general

I missed posting yesterday because, frankly, I was tired and forgot. Also it was ridiculously hot this weekend, which made me really not want to have my laptop on my lap. (These MacBook Pros are scorchers!)

Saturday, we had a contractor come over to work up a bid for the exterior work we need done on the house. We have two more bids coming in this week, so I'll wait until we have the info for all of them to post details. I can tell you this, though: it's going to be a lot of money!

Then I got a haircut, we went to Nik's Mom's for dinner, and then over to my aunt Patti's house for a movie and dessert. The movie was being shown in the backyard, so it was pretty late when we started. We didn't even stay for the whole thing (fortunately, it hasn't been that long since we've seen it--Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) and got home at 11:30. I know that probably sounds kind of silly--not even midnight!--but we're used to sleeping roughly 9:30 until 5, and I rarely sleep in much (even on the weekend). Also, I had to be at work early on Sunday.

So...Sunday was a little rough, but work went really, really well.

I suddenly realized a little while ago that tomorrow is July, so I should talk about the July goal I've set for myself (which I alluded to in a recent post).

Starting tomorrow, my goal is to take one picture every day. My short-term goal is to make it through July, but in the long term I'd actually like to continue indefinitely so I went ahead and joined the Project 365 group on Flickr.

With the knitting (etc.) and soon the house project, it probably won't be too difficult to manage for the most part, but I also want to use it as a way to challenge myself to find new and interesting things to photograph. I'm looking forward to checking out the past challenges that have been posted on the group, too.

So I guess tomorrow I'll be back with a picture to show. :)

I honestly don't want to complain about the heat after suffering so much rain and cold to get here. But wow, maybe just slightly less extreme would be nice, huh?

Here's a meme I've seen all over blogland lately, most recently on Sharon's:



1. Ella Michelle, 2. Artichokes, 3. Oak Grove Opal, 4. Night London Eye Green Colors, 5. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, 6. Margarita violeta, 7. Harbor of Hvar Town in Croatia, 8. Ends: Ice Cream Trio, 9. retired, 10. Duck Family Portrait, 11. A cheerful, sunny window..., 12. don't feed the bunny

The instructions to create the mosaic are:
Type your answers to each of the questions below into Flickr Search
Using only the first page, pick an image
Copy and paste each of the URLs into the mosaic maker

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name.

And now I must get to bed, considering I need to be at work at 7 tomorrow morning.

After a "quiet week" that really wasn't (due to many meetings and many phone calls--it occurs to me that I spent a significant amount of time this week helping people from at least three different departments, not even counting payroll), I get Saturday off and then have to work on Sunday. Working on Sunday isn't all that unusual for me (it happens once every 8 weeks), but this time there will be a whole crew there helping out.

I think I've mentioned before that holidays aren't really a payroll specialist's friend...

• they mess up payroll schedules: next Friday would be our regular payday, but it happens to be a holiday--so payday will be Thursday instead, necessitating that we move our Monday/Tuesday processing to Sunday/Monday


• quite often we end up either working on the holiday or working on the weekend so we can have the holiday off


• even though holidays cause us to have to work lots of extra hours, the existence of the holiday makes it unlikely that we actually get paid overtime for those extra hours (since we have to actually WORK more than forty hours--not counting the holiday time off--in order to get paid overtime)


• holidays also add whole new layers of complexity to actually processing payroll accurately: we have to do extra audits to look for and fix problems; and also people often want to take time off to coincide with a holiday week, which causes a huge spike in data entry (for some specific reasons I could explain, but I don't want to bore you completely to death)

My plan for this coming week is this:

Sunday: Work however long I'm needed, which will hopefully be from 7am until maybe 1pm
Monday: This will be my crazy long day this week, 6:45am until who knows (7pm if I'm lucky)
Tuesday: 6:45 to 3:15 (hey, I should be able to join the Downtown Knitters next week!)
Wednesday: 6:45 until...I'll try to escape early, since I won't get overtime for those extra hours I put in earlier in the week anyway; then I'll probably run over to Twisted to check out their Anniversary Sale
Thursday: I'm OFF! Yay!!

AND THEN...

The following week I'm on vacation. I cannot wait. Nik and I haven't had an actual vacation since last October, when we went on our honeymoon. Depoe Bay, here we come!

Yeah, I'm getting a little excited and it's still over a week away! :)

On the knitting front: the SECRET project is nearly complete! Just some finishing touches left (which have to wait until it's dry). The flower hexagons for the scarf are blocked and waiting to be sewn together, if I could only figure out the best way to do it.

