Zorya sits on the porch and thinks

I want my countertop, dang it! I want to put my kitchen back in order and I really, really want my sink back.

Tom says that he can jury rig the old sink and that part of the old Brandy Bunch orange counter top so I can have something useable until the new counter top is delivered and we can put the new sink in. If I can wait until Monday when some parts he ordered are delivered I can have the dishwasher and the garbage disposal, too.

I guess I will wait until Monday and try not to pout.

Jesse is bringing Jacob over tomorrow morning. Jesse and Kris are going up to Motor City Comic Con in Detroit for the weekend and Jacob gets to stay with grandma, grandpa, the pets and the semi-usable kitchen (yeah, I know, pout pout)

I hope it doesn't rain all weekend. I don't think I can watch toddler level television programing that long.

Politics

What's up with Clinton? Yes, I know she won the West Virginia primary last night by a big margin, but the total number of votes cast was not that big. And the population pool was very homogenous and tilted in her direction. And it's a small state with only 5 Electoral College votes that is expected to go Republican in the election.

And it doesn't change any of the metrics. Obama is still ahead in every area, including superdelegates. And to top it off, while she won West Virginia, he added 1 1/2 (Democrats Abroad delegates count as a half vote) supers to the 4 he got yesterday, the 4 he got the day before...he has picked up 40 supers since the beginning of May.

What does she think she can do to change reality? I have nothing against magical thinking, but really, this isn't helping.

Kitchen

The counters are in. We have a call in for the Lowe's contractor to come out and take measurements for the countertop. We have an appointment with an Empire flooring rep to talk about options and costs.

The countertop will be Wilsonart High Definition Laminate and the walls are painted "Desert Rouge" and "Mother Earth" from the Valspar Earth Elements palate. The cabinets are KraftMaid with natural hickory wood. When we get everything together it will look really nice.

I am soooo tired of not having a working kitchen, though. If I can't have my sink working by the end of the week I'm going to get that camping dishwashing station I saw at Meijer to use until things get put back together. I am not washing dishes in the bathtub.

Cats

Susie and Koko are still hanging in there. By my calculations Susie is nearly 16 and a half and Koko is just a bit over 16. I want to keep them going as long as they are alert and not in pain, but caring for geriatric kitties is getting really old. Mostly the daily fluids are getting really old. Neither Tom nor I are very good at sticking a needle in an uncooperative cat, so I go to the vet every morning.

Everyone else is doing well, though I think all the kitchen construction is getting on their nerves a bit.

Grandson

He's happy and healthy but still not talking - at least recognizable words. His dad and one of his uncles (Jesse and Kris) are heading up to the Motor City Comic Con this weekend so the rug rat is going to spend a weekend of quality time with grandma, grandpa, the animals and the minimally functional kitchen. Blues Clues and Noggin anyone?

Well, it's nearly time to take Susie to the vet so I had best get the cat carrier and figure out where she is hiding this morning

Just an note for my LJ friends in and around Dayton...

Just FYI, the price for a gallon of regular gas in Dayton has jumped up to $3.95. There are a few stations that are not that high - yet.


I just found some at $3.64 at the UDF on the corner of Harshman and Brandt Pike.

If anyone needs to fill up it might be a good idea to do it at lunchtime instead of after work.

Cabinets are all out of the kitchen. Spent some time at Sears picking out a new stand alone range. Spent more money than I would like, but at least that's taken care of. My early Mother's Day dinner was at the mall food court.

Not nearly to where we wanted to be, but it's getting late. Still have to patch places on the walls, scrape decorative crap off of the soffits where the new wall cabinets will be and prime the walls. Don't know if that is going to happen tonight.

We have all the shelves down and the cabinets cleaned out.

It looks that we will have to replace the oven/stove. Bloody thing has cat whizz down the back and to take the back off to make sure the inside is clean (there are vents on the back) is much more work than either of us want to get into. Not something for the home tinkerer.

Sigh.

OMG!!!

The new kitchen cabinets arrived on Thursday. Called the installation department at Lowes to find out when the contractor could put them in. They said Monday.

