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IT'S FRIDAY, MY FAVORITE DAY!!

It seems like we spent an awful amount of time on the road last weekend. We got up at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning to leave for Seattle. The Northwest Steam Society was having their annual luncheon meeting and it was a 4-1/2 hour drive from our house. A heck of a long way to go for lunch wouldn't you say? Besides, we had to pay a fortune for the piece of chicken we ate while there. But the meeting was good and it's always enjoyable to talk with good friends. We drove the 3-1/2 hours back to West Linn that evening.

After dropping Dave off at the Rose Garden Sunday afternoon, I started in on my list of errands that I needed to do before heading back home. Of course there is the usual grocery shopping and I wanted to stop at Ross' to look at bed sheets. They have a great selection and the prices are pretty reasonable. I discovered this after shopping with my sister in Phoenix. She is a shopoholic and knows where all the bargains are. Anyway, after my errands, I went back to West Linn and enjoyed my grandchildren for a while until it was time to pick Dave up after the Blazer game. It was an early game, so we elected to head back to the coast, which was another two hours of driving time. Still, we were home before midnight.

We had a couple of nice days this week but also it rained (hailed too). The sunny days gave us a chance to finish up with the wood and brush that we had hired a friend to cut. He did the cutting and we did the picking up and hauling away. Not only did we have to load it all onto the trailer, but then we had to unload it again at the burn pile at Kahrs'. I don't know which was harder but after six heaping flatbed trailer loads we finally got it all done and were very tired. We still have to remove the trunks and roots from the ground but hopefully we can do that with our tractor. After that, I will have to think about what I want planted in that spot as the entire hillside looks really bare.

This Daylight Saving Time has me all fouled up. It is so much harder for me to adjust to than Standard time. I wish that they would leave everything either one way or the other. It has been especially hard getting up in the mornings and I'm a "morning person". I am not ready to eat when the clock strikes noon and dinnertime seems way too early for me also. It will take me a week or so before I get my inner clock in sync.

As if we didn't have enough going on, we've decided to take on another project...or rather - the project has decided for us. There is an old church building on the lower corner of our property. Dave's dad converted it to a storage building when they moved here 35 years ago. It has slowly been deteriorating over time until now; one corner of the building is in danger of collapsing. For the past several years, we have known that we had to do something with it, but the financial prospect of the renovation always made us put it off. Now, as I said, it's ready to fall down and we really want to save the old building. Dave and our friend Ray have been looking at it off and on for a couple of years. Ray's a pretty good carpenter - good enough that he was pretty sure he DID NOT want to tackle this project! Last week, he had a change of heart and asked if we were ready to at least stabilize the building. We talked it over and decided we really didn't have much choice, even though we really can't afford to do it. So we took out a small construction loan and we'll probably get started next week. Dave has already cleaned some stored items off of the south wall of the building and removed some of the rotten flooring, so we'll see what happens from here! I'll post photographic evidence of the improvement (or the pile of rubble if it falls down first!)

This was a week for meetings. Dave had two City Council meetings and I had Emergency Preparedness Committee and Neighborhood Watch captain's meetings. It seems like these meetings always take more time than necessary, but it keeps us involved with our little city. I also had a work party with the Park and Recreation Committee. The sun was out on Thursday and we took advantage of that to get a head start on the Waterfront Park maintenance. Now that spring is here, the weeds have been busy growing. That put me in the mood so when I got home I mowed our lawn.

The weatherman has promised warm weather this weekend and so Lara and Greg are bringing the granddaughters down for a couple of days. They won't come down until Saturday afternoon, but because next week is spring break, they'll be able to stay until Tuesday. Both Lara and Greg will take a couple of days off work. We have to run into town today as Dave has another Blazer broadcast and we are both getting haircuts. We plan on driving home in the middle of the night tonight after the game so we can prepare for our weekend guests.

On a technical note, we've been expecting the company that hosts this website to shut down that part of their service sometime this spring and they finally gave us the date. They'll stop on March 31st, so we have until then to get this site moved to the new host. Again, if you see some kind of problem with this journal in the next week or two, please let us know so we can fix it. Also, if you're using anything other than "www.captainbell.com" to get here, you need to change that too. After the 31st, any kind of AT&T address will no longer work. The "captainbell" address works now, so make sure that's what you're using. I'd hate to lose anyone in this transition!