Tag Archives: Traveling

Trying to Organizing My Life

A lot of my updates have been through tweets most of the time.  Mainly since nothing really major normally goes on, unless it is our cats.  But I’ll try and sum up what I have been doing.

I still keep looking for Alexis, but getting better, it helps that we have her ashes back.  Weird not to have her yelling at me in the bathroom to pet her. =(  I still need to organize all of the pictures we took during the last few days that she was with us.  Drew and Sakura are great distractions, they are so young, feisty and so full of personality….not a day goes by that I’m not grateful that hubby brought them home.

Last month my extra mom lost her husband of 50+yrs  =(  And there was family drama.  I tried to call to give support to her and my sister.  With all the drama, I was hoping it would help to give them someone to vent to.  I really wish I would’ve been able to fly out and be there from them.  Even if I would just be the bad guy for them and tell the other family members off.  The rest of the family is no skin off of my back, there are only 2 that matter to me.  =)

This summer we now have 2 hummingbird feeders and 2 blooming fuchsias…finally started to get more the one hummingbird.  We have at least 3 of them hanging around.  They will hover above our heads while outside…love it!  It is really cool, didn’t know that they could be so vocal.  Last year we had at least 1 scrub blue jay, this year at least 4 and holy cow are they noisy as heck.  They are pretty, but so annoying ear wise…..ggeezzz

We brought 2 tomato plants this spring, then it rain way above normal and we thought it killed them. At the time, we thought we did something wrong or brought bad plants until they ran a story on the news and a lot of people were having the same problem.   So we brought 2 more, planted those into our planters and put the others in the ground, really not expecting them to live much less produce any tomatoes.  Well, they actually have tomatoes on them and other 2 are going nuts. We’ve already had 1 tomato off of the early girl bush and and about 5 off of the oregon spring. They have been so sweet and tasty.  They are great on french bread with tillamook extra sharp white cheddar cheese…wow.

Work wise, I’m getting more responsibility added, which is good thing.  Still working out the details to see what I can do to help out.  Looking forward to that.  I do a bit of everything at work, I really can’t even describe what I do….I guess I’m the catch all and what I don’t know or do, I know who does…..lol

Only issue that has been driving me nuts work wise is a wire that I sent out on the July 30th still has not been received!  What the heck?!?  I’ve been ordering a wire to this account info for 2yrs now and never had an issue before.

Now I do everything online or by phone, the only time I go to our local branch is make a deposit through the drive thru.  Well, due to this issue everything needs to be done at the branch…it is to the point that they now know me by my first name….ggeezz  I wouldn’t mind going in so much if it wasn’t for the same issue.  Gave up on getting the wire delivered and did a recall, fingers crossed, I will have it back in a few days and I can take care of the contractor by another and faster method.

I have finally taken the time to go through all of my stuff.  For those who don’t know me, I’m a pack rat in for sentimental stuff…..  I still have a stuffed pillow that I was given when I was about 2 in Germany, if that tells you anything, my Baltimore Orioles shirt from when I was about 9….lol.  Well, I have  bunch of pictures, every note/letter/card my parents ever gave me and nearly every card/letter/note since junior HS.  And it was all over the place, location wise….including under the bed.  I have every little note my hubby has ever given me….lol…I know nuts. =)

Now when I tweet about going under the bed, it is really a project.  This is what we have in king size : http://www.storagebedstore.com/IVG2/N/ProductID-8593.htm

So you have to move the mattress and then the plywood that the mattress sits on.  There is a big space between the drawers under there that is excellent for storage, but a pain to get to it on a regular basis and with it being king size, one person can’t do it.  So I have to pester my hubby for help….grin  But I totally love our bed set, just don’t want to have to move it….icks…

A few weeks ago I started going through everything.  I went through all the pictures I’ve ever taken (mainly from Alaska) and all the pictures that were my grandmothers’, brought some photo albums (weren’t even sure they still made those…lol)  Luckily one of my grandma’s photo album wasn’t full so I was able to put a bunch of pictures in there.

