remember my last post?

i am never, ever, ever posting anything like that again.
not the pig part - that was fine. the house part. i jinxed us.

i posted at 3:11pm. (i'll wait for you to scroll down and check.) minutes later, joel calls.
"is our house in any condition to be shown?"

the answer was no. a big, fat, resounding no. i had decided the night before to organize our study - a bunch of file cabinets, drawers, and bookshelves which have been haphazardly moved 3 times since our marriage, but never organized. 2 drawers of the file cabinet are my untouched files from high school ... get the picture?
of course, one night was not enough to organize that mess, so i left the mess everywhere.
(the rest of the house wasn't that hot either.)

nevertheless, they were coming. so i missed an important meeting after work, tidied the house as best i could ... for the "show" must go on. (yeah, bad pun, i know.)


that was tuesday. wednesday joel called again at about 3:30pm.
"our realtor called. he got a call from someone who might come see our house. they didn't leave a number so we can't call them back. they might even have already come...
is our house in any condition to be shown?"

i froze to my desk chair. once again, no. (you'd think i'd have learned my lesson.)
and all i could think of was the, ahem, certain article of clothing i had left out on the bed during my changing frenzy that morning ... i'm not going in to details ... but let's just say i was hoping with all my might that these people had stayed miles away from our house and its contents!

what can i say? i'm a modest person.

i dashed home after work, hoping against hope not to find evidence of a showing. thank goodness, there was none. i cleaned the house and was enjoying my lovely evening, successfully making dinner (surprise, surprise), when there was a knock on the door.
the realtor (who spoke very little english), and a small family (who spoke no english), wanted to see the house. now.

they insisted that i not leave - they didn't want to inconvenience me.

there's nothing quite so "inconveniencing" as hiding in your messy kitchen, pretending to make dinner, while people chattering in chinese are going through your cupboards.


hopefully today will be a respite ... because the house is messy again.
(but there are no bras on the bed.)

people keep asking how selling our house is going...

our house has been on the market since mid-january.
and we have been visited once.

that's about it.


in other news, g.i. joe's is selling discounted pig barbecues.

evil ventilation pipe wants to eat you

http://neatorama.cachefly.net/images/2008-02/ventilation-pipe-art.jpg

spring chicken

i turned 21 back in december. the last "milestone" number.
my brother informed me last night that i'm old enough to get a concealed weapons permit. (be very afraid.)

~i'm old enough to be the adult in the front passnger seat, teaching a permitted minor how to drive. (again ... you might want to stay home.)

~i am also old enough to be a peace officer.

~there is talk of placing age limits in both nba and nascar - at 21. even if they do, i'll still be old enough to be a professional basketball player or racecar driver. still debating between the two.

~and of course (need i even say it) i'm old enough to go to bars and order alcoholic beverages.

somewhere back there, when i wasn't paying attention, i merged onto the fast track to midlife crisis, forgetting my age, and i've already begun to notice the beginnings of smile lines and (nooooooo) the dreaded forehead frown wrinkles!!! i'm a hop, skip and a jump away from botox!

let me put this to you straight, people:
in mary kay language, i'm not a velocity anymore ... i'm a timewise. my life is over.


and yet...
i had the most wonderful conversation at work today with a lady named beth. she has stuffed the bulletin inserts into the bulletins every week since long before i started working at grace. she spends an hour on the rowing machine and treadmill everyday, thinks doctors are out to get you, and only takes pills when she has a bad migraine.
beth is 89 years old.
that's 68 more than my pitiful 21.
she asked me my age, and, startled at my response, informed me of my spring chicken status (in the chicken coop of life, i can only assume).

i don't think beth has ever had botox, and i don't think i'll need any either. her life-lines are the prettiest thing...
(but what do i know - i'm just a spring chicken!)

lessons from an evening with rachael

joel is the cook in our family. he enjoys it.
unfortunately, he is also spending an inordinate amount of time away from home these days, working full time and taking classes at psu.
that makes me the interim cook. oh joy.

so, last evening at 8pm i was in the kitchen, battling rachael ray and her ubiquitous grimace, attempting to come out with sesame-ginger-chicken-cabbage-noodle-hopefully-not-disgusting sometime around when joel got home from class. now i know why rachael grins.

i thought i'd share a few lessons, tips, and thoughts from my experience:

~scallions and green onions are not the same thing. they just look exactly alike.

~you can blow across the top of green onions like a flute. a flute that tastes like onions.

~the food processor is evil.

~make sure you put the food processor together properly before shredding cabbage in it. unless you're into chic-cabbage decor.

~either fresh ginger root or my ginger candle smell like ginger. not both, because they smell nothing alike. the ugly stump i'm torturing with a peeler has more street cred, so i'm saying fresh ginger.

~never, ever leave a frying pan drizzled with olive oil on a burner on high heat unattended. no matter how cool the lunar eclipse is. turn the stupid burner off! dinner can wait for a lunar eclipse!

