I'm back from my business trip to Minneapolis. I'd never been there, except for going through to other destinations. The bridge disaster is still very much on the minds there, every time I heard the news, it was mentioned. We stayed at the Holiday Inn which overlooks the void of the 35W bridge. This is the view to the north from the pool deck on 14th floor.


Monday after our meetings my collegue and I checked out the Lake area west of town and walked around Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles.

Tuesday, we had time between meetings to walk around the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.


Metrodome at sunset.


I was looking for 15th. Oops, maybe I went a little too far.


I found a cool yarn shop a few blocks from the hotel called Depth of Field. I bought two balls of yarn made of corn fiber! It's called 'Maizy' and is very soft and cotton-y. I haven't knitted in a while, but I bought them anyway. I also found a quilt shop and had to get some fabric. On the flight back I got my checkbook caught up, verifying statements from back to January. I just need to get all the recent items since the last statement accounted for. I'm so bad at balancing my checkbook. I mean, I can do the math, it's just that I'll go through spurts of keeping it ultra balanced and then periods of six to eight months of not. It's the check card purchases that do me in, I never remember to log them.

I came back home to progress in the kitchen. We now have a working dishwasher, sink and faucet (Yay!), and the backsplash tile has been put up. for the most part it looks OK, but some of the seams between sheets are too wide and it looks like an amateur put it up. It's going to bug me, but I don't know what to do about it. Oh, and the dishwasher won't open fully, or if it does, the drawer beside it doesn't. Sheesh.

Oops!

I mistyped in my previous post, I didn't get granite counter tops, I got quartz. Grantite is so easy to say, and it's so popular now.

Quartz, not so easy to say or type. Drives me nuts to hear people leave out the 'u' in quartz and quarts, and quarters, as in "This week korts of Valvoline are on sale for $1.29," or "in the forth korter the Redskins failed to score." I'm not a football fan so the last one doesn't bother me that much. We don't live in Qatar, folks, it's not that hard.

I never got the extension piece for the hot water dispenser, drat, and I'm on an early flight in the morning for Minneapolis. I'm not taking my lap top so this will be my last post until I get back.

I've just spent the afternoon inhaling epoxy fumes while my countertops were installed. It's starting to look a lot like a kitchen!

My instant hot water dispenser needs an extension piece, drat, it wasn't built for a thick slab of granite. I mounted the faucet and soap dispenser this afternoon, just need to get the plumbing attached.

Hopefully, Monday I'll have the dishwasher installed and we'll be good to go. After that it's just the backsplash and finishing work. I think.

Breaking Point

I reached the breaking point.
It's all got to end.
I can't take it anymore.
I can't do anything with it.
I can't stand the way it looks.
It's all got to go.
I was going along just fine, no problems, everything is under control, then, BAM! Outta control, like it happened over night. And it happened at a most inconvenient time. I've been tolerating it as it is but I am going on a business trip next week to Minneapolis for a couple days. (It's the first trip I've been on in, oh jeez, has it been two years now?) So I'll just have to live with this mess until I get back. Then I'll have to make some calls and work out a schedule, obtain the necessary funds to correct the situation. But still I fear this won't get it resolved until, oh maybe October. However will I live with this current state until then? It's time I got a hair cut.

This is my 204th post. I went and missed my 200th. I posted it all right, I just didn't know it at the time. Oh well.

I updated my sidebar today. I had bookmarked a lot of blogs as I found them and today just decided to list them all on my page instead or continuing to bookmark them, and sort them into groups while I was at it.

As some of the categories fell into place, I realized I need to do more of my interests, not just read about them. I have several quilting projects hanging around and while I love to go to my bee meetings, it's not inspiration enough to get anything done or worked on.

Well, there is the kitchen thing. It's hard to feel motivated to get anything done when the heart of the household is on hold. The counter top is due for installation on Friday, but I'm not sure I'll have a working sink and dishwasher by the weekend. Living in limbo zaps all enthusiasm right out of me. I hope I'll be rejuvenated creatively when I have my kitchen back. Besides, of course, getting everything back in there. I plan to purge extraneous cookware, but I may be so tired of all this when the time comes, who knows what'll happen.

And now I leave you with the picture of the day: A kid in Curaçao

Family Time

My husband comes from a large family, he has five brothers and two sisters. This weekend all eight siblings got together in Richmond for a reunion. I like his family, they are so different from mine. They are loud and because there are so many of them, there are lots opinions about lots of different subjects, mostly education and sports: baseball, hockey, and playing golf (where I join in).

