin' & Shakin'

2008-09-09T09:32:00.000-07:00

Lots of stuff going on!! Our house went on the market on Friday, and we submitted the offer on the new house on Saturday. The owner came back yesterday with his counter which we accepted! We have 90 days now to sell our house and he asked us to get our inspection now rather than after our house sells - that way he isn't waiting 90 days for us to get an inspection and find some deal breaker after the fact. So we have that setup for Thursday morning. I'll be out of town but Geoff will handle it! He's also going to walk the property at the same time and hopefully set up a septic inspection for the same time. Craziness!

Our house is supposed to get the sign up in front of it today or tomorrow - not that that's a big deal but that will sorta be the "final" step in getting it on the market. Haven't had any calls yet, but there is an open house this Sunday so hopefully that will generate SOME interest... who knows. But imagine this: we sell and close on our house within 90 days, that's the beginning of December, so right around the 1st of the year we could be moving into our beautiful new house! (and I use the words "beautiful" and "new" both VERY loosely :)

House for sale!

2008-09-05T08:38:00.000-07:00

So we met with the realtor last night and our house goes on the market today!!! (well, maybe tomorrow morning - depends on when the system updates or whatever) If you know someone who wants to buy a 4 bedroom / 2.5 bath house in the Beaverton, Oregon area - leave a comment in my blog and I will send you the details. Or if you're just interested in seeing all of the pictures and stuff, let me know that too and I'll send you the listing once I have it. :-) Stalkers. Just kidding. I'd want to see it too!

Tonight I'm going to Dinner's Ready to make a bunch of meals for my camping trip with Momlie that starts a week from today... YEAH!!!! So excited. :) Both about making the meals and the actual trip itself. And I have a business trip between now and then so it's going to be hectic time. Oh yeah, and we're selling our house and making an offer on another house.

That's about it... I had some character flaw (mine, not someone else's) that I was going to blog about but I don't remember what it was, so I guess it wasn't that important. I'll try to remember it later. Just wanted to give a quick update!

Embarassing Story

2008-09-01T10:12:00.000-07:00

I was just in the copy room making some copies of receipts for a business expense that I incurred last week and for which I was submitting a reimbursement request. (that sentence originally ended I was submitting a reimbursement request for and then I remembered for is a preposition - so although it may sound odd, that sentence is grammatically correct)

Pause. Okay, after I "fixed" my sentence, I thought I remembered reading some time ago that you actually COULD end a sentence with a preposition in English. So I did some research, and in fact you can. It’s in LATIN that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition. However, when the preposition is unnecessary (at the end of the sentence or otherwise), that’s when you should leave it off. For example, when people say “where’s it at?” I grit my teeth every time! “Where is it” is sufficient. Of course, “Where’s it?” doesn’t sound quite as good, but “where is it at” is the same as “where’s it at” and it’s just adding that extra at that you don’t need! There’s your grammar lesson for the day – you can end a sentence in a preposition, just don’t add an unnecessary one. So I suppose my opening sentence above would have been correct as originally written.

Play. After I opened the copy machine after copying the receipts, the movement of opening the lid sent my receipts flying all around. The smallest one (which happened to be the biggest expense) flew right in the crack between the two pieces of the copy machine (the collating piece and the copying piece). AHHH!!! I looked around, underneath it and behind it – and then I called Geoff, who uses the copy machine WAY more than I do. Thank goodness it’s Labor Day and no one’s here. After sufficient mocking and trying to figure out a way to find the receipt, Geoff finally found the lever to pull the two pieces apart and rescue my valuable receipt. Yay!

Stuff to blog about...

