A week later

I’ve been at the Oregon house for a week now, and what have I accomplished? Quite a lot, actually, though most of it early on–the big push getting the LR-BR-stairs carpets out wore me out and I haven’t had that kind of energy since. But let me enumerate for myself, if no one else:

House destruction 101

Not really. But it felt like it this morning. I took the carpet out of the living room and hallway, and it was quite a chore. Lots of opportunity to use any pent-up aggressive energy I may just have had lying around in the back of my brain.

Yesterday, Tuesday, I got the carpet out of the downstairs bedroom. Pictures here. It wasn’t in too bad shape, so I took it down to the basement–I will probably use it to pad the cold concrete floor in the semi-finished room down there.

Oregon house update, summer 2011

Perhaps one of many, we’ll see.

Just got up here last night, and am trying to settle in. Water isn’t on yet, so I’m still somewhat in camping mode. They should turn it on this afternoon, and it can’t be too soon for me–things are piling up. I was afraid to have them turn it on on Friday because I couldn’t remember whether or not I had left faucets open in January. I don’t think I did–but we’ll see and better safe than sorry.

The weather today has been in “wait-a-minute-mode”–20 minutes of sun, 5 minutes of rain, 15 minutes of can’t make up its mind. Mostly rain and can’t make up it’s mind this afternoon.

Took some pictures last night, and am still figuring out just what’s the best way to share them. WordPress is going to make me start paying if I use much more space, so don’t want to post here, so I’ve posted them over on Facebook (a bit of an adventure in itself, from an ipad). Theoretically you can see them here. If all this works, I’m going to spring for the paid app for uploading to FB. I tried one freebie that did weird things, but the one I used for these seems to be OK–but I can only upload 3 at a time, so the buck will be worth it. I’m thrilled that the rhodies are still out, and the Andromeda bush (a neighbor told me that’s what it’s called–so I’ll call it that unless someone corrects me) was totally an unexpected pleasure. I had whacked it back rather a lot in January, and I think that’s why so much of the foliage is red and white.

The fence guy still owes me a gate, but I think it’s going to turn out to be a good thing that he didn’t get it done before–he came over this morning, and we spent quite a bit of time discussing just how the gate should go in (it’s complicated, it’s to close off a passage between the house and garage, both sides of which are concrete) and I think between the two of us, we came up with a much better solution than the original idea of a traditional swinging gate. He also helped me whack back some low-hanging branches on a couple of trees, and offered to mow the lawn for free on account he didn’t get the fence all done on time, so this may work out nicely for me. If it stops raining long enough for him to mow.

Think I’ll go start working on pulling up carpet. Either that, or take a nap in the recliner . Maybe both–it’s only 1:30 or so.

Facebook experiment

I recently realized that I’m near my limit for uploading stuff to WordPress without having to start paying, and I’m not wanting to incur a regular charge for a blog I post to only a handful of times per year. Maybe someday, if I start using it more–but not now. I think what’s happened is I’ve posted too many pictures, and not shrunk the files enough.

So I’m trying this: put the pictures on Facebook, post the link here, when I want just any ol’ person to be able to see them. Hopefully this won’t affect my privacy setting on FB in general–it’s not supposed to. We’ll see.

Anyway, today a friend/colleague and I played hookey (it’s spring break, and we’re working the rest of the week, OK?) and went over to the east side of Pinnacles today. Picked a good day for it, it was a beautiful day–a break between storms, the next one of which is begin to move in now. Here are some pictures. Or the link to them. I think you should be able to see the annotations there.

Let me know if you can’t see them.

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Later

Now I’m nervous. It looks to me like I, at least, get into my FB page as me, and can add, edit, delete photos from that FB album when I click on that link. What other people will see, I don’t know. I’m hoping someone will let me know. If I’m compromising my FB security by doing this, I’ll delete this post.

Pinnacles in the rain

A friend and I drove up to Pinnacles in the rain today, and it was just beautiful. So here are some photos.

Beginning of trail

What amazed me about this is how blue the peaks are. I think that was because of the rain, the lichen was all open and showing its color. In the summer heat–this looks very different.

iTunes score

I discovered this morning that Buffy Sainte-Marie has a new album out. Well, new to me–it came out in 2009, but was her first new album in 17 years. Running for the Drum.

You young whippersnappers probably never heard of her, and even some old whippersnappers probably missed out back when, but she was one of my favorites during my coming of age years. She’s not everyone’s favorite flavor, but if you don’t know her, I recommend you check her out, on iTunes or here**.