I also finally got all of hubby & my ticket stubs to rock concerts, football games and other memorabilia organized and out of our photo album.  I went through and organized every letter by who sent it and postmark date, even organized the notes that I passed in school….lol Got all my cards organized, HS grad, college grad, wedding, holidays…..ect

I went through every newspaper and magazine that I kept to see if I still wanted, even found the Daily News Miner from Fairbanks, AK that I kept from the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded when I was in 7th grade.

I cleaned out my cedar hope chest and got as many of the photo albums stored in there.  Made sure that older the pictures got in there, ones that are from my grandparents and are about 50-100yrs old.

So now instead of everything all over, everything has it’s one or two container and is in one area.  I put so much stuff into the recycling and trash…..I’m hoping that if we do move from this house in 2012, that it’ll make our lives a bit easier for packing and such.

Been trying to attack my closet, especially since I lost weight there is a lot that doesn’t fit.  Some of that I’ve been shipping off to family members who may be able to use it.  The stuff is perfectly good and I normally donate it, but I like to try and help out my loved ones before anyone else.  You have to take care of family when you can, even when it is not much.  =)

We are having issues with my truck……ggrrr…  I went to do errands last Thursday and it wouldn’t start after I got out of the post office.  I had to call hubby for a jump.  We weren’t sure if it was the battery or the alternator.   I kind of was hoping for the battery, much easier to switch out and a little bit cheaper.  But as I laid in bed at night this weekend, I remembered that we just got a new one before we left FL in ’07 and it was a diehard.  (I’m a big believer in diehard batteries, once I have one I rarely worry about it.)  And the fact that we rarely drive the truck, may be 3k miles a year now….. I just felt in my gut it wasn’t the battery…plus our lives are never that easy.

We took the battery in for testing today and confirmed it wasn’t the battery….good that our diehard purchase was a good one and bad for it being more complicated.  Hubby took the alternator out of it today and we’ll take it in to get it tested tomorrow.  I’m hoping that is the issue, because for a ’97 I really don’t want to spend a ton of money….at least the truck is paid for.  But I’m really thinking that it is the alternator, we’ve had the truck since 2000 and haven’t had an alternator issue and it is over 100k mile, so it sounds about right.

Doesn’t seem like we got much of a summer…feel cheated, it was rainy and chilly through June and even at the beginning of July.  And that was after having an unusual warm winter and spring like weather that we went hiking in mid March to Smith Rock….weird.  We had a few hot days and stayed downstairs during those (no central air).  Only used the portable ac in the bedroom for one night and that was only due to someone throwing a beeping fire detector out…..that continued to beep…icks  We are suppose to get 2 more days of 90s this week and we our high Sunday was 68….lol  We did have a beautiful day today, after being chilly yesterday.

We are planning on heading to Crater Lake sometime next month.  Only the real good time to do so for us, school will be back in, less crowds and before it starts to snow (Oct).  Hubby found a bunch a little hikes, 2-5miles, but they will be steep.  Because it is about 6hrs away, we’ll be spending 2 nights camping.  And it is going to have some cold nights….extra blankets are in order.  Just going to take our MREs and some snickers, oatmeal and such…maybe some hotdogs, but no where the amount of food we took last time for camping.  Need to do a reminder practice on setting up our tent before we go….been a while and practice makes it much easier and faster when you need it and if it is raining.  =)

Been seeing some preseason football games on, nothing but a tease.  So looking forward to the kick off to the college season.  Even if a boring game is on, I’m so use to having it playing in the background that it always feels weird when the season is over.  That is from years of conditioning from my dad and my hubby….grin  I tell hubby that he needs to thank dad for his wife’s enjoyment of sports.  I know he couldn’t handle it if he had a wife that didn’t enjoy sports with him…..grin

Well, when I started this I was in the bedroom, moved myself out on the porch off of the bedroom to get some fresh air.  It is now about 2130 hours, dark with a few bugs….lol  This ended up longer then I expected.  But I think I’m going to go in, have me some wine with some extra sharp white tillamook cheese, crackers and some of our home grown tomatoes…..tasty.  =)

Life

**I originally started this on Saturday…well it is currently Monday evening….lol

I hope everyone is having a good weekend and is doing good in football (unless it is against my teams…lol)

So far, Purdue, Iowa, Penn St and Oregon won.  =)

The 3 undefeated teams in the NFL, Colts, Saints & Broncos all have former Purdue QBs, 2 of them are leading the teams.  BOILER UP!  Always a good thing.  =)

We got ourselves out of the office Sat. evening.  Just got tired of being in there and since I got my work caught up, I really didn’t need to be in there. I actually got caught up on some of my magazine reading, still have some more but hopefully be able to catch up this week while on the treadmill.