2008-09-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

Alright, finally I have some stuff to blog about. The house we were looking at back in April is still on the market - I have kept my eye on it, so I was aware that it was. My realtor emailed me 2 or 3 weeks ago letting me know, and I asked her to see if the seller would consider a contingency at this point - nope. Apparently he had received another offer that was quite low, but those buyers were "back and more serious now". Okay. Well probably 4 days later the listing price was lowered by about $15K (this was the first time he'd lowered his price in the past 4 months - I'd been watching for that, because I figured it'd be a sign he was more desperate). Hmmm.... looks like those buyers didn't quite work out now. So I asked my realtor to go back again to see if he'd take a contingency now. Sure enough, she came back and said that yes, he would entertain a contingency now (as Momlie said - "what, like do a song and dance for it?"). Oh my! We weren't really expecting that. So we deliberated over it for a couple of days, and then decided we're going to go for it. :) We asked a different realtor to come over on Friday night to tell us what we needed to do to put our house on the market - he walked through and made several suggestions (obvious stuff - touch up paint, put away pictures, put bark dust out, etc.) and we spent the weekend doing that. Our house looks fantastic now - we just have to finish up the mopping/sweeping/dusting/vacuuming etc. part of stuff and it will be picture perfect. I'll try to take some pictures tonight to post on the blog. You know me though - so don't hold your breath! So this week I need to get a pre-approval letter (our other one was only dated for 30 days, but he said he could give me a new one easily, he wouldn't have to run our credit again for 6 months so that's nice) and then I suppose we'll get in touch with the realtor we're buying with to see about making an offer. :) So crazy and random... but we are like that. We did decide (I think... again don't hold me to this...) that we're going to go ahead and sell our house whether this one works out or not. We can then live in our trailer until we find another suitable house. We weren't planning on selling for another 6 months to a year, but our selling agent told us that he is telling everyone to expect it to take 6 months to a year to sell - so that will actually work out perfectly (unless we're very lucky people and our house sells in some ridiculous time like 2 days... yeah right!). So no real action yet, but the plan for this week is: get pre-approval letter first, then make offer and put our house on market (not sure about the order for those two things... I suppose they may be somewhat simultaneous). Yikes. I've done the buying thing before but never the selling part... this should be interesting.

Here's a small funny from this weekend's house-beautify-a-thon:
Geoff: "Do you have one of those little handheld broom and dustpan things?"
Kelly: "Yup."
Geoff: "Can I borrow it?"
Hahahahaha. As though it is MINE only and I'm very protective about MY handheld broom and dustpan. That cracked us up for a good long while.

Other highlights of the weekend:
- Watching a Wildcat football WIN against Syracuse on ESPN2. There are very few things in the world better than college football!!!!!!!
- A fantastic shopping trip to Walgreens - my original total when they ran me up was around $70. After my coupons and rebates, my total ended up being -$18. Yes NEGATIVE!!! The best part is... while I was doing all of my deal hunting and gathering (I had a $10 off $40 coupon, so I had to make sure that I spent $40... and that was after all of my other coupons, so I had to do a lot of calculating... my shopping trip was slow!) Geoff was looking through the movie bin. As I was in the cosmetics section, he came up to me and said "you'll never guess what I found". I couldn't guess so he finally showed me - Blast From the Past! I've been looking for that movie for a couple of months, and no stores carry it since it's a little older. VERY exciting. It was $7.99 - but even that was included in my negative eighteen dollar total. :) So fun! I took a picture of all of the items I acquired. If I post house pics, maybe I'll include that one along with it.
- Went for a run Friday night and Sunday night. We are tentatively planning on doing the 5K Run Like Hell in October and 10K Smelt Run in February. So sore... but in reality I think that's from awkward positions cleaning this weekend (leaning over the bathtub cleaning miniblinds, scrubbing vertical blinds, patching nail holes in the walls, filling up the entire yard waste bin with weeds and clippings (okay I filled only like 75% of it - Geoff filled the other 25% with mowing the lawn), etc.)

Catching up...

2008-08-26T08:16:00.000-07:00

Back from camping - we had a FANTASTIC time. I believe this was my favorite camping trip ever - Friday night was clear enough to look up at the stars and listen to the new Phil Wickham CD as well as a David Crowder CD I've had for 4 or 5 years. It was perfect! Saturday we had a lovely campfire and I made way too many marshmallows. :)

Safety Tip of the Day: In any disaster or emergency situation, use your vehicle only when absolutely necessary. Do not go sightseeing. Keep the streets clear for emergency vehicles and relief efforts.
REALLY?!?!?! I was always under the impression that during a tornado was the best time to go sightseeing. I love my safety calendar. :) It really straightens me out!

