Jack ‘n Tracie

What a busy week+ it’s been! We got two bedrooms painted and two bedrooms swapped around, and a mountain of laundry cleaned, folded and put away! I even managed to dislodge half a Carl’s Jr. cheeseburger from Casie’s throat and save her life! (That’ll teach Cody to leave a cheeseburger on his bed…)

We’re all extremely exhausted and enjoying our first night off in quite some time. We watched “Failure to Launch” (With Cathy Bates and Matthew Mcconaughey) which was a very cute and funny feel-good movie. Perfect for when you want to smile and feel all warm inside.

I’ve got part of my garage back as well, and even have my woodworking bench and a computer desk to work on projects in the garage! Next will be working on my music computer and finishing up my music room. It’s been over a year and a half, it’s time to get-er done! Oh… and at some point in the near future we’ll be *cringe* painting the main bathroom upstairs! At least by then our arms won’t be all rubbery from all the painting we’ve done lately.

Remember those old soap commercials where the house was a mess and going crazy with activity, and the mom would exclaim “Calgon, take me away!” then sink into a bubble bath? The heck with that, Calgon can just come clean my house thanks.

We reconstructed Casey and Cody’s bunk bed and did some minor cleanup around the house yesterday, today we’re jumping in full force. Kevin’s room is prepared for painting, and we’ve got a bunch of laundry to wash, fold and put away, as well as the random house “Stuff” to find homes for on one drawer/closet or another.

I feel a little more rested today than I have in previous months after our monthly downtime at work. (This is the fun ritual of going in to work at around 11:00pm one Saturday each month to patch our network servers and reboot them without impacting our users.) I actually managed to get home by 2:00am.. yay!

At Noon Ralph and some friends are coming over so we can load my hot tub into the truck and take it over to his place. Oh how I dread moving that hot tub!

At some point this morning me and the boys have to hit the Mall to get our hair cut, and assemble my Build-A-Bear that I got for my Birthday!

Congratulations to Jackie and the Grizzlies for winning their 3rd football game of the season 27-6 yesterday as well!

We picked up a bed/desk all-in-one unit today that Kevin found on Craig’s list in Gresham. It looks in real good condition.

So this weekend will be jam packed with activities as well! I’ll be re-assembling Casey and Cody’s bunk beds to give them their “Living Room” area for them to watch TV. (I’m looking for a kids sized couch for it now..) and the room arrangements for Kevin and Melissa.

We’ll also likely be letting them paint and decorate them while we’re doing this. Whew! At least it beats chopping wood!

P.S.
Ralph! Come get this Hot tub!

Well, the winter firewood situation is taken care of. we found a guy in Corvallis that dropped two white oak trees back at the beginning of July and we bought almost a cord of it for $75.00. We drove down on Saturday to load it up in the truck (Which amazingly made it there and within a mile of home on one tank of gas, I had to switch to the front tank just before we hit our exit.)

Most of yesterday was spent unloading it from the truck, splitting it and stacking it. I bought a nice big splitting maul and a faux “Wood Grenade” (See http://www.antsaint.com/ant/2007/06/splitting-wood-.html for a picture of a real one. The one I got looks like it, but instead of a nice sharp tip it has a blunt end on it, which made for very hard starting in the wood.) but even with these tools it was quite a chore. There were many times that the axe bounced harmlessly off the wood after a huge swing. The grenade was even bouncing out of the wood!

It’ll make for some nice warm fires this winter though, white oak was ranked #1 in fuel efficiency for burning wood.

Tracie, Kevin and I are all sore as can be today though.

Missed Jackie’s second football game while we were picking up the wood, but they won 33 to 22! Second definitive victory this year! We’ll definitely be there for the next one!

Thanks to some shingles and tar paper donated by my good friend Ralph, and my Dad coming over to help, we got the wood shed pulled out, reinforced and leveled with a nice rainproof roof!

I have some pictures, but I’ll have to post them tomorrow as I don’t have them on me. It looks real nice. It’s almost freaky how square and even it is.

Kevin finished Driver’s Ed. last week and around the same time I got his title and registration updated. Now he just needs some more driving time and he’ll be ready for his test. Then he just needs a job and some insurance and heaven help us he’ll be on the road!

Tomorrow at this time we’ll be boarding a plane to Los Angeles airport and DISNEYLAND!

We took it a little easy last night, because we know tonight it going to be a flurry of activity. We’ve got 3 of our 6 suitcases located, but I have a hunch the others are in the attic, so when the kids wake up we’ll send them up there.

I have to work today, but Tracie has the day off for some laundry fun and hopefully a little relaxation. We get so stressed right before a big trip like this. (I love you honey!)

See you soon Kaykay!

Yesterday morning Tracie looked outside and saw that our happy pool had sprung a leak along the bottom seam. It was slowly leaking all day long, so after her workday was done she went out and started draining it into the backyard. I helped with the draining and demolishing/cleanup work when I got home.

We were both amazed at how fast our thirsty back yard absorbed over 1000 gallons of water! That grass had better turn green now…

On an ironic side note Melissa was watering the front yard the night before and forgot to turn off the hose and watered the driveway/bushes all night long…

It was over 100 degrees yesterday (Think it hit a record 101) and was so hot that the kids didn’t even want to go outside to play in the pool! (Although they did at one point for a short while. Cody and I played in the pool in the evening when it wasn’t quit so crazy hot.)

We have more hot weather ahead of us through the weekend. Thank god for air conditioning! What did we ever do before we had one… oh yeah, sat in front of a fan with a spray bottle.

We’ve got some modest chores to do, but for the most part I hope to rest up this weekend and just relax. It’s been a very taxing few weeks around here and we could use a break before our big trip.

6 Days Kaykay!

Disneyland Here We Come!

The kids can’t stop thinking about Disneyland at this point though, so this is going to be a long weekend!

Well, we got paid to clean out our garage. That’s an awesome feeling, even if it did technically burn up an entire weekend and a half. We’ve still got some more to do cleaning-wise, but you can walk around freely in there.

I took the last 2 days off to spend with the kids and had a blast. We wasted a bunch of time playing games, I got some serious house laundry done too. Last night we went out to dinner at Rocky’s Pizza and saw Disney’s Wall-E. What a simply adorable story and the cutest little robot ever!

Speaking of Disney… 1 week tomorrow and we’ll be at Disneyland with my Kay-Kay!