Lets see….where to begin….

We went out to Minnesota to visit hubby’s folks during the first full week of Oct.  We had a nice visit playing catch up.  The weather turned chilly and wet but still warmer then it was projecting.  Luckily we left the day before they got snow….lol  We weren’t ready for that.

We had a normal flight out, an okay flight back.  But one of our luggage missed the connecting flight in MN. Now I wasn’t happy about it, but wasn’t too worried.  This happened to my family years ago when we flew up to Alaska and they delivered the luggage to our door when it was found.

But when they called us stating that they found it, we found out that the girl who took our info screwed up and left the previous person’s name/info in ours and she did that to another girl. Which made no sense to me because she took our tag number and that should’ve pulled up OUR info.   So now they had to tracked down 3 different pieces of luggage and figured out which went to who.  Because we didn’t know until we got it, but they removed our old claim tag and put a new on there with the other person’s info?!?!  That was stupid!  Couldn’t they see that the names didn’t match?

So after different calls through the day from airline as they try to figure out what the previous person did, they finally found our luggage and got it out to us.  Which was a good thing, it had our flash for our camera in and a lot of clothes that adds up fast if it needed to be replaced.

When we got home, I pretty much spent most of my time just playing catch up.  We didn’t have the best connection or enough time for me to get that much work done while visiting.  I did enough that I wasn’t drowning or totally neglecting my duties.  After I finally caught up, which took less time then I thought, I had to get into my payroll prep.

It finally got somewhat reduced on the amount of accounts I need to take care of.  And didn’t have to do no where near the amount of fraud checks we had to in the last few rounds.  So that was a big plus.  Still had a lot to do, but much less intense.  Actually got through it all without losing my mind……..lol

Got enough done that we drove down to Silver Falls Creek State Park on Wed the 21st. It took us 2hrs to get there and it was rainy but still not a bad fall day.  We only did about 5-6miles of the Ten Falls Hike (skipped the 2-3mi loop with 3 of the fall) since we started later then we originally planned.  It the hike only took us about 2.5 hours since there wasn’t a lot of elevation change.  Amazing how much better our time is with out it. =)

Thursday we were just mentally wiped out, the flannel shirts on the bed felt so good and it was chilly out….so we stayed in bed and skipped the gym.  Didn’t feel that guilty about it since we did good on our hike the day before.  But Friday was another day that we stayed in bed…not good.  That past week I had been doing ok on the treadmill, but my abs was just tedious and I was annoyed by it.  So that just didn’t help me mentally. =(

Today I did pretty good and I’m happy about that.  I did good on my abs, just need to do more weights.

I was just blah those days. I forced myself to get my work done.  I didn’t actually start getting any motivation until Sat evening/Sunday. Today I got some work done ok and without an issue.  What I really need to start on is payroll prep.  If I get a good head start on it that would my life so much easier in this round.  Especially since I won’t be working that much on the 31st evening so I can give out candy.  =)

I was going to post this with pictures, but it is taking me longer then I thought to edit them.  So I’ll post them later.

What’s Happening In My Life

We are here on the plane, heading to Minnesota. So not use to getting up at 5 am, but then we didn’t crash until midnight. Too busy trying to get things done, watch the games and catch up on shows.

It has been another very busy and stressful week trying to keep up with payroll. I’m hoping the next round is nowhere near as big as this one. But we are going to be making some changes, so it should be slowing down….at least by Nov 1st round.

We still went to the gym 5 days this week, even though Thursday wasn’t very good. I got the treadmill in and my floor abs, but not my sit up bench and weights. I’m always challenging myself on the treadmill, that is easy….just watch the distance and time…I log it. But it harder to challenge myself in the other areas…that is where I need a trainer. I’m getting a work out in, but we just need to stay at the gym longer then 60-80 min, but by then we are thinking about all that we want to get done and want to get home.