Last night for dinner we had Pioneer Woman's Not Your Granny's Mac & Cheese. Spicy, but delicious! Great flavors. I love Pioneer Woman - I don't remember where I read about her, but she is hilarious and has great sounding recipes. Last night was the first one I'd tried, but it was fantastic. We biked to the grocery store to get the ingredients beforehand - I love biking, and yesterday was the perfect weather for it.

I had soy milk in my coffee this morning. I've been wanting to try it, so I took the plunge. It was alright.

Check this out - http://houston.craigslist.org/dmg/813229270.html. I know that link will be gone in a week, but here's the gist - "We were looking for a domestic helper to assist a soon to be expecting mother (February 2009) to start ASAP."
First of all - we "were"??? Then why are you posting on Craigslist if you're not still in need? Anyway, my bigger issue is what is with the "soon to be expecting mother"? Typically people just say "expecting mother". And if they're trying to say expecting soon, that's different than soon to be expecting. It makes it sound like she's going to be pregnant soon, but is not yet. And even if they ARE trying to say she's expecting soon - she's not really. It sounds like she just started her second trimester. Ahh, I digress....

A few more tidbits

2008-08-19T12:45:00.000-07:00

Sunday I wasn't feeling well so I was just taking it easy. I browsed through games.com, as they sometimes have some fun games (they used to have Monopoly which was super fun) and I hadn't looked at it in a while. I saw a game saw Solitare Race so I clicked on it to play, took the tutorial, and started to play. I was like "what is going on here?" and Geoff looked over and said "HEY, that's Nerts!", which is a game that his family loves to play. I had played only once a couple of years ago and didn't remember much, so Geoff leaned over and gave me pointers on what to do and how to play. Once I got the hang of it, he started playing against me (we both played online with Computer 1 and Computer 2 as the other two players - quite fun! - let us know if you want to play with us online sometime). We played again a couple of times last night too, and I'm the reigning champion between the two of us right now. So fun!

I have been cooking lots of great things with veggies from my coworker's garden - I made zucchini bread Sunday night and balsamic vegetables last week. I've also started using the basil I've been growing. YAY.

Phil Wickham recorded a live CD at our church early in July and it's now available to be downloaded (for free if you agree to sign up for his newsletter). I've been listening to it today and it's so cool to think that the voices are the voices of my church. :) We weren't able to go, and I can't remember why now (we may have been camping), but I've heard it was just an amazing amazing night!

Half Birthday

2008-08-19T08:05:00.000-07:00

Today is my half birthday! I know, no one over the age of 6 should celebrate a half birthday, but I have ever since high school. (noted it, not so much "celebrated" it) My friend Laura's real birthday is on August 18, so we always sort of joked that we were half-birthday twins (almost). I remember her birthday because it's the day before my half birthday, and she remembers my birthday because it's the day after her half birthday. Works for us! :)

I don't think I wrote about the Eco Party last week, but it was fantastic. A great dialogue, and I learned a lot. #1 take home point: you cannot recycle any cardboard that has been used in the freezer (frozen entree boxes, frozen pizza boxes, ice cream containers, popsicle boxes, etc!). They have a waxy coating on them to make them freezer-friendly, and as a result they are not able to be recycled. Very interesting!

My latest crazy idea (that has loosely stemmed from the Eco Party, though I've thought about it for months) is buying a side of beef. Geoff, the greatest omnivore in the world, LOVES the idea. Ever since I mentioned the idea, a typical conversation has gone like this:
Kelly: "What should we have for dinner tonight?"
Geoff: "I don't know, but if we had a side of beef I'm sure we could figure something out!!!!!"
It's very entertaining! There are quite a few local ranchers around here that will do it, and a handful of them have representation at the Portland Farmer's Market, so we're going to go next weekend to check it out. If we did it, we probably wouldn't do it until the spring (some ranchers do it monthly, some only a couple of times a year).

