This month's calendar Archives Our Google Calendar
April 17, 2015
IT'S FRIDAY, MY FAVORITE DAY!!
The week started out pretty wild and wet. We had strong wind gusts and heavy rains. I am so glad we cleaned our rain gutters last week between storms. It was a nice feeling looking outside the window and seeing the rain gushing from the rain spouts instead over the edge of the gutters.
We are missing one of our feral cats - Tom has been gone for a week now without any sign of even a whisker. We don't know what happened and his brother, Jerry has been all freaked out about his disappearance. They were so close and it has been hard on Jerry. He's usually first in line for a belly rub, but he hasn't come close since his brother disappeared. All he does is sit under the hedge and meow his heart out! I put out a message to all of our neighbors to be on the lookout for Tom, but nobody has seen him. I don't think he would run away, so the only thing I can imagine is that a coyote or some other animal got him. I wish I knew what happened so I could have some sort of closure.
Dave and I sat down and fined tuned our trip for this summer. We had lunch with a couple of friends who were in Paris last year and they gave us some good pointers. For one thing, they told us that our hotel is way out from all the sites we want to see, so we will have to see if we can get that changed to a better location. We also cut our stay in Paris by one day so we can spend an extra day with our exchange student who lives in Frankfurt. We also had some extra time to kill in England before we leave for our canal boat trip, so we decided to take a side trip to Ireland for a few days. Next will come the fine-tuning. What do we see on a short trip to Ireland? How will we spend our time in Amsterdam and Paris? Suddenly it seems there isn't enough time to do everything.
Since we decided to get a "house sitter" while we are gone, I have been cleaning out some closet space for her. You know how it is when you have something and don't know where to put it, so it gets stashed in the closet, right? Well our closets looked like "Fibber McGee's Closet" and we took our life in our hands just trying to open the door! I still had a lot of the clothes that belonged to my mother-in-law, so we went through them with Dave's sister and gave a lot of them to our local charity center, The Hope Chest. I found some old sleeping bags which will go to a shelter. While I was at it, I cleaned out the closet in the office. That closet was full of old computer stuff: broken key boards, outdated memory programs, etc. I packed all of that stuff up and took it over to our local recycle center so now we have plenty of closet space.
Remember when a bird flew into my kitchen window and broke it last November? The link to the journal that week (with pictures) is here. Well, the carpenter finally came by this week and after another two days the new window in the kitchen is finally in place. It took him longer than usual because we told him we wanted the siding removed to replace the window rather than just hacking a hole in it. He did a great job - just what I wanted! After staring at that old piece of plywood for six months, I am glad to be able to actually look out my kitchen window. The new window is double paned and a quarter of an inch bigger so there were some adjustments. I lost part of my window sill but otherwise I am pleased with the new window.
Our granddaughter, Jaysa, and her fourth grade class took a field trip this week. One of their stops was the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria. Her mother went along as a chaperone and she took this picture of Jaysa in the pilot boat. It reminded Lara of her Granddad Bell when he used to bring the big ships up the Columbia River. The other stop that Jaysa made was Fort Clatsop before they headed back to West Linn. They had left West Linn at 7:00 a.m. and didn't get back home until 6:00 p.m., so it was a very long day for them. But they had a great time and enjoyed their outing.
We are expecting sunny skies for the next few days and I am going to take advantage of them by getting some yard work done. I am itching to plant some of the flowers that I purchased but the nights have been on the cool side and I don't want to lose them. In fact, we spotted a skiff of snow on the mountain range in front of our house earlier this week. I did manage to replant some strawberries that the deer ate up from last year. I covered them with a screen to discourage the critters. Let's see if that works!
We stayed pretty close to home this week. We did go up to Shelton, Washington last Sunday to meet some steam friends for lunch. LeRoy had done some repairs on a pump for the steamboat and we decided to meet halfway in between to pick it up. It was a seven hour round trip for a one hour lunch, but we enjoyed the time we spent with LeRoy and Janet. We were also invited to a dinner at the high school on Wednesday, but Dave had just come from the dentist that afternoon and decided at the last minute that he wasn't feeling up to it. He did want to go - he volunteered as a judge in a regional speech tournament last weekend and it was a "thank-you" to the judges for their help.
