We have seen or read the news a few times this week, and in case you have been living in a cave, here's a summary of what must be the most important news item every single day: there are lots of children's toys that contain lead, and that's bad. Pretty much every toy containing any paint is on the banned list, we think. It's a miracle we all turned out OK considering there was probably lead in almost every single toy we owned in the '70s and '80s.
All this talk of lead paint inspired Erin to actually find and use the face mask we have in the garage while sanding the door frames and floorboards in our living room. Granted, this is the final room in the house to be painted and she has thus far sanded paint off of door frames and floorboards in the remainder of the house while simply trying not to breath too much. Our house was built in 1960, so it's possible there could be at least one layer of lead paint on the wood. With all the bad news about lead paint, Erin started wondering what might happen to her if she did ingest lead paint dust from, say, sanding five rooms in our house. Cancer? Brain damage? Hallucinations? John helpfully pointed out last night that we did indeed actually sign a waiver when we bought this house stating that we are aware that our house contains lead paint and will not sue the old lady who used to live here should anyone die from lead paint poisoning.
As it turns out, lead generally affects children, causing such things as ADD and learning disabilities, so we're in the clear. And now that we've sanded away and repainted all the other lead paint in the house, you can feel safe to bring your children here as well.
All this worry and time spent researching lead paint could have been avoided if we just didn't watch the news. Lessons learned: ignorance is bliss, and just buy your kids video games for Christmas...it's better for them.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Monday, November 26, 2007
My Mistake
Erin finally got a job several weeks ago after months of searching for a paid internship position in the Dallas area. She is now unemployed yet again. The story of what happened for the two weeks in-between is like a bad dream. In hindsight, an important lesson has been learned: intuition is not to be ignored.
When Erin interviewed for the position she got bad vibes about the owner of this practice, but after searching for months, any paid job that had an available opening looked great. After two weeks of living day by day to figure out whether she did or did not have clients to see, Erin found out that her suspicions about something being not quite right with her boss were confirmed. The practice Erin was working for received a subpoena with the promise of a subsequent investigation by the state board for unethical and illegal behavior. Erin decided the next day to quit while she was ahead: no regular clients yet, no need for anyone to know she had worked at this place for two weeks, no hours accrued toward licensure yet. It is also safe to say that the woman running this practice is a paranoid sociopath, literally.
After such a stressful re-introduction to working in America, Erin is now thinking much more carefully about where she takes an internship position. And for now, she is quite happy trying to get our house back in order because we are still in the process of remodeling and hope to have the house somewhat back to normal for the Christmas season. Plus, we have a preemie nephew who is now living at home with his parents but still needs lots of help. Actually, the help may be more for the benefit of his mommy than for him, but Erin is more than happy to drive down to be with them now that her schedule is flexible again.
When Erin interviewed for the position she got bad vibes about the owner of this practice, but after searching for months, any paid job that had an available opening looked great. After two weeks of living day by day to figure out whether she did or did not have clients to see, Erin found out that her suspicions about something being not quite right with her boss were confirmed. The practice Erin was working for received a subpoena with the promise of a subsequent investigation by the state board for unethical and illegal behavior. Erin decided the next day to quit while she was ahead: no regular clients yet, no need for anyone to know she had worked at this place for two weeks, no hours accrued toward licensure yet. It is also safe to say that the woman running this practice is a paranoid sociopath, literally.
After such a stressful re-introduction to working in America, Erin is now thinking much more carefully about where she takes an internship position. And for now, she is quite happy trying to get our house back in order because we are still in the process of remodeling and hope to have the house somewhat back to normal for the Christmas season. Plus, we have a preemie nephew who is now living at home with his parents but still needs lots of help. Actually, the help may be more for the benefit of his mommy than for him, but Erin is more than happy to drive down to be with them now that her schedule is flexible again.
Friday, September 28, 2007
It's too hot
It has been autumn for five days, but here in Texas you would never know. Erin heard on the weather last night that the high temperatures right now are 5-7 degrees warmer than normal with no end in sight. By the way, every time we watch the weather segment of the news Erin can't help but think that it might be just a little ridiculous that with all the news going on in the world, a full 5 minutes of 15-20 minute newscast (that's after the commercial breaks) is spent rehashing the weather. After all, on most days in Texas the weather segment is almost exactly the same day after day.