We're camping again this weekend - this trip will be the debut of the indoor/outdoor carpeting AND our new bike rack thingy that we bought (actually we have had a bike rack, but it's hitch based. Since our trailer is in our hitch when we're camping - imagine that - it doesn't work. So we bought this little hitch adapter thingy that hooks onto our camper bumper and makes it a hitch that we can put our bike rack in. fancy.)

I love the Olympics. But they make me sleepy. That is all!

Another yard-related issue

2008-08-13T09:19:00.000-07:00

So Geoff and I are little gardeners this year - as you may recall, we planted basil, tomatoes (2 plants), and peppers (2 plants). The basil did great indoors and has been thriving since we moved it outdoors. One pepper plant died almost immediately, and the other is hanging on. It doesn't look great, but it's alright. The tomatoes are FANTASTIC. They are big and beautiful and have tons of teeny tiny little green tomatoes all over them.

However, we have ivy. Everywhere. It is crawling over the fence from our neighbors - both behind us and to the side of us. It's even crawling up our next door neighbor's HOUSE. We stay on top of it and keep it out of our yard/plants/fence as much as possible - we're out there all the time combatting the ivy. I guess our neighbor decided enough is enough, because last week when my mom was here he was out there spraying. My mom went out there to get the mail and he said "be careful, this chemical is very strong" (he was in coveralls and a respirator). YIKES. But he's kind of a strange guy, so it's not too surprising. Anyway, a few days later we look at the ivy on their side and it is dead dead dead. As I was out there working in our yard yesterday, I saw that the ivy on our side has little spots on it. Then I looked at our tomato and peppers plants - they have little spots on them too!!!!!

It appears that some of his chemical (I have no idea what it was) got on our tomato and peppers plants too. It's been on there for 9 - 10 days I'd say, and the plants overall still look good - just some spotting on the leaves. So to my green-thumbed readers, I ask: Is there anything we can/should do for them? Are they going to make it? Or should we just keep hoping that they will get through this tough time in their little plant lives?

More randomness

2008-08-13T08:45:00.001-07:00

Yesterday as Geoff and I were leaving work, a fella in my group stopped us in the hallway. Apparently, Geoff had done a favor for him sometime last week, and the guy told me "Kelly, he's perfect." I laughed, and he went on, "When he helped me take care of that thing, I thought 'gosh, he made that process so painless when it could have been so difficult, he was so friendly, and he just really took care of things.' Then someone told me 'You know, that's Kelly M's husband' and I said NO WAY!!!!!" Hahaha. Very funny, Tom. Yes, Geoff is kind and helpful and great, and I'm just mean and undeserving. I know.

I have this urge to go swimming so I'm going to the gym pool on Saturday. However, I'm worried that every other gym member has the same urge due to the Olympics. I'll test my theory this weekend.

Lest anyone think our parents forgot our anniversary, my parents, Christine, and Abel sent us a couple of items off of our registry. When we got home from work/shopping/dinner on Monday, there was a large black tube sitting on our front porch. I thought "WHAT in the world?" I figured it was probably related to our anniversary, and probably from Geoff's parents, although I had a couple of other friends I could think of that may have dropped something off. Geoff was going to go get the mail (we have a "community" mailbox) and I told him I'd wait for him to investigate. He walked in the house after getting the mail and said "I figured it out!!!" I said "how?" He said "I saw the corner". Hmm... corner... odd. So we went outside - indoor/outdoor carpeting. OF COURSE!!!! A fabulous camping gift from Geoff's parents. Along with a CARD with several inside jokes in it. When we go camping, we always check out everyone else's setups - a lot of people have mats / rugs / carpets / etc. that sort of make a "front porch" in front of the camper. That way they can walk outside in bare feet and they don't track as much in the camper, and now we have our very own giant piece of indoor/outdoor carpeting for the camper. We are blessed.

