Time for an update
So it's been 6 months since my last LJ post. Plenty of news/recent events to share. In November, we were still working on the house, pretty much every waking hour. We finally finished the bathroom *enough* to move in. We moved in the week prior to Christmas, and it's awesome. While I'm itching to complete *something* in here....we love living in this part of town. We can walk to 2 grocery stores, bars, restaurants, the bank, the river, fun stuff. We are loving it.
We still have the walls left to finish in the bathroom. We have the kitchen planned out and almost all the appliances purchased but we are hoping to go to France this year and not sure we can do both. We can live with the kitchen for awhile, I think. The upstairs still needs to be rewired, the downstairs needs additional outlets, we need more overhead lighting, we need new floors in the main house, we want to upgrade the water heater to gas, and of course there are still rooms with plaster repair/repainting to be done.... It's overwhelming but I'm really not that worried about it right now.
Yes, there's more crime here - most of the time it's of the property theft/damage variety and not violent, but it's certainly different from sleepy little Camas. And living with 2 roommates ("the boys") is going better than I'd expected as well. I wondered if I'd get tired of them being around but they're really great roommates - everyone helps clean the kitchen, we clean the rest - they're really relaxed about the state of the house, and they love Ezri and Cutlass, so it's been pretty awesome.
B has been pretty busy lately with this work stuff - he has 4 open work orders for WaferTech and his sales guy just called him about some potential work for HP in Eugene, OR. We'll see how that one shakes out.
We're hosting my college roommate's Great Dane this week, Verbena. She and Ezri don't get along perfectly but they do pretty well. We took them both to the Sandy River delta yesterday where they chased each other for about an hour and a half. Both are still pretty tired today, which is great.
My own work is going well - my client finally hired a CIO and she seems pretty smart and understanding of how to work with IT groups which was a sorely needed skillset there. I've been to ATL once a month for the past couple months and will be going again soon. THe projects are interesting, my coworkers are smart and invested, and I'm having fun! Can't beat that...
My family's had a bit of roller coaster-ness this year. My younger brother, the one who's deaf and has multiple other disabilities (dev and phys) fell on Christmas Day and sustained a hairline fracture to his leg. We didn't know it at the time. My parents could NOT care for him when he was unable to walk and it was really tough for everyone for about 3 months. Fortunately it provided the impetus for them to accept that fact, and also the justification for the state to take over his care and residential needs, and so as of March 8th or so- he's no longer living with my parents, he's in a group home administered by the same organization who manages the day program he's attended for the past 10 years and this has been an absolute blessing to my parents. They just couldn't do it anymore. His transition into the group home has been way better than any of us could have envisioned, which tells me he has been ready for this change for awhile now.
It took our meeting with several groups, my sister had to call in a favor from the US State Rep who's from that area (and thank goodness she had that relationship to lean on). So it's all said and done now. And he's happy and my parents are adjusting well to the "new normal" too.
I'm hoping summer will start soon here in PNW - though I think we have a couple more months of spring rain/grey/etc to live through first...
Happy Thursday everyone!