~don't put water in a hot frying pan drizzled with smoking, burnt olive oil. (note from the chef: i'm not actually stupid enough to do this on purpose. i set the pan aside - right next to the spaghetti that was boiling over.)


dinner was delicious!

guess who...

ran over her foot with a shopping cart.
full of groceries.
at the far end of the parking lot.

(this would be the same foot that got run over by a truck recently.)


despite my resulting impairment, amid muttered imprecations, i wrested the enemy back to the maximum security prison for bad egg carts from whence it had escaped. i had originally retrieved it from the minimum security prison inside safeway, where the inmates are allowed short supervised excursions around the store if they behave. this was not what i call "behaving" ...

i hope this cart stays put for a long, long time.

i irritated a famous person!

victoria taft is a local talk radio personality on 860 kpam. she talks about political stuff and does commercials for botox. (she probably does other things too.) around christmas, she recorded an ad encouraging her listeners to buy a gift certificate for botox as a christmas gift for their significant other.

a great stocking stuffer (well, something-stuffer), as it were...

any-hoo... i blogged about this back in december expressing my, um .. dubious ... views on the romance (or lack thereof) expressed by this choice of christmas present.

logging into blogger recently, i noticed i had a comment on that blog ... from victoria taft.

read the (short) post and (short) comment here

email sandwich

patty has been volunteering twice/week in the grace office for a while now.
we like her a lot.
here's why:

i was showing her how to respond to the general grace emails, and explained that there are 3 main categories of emails we receive at that address:
1. spam
2. bac'n: a hot new addition to cyber-vernacular, meaning "the spam you sign up for" -i.e. amazon.com sales or e-newsletters you don't read
3. the legit emails from people who have questions for the church
...at this point patty piped up and said "oh you mean lettuce?"

[blank look from the slow one]

"as in lettuce respond to it."


i'm still cracking up.

details~

we had a lovely time in newport, and i thought i'd share some of the little details that made the trip great ... in photo form, of course.

our room



this is a model of the same lighthouse that i posted a pic of yesterday. (the shells were found on the beach by moi.)
our room was decorated with a lighthouse theme.





they kept plants much better than i've ever been able to ~ must be the fresh sea air.
watering them probably helps too. O_O



used bookstores



we only managed to hit about 3-4 or so ... this one's the cutest. there was one in lincoln city that's actually called "robert's bookstore" ... cool name, but we didn't like that one as much.

restaurants



this is a menu from one of the cute places we visited ~ we had great luck finding little mom-and-pop places with reasonably priced, good food run by interesting people with great stories.

critters

i ♥ seagulls!



the seals were pretty cool too ~ we hiked down to a beach where they rest a lot ~ we saw a baby, though i didn't get any clear pics of it. :(
ask me sometime & i'd be happy to show you lots of blurry ones!!! :)))



my foot

i took lots of walks on the beach, climbed on rocks ... stairstepped to the top of the tallest lighthouse in oregon... yippeee! yeah, my foot bothered me a fair bit, but i'm just super excited to be able to do those things at all!



this is one of the times i got stranded on a too-small rock, venturing further than i should have into the incoming tide in the name of art.
but ... it was from that rock that i got this pic:




a smattering of these are also on my flickr.

quick post

i'll post more about our [amazing] trip later; for now i'll leave a couple pics:

yaquina head lighthouse
(pronounced yuh-KWIN-uh, not yah-KEEN-uh)



my gorgeous husband
and his fluffy, non-gelled hair! :)

day 1 on the beach

2 words: sunny and sick!

we got in late last night after an absolutely treacherous drive through the worst fog i've ever seen! (joel insists it wasn't that bad...) it was raining and storming and all around gross, but today...
50 degrees and sunny!

this is the view of our accomodations from the beach:



and this is the view from our room (taken with point and shoot ~ i'll have better later):



notice the blue sky and lack of any rain in either picture! :D

but yeah, i'm sick. like, talk-in-a-whisper, coughing-all-night, downing-cough-drops-like-candy sick.



my wonderful husband ran to the store before breakfast this morning and bought cold medicine, cough drops ... the works.
but with a view like that from our room, i don't have much to complain about! instead, i have more time to take pics and photoshop!
here's one i took on the beach and processed today (larger because it's prettier):

this is what they hired me to do?

my sense of humor +
increasing photoshop skills =
comedic relief for tomorrow's sermon






i think i've found my spiritual gift.
i don't know that gerry smith and gerry breshears would concur, though.

i ♥ the ocean!

yay! we're going to the beach today! and not coming back til monday!

in the meantime, if you've ever watched a movie ... enjoy this hilarious link!
http://www.sff.net/paradise/overlord.html

ciao!

hey, that's us!

check out a photo tour of our home at our realtor's website:

http://openonthenet.com/
tours (upper left)
address: 1715 se 4th gresham ...

(it won't link directly)