When we went to Beau and Kendra's a couple of weeks ago for dinner, they pointed out a new ceiling fan they'd installed that day. It looked great! Then they said it was $40 at Home Depot and I was sold. I went the next day and it was marked down to $32!!!!! Even better. I bought it and Geoff installed it yesterday. When he was done, he called me into the room (our bedroom) and showed it to me. It is great - except it doesn't have a light. I didn't even THINK about a light. So it's a little annoying walking into our room and flipping on the light switch and not getting light, but we'll get used to it. We have these nice "spotlight" things for our bookshelf that we never use, so Geoff turned those on last night. And it's SO worth the trade off of the fan - I love ceiling fans. They are in every other bedroom in our house but ours, so now we've joined the fun.

This weekend I was thinking "gosh, my hair sure is annoying. I need a haircut". On Monday a coworker said "are you growing out your hair?" and I said "NO!!! I was just thinking I should get it cut". Then yesterday a coupon for Great Clips came in the mail, and I took that as a final sign and got my hair cut. It looks awesome - she did such a great job. I'm very pleased.

Going along with my haircut and with Geoff in the attic for hanging the fan and in the crawlspace for running speaker wire, I realized that I should take more pictures. I need to come up with a system for organizing my pictures first (I have a system I just haven't taken many pictures in the past 4 years - yes that long - so it needs to be udpated) and then maybe I'll start. MAYBE. I'm not committing to anything yet.

We are going to an Eco Party tonight. A friend of mine just finished up the Master Recycler program, so as part of his volunteer hours he put together this little gathering. Geoff is nervous we/he are/is going to be shunned for not being green enough. I told him our cloth napkins will keep us in the in crowd. ;-) Not to mention that my friend went to Georgia Tech (where my brother in law Trevor goes to school) and his wife went to Northwestern, so that alone makes them cool people. I'm looking forward to it! Just have to finish up my homework now - a little survey about what types of things we do and don't do to reduce our carbon footprint.

9 minute blog of randomness

2008-08-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

I have 9 minutes before a meeting so I'm going to see what I can get down on "paper" here.

