Saturday: yearly fall meal

Tonight was our once yearly meal of squash and ham. It was delicious.

Thursday: 1.5 desks

We can play footsie now too :D

Tuesday

We have a tree in the back that seemed to turn bright red overnight, because neither Ben or I remember it being like that yesterday.

We also got the hutch on Ben's desk.  It still needs some doors.

Monday: desks!

Our desks came in today!  These are the packages (after we inspected suspesious spots for damage.)

Having some of the pieces put together and most of the pieces strewn about:

This is the bottom half complete.  We still need to put the hutch and two drawers together, but since it was usable we decided to stop for the evening.

Sunday

Well, I had to work for a few hours today.  It wasn't exciting, but it wasn't that bad I guess.  The tree for which I raked leaves yesterday proceeded to dump the same number of leaves as before so you can't even tell that I raked.

Friday: an almost still life

My camera and I had fun together.

Thursday: horde city raid

Today we raided all four of the horde cities. We killed three of the four bosses, but by the end the horde realized what we were doing and stopped us. It was a lot of fun.

Update: perfect attendance

I was given an award today for perfect attendance at work in 2007. We also got ice cream sundaes. It was yummy.

Tuesday: cute cats

Monday

Work wasn't very exciting today.  Oh well, I guess that happens sometimes.

I think hand-picked apples taste so much better than ones from the store.

We ordered some desks today!  We're excited to get off the card tables and have places to store stuff.

Sunday

Not much happened today.  We were pretty much able to come home straight after church which was really nice.  I played a lot of WoW and did some chores.  And ate apple stuff. :D

Saturday: apples

Today we did apple activties with Clay and Jess.  First we went apple picking, then we found some warm donuts and cider, and after dinner we made apple crisp.  It was a lovely evening.

Friday: TV and cold

Tonight we turned the heat on.  I love having the heat on due to the smell and the sound, but do not like the bill.  Maybe it'll get warmer so we can turn it off for a bit again.  

Dusty and Laura came over after dinner tonight and we tried their Digital TV thing with our TV.  It made about three channels come in really well, so I expect we'll get one and put it with the upstairs TV.  While they were doing this and Laura and I and were trying to watch Are You Smarter than a 5th grader.  The guy almost won a million but forgot one is a factor. :(  Good story, I know.

Thursday: VP debate

Hmm, well even though Biden seemed to have some problems with nationality adjectives (I heard Serbs and Bosinacks and Sheas instead of Sheites), I think he won in my opinion.  He answered the questions more directly that Palin who sounded a few times like a goody-two shoes ('I have never changed my mind').  I also remember her saying that she was governer of a major energy producing state just a few more times.

We'll see if I agree with my statement(s) tomorrow. :)  I was only half paying attention so I could be wrong on some of my assesments.

Thursday: nostalgia

I'm experiancing a bit of nostalgia.  I just removed all of the papers I used for research/thesis and am about to recycle them.  I have spent a lot of time with these papers...looking through them to get facts, looking through them to see if they support somthing I want to say, trying to find methods on how to do something, etc.  I kept putting off getting rid of them in case I still needed them, but I think all my excuses are gone and other stuff needs to be stored in the space.  Sigh.

I did keep the "how to read ear notches on pigs" sheet though.  It is just too cute.

Wednesday: one less

I received my third Gardasil shot today.  Yay.  They are a bit painful. :(

In other news, I'm glad that we're over hump day.  I just wasn't very excited about going into work this morning.

Tuesday: Tang

Even though fake Tang is 50% cheaper than real Tang, DO NOT give in and buy it for spice tea.  It does not taste the same.

(We learned this about 10 years ago, but I was hoping that fake Tang had improved since then.  It hasn't.)

Tuesday: Fall

Fall is starting to come to our backyard.

Sunday: the hunter wins!

So after months of hunting Flurry, trying to get a "relaxed" shot, I finally won!  I think that it's in part to a quieter camera.  And probably in part to the computer move.

Saturday: Flurry's happy place

So I haven't put the cat carrier away since the vet because I've been lazy, but it turns out Flurry really likes sitting in there and often goes there of her own free will.

