general

Yesterday I actually got home at a semi-reasonable time after my every-other-week LONG work day. Only 10(ish) hours! This is what the house looked like when I got here:



It was dark by the time the crew left, so I don't yet have a picture with all the pretty sheeting up. In fact, I haven't even seen it yet! We're going to grab a shot on the way to the car...when hopefully the sun will be up.

There was a bit of a problem with the electricity yesterday. Basically, they broke it. It isn't entirely their fault because the house is very old and the wire/conduit/meter base were all old too. But it was working fine until they snagged the wire somehow and pulled it out. Oops.

So the house was without power for a large chunk of yesterday and they had to call an electrician out to fix it. It was all fixed by the time I got home, and now we have a pretty new meter base:



Today is my birthday and I'm celebrating by:

1) Having a job interview (whose bright idea was that? oh yeah; mine). It's with a recruiter at my company so shouldn't be too stressful. Still can't help the nerves, though.

2) Meeting with the design guy to choose colors for the house. Didn't realize when we made that appointment that it was on my birthday. Oh well, it'll be fun anyway.

3) Knitting at Twisted! Due to the other two appointments I won't be there for a terribly long time, but I'm hoping to escape from work a little early. Hopefully I'll be there from 3 (or slightly before) until 4:30.

It's been an interesting week. First, a picture of a pretty pair of glasses:



I'll explain their significance shortly. ;)

Starting last Saturday, I have been on a bizarre lucky streak the likes of which I've certainly never experienced before.

Saturday was my company picnic. The company is known (internally anyway) for being very generous with prizes at the picnics, so we knew a prize raffle was coming. When I arrived, I dropped my two raffle tickets into their respective bins (one of which intriguingly said "silent raffle" on it) and wandered off to enjoy the picnic (and wait for the prize drawing!).

The prizes that were announced at the picnic started at $100--gift cards for all kinds of places like Target, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble...--and went on from there. There was an iPod Nano, a 3-day Avis car rental, a stay at a downtown hotel, and the gift card amounts went up to $200, $250...finally, there was a 42-inch television given away. The other top prize was a $1000 voucher for Delta Airlines. They gave away three of them.

I won one!

So that was pretty neat! I got to work Monday morning and heard people twittering about the picnic and how I was one of the big winners, etc. Pretty soon, we got an email from corporate communications which turned out to be the results of the "silent raffle." The silent raffle was created so that the prize drawings/announcements wouldn't go on for hours at the picnic, and included all of the smaller prizes. They were all in the $25-50 range (plus I think I saw one that was $75).

I won a $25 Barnes & Noble gift card. [Side note: Remember that book I said I fell in love with at the yarn shop in Lincoln City? I turned right around and ordered it from B&N Monday afternoon. :D]

Wow, two raffle prizes! I was really lucky!

Then...today.

I have to backtrack just a bit to something I don't think I've mentioned on my blog. Just before my vacation, I was nominated for a "You ROCK!" prize at work. To get that, you are nominated by someone else at the company. Once they've gone through the procedure, you, quite literally, receive a rock. So the two women who nominated me showed up at my desk and gave me a rock and a nice certificate. I thought it was really nice of them to go to the trouble, so I've left the rock in a prominent spot on my desk and hung the certificate on my wall. Other than occasionally laughingly showing off my rock, I hadn't really thought much about it.

Fast forward a couple of weeks to this morning. I showed up (pretty much last) to my department meeting and was surprised to see the two women who'd nominated me and also someone from corporate communications. I had a suspicion that something was up, but had no idea what. Turns out I was chosen as the "You ROCK!" winner for the month of June--and I won a $100 Macy's gift card. They also took pictures of me, which will appear in posters throughout the company and in the corporate email that goes out every Thursday. I'd seen posters with other winners around, but somehow never really considered that I'd be on one of them! And I had NO idea there was actually a prize involved.

Are you counting? We're up to three prizes, totaling $1125. But I'm not quite done yet...

