Wednesday: Operation: Clean the House

Well, after a summer pause I need to get started with Operation: Clean the House again.  But.

I have so many things on my to-do list.  I was about 30 items higher than normal at the beginning of the day, although I'll be the first to admit that several of those items are 15minutes or less.  Sometimes I need to do something small and it's just not a good time to do it.

Anyway, I got rid of most of my "try to do these today" items, which surprised me a bit as there were a whole bunch.  I'm going to spend next week trying to knock out a bunch more.  (This is really only two more days because of Labor Day, so we'll see how this goes.)

After that the plan is to spend just a little bit of time on all the rooms that I cleaned last year.  Not a ton, but enough to get them back organized again.

Then I'm going to start the master bathroom.  It's not super small, but not super big either, so it'll be a good way to get back in the swing of things.  I'd love to start it by the beginning of October, but I might be optimistic.  I still need to do things like get groceries after all.

Monday: back to school

 School started for the kids today!  Isaac's in 5th, Joshua's in 2nd.

The day seemed to go fine for them.  Then it was about time for pick-up, and the sky was rapidly getting dark.  I knew it was supposed to rain this afternoon, but I was hoping it'd hold off until pick-up was finished.  Well, I decided to go a bit early so that I could grab Joshua first if it was raining.  (He comes out about 5-10 minutes before Isaac.)  The rain caught up with me on the way to school, but it wasn't too bad.  It was a light rain when I got Joshua and then sat in the car a few minutes before going back up to get Isaac.  I did a poor job on the timing though, and it started to rain hard.  It was too windy for an umbrella, so the parents all got soaked.  To be fair, the kids all got soaked too.  But at least we were going home and could change.

I was looking through Joshua's homework and found this gem.  It's supposed to be "noisy".  "Nosey", while it would fit the writing prompt, is not what I saw either.  And once I saw it, as two words, there was no un-seeing it.  I had to get Joshua to read it to me so that I could understand.

Sunday: back to church

We finally went back to church today.  We've been joining a live-stream for the past 2.5 years and we've been in the church for assorted things, but have stayed away from big gatherings.  We know COVID is still a thing and will probably worship from home again in the future, but it was nice being at church.  Although let's face it, it is also nice to worship from home.

vacation Tuesday (Aug 16): Ketchikan

We woke up pulling into Ketchikan. Alaska was pretty much just as I pictured it: mountains with pine

trees. It was beautiful, although foggy with a light rain.

Our tour was Totem Bring State Park and a lumberjack show. If I remember correctly, we booked this

tour as one of our smaller tours and as something to do to get off the boat. It started with a short bus

ride around the city. There are a lot of staircase houses, where there are massive staircases to either

get to the house or to get to the front door. These are here just because it is a very steep area and it’s

easier to climb stairs than hills. There was also a salmon ladder that we didn’t get to see but probably

could have walked to…if we ever come back I’d like to see it.

We went on to Totem Bright state park, where there are a bunch of recreated totem poles from the

area. While neither Ben or I are really into totem poles, and still aren’t after the tour, it was still

interesting. The time and effort it would take to even make a small totem pole was rather amazing. We

also got to walk in a little forest…there’s not much top soil so there ends up being a lot of exposed roots

due to rain over 200 days per year. There was a light rain while we were there, but nothing too bad.

We put up our umbrellas for a bit, but it was mostly super light rain or no rain.

After the state park we went to a lumber jack show. It was fun. It’s amazing how quickly they can chop

and saw through a thick piece of wood. There was a bit too much crowd participation for my taste, but

oh well. We needed to walk back to the boat after this and it would have been nice if they could have

communicated this better. There was a half hour between the end of the show and all-aboard time.

Ben and I could do it no problem, but it probably took about ten minutes. Most of the people with us

were pretty mobile, but I could see that being a small problem for some of the people.