- Yesterday was our first anniversary. YAY!
- To celebrate, we spent a night downtown Saturday night. We had a FANTASTIC dinner (easily top 5 ever) on Saturday night at Lucy's Table. So tasty.
I had:
Small plate: Goat Cheese Ravioli Brown Butter Sauce, Pecorino Romano, Crispy Shallots & Pancetta
Large plate: Catch of the day – Swordfish in a corn and prawn bisque. So it was on top of a little bit of the bisque, with chunks of corn, prawn, zucchini, red onion, and crispy potatoes.
Dessert: Boca Negra - Moist Warm Flourless Chocolate Cake, Whipped Cream & Nut Florentine
Geoff had:
Small plate: Pomegranate Glazed Baby Back Pork Ribs Manchego Cheese
Large plate: Black Pepper Crusted “Cascade Natural” Beef Rib-Eye – it had some fries and some other stuff with it, I don’t remember exactly what.
Dessert: Also can't remember the name, but it was like a custard with berries type thing. Delicious.
It was pricey, BUT they have a "social hour" Monday - Friday from 5 - 6:30 where everything (drinks and food) are 1/2 price. So we will be back!
- We have this Japanese Maple tree/bush/thing in our front yard that has been there since I moved in 3+ years ago. Apparently the previous owner loved it and pruned it and took care of it and babied it daily. I, on the other hand, have not touched it in 3 years. It's looking a little out of control (little = LOT), so this morning I googled "japanese maple prune" and came across a message board where someone was saying they purchased a house with a Japanese Maple and they had no idea what to do with it. Someone suggested that since they retail for around $1000 that they sell it back to a nursery. I thought NO WAY, you can't just sell a tree back to a nursery. So I googled "japanese maple sell to a nursery" and came up with a bunch of junk. Then I remembered the greatness that is Craigslist, so I looked up in the for sale section there and came up with a several - this is one of the first things I came up with. I figure I can sell it on Craigslist for several hundred dollars, have someone else come haul it away, and then I won't have to worry about pruning it and I can just find something else to put where it was. MUCH easier than actually doing the work to prune it. ;-) Genius.
- Geoff has been shopping for surround sound the last several months, so I've been tagging along with him to various electronic store type places. The other day at Best Buy, there was a floor model marked down to $550. Geoff asked what the best price the guy could give on it was, and he said "$550! Are you kidding? That's a $900 system!". My response was of course laughter - perhaps a brand new system in the current model year that hadn't been sitting on the floor of Best Buy for over a year being touched and fiddled with and handled and scratched may have originally RETAILED for $900 - but that doesn't make it "worth" $900 - it's only worth what someone will pay for it. SO entertaining. So after some more research, Geoff was finally ready to make his purchase. Yesterday we went to Fry's and he bought what he wanted. There were two salesmen - we'll call them Boris and Doris. Boris says "do you want the warranty on this? It's only $10 for an extra 5 years". Geoff says no, and Doris says "do you know the subwoofer is only warrantied for 90 days". I of course laughed again - wow, that's really standing behind your product to warranty it for a whole 3 months. Costco will stand behind their electronic products for 2 years. (you may ask why we didn't purchase from Costco then - Geoff wanted something very specific and we've been stalking Costco for it for months and they haven't had it) Anyway, then Boris logs off the computer and Doris says "hey, log back on" - which Boris does. HELLO, you have a personal log-on ID/password for a reason - so other people don't use your account. Then, we're checking out and Boris said "you are getting such a killer deal, a $X system for only $Y". Which just CRACKED ME UP AGAIN!!! AHHHHHHH!!!! You're selling it for $Y. It's worth $Y. So then I just started walking through Fry's saying (rather loudly) "LOOK!!! A $20,000 TV for $800!!! What a deal!" Customers were turning their heads, and Geoff was pretending to be embarassed that his psycho wife was yelling in Fry's, but he was laughing too. Hehehehe. I just love how these salesmen try to convince me of when I'm getting a "deal". Trust me, buddy, I know if it's a deal or not a deal and don't need you to tell me. I know they're only doing their job and I can appreciate that and certainly understand that these are effective techniques, but they're just hilarious to me. :)

My chop-happy doctor

2008-08-07T12:36:00.000-07:00

Warning: You might want to skip this one if you're squeamish. It's not super gory, but it is a "medical" one.

I think I've seen my dermatologist 5 times over the course of the past 2 years. EVERY SINGLE TIME I'VE GONE TO HER she has chopped something off. The first time was because I had a skin infection, the second and third were moles (part of the same mole actually, it came back irregular so she wanted to "dig a little deeper"). I didn't see her for about a year and a half, then went back a month or so ago for another skin infection. She again chopped something off, a little piece of the infected area to biposy it. That turned out to be a staph infection. So I went back Tuesday for a recheck of that and a skin check (just because I have so many moles, I like to have them checked every year or two). Before I went in, I told my mom that I was guaranteeing that she would chop something off. Sure enough, she found what she thought was a "ruptured cyst" on my back that looked funny and she wanted to biposy. So off it went. My mom couldn't believe it!

They called today with the results - benign. But it gets better. They said it was a clogged pore showing some inflammation, which is consistent with a bug bite. SHE TOOK A BIOPSY A BUG BITE!!!! Hehehehe. :)

In all seriousness, I'm not complaining. I think she's a FANTASTIC doctor, one of my favorites, and I'm very glad she's so cautious and conservative. But it's still funny that she hacked off a bug bite.

Mom blog!

2008-08-06T15:34:00.000-07:00

The last week has been a great whirlwind of activity!

Thursday night Geoff and I had dinner at Kendra and Beau's, then went downtown to a silent art auction. It was quite fun. :) After that, we picked my mom up from the airport - the timing worked out perfectly.