I have two brothers with whom I hardly ever speak, not because we're not on speaking terms, but because we forget. Well, that's my excuse, I don't know about them. I really ought to try harder to talk to them more often. We do our communicating through Mom and Dad. Yesterday was Dad's birthday so I called to wish him a happy one. Oh and please tell the short brother (6'5") the tee time next weekend is 1:32, no, better make that 1:00. He's invariably late. We're playing golf next weekend at my family's get-together. I hope my tall brother (6'7") can play, his back's been bothering him. (Dad's 6'7" too, if you were wondering, and I'm only 5'7".)

I haven't pulled out my camera at all (yet) so I have no record of this reunion, maybe later today I'll get a chance before everyone goes separate ways.

Friday

Today I took off work and played golf with my husband at a course that's new to us. I didn't do too well over all but did have some good shots. I just need to string together some of those good shot into a full good-shot game. I have completely lost the ability of using a driver, or any wood for that matter, so most of my tee shots were with a 3-iron.

The thermometer in the car showed 101° when we finished playing. Whew. toasty!

Today is day twelve with no sink or dishwasher. I got a call from the Counter top contractor, they received our slab of (forest green Caesarstone) quartz and are starting to cut it now. Installation will be on Friday, next week. So, another full week of no sink or dishwasher.

sheesh.

My eyelashes are sticky with dried tears.

I've finished Harry Potter.

Kitchen Renovation Week 2

Last week the cabinets came out and the floor was finished. Now the new cabinets are in and the new lighting has been installed. The guys removed the old bulkhead and replaced it with a shorter one so the cabinets are about 2 inches higher. They removed part of the wall next to the fridge so it will fit. They will finish that later in the week.

The backsplash tile has been ordered and the cabinet door knobs have been purchased. I have to remember to call the painter and get on his schedule. The countertops were templated yesterday and I should have a working kitchen next week when the new tops are installed. These will be the longest three weeks in my life. I hate washing dishes in the bathtub.

More news from the kitchen in progress

The new 'fridge was scheduled to be delivered Saturday morning, between 10 and 2. Don'cha love delivery windows like that?

The fun started when I pulled the old fridge away from the wall to make room for the new one. I was greeted by a lovely spray of water in my face. The copper water supply line to the icemaker had gotten kinked and finally gave out when I moved the 'fridge. I turned off the water supply and took off the old tubing. Luckily I had another coil of 1/4" OD tubing in my tool box in the garage for this very moment. But I didn't have any more compression nuts, and I couldn't go anywhere until the delivery guys came.

When my new fridge did arrive, it didn't fit. It's supposed to, it's 35 5/8" wide going into a space 36" wide. The shoe moulding was in the way and I don't have a thin enough pry bar to get it off the wall. And the base cabinet next to the fridge wasn't over against the far wall, so I had to take out the cabinet B put in on Friday.

Well, I really couldn't do anything else about it then, I did get compression nuts and hooked up the icemaker to get it going, we've been too long without the ability to make iced tea. I also moved over the food. I won't bore you with what I found, but it is safely in the garbage can waiting for collection on Tuesday.

Until a few hours ago I had two refrigerators in my kitchen, neither in the cubby where they'd fit, both plugged in. Try walking around in there like that! I advertised the old one on freecycle to get rid of it, got a taker, and a very nice couple who just moved to our town came and took it away. I didn't even clean it out.

My copy of Harry Potter from Amazon.UK come on Wednesday, sooner than expected. I finished reading HP6 Thursday morning and have been slowly reading thru the new book. I found a phrase in the UK version I not familiar with: like baize over a budgerigar. I looked it up in our American copy and found it translates to blanket over a birdcage. Would you have known that?

Another bunch of pictures

This past weekend was my husband's high school reunion. The family part was a picnic at the New River, second oldest river in the world. The park is split into two parts, the top, where you park and enter the river if you're tubing or canoing, and the bottom, where you get out and take the bus back up to the top to do it over again. The picnic area was set up at the bottom.

My husband and son rented tubes and tubed down the river. I went the dryer and seemingly safer route: canoe. The river looked pretty flat so my plan was to go down solo to the picnic area and get my daughter so she could canoe too. On the way down I start to panic with visions of the times I got thrown out of a raft on the Lower Youghiogheny. But then I got the canoe unstuck from the rocks without tipping over and I was fine the rest of the way.