My weight is finally got below 154. It moves between 152-154. I’m aiming for 150, realistically don’t see hitting the 140/145 from HS….too old for that…lol This week is probably not going to be a good one for me without the gym. But I do have a neat application on my iphone that lets me log my eating that helps. It is easier then carrying my small notebook writing everything down.

I’m hoping to be able to fly out and visit my family this spring. I was thinking of April due to the weather, but my sister reminded me that there are 3 birthdays in March. My mom, a niece and nephew….from the 23-31. If I do that I’ll probably end up missing one of them, but that would be cool to be there for 2 of them.

And then somehow I would need to work it that I head up to Michigan to visit my best friend…..it is going to take some thinking and planning if I’m able to head out in the spring.

If you saw my tweets, one of my toenails was very sore from the hike. It was from the too long nail continuously hitting my boot and being pulled up. I found out later that hikers are known for losing toenails…yuck. So far mine isn’t hurting anymore. But later that evening after my pedicure I stubbed my toe….ouch. Well, I can’t see my toe nail since it is covered in nail polish. But when I look in front under the nail….it is black….icks. A few of hubby’s toe nails are black, but I don’t think that the are as black as that one….lol So I’m been trying to be careful as heck with it

I am hoping that we find time to get one more hike in. Since we finally hiked on Mt. Hood I would love it if we can do one at Crater Lake. The pictures of it are stunning and the lake is the deepest blue. I have to look up what elevation it is at. Because Oct is cutting it close snow wise. Not even a week after our hike is 70degree weather that area of Mt Hood received 2in of snow. So hopefully we won’t have that issue there at Crater.

But then we do have other options for hikes, such as the coast. We’ve visited the coast but haven’t hiked anywhere on it. So that would be really neat to do. So we’ll have to go over our options.

We have been watching the Ken Burns documentary on the National Parks…very neat info and stunning footage. Damn, I just wish we can take off and spend a year visiting them all.

I’m going to close this session for now…I can no longer think of what else to share. I’ll post this when I get the chance. =)

What’s Happening In My World

Been a while since I posted and time for another one.  Now where to begin….

We’ve been needing new laptops, ours are like 4-5yrs old and obviously outdated.  I personally was trying to hold on until the new windows operating system came out because I HATE vista.  But I was getting really worried about my pc, locking, shutting down……fans going all the time….not a good sign.

Well, hubby has had enough…we are tried of the antivirus programs that hog your resources, the continuous updates that windows has you do and frankly, vista was unforgivable.  So he decided on a macbook pro, screw pc with windows.  He got one last month and really likes it.  There are things that are weird on it but he is much happier with it.  He has been trying to convince me to get a macbook pro, but there would be no way unless I can use quickbooks and convert my files.  I can not do my job without it.

I found that QB does have a mac version and that there is even a mac version of office, which I needed for word & excel.  So after watching hubby with his new macbook and finding those programs, I too finally got a macbook pro.  A basic one that with only $100 extra let me go from 2gb ramm to 4gb ramm!  And after using my laptop with 1.5gb ramm….wow, big differences.

I got it on Friday the 8th, so I spent the weekend transferring files over and setting it up and learning it. We ordered my programs that I needed and of course it was a holiday weekend, so we didn’t the stuff until Tues….doh.  So I spent Tues trying to get those set up, had to get a new keyboard/mouse combo since my other one was for windows and get work done AND get ready for my friend Jessie that was coming out on the 11th for the Oregon/Purdue game in Eugene.

During all this stress and work, Sakura lost a claw while freaking out when she got caught in a plastic bag.  Now we didn’t know she lost a claw from this…they were playing with the bag, like all of previous cats have, so we didn’t think nothing of it.  Then we hear this huge commotion, see Drew fluffed up to 2-3times his size, heck we thought it was Sakura because we almost never see him do that.  He is all freaked out and when we finally find Sakura, she is behind the couch stuck in the handle of the plastic bag.  The water was a mess and the food was tipped over from Sakura running with it.  That was on Fri the 8th.

