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April 23, 2010

IT'S FRIDAY, MY FAVORITE DAY!!

We were pretty busy this week. First of all, on Friday night and Saturday morning we attended a presentation at the local community center in Manzanita on the earthquake and tsunami update for our region. The speaker was James Roddy, a geologist from the State of Oregon and he was very informative while at the same time very entertaining. He jokingly calls himself the "Prophet of Doom" and talked about the Indian lore in our area and how the old stories tell of past catastrophic earthquakes and tsunamis. It was all directed at letting us know what to expect when we have the "big one". It was really a wake-up call to get ourselves prepared for the inevitable, since we are way past due for a major earthquake in this region. Later Saturday afternoon we went to a memorial service at a friend's house. Dale had lost his wife to Alzheimer's and breast cancer. The house was packed - there was a huge turnout. That was nice to see. We stayed for an hour or so, and then headed home. By that evening, we were pretty much all "socialized" out.

Sunday after breakfast we hitched up the trailer that was full of old sheetrock and other garbage and headed for the dump in Tillamook. We had been trying to keep the trailer dry with all that sheetrock in it and really wanted to get it emptied. As soon as we got back from that trip, we took another load of rotten wood to the burn pile down at Kahrs. Dave and Des ended up burning the huge pile (which was mostly our stuff) and that took most of the afternoon.

In addition to all that, we did the usual things: I had water aerobics every morning, and a Garden Club workshop on Tuesday. Dave had a City Council meeting Tuesday night. We were supposed to go to dinner at a friend's house Wednesday night, but we missed communications with them and didn't make it. It wasn't raining Thursday, so I went downtown to work with some of the Parks Department volunteers at cleaning up Waterfront Park. We watched the Blazers win their first playoff game with Phoenix on Sunday, and then lose the next one on Tuesday. Since we get paid by the game by the Blazers, we're pulling for them to have a lot of games in the playoffs!

I have been following this blog on the Internet for some time now and the woman who writes the blog is very good. She had written a cookbook and was on a book tour scheduled for a stop in Portland. I love the way she writes and I wanted to get a chance to meet her so I decided to make the trip into town. I wanted to get a cookbook and have it autographed by her. She was scheduled to arrive at the bookstore in Beaverton at 6:00 in the evening, so I left for town around noon so I could get in a few errands beforehand. I went to the nursery and got some bedding plants, a few herbs and vegetables. It is still too cold to plant outside but they will keep in the greenhouse until it gets a little warmer. I also got some groceries and then arrived at Powell's Books around 5:30 p.m. I didn't realize how popular this gal was! It was standing room only by the time I got there. I would guess there must have been at least 400 crazy women who came out to see her. They handed out tickets for us to use to get our book autographed and my number was 357. After waiting for FOUR HOURS, I finally got my book signed and I was on the road back to Wheeler. It was raining very hard and it was very dark and I was very tired. I got home after midnight and vowed to myself that I would NEVER do that again!

We got a telephone call this week from our daughter Leslie. They have the chickens and pigs in Silverton. Actually, the chickens are taken care of by Paige, their 8-year old and the pigs are a 4-H project for Ashtin, their 10-year old. Anyway, Leslie always lets the chickens out of their pen when she comes home from work. The other day she let the hens out and then had to make a quick run to pick up Ashtin from soccer practice. While she was away, the neighbor's dog came over and killed two of the chickens. When she got back, there were feathers all over the place and she saw something headed for the back of their property. She followed it and saw that it was the neighbor's dog. She came back and looked for the chickens, but all they could find were the signs of a massacre. Poor Paige was heartbroken and Leslie was so angry she went over and let the neighbors know what will happen to the dog if it ever sets foot on their property it again. Anyway, they thought they had lost all three chickens but the next morning they found one huddled on the front porch. The frightened hen will probably not lay any eggs for a month after being terrified by that dog. Leslie said the next day the remaining hen was calling for her friends that were killed by the dog. It was so sad and it makes me so angry that people are so irresponsible about their dogs.

Speaking of Paige, we were sent this picture of her in the outfit that we bought for her birthday. She looks like she is eight going on twenty-one! I love buying clothes for her because she loves to "style"!!

The guys have been busy all week (weather permitting) working on the church. They have just about come to the end of the first phase of the project. Ever since they started, they have been jacking the roof up so they could knock down the rotten wall that was under it. Since they had to do that an inch at a time, it took several days, but they finally got the thing high enough to demolish the old wall (that's what we burned at Kahrs') and frame in a new one. Once they finished the framing, they gingerly set the roof down on the new wall and celebrated when it stayed there! It's really nice to be able to look out there and not see that corner of the building sagging like it was. They figured that part of the building had dropped about 15 inches! Now, they have to tackle the back wall. If you look at the rear of the building in the photo, you can see the gap at the top of the back wall. That's how much they had to raise the roof to accommodate the new wall and now that's how much they have to raise the back wall to get it all to match. That part of the project will start next week.

I had to post this a day early because we are headed into town for a couple of Blazer playoff broadcasts on Thursday and Saturday and a memorial service on Friday for Dave's aunt who died last week. I'll talk more about that next week.

Thanks for your patience during the big switch. Although we knew that AT&T was going to pull the plug on the website, Dave procrastinated about finishing the changeover to the new host until they actually shut me down! And that all happened on Thursday night - just before I posted last Friday's journal. As a result, many people missed seeing the journal on Friday morning. It was Friday evening before Dave finally got everything re-posted and all the photographs working properly. There is a little bit of a difference in the look of the page now - almost all of the history is gone. Starting now, we'll try to keep the history going from week to week, and will add some older posts to the archives as we go along, but it's going to take a while.