Fall is one of Erin's favorite times of year so it is unfortunate that Texas has no such season...usually. Right now in Amsterdam it is in the 60s and rainy. OK, we don't like the rain so much, but temperatures in the 60s we could go for. And we really love the trees changing color. About this time last year we visited the Apenhuel (monkey zoo) in the Netherlands. We were wearing coats and the monkeys would stop all activity and sit in a yoga position to soak up the sun every time it came out from behind a cloud. The only thing we want to soak up here in Texas is some air conditioning.
It had better cool off before Thanksgiving because it is just wrong to wear shorts and T-shirts on Turkey Day.
Fall is one of Erin's favorite times of year so it is unfortunate that Texas has no such season...usually. Right now in Amsterdam it is in the 60s and rainy. OK, we don't like the rain so much, but temperatures in the 60s we could go for. And we really love the trees changing color. About this time last year we visited the Apenhuel (monkey zoo) in the Netherlands. We were wearing coats and the monkeys would stop all activity and sit in a yoga position to soak up the sun every time it came out from behind a cloud. The only thing we want to soak up here in Texas is some air conditioning.
It had better cool off before Thanksgiving because it is just wrong to wear shorts and T-shirts on Turkey Day.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Updates on "Free"
We still have our free Ford Focus. The evaluation lasts one more week, and then we will have to go back to putting miles on our own cars and paying for insurance on two cars again. It’s been fun while it lasted.
A couple of times we’ve had to take the Focus in so engineers could fly down from Ford headquarters in Detroit to make some changes and check some things out based on our survey comments. During these inspections, Ford gives us a free rental car. The first experience was with a Ford Expedition. Although John loves driving cars that sit so tall over the road, it was a bit ridiculous driving around that behemoth with the two of us sitting up in the front seats with about 20 feet of empty space behind us. The second rental was much more practical…or at least, we made great use of it: a Ford F-150 super extended cab something or other. It just so happens that we had it over the weekend, and it also just so happens that we are doing a lot of remodeling at our house…still.
So, it made perfect sense last Thursday night and Saturday to spend hours upon hours at Lowe’s and Home Depot buying things like 12-foot long pieces of crown moulding and baseboards and large boxes of faux wood plantation blinds for all the windows in our house. Granted, it was pouring cats and dogs when we had to return some of the door casing to Lowe’s on Sunday, but it was ever so much more convenient with a free truck to haul the things around in.
Oh, and we finally got our compensation from Ford for agreeing to do this evaluation of the Focus. Let’s just say the baseboards, door frames, and crown moulding in our home are compliments of Ford, including the means of transportation to get them from the store to our house.
This last weekend of "Free" also included free tickets to the Dallas symphony on Friday night, which we drove to in our free truck and parked at in the free parking garage provided by John’s company across the street from the symphony hall.
Yesterday we almost got a free $400 bed frame from Bombay Company, but we responded a bit too late. Oh well. I guess not everything is free.
In a more frustrating instance of Free, our phone stopped working again last Thursday. This time Time Warner said they couldn’t make it out to fix anything for 4 days! This is the second time in the last two months of our “no-risk trial period” that our digital phone has stopped working. By now, the phone works once again and John got Time Warner to give us almost all our money back from the past two months. Plus, yesterday in the mail we found that Time Warner sent us a coupon for a free ticket to Six Flags with the purchase of a $15 off ticket because we’re “valued” customers. All this said, we still would never recommend Time Warner to anyone, not even an enemy.
This ends the tale of "Free." If anyone knows John, none of this news will come as a surprise, but John still wishes to share the entertaining story. Even with all this "Free," nothing has yet to supersede the free computer; that one has been reigning champion of "Free" for nine years now.
A couple of times we’ve had to take the Focus in so engineers could fly down from Ford headquarters in Detroit to make some changes and check some things out based on our survey comments. During these inspections, Ford gives us a free rental car. The first experience was with a Ford Expedition. Although John loves driving cars that sit so tall over the road, it was a bit ridiculous driving around that behemoth with the two of us sitting up in the front seats with about 20 feet of empty space behind us. The second rental was much more practical…or at least, we made great use of it: a Ford F-150 super extended cab something or other. It just so happens that we had it over the weekend, and it also just so happens that we are doing a lot of remodeling at our house…still.