Friday after work, Geoff and I took both of our moms camping. We went to Ocean Park Washington to the Ocean Park Resort. We had been thinking about renting an "annual site" there (meaning that you pay a flat rate for an entire year and leave your RV there, so it almost becomes a vacation home). There are pros and cons to this: pros are having amenities every time you go (pool, cable, wifi, etc.), lower cost, getting to know an area really well, getting to go to the coast every time, etc. Cons are being restricted on where you go, having to drive a couple hours every time to get there, exposing your RV to the salty ocean air all year, etc. We got there and the park was much more run down than we thought. Actually, we figured it might be run down, but because of all the rules we read about annual sites, we thought they'd be pretty nice. Well turns out that those are only the rules for the NEW annual sites - not the ones that have been there 21+ years (yes, the owner has owned it for 21 years and some folks have been there longer than he has). The owners were VERY nice and the town was really cute, but we eventually decided it wasn't for us. If nothing else, at least we got to see Jake the Alligator Man while we were there!

Monday and Tuesday I took the days off of work and just had fun with my mom. Geoff made wings one night, we did lots of shopping, played lots of games and worked on a puzzle, etc.

Tonight we are going out to dinner with my mom and Geoff's parents at On the Border in pre-celebration of our one year wedding anniversary (which is actually on the 11th). On the Border is where we had our rehearsal dinner, and it JUST came to Oregon (actually it's in Vancouver, WA, just north of Portland) so this is perfect. I'm very excited!

This weekend Geoff and I are going to go downtown for a night and do some shopping and have a nice dinner for our own little anniversary celebration. Yay! :)

Quite a morning!

2008-08-01T11:59:00.000-07:00

So this morning Geoff and I got up early, got all ready, and headed to the camper (which is parked 5 or 10 minutes from our house). Just as we are pulling into the parking lot where it is stored, I realize neither of us grabbed the box where we keep all of the trailer keys and accessories. UGH. So we head back to the house, with me fretting about being late to work, how could I be so careless, etc. I was very upset/annoyed about it. Well the Nearly Impossible Question is playing on the Fish, and they are giving a clue. The question was "the average homeowner spends 3 days a year doing this". And I said "yardwork" which Geoff thought was not right. And I said "well it really depends - do they mean some portion of 3 different days over the year, or do they mean like 72 cumulative hours throughout the year?" So people call in and guess things like "mowing the yard" "cleaning out the gutters", etc. Those aren't right, and they give a clue - "you're not actually DOING the physical work." I yell "CALLING REPAIRMEN!!!" and Geoff was like "really? I don't think so". Then I said "WAITING FOR REPAIRMEN TO COME TO YOUR HOSUE!!!!" and grabbed the phone and dialed. The first time it started ringing. It rang 6 or 7 times and then Pete picked up. I stated my answer and they said "YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!" Yay for me. :) Pete asked me some questions about where I work, my weekend plans, etc. I won a gift card to a Mexican restaurant on the Eastside of Portland and tickets to the Oregon State Fair! They are going to mail them to me. :) That cheered me RIGHT up. Then we called Geoff's mom, since she goes to work at the same time as us, so we could tell her to listen to me on the radio. It was VERY edited - I was surprised, because it wasn't when I won in January. And it was flawless too, it sounded like a real conversation but they had taken several chunks out. So both Gary and Julie got to hear me on the radio. I'm so awkward on the radio - I get all flustered and shakey and sound dumb. But that's okay, I LOVE winning the Nearly Impossible Question. Now just 30 days until I can do it again!

What do you think of this?

2008-07-30T11:34:00.000-07:00

When we were in Dallas I saw a Hyatt Place hotel - I had never seen one of those before. I LOVE their logo. I am thinking of painting a canvas to hang in our house that uses their logo, only instead of the two black dots (that are put there to make the logo look more like an H, I assume) I'm thinking pink for one and brown for the other. Thoughts?

Geoff's new collection

2008-07-30T10:37:00.001-07:00

A year or so ago, Geoff decided he wanted to start collecting liquor bottles. I suppose this is because he thinks they look cool. Well, being the big drinker that he is, he's collected ONE in the past year.