We also moved the computers back upstairs today since the weather is cooling off.

Thursday: happy

I have an amazing and wonderful husband.

Tuesday: someone stole my seat

Thursday – Monday: Las Vegas (extra long)

We left Thursday to go to Las Vegas, meet a friend from WoW, and show his wife that we weren’t imaginary. We made our connecting flight in Detriot (yay) and got there without any significant problems. We ate dinner and by the time I went to bed I had been up for 21 hours…much longer than normal but adrenaline was helping.

Friday Ben and I walked around the gardens before Steven and Jen got up.



For breakfast I had a wonderful small French toast with chocolate and cranberries. Delicious. After a bit of gambling Jen and I went to the spa. It was amazing. They have showers that have four heads…so you never have to be out of the water. I’ve thought for a while that that should be the standard way of showers (although two would probably be ok most of the time). They also had some lovely pools and I got a relaxing massage.

spa link

Our show of the night was Cirque du Soleil: Ka. I loved it. They had this amazing floor that rotated in a half of hemisphere…so it could be a floor, or a wall, or halfway in between. There was also a scene with hand shadow puppets that was really cool and some people costumed as animals that were cute/funny.

Ka link

Afterwards we went out for a nice dinner. We found out that Steve really loves his meat. I had some colossal shrimp prepared in an excellent way.

Saturday I lost money in the morning before breakfast which was sad. However, breakfast was a buffet and it was very happy. There was so much food and lots of sweet breakfast food.  There was a lack of fresh fruit, but the rest of the options made up for that. We walked around the casinos a bit.

I drank tequila for my once-every-four-years time because maybe my tastes changed. They didn’t. I think everyone enjoyed the looks on my face though.

Ben played some blackjack, and then I took a nap. That evening we went to a Penn and Teller show. Talking afterwards we were able to figure out possibilities as to how they did all the tricks, but some of them alluded us completely and even if we did know their execution was awesome.  We took a quick trip up the Eiffel tower before bed.

Sunday was our friends last day.  We had a not so good brunch at Caesar’s (more expensive and not as many options.) Oh well, the food was still good. We did some more walking around and finally got a picture of all of us together to prove it wasn’t an imaginary trip.

(Glass flowers in a ceiling in the Bellagio)

Ben managed to get tickets for Cirque “O” in the evening. It was good, but I think I enjoyed Ka better. They did have more traditional and cool acrobatics though.

O link

We played some Texas hold em’ before bed. I think that was maybe my favorite gambling of the trip. Maybe because I was actually making money. That does always help.

We got up a half hour early on Monday so we could play some Craps before the flight since that was the only thing that we hadn’t played that we wanted to try. We managed to come out ahead on that too, so it was a good note to end on.

So some overall thoughts:

1. We came out about even or maybe slightly ahead on money that was gambled. I think Ben was a little ahead and I was a little behind.

2. Steve and Jen are fun traveling partners. 

3. It was a lot of fun to go with people who had been to Las Vegas before and knew some of the good places to go/things to do/ or at least sort of knew their way around.

Wednesday: AK0! AK0!

So today I did a fit check of something on the aircraft and we found the aircraft came in with something wrong (not really a surprise).  I'm talking to one of the guys who fixes that stuff, and he complains that it is taking forever to get parts.  He tells me to make sure the paperwork says AK0 and not AK1 on it.  Ok, that makes sense to me: 0 must be higher priority than 1.

I'm talking to the people that will help me fill out the paperwork and I say "Can we make sure it is an AK0 instead of an AK1?"  They look at me in amazement and can't believe I know that.  

"Wow, you know that?"

"No, I have no idea what it means." I say. "I'm just repeating what I heard and I need this fixed." :)

Laughter.

So now everytime I go in there I'm going to tell them it is an AK0 priority.

But I also know more now:

AK0 is the highest priority

AK7 is the middle priority

AK1 is the lowest priority.

Make sense?

Tuesday: vet

Flurry had to go to the vet today.  She was not happy about it.  The only thing good about the vet is that she doesn't mind the car ride home. :)

Here's a picture from yesterday when I was trying different settings.

.