This one isn't so much a prize, but it kind of fits so I'll mention it anyway. I got back from the meeting just in time to run off to Lloyd Center to meet with a few knitters at lunchtime. Just as I was about to walk away from my desk, the phone rang. I picked it up and Jessica, one of the knitters I was meeting, said, "Hey, I have a 2-for-1 coupon for Jamba Juice! Want one?"

So--free Jamba Juice for lunch today. :D

Incidentally, every person I've related these events to so far has said something along the lines of, "You need to play the lottery this week!"

Nik and I had been amusing ourselves with this idea off and on today. (I'm a former math teacher and we're both very rational people, so the whole idea of "cashing in" on a string of luck is pretty funny to us.) Nik even went so far as to speculate that I'd actually USED UP my good luck and it was over now, so no need to buy a lottery ticket.

When Nik picked me up this evening, we were both hungry and I didn't feel like going home and cooking so we went out to dinner. We went to Micky Finn's, a pub a mile or so down the street from us. Wednesday is Pint Night and the rep from Blue Moon (tonight's featured brewery) was going around handing out raffle tickets to everyone and told us there'd be a drawing in around half an hour.

This, of course, caused further discussion of the whole luck thing. (Nik is wondering if there's a conservation of luck in force, and if so, who is having a really bad luck week to balance out my good luck?)

I'm sure you can guess by now what happened.

The Blue Moon rep gave out 6-8 prizes and kept calling out ticket numbers...nope, not mine. Not Nik's. Eventually, Nik made some crack about, "Well, this is proof." (We're still not sure what it was proof OF, but whatever ;)).

Numbers were called, people picked their prizes...then he announced that the next would be the last one for this drawing. (I'm pretty sure they do multiple drawings through the night.)

Guess whose number was the last one called?

That's where those pilsner glasses, pictured above, came from. :D

Crazy, huh?

I haven't found anyone with leftovers of the yarn I need (it was a longshot!), so I bought another skein from The Loopy Ewe. It should arrive by the time we get home from the coast. (I actually got an "it's been shipped" notification the same day I placed the order! It'll probably get to my house before I do.)

Yesterday, I drove up to Lincoln City to visit Nestucca Bay Yarns and run a couple of errands. Nestucca Bay is a cute little shop with some nice yarns (including lots of Cascade 220, Manos del Uruguay, many Rowan yarns, and their own handpainted yarns). I bought this:



Tara, who was working at the shop yesterday, and I had a nice chat. I think I've inspired her to pick up crochet. And she tempted me with this book that I now really, really want. It's all about crochet stitch motifs, which is way more fun than rows and rows of crochet. All different kinds of squares, circles, and other shapes! I already have ideas in mind for some of the things I saw in the book (I sat down and flipped through it for a good 15 minutes, at least). [As an aside, why doesn't Amazon have the book? Nestucca Bay had about 6 copies of it!]

I also rather liked this book.

After my nice yarn shop visit, I went off in search of a place to get a pedicure and found a great, tiny shop called Nail Extension. Two manicure stations, two pedicure chairs, and I'm not sure there was much else (other than a few shelves with products for sale). Bit pricier than I would normally pay for a pedicure but it was really nice, she did a beautiful job on my toes, and we had a very nice chat while she was working on me. Well worth the cost, imo. :)

I'm not sure if you can really tell the color, but here's a shot of my toes:



They're a deep purple that looks like midnight blue in certain light. Really pretty!

And finally, one photo that cracked me up:



This is my niece, Sydney, trying to beg me for the Nintendo DS her dad had just announced that she DOES NOT NEED for Christmas this year. Too cute!

I'm now officially on VACATION!

I don't go back to work until July 14th. YAY!!

Tonight, I need to put the finishing touches on my "secret" project so I can get the HSKS5 swap kit in the mail tomorrow. Pretty much everything else is ready to go. I can't wait for Narcissa to get her kit! Giving presents is fun. :D

I'll make sure I take some pictures before I send it off--once she gets it, I'll post about the secret project (both here and on Ravelry) and the yummy yarn I got for her.