MONDAY!

Fricking Monday!

We have to empty the cabinets, tear out the whole bloody kitchen this weekend, patch and paint the walls. When we bought the stuff we got a timeline that suggested we would have several weeks to get ready.

Not to mention the fact that we probably will need to pull up the laminate floor and decide whether to reuse it after the cabinets are in or put down something else (Laminate and cat whizz do not go well together, and unfortunately there are at least 2 elderly kitties who can't find the cat boxes anymore)

It's gonna be a weekend!

Well, I throughly killed my iPod over the weekend. It got wet when rain blew into my tent. We thought it was the battery but a trip to MacDepot on E Dorothy Lane yesterday confirmed our worst fears. The motherboard was fried. Dead, dead, for a ducat dead. Sound taps.

Tom wasn't keen on replacing it with another classic iPod as they are due for a new release - buy one now and we would miss the upgrades.

To cut to the chase, we walked out of the store with an 8 gig iPod Touch. It was an pre-January upgrade model so the price was reduced. Even with buying and downloading the upgrade we still saved money over the new and improved model.

It's a very cool toy with some fun bells and whistles

I shall have fun playing with it's potential. :-)

The grandson gets whiney when I take a few moments to do anything on the computer, so I’m gonna leave iJournal open and add on as I can.

Kris is moving the first loads of sutff into his new aparment today. I have the Element, but we can’t use it’s space to the fullest because I have to keep a seat down for the baby seat. It’s going to be strange and a bit emptier in the house without him around. I know it’s time for him to be out on his own, but still...

At least he is still in Dayton - just farther away. He will be close to work and school, which is a good thing. I have to remind myself that I was 18 when I moved half way across Texas for school, and then when I transfered to a school closer to San Antonio my dad got an assignment to Minot, North Dakota.

Tomorrow DPA will be camping at John Bryant Park near Yellow Springs. Tomorrow we are also looking at evening thunder storms. As I recall when we went camping with Kyle’s Cub Scout group a few years ago we had a thunderstorm blow in the first night. A big one with lots of lightning and some serious winds. Aren’t I lucky?

(midafternoon) Got back to the house a few minutes ago. Kris has signed the lease and we dropped off his bed and a load of clothes. He is planning to do a little every day for the next few days until he’s moved over.

And for some minor excitement, I hit a Canadian goose on Brandt Pike next to Tom Cloud Park. I was trying to watch traffic and look for a hole so I could change lanes and suddenly Kris says “Mom! Goose!” I saw it but it was too close and traffic was too heavy for me to slam on the brakes. I was going between 30 and 35 mph. I felt a thump and then saw the goose in the grass on the side of the road. Kris said he saw it flying up on it’s own power when I hit it so he didn’t think I had hurt it too much.

The grandson is watching something kiddish on Noggin at the moment. I’m glad he likes it. It’s definitely for a younger audience than 54 yr old grandmas.

It’s nice to be able to take a bit of a breather but what I would really like right now is a nice long nap.

We are going down to the Apple Store in Cincinnati. We have an appointment at 1pm at the Genius Bar to have my old MacBook fixed. It keeps shutting down after an hour or so of use when it is on the battery. The laptop will probaby have to be sent out for repairs but that's no biggie as I still have my current MacBook to use.

I noticed that LiveJournal had a page of links to programs that can be used to post without being on the webpage so I thought I would give one a try. Since I do almost everything on my MacBook I downloaded iJournal.

I'll check a little later to see how this post looks.

Doesn't seem to have a way to include an image, though I was able to open one on the computer in Preview and copy/paste it into this posting.

Update 27 Apr:

The picture didn't make it into the post. I'll have to play around with iJournal a bit - may not be possible.

The link from the Discovery Channel site doesn't do embeded media

http://dsc.discovery.com/video/index.html?playerId=203711706&categoryId=1488640350&lineupId=1504354140&titleId=1509264631

So you can click on the link or this Youtube clip:



The Discovery Channel link has better quality video

My 22 yr old, Kris, went apartment hunting today. He found a fairly reasonable place in downtown Dayton, just off of Keowee and 5th street. He's 6 blocks away from work and Sinclair College.