Anyone have any suggestions? I've tried a few things, but been a bit unhappy with each for various reasons. The problem, I think, is that they were blocked pretty aggressively to get that open flower look which caused the stitches along the outer edge to stretch. So when I sew through them, the stitches tend to pull the whole side tighter and at the same time the whole thing is kind of loose...

I tried to just slip stitch them together, thinking that would give them a little firmness but it looked kind of odd--and pulled in too much. It just occurred to me to maybe try the slip stitch again, but doing two slip stitches in each stitch. That might make it pull in less and also give them a better foundation. Hmm.

Guess that's the first thing I'll try in the morning. I think I'm just not accustomed to sewing crocheted pieces together, so I'm fumbling around a bit here. I'll figure out a way to handle it soon, I'm sure.

Those of you who check in here regularly may have noticed some irregularity in posting. I started up the new blog in April, was a bit sketchy about posting, but then in May I was suddenly posting every day! June hit, and I'm all sketchy again.

I have made an important (for me, anyway) discovery. Or a couple of them, I guess.

First, something I learned from the May experiment (my unpublicized goal was to blog every day--in reality, I missed two days but ended up with 31 posts anyway due to extra posts a couple of times; I considered the experiment a success): blogging every day isn't really that hard. Yes, occasionally I ended up throwing up a sort of cheater post but at least I put forth the effort to do SOMETHING.

Second, if I DON'T have a "post every day" goal in my head, it is ridiculously easy to convince myself that I don't have anything to post about. Seriously, I think of lots of things to talk about (writing blog posts in my head--I'm sure we've all been there). But then I manage to convince myself that it's not worth it, no one will care, it's boring...whatever. Obviously there's some self-defeating thinking going on here, since I really do WANT to post.

So. New goal, spoken in public this time: From now on, I'm going to post DAILY. I won't beat myself up if I do miss a day here or there (so don't worry that I'm dead or in the hospital or something if I miss one day ;)), but the plan is to put something out here every day.

In July, I think I'll have another goal to pursue. I'll talk about that one as it gets closer (it's something I also tried to accomplish in May, but getting used to posting every day and also trying for the second thing at the same time didn't work).

On the knitting front, I cast on for a new pair of socks yesterday. Just one quick thing to say about them: Wow, that Kureyon Sock knits up pretty. I'll post a picture tomorrow. :)

The sun finally decided to grace us with its presence this afternoon, and Nik and I went out to take advantage of it. This was the view from our table at dinner tonight:



And here we are:



I had one of these:



:D

We parked on the east side of the Willamette, near the Hawthorne Bridge, then walked over the bridge and down the waterfront a bit. We didn't choose a restaurant in advance, preferring to see where we felt like stopping once we got there. I couldn't resist stopping at the Marina Fish House, though. It's actually ON the water (so there were lots of views similar to that first shot).

Finally, here's the Hawthorne Bridge, from the west side just above Waterfront Park:



What a beautiful evening!

We just watched an episode of Don't Forget the Lyrics. The contestant made it to $200,000 and was trying for $350,000. Her song choices were: "Jet Airliner" by The Steve Miller Band or "You Sexy Thing" by Hot Chocolate.

My reaction was something like, "Wait. What? Jet Airliner? I can't imagine what that is, and I've listened to their greatest hits album a million times!"

Contestant must have agreed because she chose the other song (and ended up walking away with her $200,000--smart girl).

However, I was so curious about the Steve Miller Band song that I had to go check it out in iTunes. Song starts. "Oh, I know this song...but I don't know where 'Jet Airliner' comes into it."

Then I started laughing 'cause I figured it out. The chorus of that song says, "Big old jet airliner, don't carry me too far away..." (etc.) and, even though I've heard the song hundreds of times, I had NEVER figured out that "big old jet airliner" phrase. It was just nonsensical syllables to me--and clearly I'd never looked at the name of the song in the track listing. It certainly never sank in if I did anyway.

Isn't it funny how you can do that? I guess it was just never important enough to me to go find out what the heck they were singing!

Big old jet airliner. :D

Expected to work 5-6 hours today. Wound up working 14.

Ugh.

Bed now. Knitting talk tomorrow.

IT'S JUNE! STOP RAINING!!

sigh

(In better news, I just found out that I won the pattern for this cute bag. Thanks, Emma!)