My next time down the river was uneventful, except Fern was in the back steering. And we almost went over some rapids backwards. Rapids being kind of flat given the low river level.



A view over the bow.

 

Kitchen renovations started Monday. I'm doing OK with some decisions, but I have two kinda big ones left: chrome or satin stainless faucets and the color of backsplash tile. I wanted to go with chrome, but the instant hot water dispenser only comes in the satin finish. Which means either it won't match the other chrome pieces, or I change everything. Again.

This the the "before" picture.



This is what we came home to after day one.



A very large box was waiting for me when I got home yesterday. My husband greeted me (before I saw it) and said he thought it was my new Harry Potter book. It was the kitchen sink.

 

The last picture today is of my son in the pool at the hotel at twilight.

I heard an ad on the radio this morning for a new service from OnStar: step-by-step directions. With the gaining popularity of GPS devices and now this new service, I wonder what happened to maps.

My dad tells a story of me reading a USGS 24K quad sheet (topography map) at age 3. I love maps, my college degree was in geography. I'm a visual-spatial person, I need to see where I am on a map and how it relates to everywhere else.

A couple springs ago we took a cruise out of Florida. The traffic getting down there was horrible, standstill traffic the whole length of Georgia. Checked the map and hopped over to the state route that parallels the Interstate. The state route was empty. What? don't people know this road is here? Not that I minded it being empty, but still, our van could not have been the only vehicle taking the alternate route.

It baffles me why the sudden need for a service to help you get somewhere, how did you get there before? Maps. Every utility/repair van had a map book of the metro area on the front dash. (Yay maps!)

I just can't get that lady's voice on the OnStar step-by-step directions commercial out of my head, "I use it all the time." Are there that many carto-illiterate people out there who need this service? Are people that lazy?

Do you use a GPS for directions everywhere you go? How do you feel about being dumber than a computer?

On the way back from my husband's high school reunion, —I'll post pictures later—my daughter announces she has finished reading HP7. It was 2:13 pm. Less than 30 seconds later my husband starts reading the book. (I was driving.)

I'm waiting for my preordered (February!) my copy from Amazon.uk, but it has yet to arrive.

Now it's almost 10:30 and 400 some pages later my husband says to me, "I'm not giving away anything from the story, but the the witches could benefit from the Internet."

If you can't stand the heat...

Stuff is finally starting to happen on the kitchen front. The deadlines are forcing me to make the decisions I've been having trouble making. (Maybe I should go back to therapy for this indecisiveness, I really don't know why it's so hard for me. Maybe because I've been burned by bad color choices before, maybe I'm afraid I have a longevity—will it look dated in ten years—fear, maybe I want to make sure everyone else likes what I pick, maybe I don't have a clear vision of what I want my kitchen to look like or feel like or the mood it should exude so I can't pick things to go with this absent vision.) I finally picked a sink and ordered it. I finally picked a faucet and ordered it. I'm very close to picking a counter top color. I going with glass tile as a backsplash, I just don't know what color yet.

B, my builder is coming on Monday to take the base cabinets out. Then the floor guy comes on Tuesday to repair the floor and put down new tile where the old cabinets were. There's no turning back now.

My living room is starting to look like a yard sale. I've started emptying out the base cabinets into boxes. I know I'm going to get overwhelmed and I hate that. Too much in there, and too much stuff we never use, I know I'll have to be make more decisions, this time about what to purge. And, I'm not looking forward to not having a kitchen for a couple weeks.

On top of all this, I haven't lost the 10 pounds to get down to trophy wife status for my husband's thirty year high school reunion this weekend. (So I won't be at home emptying out cabinets! Argh!) I'm kidding (really!) about being a trophy wife, I'm a little too old, and I think I look pretty good as it is. But I gotta figure out what outfit to pack. Sheesh, another decision....

Ever have one of those weeks?

You just don't feel in top shape,
you're still feeling sluggish from having eaten too much party food from the weekend and the scale still reads several pounds up,
you're able to sneak in a rare nap, and you still feel tired and try to go to bed early,
you think about making an appointment at your doctors office,
you hardly laugh during a comedy on TV,
you make it through a day of work but you're not sure how,
then you go to the bathroom and when you turn to flush you notice the liquid in the bowl is not the usual color, but is now twinged brightly with pink, and you're really panicking now, should I go straight to the emergency room, make arrangements myself with the funeral home,
then you remember you had beets for dinner last night?

Interesting thing happened today when I gave my son a pair of swim goggles. He put them on.