He will be signing the lease on May 1st and moving in over that weekend. It going to be weird not having him here.

I wasn't trying to rush him out, but he's old enough to be out on his own and he certainly is earning enough to pay for an apartment. And he will be out of the basement so we can start tearing out the walls and getting rid of mold that is most certainly there from the minor flooding we had a couple of months ago.

Update 23 Apr:

My 13 yr old, Kyle, is taking this move in stride but he seems a bit sad about not having his brother home after the first of May. Tom and Kris want to set him up with a Meebo account so he can "talk" to Kris in the early afternoon and evening. I'm thinking of giving him his own email address by renaming our 4th Roadrunner email addy (we get 4 total) and changing it from the email we use when we have to give an email on a website but we don't want to be bothered with spam. Eh, it's a small sacrifice. :-)

We had to put the statue in the garage over the winter. Last year he stayed out and I don't think the snows were kind to him.

I really love how the garden is blooming out this year.

So I starting printing out the newsletter so I could give them to Kris to take to Campus Ministry this morning. Got through page 1 and page 2 and the printer threw up a "warning, low ink" on one of the blue cartridges. And apparently purple is getting low.

I have the cartridges to change them out but I don't have a clue how to do that. Dang!

Fortunately Tom doesn't leave for Philly until later this afternoon but he won't be home until lunch time and Kris will be gone by then.

Sigh. Well, there is always tomorrow.

Have to take one of the cats to the vet in a half hour. This time it's the elderly (16+) girl kitty with the thyroid and kidney problems. I'm amazed that she's still with us.

This story hit the news late Friday. It's been sticking in my craw all weekend.

Top officials OK’d harsh interrogation tactics

Article excerpt:

Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.

The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.

Send a letter to your Senator via the ACLU and tell them what you think.

Been messing around on my MacBook all morning. I need to get my tush in gear and get some things done.

I need to finish the DPA minutes and post them on the yahoogroup, the website and the LJ community. I need to make the campsite reservations for our May DPA trip. I need to get copies of the newsletter printed so Kris can take them to Campus Ministry tomorrow. I need to do some housework.

But it's dreary and my sinuses hurt. And this morning I realized that it has been just about a year since the last phone conversation with my ex. I'm going to be facing a series of one year anniversaries starting in May, and all of them were sad partings. I can't let myself get all maudlin though. Life goes on, and I still need to remain engaged in the here and now.

Kids, cats, dogs and grandkids can't be put on hold.

There is a dead mouse in the bathtub. I'm not kidding.

Ick! Ick! Ick!

Obviously a job for Tom when he gets up to get ready for work.

I'd like to know how the durn animal managed to get into the house. I am also curious about why the heck a mouse would come into a house with 9 cats and 2 dogs. No sense of smell? Suicidal? Stupid? And how many other "presents" will we find over the next few days? Infinity Ick!!!

Speaking of dogs, Josh got out through the gate yesterday and took off for a doggie adventure. He came back safely an hour later, but it is very fortunate for him that I didn't need a new rug.

Found this through Stumble Upon




The video is titled "14 Characteristics of Fascism" and the website is Stop Fascism Action Network.

And the funny thing is that I get very impatient with crossword puzzles. OTOH, my mother loved them and often tackled them with a pen.

You Are a Crossword Puzzle

You are well read, and you have a good head for remembering facts. You are a wordsmith. You have a way with words, and you're very literate. You are a mysterious person who enjoys dropping little clues every now and then.

Well, this is as good a battle cry as any. :-)

What Is Your Battle Cry?

Striding through the wasteland, wielding a piece of chainlink fence, cometh Zorya_thinks! And she gives a low cry: "For the love of beatings, I plunder like the world's mightiest bad-ass!!"

Find out! Enter username: Are you a girl, or a guy ?

created by beatings : powered by monkeys