Monday, August 09, 2010

What to say, what to say.......

Unlimited boringness is my life right now. Ethan was moving furniture (Unsuccessfully) and caused a big scrape and a hole in the wall, so he consulted with the wall-fixing people in the engineering department at work, and we learned how to patch a hole in the wall or a scrape. The hole is filled and I just covered the entire house in powder because I used the rotary sander to sand the putty stuff down so we can apply the orange peel texture and then paint overtop. I have one more area that needs sanding, and I don't care if it takes me an hour--I am doing this one by hand.

Bit of an issue finding the same color of white paint that the house already has--we have a can of white paint labelled 'snowdrift'...which turns out to be outside paint and not the same as whatever is painted all over the walls upstairs. This will be fun....

Other than that....we have decided to take all the furniture upstairs and exchange it with the furniture downstairs (see hole in wall above)....but that hasn't happened yet. Ethan tried to do it himself while I was sleeping, but got the loveseat stuck halfway down the stairs because he forgot that the couch 'legs' have to go OVER the railing for the stairs. So I tried to help him pull it back up, and used very poor body mechanics. Tearing pain and all that...and now I have an unhappy disc in my back. Awesome!! Much better now, and if the pain doesn't go completely away, one of the spine residents at work said he will write me a prescription for PT and I will get tuned up there.

Still working on Frank Sinatra the cat. The shelter in Rome is keeping an ear out for anyone travelling from there to the US--I will fly anywhere in the US to meet him/pick him up and bring him to Seattle. We will eventually get this worked out..

I am still working on *@&% issues at work regarding my vacation time--they have made it all but impossible to get time off....and then there is a sort of wishy washy 'first come, first served' policy where they said if you can't find someone to cover you for vacation time, the first one to request those specific dates off can still have them off......and I have THREE different vacation requests in with no coverage, and no one else wants those dates off.....and STILL not approved. Getting irritated by it all.

One of the dates I want off is for the CKC Scrapbook convention in Bellevue in November--I took Friday off from work last year, and went all day Friday and Saturday taking classes and had a wonderful time. Trying to do that again this year, and adding in an evening class on Thursday (a workshop to help me with design issues). Should be lots of fun....if I ever get approved!! I can cancel the classes within the next few weeks if I don't get the time off...but they need to really give me the days and be done with it. First come, first served and all that. I won't *even* get into the whole 'find your own coverage' drama. I did (I think) a good job choosing scrappy classes that actually use colors/themes that I have an interest in (multiple picture page ideas, travel themed classes, an envelope scrapbook class I plan to use for all the tickets and stubs from our Europe trip, etc)

We are also trying to take off a couple of days around Columbus Day in October (Seahawks bye week), and may head into Victoria, BC. Kenmore air (seaplanes out of Seattle) recently became an airline partner with Alaska Air, and it is only 10K miles ROUND TRIP to fly from Seattle to anywhere in WA or to Vicoria BC. Ethan said he was OK with the teensy seaplane idea, so we want to get this booked ASAP. If they have awful restrictions on using airmiles like some airlines, we may go to San Francisco instead to see a play calledScapin that Ethan saw back in high school and loved.

We are also trying to take off some time around Labor Day to do....something. We thought about a big camping trip to Central Oregon, but haven't gotten a ton of interest from anyone on that one, plus it is getting down to the wire on reserving multiple camp sites. Might go to Portland for a couple of nights at the Edgefield McMenamin's winery--stayed there once before and really liked it. We shall see.

Still scrapping in my room on the weekends, mostly. I have now moved on from Germany pages to my first Amsterdam page. May skip all those flower pictures for now, though, and come back to that later on. I got some really cool old-timey paper with Paris themes, and I am looking forward to using that.

I guess that is about it for this update. Not a whole heck of a lot going on up here in the Emerald City.