Sunday: new camera

Old camera

new camera (much smaller and bluer!)
Ben and me

Flurry

Friday-Sunday: Lady's retreat

I went on a retreat with ladies from my church this weekend.

Here we are playing ladder golf

Two of our people were on cruches for a bit.  (Jess hurt her ankle playing paint ball)

Heidi and I in the main tent.

Thursday: more basement pics

We got our water softener put in today.  The neighbors up the hill had to replace all of their faucets because of hard water, so we're trying to avoid that.  (Our calcium was 11 ppsomething, which isn't super high but high enough.)

Wednesday: work bench

We got the workbench together today!  It looks nice, although it was a pain to put together.

I have one more days worth of work for "my" A&P mechanic to do at work tomorrow.   Everyday I'm been managing to get enough for only the next day.  Not the best system, but it's more-or-less been working so far.  I'm excited about tomorrow because we finally got a part that is rather essential to part of the build, so I'm hoping to get far.  Or at least discover a lot of problems.

Tuesday: a good day

Today was a good day.


It started out with working from home in the morning because I was going to get a late start at work. I was eating yogurt for breakfast and Flurry came over (several times) to try and get some. At one point she stood on my shoulder trying to figure out how to get some.

Then I gave blood at work. Thanks to iron-rich vitamins, I didn't have any hemoglobin problems. I felt a bit dizzy at some points, but ended up doing fine.
I went to Bible Study at night. It was our first "real" Bible Study in a while and it was really good. We talked about sin and fears and habits and such and how they all link together. I realized one of my fears is that of being accepted. I'm not really sure why, but it's definitely there. Anyway, afterwards one of the girls asked if I was going to the women's retreat this weekend. I wasn't for a bunch of dumb reasons...basically I didn't get around to signing up. So she had one of the other people call the coordinator to see if there was still room. A lady had dropped out earlier today so there was a (pre-paid!) spot for me! So I came away from the study feeling very accepted and excited about this weekend. The only problem is that it's a women's retreat. I don't really consider myself a woman yet...I do woman things all the time, but am really just an old young adult. Well, maybe I can be both for a weekend.

Monday: hot dogs

Well, it's a Monday so we went back to work today. Funny how that seems to happen so often.

Ben had a migraine after work so I cooked dinner. I decided to grill...please keep in mind that this was my first time ever grilling. First I learned that you need to hook up the gas before it will light (this was easy to learn). Then I learned that you need to turn the gas on (also easy). Then I learned to you need to turn it to the "chose this setting for lighting" and not "high." This was a bit harder to learn, but I did get it all by myself.

Then I had to learn what hot dogs look like when they are cooked. Luckily, we only had hamburg buns so I could justify cutting them in half to see if they were warm inside.

I think they turned out very professional looking.

Sunday

I did a lot of chores today.  Ben also made a new recipe for dinner...it was pretty bad for us, but tasted really good.  However, it took more work to make than expected so probably won't be made again.

Here is Ben continuing to put our workbench together.  We decided that we need to get some new tools for it, so we'll pick them up tomorrow after work along with a few groceries.

Saturday: rain

Today was a wonderful rainy day.  It didn't rain the whole day, but it did rain quite a bit and stayed cloudy the whole day.  Of course, this didn't help my productivity much, but I managed to at least get a little bit done.  There's always tomorrow. :)

We went to see a comedian at our church this evening.  While some of the jokes were funny, over all he was just ok.  But it was nice to get out for a little bit.

Friday: Olive garden

So, we went to the olive garden yesterday.  I decided to get the all-you-can-eat pasta because some of the combinations sounded good.  I even asked for a smaller first portion so I could get a second.  Well, the first portion didn't seem so small.  And between the salad and the breadsticks I was only able to eat half of it.  Half!  I was so dissappointed in myself.

Then we watched 21 in anticipation of our upcoming trip.  I should probably take some time to learn at least basic strategy for some of the games.

Thursday: almost the weekend

Today was pretty good...I had enough to do, so that helped.  Except that I was super cold.  It is so warm outside and so cold inside.