For most of his life he's had issues with anything on his face, the most prevalent thing: water. Shampooing was a big problem for a long time. Within the last two years he's gotten over having water on his face and has started going under the water voluntarily. His swimming has gotten better, evident by his medal at the Special Olympics this past winter.

This afternoon the three of us were playing in the pool, my daughter and I are trying to teach my son how to do a handstand in the water. He puts his hands on the bottom, but can't get his feet straight up, keeping his knees bent. After a while he lost interest so I got out to get my daughter's goggles for her. I grabbed a second pair and handed them to my son just to see what he would do. Much to my surprise, he put them on and headed straight for the lap lane, (thank goodness there wasn't anyone already using it,) and he swam several laps, obviously very proud of the goggles on his face and of himself.

I'm still recovering from Fern's Birthday party. Friday she had a gaggle of friends over for a pool party at our club, then to the theater for the late showing of Harry Potter 5, followed by a sleepover.

Kevin doesn't like to go to bed until every one else is in bed, then will come and check on us. thus, at 3 in the morning I was greeted with"Hi," and he won't go away until you say "Hi" back, thus waking you up.

Saturday night I went with AM to the adult party at our pool club, featuring the local rock (cover) band, the Crayfish. One of the members lives in our neighborhood, so there were a lot of neighbors at the party.

My husband took Fern to the Orioles game for her birthday, complete with her name on the scoreboard.

I got to sleep in a little late, but still the bad eating all weekend from party food is making me feel sluggish. Argh.

Now it's back on the straight and narrow...

But, darn it, I can't walk in the morning, I've been called for Jury Duty and I have to be there at 7:30. yikes.

Fave Five

I'm just curious, how many times do you visit a blog before you blogroll them, if they are just a few clicks away?

Kate commented on my blog the other day. I sometimes wander over to her blog from Greeny's. The other day I wandered over and clicked on one of her 'rolled blogs, 25 Year Plan. He had been visited by Michele who does a blog of the day. A couple clicks later I found some new and interesting reads. Blogs I'd go back to, blogs worth going back to.

So, do I follow the chain of links every time I want to visit or just blogroll them myself? If you bring a new blog into your life, how long do you date this new read until you invite it to stay, as it were.

I don't want to list any old blog I've read once or twice. I guess I want to be careful about the fiends I pick. I kinda think your list of regularly read blogs reflects on you, or does it?

If a blog you like is just one click away, if it is listed on a tried-and-true friend's blog, do you need to list it yourself? What if that friend "breaks up" with that blog, no longer reads it and removes it from their list?

I've recently added VariantE to my list and 1000 Days at Sea is listed there, which I read sometimes. How many times do I visit before I list them, too?

Do you wait for them to add you before you'll add them?

Or, is having a long list of blog friends like a badge of honor? But wouldn't it be the other way round, having a lot of friends who list you, be the honor?

Who's in your fave five?

Curried Chicken Salad

This is what I took to AM's pool party last week, I got a request for the recipe, so here goes.

I'm not into measuring, I just eyeball it.

• drain two 12 oz. cans of cooked chicken, (mine came from Costco) reserving some liquid (of course you can cook your own chicken, but I didn't for this party)


• Put the chicken in a mixing bowl and use your fingers to mush the chicken hunks into smaller pieces, you can chop it up with a knife if you really want to, but it takes longer.


• add
  
  
  • a large handful or two of golden raisins and/or grapes cut in half, champagne grapes are good, too, for this if they are in season
  
  
  • a very large handful coarsely chopped pecans
  
  
  • a chopped crunchy apple or two
  
  (other fruit could include chopped dates and pineapple, add to your taste, I think I used dried cranberries last week, too)
  


• put about 1/4 cup of the reserved chicken stock in a pan and stir in 2 or 3 teaspoons curry powder, I used sweet curry.


• bring to a boil and simmer, stirring, until you have a thick paste remove from the heat and let it cool for a bit.


• when you can stick your finger in there without burning yourself, add about a cup of mayo and stir until smooth


• add the mayo to the chicken & fruit mix and stir thoroughly


• refrigerate for about an hour to let the flavor intensify before serving

let me know how it turns out!

More Photos

These were waiting for me at the restaurant last night at dinner...

Fern's cousin, Rose, came to visit last week. One evening we went to the pool. Not only did Rose work up the courage to dive face first off the high-dive during the time, she'd gotten pretty good at flips.

This is the Rt. 17 bridge going into Charleston, SC shot through the car windshield.

The entrance Camp David