So, it made perfect sense last Thursday night and Saturday to spend hours upon hours at Lowe’s and Home Depot buying things like 12-foot long pieces of crown moulding and baseboards and large boxes of faux wood plantation blinds for all the windows in our house. Granted, it was pouring cats and dogs when we had to return some of the door casing to Lowe’s on Sunday, but it was ever so much more convenient with a free truck to haul the things around in.
Oh, and we finally got our compensation from Ford for agreeing to do this evaluation of the Focus. Let’s just say the baseboards, door frames, and crown moulding in our home are compliments of Ford, including the means of transportation to get them from the store to our house.
This last weekend of "Free" also included free tickets to the Dallas symphony on Friday night, which we drove to in our free truck and parked at in the free parking garage provided by John’s company across the street from the symphony hall.
Yesterday we almost got a free $400 bed frame from Bombay Company, but we responded a bit too late. Oh well. I guess not everything is free.
In a more frustrating instance of Free, our phone stopped working again last Thursday. This time Time Warner said they couldn’t make it out to fix anything for 4 days! This is the second time in the last two months of our “no-risk trial period” that our digital phone has stopped working. By now, the phone works once again and John got Time Warner to give us almost all our money back from the past two months. Plus, yesterday in the mail we found that Time Warner sent us a coupon for a free ticket to Six Flags with the purchase of a $15 off ticket because we’re “valued” customers. All this said, we still would never recommend Time Warner to anyone, not even an enemy.
This ends the tale of "Free." If anyone knows John, none of this news will come as a surprise, but John still wishes to share the entertaining story. Even with all this "Free," nothing has yet to supersede the free computer; that one has been reigning champion of "Free" for nine years now.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
The Capital
Erin took her first trip to this nation’s capital just last week. Just as she has heard from people her entire life, Washington DC in August was crowded and extremely hot. In fact, we thought it was hotter in DC than it had been in Dallas (although that story is quickly changing now that Dallas has a forecast of highs in the 100s for the next week). We survived, however, and saw all the major sights, plus a couple minor sights, in three and a half days.
The trip came up on short notice when John finally found out a week beforehand when he was to give a presentation to some clients at the Pentagon. We have friends from Amsterdam living in DC now, so we had wanted to go up to see them anyway, and we got to stay with them over the weekend.
John was a bit nervous about getting into the Pentagon after he was instructed to take the metro to the Pentagon stop, ride the escalator up and wait at the top of the escalator for a man in a yellow tie. Mysterious. It got even more interesting when John arrived at the correct time and waited, and waited, and waited. No guy in a yellow tie showed up. So, John was trying to check his blackberry to make sure the time and place were really right. Suddenly his blackberry stopped working. All this time, a guard with a machine gun is standing a few feet away closely watching John. To solve the blackberry problem, John determined that maybe taking the battery out and putting it back in would help. Of course, taking your blackberry apart in front of the Pentagon looks a bit suspicious. The guard moved closer. When reinserting the battery did not help, John thought he’d look through his briefcase to see if he even had the number for the man in the yellow tie. While rifling through his bag (again, a suspicious activity for a single person waiting in front of the Pentagon), John became aware that the guard with the machine gun had moved closer and was talking to another person. John felt this was probably a conversation held only so the guard could be closer to John and monitor his movement.
Eventually the man in the yellow tie turned up. After all this waiting in the 100 degree temperature outside the Pentagon wearing a suit, John was a little wet. Thankfully, it only took a few minutes to pass through Pentagon security and John had an hour or more before his meeting to cool off. The Pentagon security allowed John in before they even knew what he was doing there, and there were no confrontations with any armed guards.
All this, the plane tickets and a super fancy hotel room at the Ritz for a 20 minute presentation, which, John points out, seemed to bore the clients to tears. But then, John was finished by noon and we had the rest of the day to go sightseeing.
Some notes on visiting Washington DC in the summer:
- The Spy Museum is very interesting, but it goes on and on and on. We spent way too much time in the first three areas and ended up zooming through the last few areas because one can take only so much of one museum.
- It’s almost pointless to go to the Museum of Natural History on a Saturday in the summer. It was wall to wall people! After seeing a few major items, John was going crazy with all the people so we left.
- Even though the line at the National Archives looks short (compared to many other lines in DC) the 45-minute posted wait time is indeed true. We thought this would be a quick trip before joining our friends for dinner, but we ended up waiting almost an hour to get in. This is not very comfortable in the heat of summer.
- Bring your sunglasses. John forgot his, so we shared one pair depending on who was in the most pain (usually John). The Supreme Court is blindingly bright in the daytime sun.
