Quarterly Report. ;)
I guess enough time has passed for me to get around to updating. ;)
The new house we bought late last year is wonderful. If I have any complaints (and it's a very minor complaint) it's that we still aren't moved completely in yet. It's a larger house than we've ever had and we don't have enough 'stuff' to fill it. Rather than fill it with junk, we are carefully saving for nice furniture and antiques from our families, so several rooms may stay empty for years.
In an event now commonly called 'The Sooting', the natural gas fireplace in the house produced an airborn soot that completely coated the first floor of the house. Within weeks of moving in to the house, we had to have many of our things removed, the first floor repainted completely, and live exclusively upstairs into a space smaller than our original house. The silver lining of the event was that 1) there was no fire and no one was hurt and we lost virtually nothing but time and 2) the first floor is professionally painted in colors we picked. Not a method I'd recommend to get your house painted, but we're counting our blessings.
In a move regarded with some jealousy by my male friends and seen as an early midlife crisis by my female friends, I bought a Jeep this weekend. It's well used and has some frills (it has a stereo, for example), but otherwise it's a fairly masculine sort of vehicle completely out of character for anything I've ever owned, save that it is just practical enough and nothing more. Everyone is going to have to forgive me for driving something that's not compact and fuel efficient, but at 6' 5", I'm tired of climbing *down* into cars and looking into SUV headlights. I take some small comfort in the fact that it still gets better gas mileage than those damned Hummer monstrosities, even the H3. I'll make up for the gas I use in not raising everyone's insurance rates by making health claims based on bad knees and back from climbing into my old tiny car. ;)
My daughter continues to delight me with her growth. She wrote her name at home for the first time last week using handwriting, rather than block letters. Things like that make the price I pay for her education, that is, getting her a real one rather than leaving it up to the government, worthwhile.
The new house we bought late last year is wonderful. If I have any complaints (and it's a very minor complaint) it's that we still aren't moved completely in yet. It's a larger house than we've ever had and we don't have enough 'stuff' to fill it. Rather than fill it with junk, we are carefully saving for nice furniture and antiques from our families, so several rooms may stay empty for years.
In an event now commonly called 'The Sooting', the natural gas fireplace in the house produced an airborn soot that completely coated the first floor of the house. Within weeks of moving in to the house, we had to have many of our things removed, the first floor repainted completely, and live exclusively upstairs into a space smaller than our original house. The silver lining of the event was that 1) there was no fire and no one was hurt and we lost virtually nothing but time and 2) the first floor is professionally painted in colors we picked. Not a method I'd recommend to get your house painted, but we're counting our blessings.
In a move regarded with some jealousy by my male friends and seen as an early midlife crisis by my female friends, I bought a Jeep this weekend. It's well used and has some frills (it has a stereo, for example), but otherwise it's a fairly masculine sort of vehicle completely out of character for anything I've ever owned, save that it is just practical enough and nothing more. Everyone is going to have to forgive me for driving something that's not compact and fuel efficient, but at 6' 5", I'm tired of climbing *down* into cars and looking into SUV headlights. I take some small comfort in the fact that it still gets better gas mileage than those damned Hummer monstrosities, even the H3. I'll make up for the gas I use in not raising everyone's insurance rates by making health claims based on bad knees and back from climbing into my old tiny car. ;)
My daughter continues to delight me with her growth. She wrote her name at home for the first time last week using handwriting, rather than block letters. Things like that make the price I pay for her education, that is, getting her a real one rather than leaving it up to the government, worthwhile.