Tomorrow...I have no idea what I'm doing tomorrow (other than going to the post office), and I'm okay with that! The rest of my vacation will probably be pretty busy, so one empty day is actually kind of nice.

YAY VACATION!!!

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!)

A few blocks north of us on 72nd, there's a smallish commercial building on a corner. When I first moved in with Nik--a little over 3 years ago--it was a strip club of some sort. The strip club moved, "For Lease" signs went up and a while later a new business opened. The new place was called "Little Hands Learning Center," which made me think it was an education-related store or a daycare center or something like that. But then they hand-painted some advertising on the door that said "Kids books, toys, and clothing for sale" which really didn't help explain what the place actually WAS. Of course, I never went in to find out. It was just one of those mysteries you think about once in a while when you drive by on the way home from work.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the place eventually closed and the "For Lease" signs went up again.

Recently, we were driving by on our way home from work and I suddenly noticed a new sign: "Pins & Needles"

What?! I did a really fast double-take. Could it be a sewing shop? Or something else crafty? Within a few blocks of my HOUSE?

But...no. "Pins & Needles" is an acupuncture clinic!

Darn.

...I did just discover that there's a new shop down Woodstock from us, though, that looks promising. I think it's more art than craft, but it has prominent signs about classes. Will have to go check it out one of these days. :)

The week was a bit grueling, but it's finally Friday. Yay! And it's a 3-day weekend! YAY!

And even better, I actually get ALL THREE days off!

[For those of you new to my blog...let's just say that there are certain things that really suck about working in payroll. For instance: holidays. Most of the time, holidays force us to either work on the holiday, or work an extra day during the week to make up for having had the holiday off. People have to get paid on time, holiday or no! Memorial Day--this year anyway--does not interfere with our payroll schedule. Yay!]

I made it to Twisted three days in a row this week! The weather has been pretty yucky, so I've been taking the bus even though it's only a little over a mile from my office. I get off the bus about a block and a half from the shop, crossing two small streets. You'd think that'd be a pretty safe way to go, wouldn't you?

I almost got run over today.

The bus lets me off on a two lane, one-way street. I always cross the side street first, to give the bus a chance to get by and because I have to wait for the rest of the traffic to clear anyway before I can cross the one-way street. So, as usual, I waited for all the traffic to clear (there's a traffic signal at the previous intersection) and then crossed the street. I made it halfway across when a woman driving a huge silver SUV turned left onto the one-way street from the other side. She stopped in time, with tires squealing as I jumped sideways away from her car.

I don't think she was any closer to me than, oh, 6 feet, but it was scary!

Now I'm looking forward to a quiet weekend, with lots of time to rest. And lots of knitting, I hope.

Yesterday was the first time I've missed posting something during the whole month of May. Between just being exhausted and then being up late watching American Idol (I had to see if David Cook was going to beat David Archuleta!), I just lost track and went to bed without posting. Oh well, I'm still doing quite well on my self-imposed "post once a day" goal.

This has been another of those crazy work weeks where I work way, way too late one of the days and then struggle to balance it out the rest of the week. And sleep enough to overcome it. I'll be going to bed very shortly in an effort to make Friday feel less awful than Thursday did.

Yesterday after work was nice, though--I left a little bit early and went to Twisted. Tammy and Kim joined me a while later and we chatted and knitted until Nik came to take me home. It was so nice seeing them! It's been ages.

My second Sorta Charade sock is well underway now--the leg is done, and I'm starting on the ankle. I've also been making a little progress on Mom's Follow the Leader shawl. I have a few things coming up that are going to pull my attention away from all these awesome works in progress, though, I think. I may finish the sock this weekend, but then I have things to work on for the HSKS5 swap (even though it's a sock KIT swap, there's still a handmade component to the swap--which, don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about! I'm even looking forward to it, but it's yet another thing to add to a queue which is looking a bit daunting right now). And I'm taking a class starting next weekend, so I'll have a project to work on for that, too.

Oh well--I'm sure I'll figure out how to juggle everything. I just don't want Mom's shawl to keep getting shoved to the bottom of the list! Better work on it a bunch this coming week...haha.