- If you need to take a nap in the afternoon and want to do it in a secure place, find yourself a tree on the Capitol grounds and rest in safety. We noticed after lying down and napping for about 20 minutes that we had had our very own armed guard watching over us the entire time from the nearest sidewalk. After we left, another guard came over to inspect the ground where we had been and must have been satisfied since he walked off rather quickly.
- The Native American Museum has a good cafeteria with a wide range of food available. It’s a little expensive, but the buffalo burgers are huge so we split one.
- Take care before joining a guided tour at the Library of Congress. Our tour guide was extremely long-winded, and the only reason we wanted a tour was to get to go see the main Reading Room (which of course is the last stop on the tour!). Honestly, one boy on the tour played his handheld video game the entire time, even right in front of the tour guide. John and I bolted right after the Reading Room. We were glad we did, because several minutes later we saw that our tour guide was still going strong! The Library of Congress itself is great! This is only a warning about the tour guides.
- The Lincoln Memorial really is better at night.
- Bring good walking shoes. Large memorials and buildings look much closer than they really are.The Bureau of Engraving and Printing is not open on Saturdays. Erin made a slight error by scheduling this stop on Saturday only to find out Friday night that it is only open Monday through Friday. Ooops. We’ll have to do that on our next trip.
The trip came up on short notice when John finally found out a week beforehand when he was to give a presentation to some clients at the Pentagon. We have friends from Amsterdam living in DC now, so we had wanted to go up to see them anyway, and we got to stay with them over the weekend.
John was a bit nervous about getting into the Pentagon after he was instructed to take the metro to the Pentagon stop, ride the escalator up and wait at the top of the escalator for a man in a yellow tie. Mysterious. It got even more interesting when John arrived at the correct time and waited, and waited, and waited. No guy in a yellow tie showed up. So, John was trying to check his blackberry to make sure the time and place were really right. Suddenly his blackberry stopped working. All this time, a guard with a machine gun is standing a few feet away closely watching John. To solve the blackberry problem, John determined that maybe taking the battery out and putting it back in would help. Of course, taking your blackberry apart in front of the Pentagon looks a bit suspicious. The guard moved closer. When reinserting the battery did not help, John thought he’d look through his briefcase to see if he even had the number for the man in the yellow tie. While rifling through his bag (again, a suspicious activity for a single person waiting in front of the Pentagon), John became aware that the guard with the machine gun had moved closer and was talking to another person. John felt this was probably a conversation held only so the guard could be closer to John and monitor his movement.
Eventually the man in the yellow tie turned up. After all this waiting in the 100 degree temperature outside the Pentagon wearing a suit, John was a little wet. Thankfully, it only took a few minutes to pass through Pentagon security and John had an hour or more before his meeting to cool off. The Pentagon security allowed John in before they even knew what he was doing there, and there were no confrontations with any armed guards.
All this, the plane tickets and a super fancy hotel room at the Ritz for a 20 minute presentation, which, John points out, seemed to bore the clients to tears. But then, John was finished by noon and we had the rest of the day to go sightseeing.
Some notes on visiting Washington DC in the summer:
- The Spy Museum is very interesting, but it goes on and on and on. We spent way too much time in the first three areas and ended up zooming through the last few areas because one can take only so much of one museum.
- It’s almost pointless to go to the Museum of Natural History on a Saturday in the summer. It was wall to wall people! After seeing a few major items, John was going crazy with all the people so we left.
- Even though the line at the National Archives looks short (compared to many other lines in DC) the 45-minute posted wait time is indeed true. We thought this would be a quick trip before joining our friends for dinner, but we ended up waiting almost an hour to get in. This is not very comfortable in the heat of summer.
- Bring your sunglasses. John forgot his, so we shared one pair depending on who was in the most pain (usually John). The Supreme Court is blindingly bright in the daytime sun.
- If you need to take a nap in the afternoon and want to do it in a secure place, find yourself a tree on the Capitol grounds and rest in safety. We noticed after lying down and napping for about 20 minutes that we had had our very own armed guard watching over us the entire time from the nearest sidewalk. After we left, another guard came over to inspect the ground where we had been and must have been satisfied since he walked off rather quickly.
- The Native American Museum has a good cafeteria with a wide range of food available. It’s a little expensive, but the buffalo burgers are huge so we split one.