After dinner we went to see the comedian. He was pretty funny and did a nice job. We then played a

game of cribbage (I finally won a game) and went to sleep. 

vacation Monday (Aug 15): day at sea

 Today was a day at sea. We didn’t think any of the planned activities were all that interesting, so we just
took it easy. We did a lot of reading, played some games, watched a movie, and ate a lot of food. The
food was all good today. The best thing was a special dark chocolate and lime dessert. There were also
some hazelnuts for crunch.

The weather was foggy. The captain said the fog would leave by noon, but it came and went all day. I
also thought I saw a whale spout and perhaps a flick of a tale, but my guess is that it’s only a 30% chance
that I actually saw it. I’ll give it a strong maybe, and there was a lot of excitement on my end.

These signs kept showing up on the smart screens, but dinner tonight was the first time I was actually able to get a picture with one.  Usually I just saw them out of the corner of my eye or they didn't come up when I was ready to get a picture.

Saturday: lazy

It was a lazy day today.  We all did stuff in the basement for a while in the morning.  (Isaac brought his game down to join us; I wasn't sure he would.)

I read a lot.  I wasn't feeling bad, but I also wasn't feeling quite right.  There were a lot of things I should have been doing, but I got a few things crossed off the list, several things added to the list, and decided that it was fine to chill more than normal.

Vacation Sunday (Aug 14): on the boat

 It took us a bit to get to sleep, even though it was late and we were super tired. Of course, we also
woke up early due to the time change. We lazed around for a while, got a muffin from the lobby,
pretended to take a nap, and were finally on our way.

Our Uber driver was a bit scary. If I had been the drivers around us I would have been rather upset.
That being said, he got us there safely and easily on time. We drove through the port area of Seattle
and while it was a whirl wind and poor tour, it was still fun to see. Coming up from the south Ben and I
were both surprised at how small the Sky Needle looked compared to the other buildings, but once we
were on the boat we saw that it was much farther north and that looking at it from the west made it
look set apart and taller.

Check-in went so smoothly. The only small issue was that an airport agent had ripped off a luggage tag
and the signage for getting new luggage tags wasn’t great. Then Ben had to go through two staplers
because the first didn’t actually have any staples. We had preordered our medallions that let them track
our every movement, and so got to skip a ton of lines.

Now, the app that they use is terrible. I’ll return to this later, but it wouldn’t let me (or Ben) upload my
vaccination card or proof of negative test. Ben was able to upload his stuff. Anyway, that put us in the
“blue” lane instead of the “green” lane. Well, this actually worked out to our advantage because the
blue lane had two groups of people and the green lane looked like it would take about a half-hour. So in
this case the bad app helped us. They verified all our info and said we could get on the boat!

We had lunch right away. I had a calzone with half an apple tart. They were both good, but not
amazing. We tried to watch our safety video through the app but it wouldn’t load. We finally got to our
room (in the very front of the boat) and the beds were twins because the app didn’t submit our
preference for a queen. (Now, we knew this could easily be changed, but again, the dumb app.)
We dropped off the backpack and went to explore. We were both surprised (quite literally) to see Mt.
Rainer. We weren’t expecting to see mountains and then there one was! We enjoyed finding other
mountains around the boat after that.

I ended up taking a nap after our tour. It’s also when Ben realized that our dinner reservations hadn’t
been saved and the person on the phone was very unhelpful. We decided to walk to guest services, and
a nice lady there found us a table at our desired time and we were able to get a reservation at one of
the nice restaurants, which had been completely booked when Ben talked to the person on the phone.
While we wouldn’t have gone hungry, it’s nice to have a reservation.

Dinner…was a bit interesting. The couple two tables down from us was obnoxious. As we sat down they were bickering with each other and then a manager came over and they complained about the wine for twenty minutes. A couple finally sat down between us and things got back to normal. The four of them talked about a lot of things but it was normal conversation topics. The food itself was delicious. A cold pineapple soup and some cod with mashed potatoes, carrots and green beans.

We found a place to play a game while watching the coastline and sunset and headed back to our room
to read. We fell asleep fairly quickly…it had been a long day and we weren’t used to the time
change yet.