Facebook spillover*

Bit of excitement on the walk this morning. Encountered a couple of coyotes on the way back. No big deal, happens regularly, but usually I manage to get Mika on the leash before she takes off after them. In her youth I felt she was well able to take care of herself, but now I worry more, especially when there’s more than one and they could gang up on her. This morning, she was well ahead of me, and off like a shot (an elderly shot, but still quite spryly). Picture me crashing through the brush, calling loudly for her, for 5 minutes or so–enough to worry me. CJ torn between chasing the coyotes (which I was all for, to keep them distracted from Mika) and sticking with me, since I was calling for Mika, which to CJ implies I want both of them. All’s well; after awhile here comes Mika, panting happily, big grin on her face, and CJ gets in a good thorough chase after the coyotes, so both were happy as little clams.

Tick check: 10 minutes, 30 ticks, 1 on me (but I got it before it bit.) I don’t know if it started out on me, or got on my while de-ticking the dogs–CJ likes to lean in while I’m brushing them off her.

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* I recently caved and joined Facebook on accounta family is all on it, but am finding it less than wonderful. In this case–intended to put this up as a Status update (which I find a stupid header, not at all descriptive of what people use it for.) It went over the character limit, so Facebook offers to do it as Note–but where the heck to notes GO? I have no idea, so decided to simplify and post it here.

House reality

Mostly I really enjoyed my time in the Oregon house, and God wot it relaxed me. Even though, or maybe because, I was so active and worked so hard, physically. But some of the hard realities are definitely sinking in.

House, day 2

Apparently I want to keep a diary, at least for awhile. Who knew? I can’t imagine who would find any of this interesting enough to read–probably even me in a few years–but then I read other people’s trivia with interest, and “it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want to” (sung to the tune of “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to”. And if you’re old enough to remember that song–hi.)

Today was less productive than yesterday.

House update: There!

The process was stressful, but ultimately successful: I now “own” two houses, one in California near my job, and one in Oregon in anticipation of retiring in 3.5 years. Or sooner if things get too ugly at work, but that’s another story, and I’m just looking for excuses to retire earlier anyway.

Tonight is my second night in the house.

House update: almost there–maybe

I was going to hold off updating here until things were actually settled, one way or another, but find I want to “talk” about it now.

It’s been a bumpy road, to say the least.

House pics

My big news these days is that I’m trying to buy a house in Oregon to live in when I retire in 4 years (Yay!) I’m not going to tell the whole story of how I came to find this house; instead I’m just going to post some pictures so I can moon over them from my iPad whenever I want. I’m trying really hard not to count my chickens before they hatch, and if there’s any endeavor for which it ain’t over til it’s over it’s buying a house; nonetheless, I want pictures for mooning purposes.

Salmon and Sawtooths

So last night we had supper with childhood friends we hadn’t seen in 50 years (see, I’m getting used to it–no caps . The youngest (Midy) was an infant when we left town, and now lives next door to their mom. I tend to drop in on the mother whenever I go through Salmon, but the last few times I haven’t been able to find the lane into her property, but with directions provided by Heather and her husband, we found it and went to see her.

Back to where I started from

I’m having an active summer, and I may (or may not, I never know) blog about more of it later, but for today I’m going to jump into the middle.

Three years ago, I took a trip with my brother. He wasn’t in very good shape on that trip. Well, he’s gotten a lot better since then, and I now have a camping trailer instead of tents (that is, I still have the tents, I just don’t use them), so we decided to reprise some of that trip this summer.

Experimental: Walk photos

I’m trying out a number of things with this post: a new camera that I may or may not keep, getting photos into the iPad, getting a photo that’s in the iPad into a blog post. So here goes.

iPad Update

Well, it’s a few weeks later and things have settled down. I have my system put together and it’s working for me. The exploration involved several trips to various stores buying and then returning things–which if they’d let you try things in the store could save everyone some time and trouble, but modern packaging prevents that. Heck, modern packaging damn near prevents actual use of products, but that’s a rant for another day.

Just because I feel like it

“I’m telling you, absolutes don’t work.”

“Never, for anything, ever?”

“Absolutely.”

Here we go up the learning curve

So yesterday the G3 ipads came out, available at 5:00pm, and by 5:30 I had mine and was headed home. Now I just have to get used to a whole bunch of new conventions. I’m beginning to get used to the on-screen keyboard, though it’s a bit weird having to switch back and forth between the ABC and the numeric screens. But I’ve run into a few things that I’m wondering about.

iPad Lust II

With a certain amount of fear and trembling, I put 50% down on an iPad yesterday. The G3 is supposed to come out this Friday at 5:00, but since I’m going through a retailer, not an Apple store, they may not get theirs until Saturday or even Monday. It’ll still be quicker than pre-ordering online, though–those won’t ship until May 7 now.

The fear and trembling comes from the fact that you need a newer computer than the faithful iBook upon which I am typing this to work with the iPad.

iPad Lust

Yes, I’m lusting after an iPad (and hereafter in this post, I shall not be capitalizing the P. My fingers can barely coordinate these days to capitalize the first letter of a sentence, let alone the second letter in a word in the middle of a sentence.)

So far I have resisted,