This month's calendar Archives
November 4, 2004
IT'S ALMOST FRIDAY, MY FAVORITE DAY!!
I will be posting this on Thursday this week because we have to go back into town Thursday afternoon as Dave has another doctor's appointment and we have to engineer a Blazer game on Friday night.
It has been a very laborious week! Since the sun came out over the weekend, I cleaned the deck of all the leaves and raked leaves from the lawn. I managed to fill 5 garbage cans. But Murphy's Law being what it is, we had a terrific storm with winds gusts of 50 mph and lots of rain the next day. Soooo, raking the leaves was in vain as there are just as many on the ground as before I started to rake! I should have just waited until they were all off the trees! The positive side is that I got outside and got some fresh air and exercise (even though my arms felt like they were ready to drop off the next day).
Since we now have the cabinets and wall bed, I have been busy staining. We decided that they needed two coats to make them look good, so that job is going to take twice as long! Oh well, it’s raining outside anyway.
After Dave picked up the wall bed, we brought all the pieces in the house...only to discover that there were no instructions for putting the thing together! We called; they apologized and sent a 15-page manual for assembly! No wonder Dave and Ray were standing there scratching their heads looking at that bed! Then once they were able to start looking at the instructions, they found that a number of pieces were left off the shipment. There's no way they could have mounted the bed on the wall! So now we have to go back to pick up the mounting hardware this weekend while we're in Portland.
When we lived in the city, we would usually just go get something when we needed it. Now that we're a hundred miles from town, we find that we rely on FedEx, DHL and UPS to get stuff to us...and we seem to be waiting for delivery trucks ALL the time. We order things and then wait patiently for them to appear. With luck they come when they say they will, but that is not always the case. For instance, we waited on Thursday for our lateral file for the office to arrive, and it never showed up. When we called, they had decided that they wanted extra money to deliver to the coast. Well, I straightened them out on that little item right away! So then one of the other salesmen (not our guy) said he was going to come down Sunday and go fishing right in front of our house and that he would just throw it on the truck and drop it by while he was here. We waited all day Sunday, and he never showed up. On Monday, when I checked on it, we found he had been sick and never did go fishing. But then he never did bother calling us and letting us know he wasn't going to make it either! So we spent the first part of the week waiting for another delivery truck...that one finally arrived on Wednesday. I know we live at the coast and it is a long way to deliver anything, but it sure gets discouraging when they said they will deliver and they don't. Lots of times we have come home to find packages on our back porch that we weren't expecting for weeks that have come early and other times, we don't know when to expect the stuff we have ordered.
Did I tell you that this place is going to the "birds"? We spotted a Red-Breasted Sapsucker hammering on the tree outside our bedroom the other day and I have counted up to 10 blue jays at the feeder, along with little junkos and sparrows. The word is out that there is always a good meal at the Bell's. How can you tell it's a rainy day with little to do? When you spend an hour with binoculars, camera and bird book trying to identify a single bird! Ahhh...retired life is great!
GIVE ME A BREAK!!
What time is it anyway?? We just changed back from Daylight Saving Time, and I can't keep up! Did I say that the whole time changing business ticks me off? Hee, hee, "ticks" me off, get it? I can't remember if I "fall back" or "fall forward", but geez, what a pain. I have such a routine that it takes me a week to get myself on schedule again.
We have to fuss with so many timepieces around the household. Go ahead, let's count them. Let's start in the bedroom, with a clock on each nightstand, then the bathroom has two. You have to know what time it is when you are then there, right? The living room boasts two, one that we have to climb up on a ladder to change and the other one (my favorite) a marine clock which chimes every half hour and the only time I tell Dave that it is right is at 8:00 as it chimes eight times! Oh, and I forgot about the VCR. It's in there too.
That brings me to the kitchen, yikes! There's the wall clock, the oven clock, the microwave and the coffee maker clocks. In the office, there is an audio clock in the answering machine, and my favorite, the computer clock that politely takes care of itself. Downstairs, there's a clock in the guest room, another in the guest bath and yet another that sort of floats around between the garage and the construction project. Let's not forget the radio clock out in the car that we always have to get out the manual and look up the instructions on how to change that. Dave counted 22 clocks that need to be changed!
I also have to remember that my sister who lives in Arizona is one hour ahead of me during standard time. Arizona doesn't go on daylight saving time so when we do, Arizona and Oregon are the same time. So let's see, are we on the same time now? Or an hour different? I don't know, I'll just call her and ask what time it is!
I guess with all this change, we have another hour of sunshine in the morning? Around here? You have to be kidding. This is Oregon and the rains have started and the only sky we see is gray and when it does sunshine, we are amazed. I am for leaving the clocks the same all year around.