- Take care before joining a guided tour at the Library of Congress. Our tour guide was extremely long-winded, and the only reason we wanted a tour was to get to go see the main Reading Room (which of course is the last stop on the tour!). Honestly, one boy on the tour played his handheld video game the entire time, even right in front of the tour guide. John and I bolted right after the Reading Room. We were glad we did, because several minutes later we saw that our tour guide was still going strong! The Library of Congress itself is great! This is only a warning about the tour guides.
- The Lincoln Memorial really is better at night.
- Bring good walking shoes. Large memorials and buildings look much closer than they really are.The Bureau of Engraving and Printing is not open on Saturdays. Erin made a slight error by scheduling this stop on Saturday only to find out Friday night that it is only open Monday through Friday. Ooops. We’ll have to do that on our next trip.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Remodeling and Demolition
Quite unfortunately we have written a summary of our experiences and what we learned living in Amsterdam for a year and a half, and we have lost the document.
It has just occurred to Erin that she wrote the summary right after moving back to the U.S., so we did not yet have this computer. The document must be on the old, extremely slow computer we were using until ours arrived from the Netherlands. Thankfully, John has not yet wiped the hard drive on that computer (or the other old computer mysteriously sitting in a closet in our house!), so the document is not really lost. It’s just unreachable until we hook that computer up again to find it. Once again, we have to say that the summary is forthcoming!
Since returning to our home in the U.S. we have ripped out carpet in the hallway and second bedroom, painted the hallway white and the second bedroom green, changed out three light fixtures, chopped down a big tree in the front yard and just recently finished demolishing the hall bathroom. The only usable item in the bathroom is the toilet since there is no sink and the bathtub is filled with peeled off wallpaper. Needless to say, our house has been in all kinds of disarray for the past month or more.
It’s funny how our physical surroundings seem to match life circumstances right now. Settling back into life in Texas is bringing new circumstances and feelings. Our lives have undergone reconstruction now that we have experiences living in Europe and Erin is trying desperately to determine what her life should be like now. Like our house, many old ways of living here in this country, in this city, have been cast aside. We are still figuring out what to put in the place of those old things. With the birth of our nephew almost four months early, stability, comfort, certainty, and peace have been ripped out from under us. Like the furniture scattered all over our house, our time, commitments and thoughts are scattered, messy and unpredictable right now. The difficulties, hard work and restructuring are ongoing…both in the house and in our own journey.
If anyone knows Erin, she has little tolerance for living in disorder. She likes things to be organized, clean and where they are supposed to be. However, the chaos of our house is not bothering her as much as usual. Perhaps it is because her whole life feels disordered right now. Maybe she’s learning that life goes on even amid messiness.
Is it just coincidence that we have decided to begin demolition and remodeling of our house at this particular point in time? Or maybe we are subconsciously reflecting physically what we feel on the inside.
It has just occurred to Erin that she wrote the summary right after moving back to the U.S., so we did not yet have this computer. The document must be on the old, extremely slow computer we were using until ours arrived from the Netherlands. Thankfully, John has not yet wiped the hard drive on that computer (or the other old computer mysteriously sitting in a closet in our house!), so the document is not really lost. It’s just unreachable until we hook that computer up again to find it. Once again, we have to say that the summary is forthcoming!
Since returning to our home in the U.S. we have ripped out carpet in the hallway and second bedroom, painted the hallway white and the second bedroom green, changed out three light fixtures, chopped down a big tree in the front yard and just recently finished demolishing the hall bathroom. The only usable item in the bathroom is the toilet since there is no sink and the bathtub is filled with peeled off wallpaper. Needless to say, our house has been in all kinds of disarray for the past month or more.
It’s funny how our physical surroundings seem to match life circumstances right now. Settling back into life in Texas is bringing new circumstances and feelings. Our lives have undergone reconstruction now that we have experiences living in Europe and Erin is trying desperately to determine what her life should be like now. Like our house, many old ways of living here in this country, in this city, have been cast aside. We are still figuring out what to put in the place of those old things. With the birth of our nephew almost four months early, stability, comfort, certainty, and peace have been ripped out from under us. Like the furniture scattered all over our house, our time, commitments and thoughts are scattered, messy and unpredictable right now. The difficulties, hard work and restructuring are ongoing…both in the house and in our own journey.