My mom is coming into town tomorrow for a week (YAY!) and so we're going camping (we = Mom, Momlie, Geoff, and me). We were talking about having chicken fajitas for dinner one night, and I said that I bought a 5 pound bag of limes from Costco (they're part of the marinade for the fajitas). I froze some of them - I don't know if you can freeze limes, but we'll see what happens to them. So then we came up with the idea of having margaritas with the fajitas, since that would help use some of the limes.

Well the next day Momlie shows up with Margarita in a Bag. These things look so fun! I'm very excited to try it. Of course, they won't actually help use the limes, but we can always use them for garnish. ;-) I thought we had some tequila at home, so I said I'd either bring it or buy some.

So we went to the liquor store on Monday (in Oregon the liquor stores are all state run, you have to buy liquor from them, no grocery stores or anything) and bought some tequila. I mentioned something about how cute I think the little tiny .5 ounce airplane bottle are and Geoff got all excited. "I DIDN'T KNOW THESE EXISTED!!!!!! These are the cutest things ever! I think I'm going to change my collection to all little bottles!" I laughed and made fun of him - maybe no one else knows that these little bottles exist either, but my grandparents went on tons of trips when I was younger and always brought back those little bottles from the airplane, so I remember seeing them around their house. This happened on the way out, and I asked him if he wanted to back and buy one as long as we were there, but he said no. Well later when we got home, I remembered that when I went to Mexico I brought back a little box of 3 tiny tequilas (the small versions of these in this picture). So I gave those to him to start his collection, and he was very happy.

So I also thought we had triple sec at home, but it didn't matter if we didn't because the bag says it's optional. Turns out we didn't, and Geoff was like "I'll go back to the liquor store and get some!!!!!!!!!!" I was like "um... we don't really need it". Geoff: "Puh-leeeeeeaaaaaassssseeeee!!!! I want my little bottle." Haha. Okay. So he went and got triple sec. But he came home SO SAD because apparently the liquor store he went to didn't sell little bottles. :( So we went back to the original liquor store and he got a tiny bottle of tequila and a tiny bottle of Grand Marnier, which was the closest thing they had to triple sec in the little bottles. (Geoff asked about triple sec and the guy suggested the Grand Marnier). He has decided to collect the "matching" little bottle to whatever he is buying from the liquor store at the time. So now that he has his 5 bottle collection (3 from Mexico, 2 from yesterday), it may only take him another year or two to get to 6. :) They are very cute though, and they are a perfect little stocking stuffer for him. I just think it's hilarious that my non-drinking husband is obsessed with liquor bottles. AND that he's been to the liquor store 3 times in the past 2 days, which is easily more than he's ever been cumulatively in his whole life up until that point.

Good luck with that

2008-07-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

As stated yesterday, I wrote the "e-help" line for the hospital where I get my Remicade to complain about the shortening of hours. I heard back from them today:

Hello Kelly, I am sorry I cannot help you. You would have to contact the infusion center at . Perhaps they could suggest an alternative foryou. I will forward your email to quality management. Thank you for using the eLine.

I replied:
Thanks for your reply. The Infusion center said that they had no control over it, the hours were set by hospital administion. Do you have contact information for the St. Vincent hospital administration?

The response?
Hello Kelly,
That number would be 503 XXX-XXXX. Good luck with that. You may also hear from the quality management people.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I love it. "Good luck with that" - even she knows my case is absolutely hopeless. :)

Remicade is good :)

2008-07-29T16:50:00.000-07:00

I'm at my once-every-8-weeks Remicade appointment. They are doing a pilot with shorter hours (I used to come around 4:30, today I have to come at 2:30). I don't like it! Different staff, more crowded parking lot and hospital, had to wait 30 minutes to even be called in, and on top of it all I had to miss work.

On the plus side, there is wireless internet and cable TV here, so I can't complain much. I was able to log on and work remotely. I can also use my cell phone, although the reception here isn't the best - I was talking to someone from work and they were having a hard time hearing me. Still, I got a lot done.

I was talking to some of the nurses about the whole "fewer hours" thing and THEY HATE IT! They said if I wanted to, I could write to the administration, so I did that immediately. Even one or two nights a week would be much more accommodating to those of us sickies who work during the day. We'll see. :)