Sixteen Years!

Posted on August 25, 2012 by Pamela

Here Bob is pretending to drop cake in my face. He didn’t really. And there was no cake smushing.

Guess what I’m doing for my wedding anniversary?

Going to a Timbers game. My honey gets to sit in general admission while I sit in my reserved seats with ticket partner. Romantic, huh? This is a huge game against our rivals the Vancouver Whitecaps.

You might be wondering why I haven’t been talking about the Timbers as much as I used to. You might have thought I’d grown bored with it or moved on to other interests.

Nope. I’ve got a post in draft talking all about the Timbers. You’ll know it all soon.

Last night we went through our photo album and guestbook. Lots of terrific memories but we’ve lost a lot of people. Every time we turned a page we were reminded of someone else. Here we are with our Grandmas. Both gone.

Here’s how I found my car when we left the wedding site. As I recall I went back to work that week and then we left for our honeymoon at Labor Day. We went to Bumbershoot and then to the San Juan Islands and Victoria, BC.

This is the guestbook. For the inside we took Polaroids of all the guests and had them sign.

My cousin Jennifer (she’s the one in this photo) was very persistent and walked around during the reception to make sure she got everyone in there.

This is us on the first page.

It fun was fun to go through it. People we don’t see very often. Little kids who are in college now. All our favorite people together.

Great day. Now let’s go Timbers!

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The Fun Starts Here

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Pamela

Remember when I cleaned the garage? Well now we can go to boxes of crap without having to climb over a broken exercise bike, 6 rusty tomato cages and a pair of lamps we don’t use.

Since tomorrow is our wedding anniversary, I pulled out the wedding box and will have more tomorrow.

But I found this photo in there. This is me writing with my Powerbook 520 and my old timey superfast modem (14.4? How did it work in those days?). Also my cute glasses frames. I took them in and asked if they could be remade into my new prescription and they said no.

I desperately need new glasses now except my eyes are 100x worse than they were in this photo. Now I need quadrifocals or who knows. I keep putting the appointment off because whenever they’re giving me the eye test I feel like I’m personally letting the doctor down when I get the letters wrong and I haven’t been in the mood for that sort of emotional roller coaster. But I broke the arm off one of my cheapie reading pairs so the glasses situation is pretty desperate. I’m going to make an appointment on Monday.

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Back!

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Pamela

Just yesterday returned from another amazing family visit in Northern CA.

Obviously any minute now I will be writing a great post catching up on everything.

That was a joke.

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Summertime

Posted on August 11, 2012 by Pamela

This is a photo of the shop from 3 years ago. Long story about how hard it is for me to get to major projects omitted. I wrote about that round of the project here.

This was my marathon project I worked on yesterday.

These before and after pictures aren’t very representative. I cleaned out the shed in the backyard, too.

The scrap metal guy hauled off a load and we took a load to the dump. It costs $28 to take a crammed-to-the-top truckload to the dump. A couple weeks ago I phoned the garbage people to ask about tossing two plastic chairs. The kind that are super cheap and look like crap after a couple of years. She said if I tied them together they could consider it one item and they could schedule a special pick up for $13. Rip! Glad I waited.

Still to come: electronics recycling, Goodwill and hazardous waste disposal.

I threw away stuff that has been sitting around since we bought this house.

We also tore out this crapily built-in cabinet thing that we didn’t use. That’s going to make room to put the old fridge when we finally buy a new one.

This is the shop yesterday.

There’s still some stuff to do but I’m feeling there should be a parade with fireworks in my honor.

I finally saw Bridesmaids.

Oscar attention? Really?

I thought there were funny scenes. Was it just the novelty that women can make a gross-out comedy, too?

There was a point where I thought maybe the movie had something interesting to say about female friendships and competition. Or maybe taking a risk and how to come back from failure. But it never did. I get it as a funny movie and I *love* Melissa McCarthy but I don’t get the AA nominations.

I finally wrapped up the dental saga that started last month with a root canal. The dentist gave me a temporary crown when I returned from vacation and I broke it after a few days. I wasn’t even eating anything crunchy.

The new crown was installed this week it so fun to eat with a full set of teeth. It was a back molar that used to be crooked but she shaped the nubbin somehow and made it look straighter so now if I smile at you with my mouth wide open and my chin down you will see pretty straight teeth in the back.

Let’s hope I don’t have any more dental adventures for a while. That was expensive.

My sweetheart has been out of town for a week. Last weekend I made a bunch of salads thinking how easy it would be to grab salads and not have to cook. Of course after the third day, I hated salads. Plus when you eat healthy foods you’re hungry every two hours. I’m still trying to finish up what I made but a Burgerville run sounds pretty good at this point.