If anyone knows Erin, she has little tolerance for living in disorder. She likes things to be organized, clean and where they are supposed to be. However, the chaos of our house is not bothering her as much as usual. Perhaps it is because her whole life feels disordered right now. Maybe she’s learning that life goes on even amid messiness.
Is it just coincidence that we have decided to begin demolition and remodeling of our house at this particular point in time? Or maybe we are subconsciously reflecting physically what we feel on the inside.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Anybody out there?
We're not sure if anyone is even reading our blog anymore, especially since it's been a couple months since our last post! We've been a bit preoccupied the last month or so. Erin's sister gave birth to her first son at 24 weeks of pregnancy; that's about 15 weeks early. Our nephew was 1 pound, 9 ounces at birth and is still in the NICU at a hospital in Austin. Erin is able to go down to help her sister for a week at a time since she never got an internship. Obviously our thoughts, focus, and much of our time center around our nephew who is still in critical condition.
Our vacation to Colorado in June/July was interrupted the day after we arrived with the news of our nephew's birth. We stayed only two more days before driving back to Texas to be with Erin's family in Austin. The few days we were there were nice. We got to visit with John's family, went on one hike, Erin learned to knit, and we enjoyed some great food. Erin has promised John that she owes him about 7 days of vacation now.
That's right...Erin still has not found an internship (although the whole search has been put on hold since the end of June). We decided a few weeks ago that it is just not worth it to take an internship that is a volunteer position, work 40 hours/week for free, pay for the cost of gas driving to/from the location, and perhaps even pay $100/week or more for a supervisor. This all works out OK right now anyway, so Erin can pick up and go to Austin whenever she's needed. This family situation will most likely last at least a few more months. She is volunteering at a pregnancy center and determining how many and what kind of other volunteer opportunities she can commit to.
John is enjoying work right now. The hours are normal and there are lots of free dinners and parties with the interns right now. We guess since this time of year is not quite as busy for everyone, the company decides it's a perfect time to pile on the extracurricular activities, dinners, and parties. With all this free time, we've started remodeling the house little bits a time: taking out carpet, cleaning the wood floor underneath, painting, demolishing a bathroom and redoing it, cutting down trees, trimming bushes, etc.
This is not to say there are not lots of funny little stories that have taken place in the last two months: being forced to change phone service, shipping a keyboard via UPS, getting a free 2008 Ford Focus, Time Warner debacles, air conditioner wars, and the chaos that happens when John has to live by himself for a week. It's too much to catch up on. Life is not ever normal. Unexpected circumstances are making life a little stressful and different right now, but we are reminded how blessed we are to have such a caring, loving, present family in tough times.
We know we still owe everyone a post summarizing our time overseas. We promise it's coming...soon!
Our vacation to Colorado in June/July was interrupted the day after we arrived with the news of our nephew's birth. We stayed only two more days before driving back to Texas to be with Erin's family in Austin. The few days we were there were nice. We got to visit with John's family, went on one hike, Erin learned to knit, and we enjoyed some great food. Erin has promised John that she owes him about 7 days of vacation now.
That's right...Erin still has not found an internship (although the whole search has been put on hold since the end of June). We decided a few weeks ago that it is just not worth it to take an internship that is a volunteer position, work 40 hours/week for free, pay for the cost of gas driving to/from the location, and perhaps even pay $100/week or more for a supervisor. This all works out OK right now anyway, so Erin can pick up and go to Austin whenever she's needed. This family situation will most likely last at least a few more months. She is volunteering at a pregnancy center and determining how many and what kind of other volunteer opportunities she can commit to.
John is enjoying work right now. The hours are normal and there are lots of free dinners and parties with the interns right now. We guess since this time of year is not quite as busy for everyone, the company decides it's a perfect time to pile on the extracurricular activities, dinners, and parties. With all this free time, we've started remodeling the house little bits a time: taking out carpet, cleaning the wood floor underneath, painting, demolishing a bathroom and redoing it, cutting down trees, trimming bushes, etc.
This is not to say there are not lots of funny little stories that have taken place in the last two months: being forced to change phone service, shipping a keyboard via UPS, getting a free 2008 Ford Focus, Time Warner debacles, air conditioner wars, and the chaos that happens when John has to live by himself for a week. It's too much to catch up on. Life is not ever normal. Unexpected circumstances are making life a little stressful and different right now, but we are reminded how blessed we are to have such a caring, loving, present family in tough times.
We know we still owe everyone a post summarizing our time overseas. We promise it's coming...soon!
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