So late Sat we noticed that something was wrong with her walking, there was blood marks here and there.  We had just trimmed their claws like Wed/Thurs, so we are freaking out thinking we cut too far and she got an infection.  Of course the next day was Sunday, the vet was closed and then Monday was a fracking holiday…closed also.  We read online about soaking it in epsom salt, so we did that to her annoyance.  When we got her in Tues they made room for her because a claw infection is a serious thing.  We found that the salt helped, they gave her antibotics and saw that she lost her claw.  And when talking to the vet, it dawned on hubby that it wasn’t from the trim. She didn’t jerk when he did that claw and we only do the tips.  It was from the bag incident.

She is doing much better, lets us look at her claws (well, within reason) and looks to have another one growing.  But the messed up thing, is that Drew got into another plastic bag in the spare room a week later the morning that we were leaving for Eugene and the same damn thing happened!!!  It freaked him out so bad that he wet himself.  We don’t think he did it has bad as Sakura’s but he lost 3 of them.  WTF?!?  We’ve never had cats do that before.  His claws are already back to normal after a few times in epsom salt.  But no more plastic bags are allowed to be accessible to the wonder twins.

It was great to see Jessie! I haven’t seen her since her wedding. She use to work for me at Fannie May in Lafayette.  She use to be one of the ones the helped me run it.

She finally got here Thurs after her flight was late and we went to a pub that we liked to go to and just relaxed.  She was so thoughtful and brought us this Purdue football season t-shirts!  Friday we took her to the local sights, Larch Mountain & Multnomah Falls.  Then her and I visited the outlet mall nearby.

Saturday we drove down to Eugene, took us less time to get there then we thought it would. Saw a ton of Oregon Duck fans on the way. =)  Got a lot of stares for our Purdue flag and clothes…..grin

When we stopped for lunch and walked in….the host was wearing a duck jersey and just stared.  Hubby was like, yup all 3 of us….lol  Everyone was nice and good natured.  We found the stadium much easier then we thought we would and need kill time before they’d let us in, so we chilled out at the park surfing on our phones.  Now we were hot as heck and hid in the shade.  It hit 90degrees…icks So totally above our average at this time of year.

When we finally got in, the entrance we took was right next to the enclosed practice field.  And the Ducks do a really cool thing with it before the game.  They put a plastic/rubber cover on the field set up a bunch of tables/chairs, tvs, a bandstand and concessions.  It was really nice and great place to hang out and stay cool.

Then the oddest thing keep happening.  Oregon fans keep stopping to make sure that we were treated right and welcoming us to Eugene.  That was weird, but very cool.  When we got to our sets, we were surrounded by Ducks…the Purdue Alumni was about 2 sections over, but we did get a Purdue family in front of us….lol  Overall, the Oregon Duck fans were really cool.  We were so hoping that they wouldn’t be like Wash Husky fans who are the rudest and have the worst sportmanship we have ever encountered.  The OR fans were the standard fun trash talk & good natured ribbing that we were used to in the Big Ten.  The way it should be.

Autzen Stadium is a really nice.  It has really nice setup for the concessions and bathrooms.  And it is LOUD.  It is the loudest one I’ve ever been in.  My ears rang forever afterwards.

It was extremely slow going on the I-5 going home.  It didn’t actually clear up until we got on the 205, which was like 20min away from home.  But we still made better time then we thought we would with all that traffic.

Sunday, my friend was happy to just stay at home and chill out while watching some football.  I was actually able to get some of my regular work done, while she surfed and work on my other laptop.

I got up about 05:30 to get her to the airport Monday and actually skipped the gym due to all the payroll I hadn’t been able to get to.  Go thing that I did, learning the different version of the programs I use slowed me down and I had a ton of new people to add to it.  Payroll on the 15th is usually my easiest……not this time.  I can normally get it all ordered before bed on the 14th (since I’m on the west coast, cut off is midnight eastern)…..nope, not until Tues was I able to order it.  Then we have this fraud scrubbing we had to do, that I still have 6 people waiting on that before I can pay them.  I ended up 2 days behind on the catching up the books and spread sheets.