I was really tired around 7 so I took a nap.  It was one of those where you're kind of woken up so you think you should get up (and at least go to bed) but you just can't.  I opened one eye for about two seconds before it became too much work.  I had a brief dream about Captian Picard that I won't try to explain before finally managing to drag myself off the couch.  Of course, once I got to the bed I had moved too much and wasn't quite tired enough to go back to sleep.  So I'm trying to catch up on some of my communications.

Wednesday

Hmm, not much happened today. A bit of a slow day, but not so slow that I didn't have work to do. Yesterday we played some more ultimate frisbee and had a cookout. It was fun.

I'm trying to get a picture of Flurry with her eyes closed because Ben said that in all of my pictures she looks hyper. It hasn't worked yet.

I recently upgraded to Firefox 3. It annoys me that the spell check doesn't have contractions in it's dictionary. I would like to try Chrome. Well, I just downloaded it. We'll see how it works for a bit.

Monday: a day of labor

Today we painted the trim in the office. It took a little while, but not too long and we did stop for a few breaks. My nap was calling my name. Anyway, that is two rooms done. Yay.

This concludes this amazingly productive weekend. There are a few chores that didn't get done, but it is important to relax too, right?

Oh, a funny Flurry story...at 7:30am Ben received two taps on the shoulder by Flurry. She obviously knew he was about 15 minutes late for getting up for work and wanted to nicely remind him of that fact. :)

Sunday: what I learned today

1. Don't pour hot liquids into plastics that easily melt.
2. My two best new camera options are either larger and 10x zoom or smaller with 5x zoom.
3. The new cat outhouse works well as a step.
4. Well loved stuffed animals never really leave.

Saturday: we got a lot done

Today we managed to get several chores done! Ben and a coworker cut down some trees that had fallen, and then Ben and I moved the branches into the woods. I cleaned the kitchen, started laundry, and changed the kitty litter box (see below). I also managed to take a nap and we both played a lot of video games...so it wasn't just a work day.

Before new litter box:


After new litter box. I'm hoping the length and the piece of board in front will help a lot with keeping the litter out of the hallway.

Thursday: Cats. Work Safety

Work safety
I get back from vacation and go to the bathroom. Much to my surprise I see some of that safety foam on the edge of the garbage can. It is your normal sheet metal garbage can mounted to the wall. The edges aren't sharp and the corners are rounded. It is easy to avoid so doesn't seem to be an obstacle. The only thing I can think of? Our safety engineer decided it was a hazard to the workplace.

Cat breeds
Ben was looking at cat breeds today and we decided that Flurry's marking match a Turkish Van pretty well and her attidutude matches a Maine Coon. Turkish Vans are all white except for markings on the head and tail. Flurry's aren't as prominent as purebreeds though. This is what wikipedia says about Maine Coon personailites, with my remarks:

"Maine Coons are a breed distinguished by high intelligence, dexterity, and playfulness. They have a tendency to use their front paws extensively (often curling the paw round to pick objects up) and as a consequence will easily learn to open cabinet doors, turn on water faucets, flush toilets, or pick up small objects. Some Maine Coons will eat, or even drink, from their paws, rather than from the bowl itself. All the time!

Due to their above-average intelligence, Maine Coons are known to be one of the easiest cat breeds to train. Maine Coons are noted for their ability to trill their meows, which sounds like a combination of a purr and a meow We think she does this, and they tend to make this sound when happy or startled. When they do meow, it tends to be very high in pitch, in comparison to other breeds. They are noted for rarely eating alone, preferring to eat in the company of other cats or humans. She often eats when we are in the kitchen Maine Coons are not known to be "lap cats" but of course, this may depend on the individual cat and some may prefer laps. Flurry's oonly a lap cat for the day after we get back from a long vacation

Some Maine Coons enjoy playing with, but not usually in, water. Flurry lover her sinks! ...

Maine Coons can be very dog-like in their behavior. Playing fetch is a favorite game. As with dogs, they will bring their ball, drop it at the feet of their intended playmate and wait for the ball to be thrown. They will often accompany their owner on chores She loves following me! like getting the mail, walking the dog, and may also come when beckoned, even if outside. Maine Coons are typically very calm and listen to their owners. Ok, well maybe she isn't very calm or listeny."