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Flowers

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Pamela

Real post coming soon.

Promise.

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Pumpkin Patch

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Pamela

This is the pumpkin patch out front.

After a couple of disappointing years I have high hopes for this group.

There is something snacking on the leaves.

I don’t understand why the snails and/or slugs aren’t more discouraged. I’ve done nothing to make them feel welcome.

I think this year is going to be a dud for tomatoes. I’m thinking about wrapping the cages with plastic wrap to coax them along.

One of these days I’ll write a real post. Stay tuned.

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Dahlia Update

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Pamela

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Comfortably Numb

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Pamela

I’m trying to coordinate a trip to California to see my family. This is a photo of me and my cousin Jennifer just a few years ago on Waikiki. She’s one of the people I’m trying to see.

Did I really neglect to share my dental emergency right before vacation?

If you can’t whine about your dental emergency on your blog, where can you whine about it? (Answer: Everywhere else. But still.)

My last day in the office before vacation I had planned to the last minute. I was cranking through getting everything done. Plus, it was the last semi-final of the Eurocup so I came in early so I could take a long lunch to watch the game and still get all my work done. Extra plus, I skipped breakfast so I could order a bacon cheeseburger at the sportsbar where I was going to watch the game.

But … I had a fairly new filling and the night before I was brushing my teeth and I ran my brush across this tooth and then Bob had to peel me from the ceiling. I thought it would be a good idea to see if my dentist could take a peek. Maybe the new filling needed an adjustment. I didn’t want a broken tooth on vacation.

Cut to:

Me at the endodondist prepping for an emergency root canal, missing my game, missing my bacon cheeseburger, my stomach growling sadly while I stared at the ceiling. And if you know anything about root canals, you know that they fry your dental benefit to kingdom come in the first 3 seconds so all my vacation money ready for spending handed over to surfer endodondist.

“Hi! How’s your day going so far?” he asked when he came to examine me.

Me: Uh, I was hoping my day would go exactly like this.

The good news: my tooth felt better and gave me no trouble on vacation. And I got a pocketful of drugs for my troubles.

The bad news: I had to have soup and rush back to the office and try to finish my work since the root canal took longer than a soccer game. Additional bad news, my soccer team lost which I found out later when I watched it on my DVR.

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Garden Report

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Pamela

Here’s the garden patch way back in the spring.

Here’s the garden patch once I finally got off my butt and threw a few things in there.

Here it is now although now means a couple of days ago. I picked all the peas in the lower right and yanked the plants.

Earlier I did a lot of tough love on the sunflowers but not tough enough. It’s so hard for me to pull stuff out. I like to give everything a chance. But between the apples and the sunflowers the tomatoes are awfully crowded.

A couple of the tomato plants are tall and have lots of yellow flowers but I don’t even see a tiny green tomato yet.

I’ve still got some greens although stuff is bolting. I have a volunteer squash of some kind. The raspberries have finally slowed down. I need to find my notebook and see if it’s time to start clearing out dead wood yet.

The potatoes are going like crazy. This represents only a partial harvest. I still have at least three other potato areas that need digging plus I think I spotted a plant hiding in the raspberries.

I love digging potatoes. It’s like magic. You pull up a tired looking green plant. You stick your shovel carefully into the dirt and turn it over. Magic: potatoes. I made a potato salad today and ate about a pound for lunch.

I started the lemon cucumbers on the windowsill. Yes, kind of late. My cucumbers have been sorry for the last three years so it’s just a formality at this point.

I planted these guys yesterday and now they’re wilting in the fairly mild heat. Toughen up my pretties!

I started pumpkins on the windowsill, too. They’ve been in the ground at least three weeks. I also have some volunteer pumpkins that are doing fantastic. This vine has three little yellow balls and it’s shooting across the yard.

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Super Weak Post Material

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Pamela

I’ve had this backpack about four years? I could probably search the archives but I’m not in the mood right now.

I like the backpack but the hardware has been falling off.

I’m an old lady who uses it to drag my purse, yogurt/granola and reading materials back and forth to work. Sometimes I throw a laptop in there and take it on an airplane with me. It really doesn’t know hard labor.

It has two compartments and the zipper handles on the upper compartment both broke off. (Photo shows the lower compartment.)

I knew there had to be some great idea of something to use as zipper handles.

I thought maybe some heavy duty ribbon and I tried a wimpy ribbon as a test and it was worthless.

Then, I got an idea.

Keychains! Which we have a million of around here. The REM one is a little flimsy so I might look for a stronger metal loop. But the Boba Fett is badass.

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