And if you saw my tweets, having major issues with the reconciliation in the mac version of QB.  I finally got it to work, but they really need to get it up to speed.  I expect differences between Mac QB and Win QB, but some of those differences are horrible.  Using Mac QB is like using Win QB from 6 yrs ago.  I know that this is like only the second year of them making a version for Mac again (didn’t have one for 7yrs) and that was due to apple’s decline.  So they have to rebuild it, but come on……I should be able to change my fracking fonts and the reports not look like something out of high school….ggeezz.

I usually wait 3-4yr in between my QB upgrade, but if they can get some of these basic changes in the next version I’ll get it.  Of course, I have to see it in action 1st to make sure that it is there. But for now, I’ll just work with it and hope for the changes.

So it has been a stressful week work wise and learning wise.  I’m finally taking time out for my own little work things.  Like getting our photo printer hooked up to my mac and getting the software downloaded for it.  I figured out how to import pictures through photo shop, because there is no way in hell that I’m using iphoto.  That is horrible system for people who want to do their own thing……you can’t even find the pictures on the HD when you import into that, you have to use that damn program….ggrrr.  It is enough that it gets under my skin and I’m so, so happy that I can use my photo shop for it.  =)

Need to learn the FTP program that we have for the mac.  Not sure about it, seen hubby use it and I don’t like the layout and he doesn’t either.  Seems unorganized….which is not us.

Since the kids are finally back in school we have some nice weather left, we are planning a day hike later this week.  We are looking at this trail : http://www.nwhiker.com/MHNFHike27.html

It almost 10miles and only a 1400 ft difference in elevation (after our last one of 12miles & 2900 ft difference, doesn’t seem as bad…lol)  What is going to be kind of strange, is seeing the east side of Mt Hood.  We live west of it and are used to that west outline of it.  I’m getting so psyched for this.  The pictures on that link look beautiful and I love hiking.  And since we did our 1st big one, we are much better on trying to prepare ourselves.

We will have to leave here around 6am, since it is about 90-120min away.  We don’t want to run out of daylight like that last time…..now that was scary because that trail got very rough and dangerous.  I’m HOPING that it will only take about 4-6hrs.  The last one took 8hrs & 20min and as I said longer and bigger elevation difference which slowed us down.

So now I’m trying to decide what I want to do…….thinking of attacking some pictures.  If I get the galleries made it force me to learn that FTP program we have. But today, other then making sure there aren’t any fires at work, I’m just trying to work on my own thing and watch some football.  =)

The Coastal RedWoods

Well, it has taken me a couple of months of getting to it, but I finally got the pictures up from our trip…..better late then never.   =)

They are located on this page of my blog : http://www.paulineantoinette.com/our-travels/

They are sorted by the different types of cameras and in sections so the galleries aren’t so overwhelming.

From the Nikon D70

http://www.paulineantoinette.com/PNH/travel/2009_0525_Redwood_NP/part1/index.htm

http://www.paulineantoinette.com/PNH/travel/2009_0525_Redwood_NP/part2/index.htm

http://www.paulineantoinette.com/PNH/travel/2009_0525_Redwood_NP/part3/index.htm

http://www.paulineantoinette.com/PNH/travel/2009_0525_Redwood_NP/part4/index.htm

http://www.paulineantoinette.com/PNH/travel/2009_0525_Redwood_NP/part5/index.htm

http://www.paulineantoinette.com/PNH/travel/2009_0525_Redwood_NP/part6/index.htm

From the Olympus Stylus 740

http://www.paulineantoinette.com/PNH/travel/2009_May_Redwoods/part1/index.htm

http://www.paulineantoinette.com/PNH/travel/2009_May_Redwoods/part2/index.htm

http://www.paulineantoinette.com/PNH/travel/2009_May_Redwoods/part3/index.htm

http://www.paulineantoinette.com/PNH/travel/2009_May_Redwoods/part4/index.htm

http://www.paulineantoinette.com/PNH/travel/2009_May_Redwoods/part5/index.htm

http://www.paulineantoinette.com/PNH/travel/2009_May_Redwoods/part6/index.htm

From my iPhone

http://www.paulineantoinette.com/PNH/travel/2009_redwoods_iphone/index.htm

I hope that you enjoy!