Year: 2007

The weather is perfect. Low humidity, sunny, mid-eighties. Ripe peaches and farm-fresh sweet corn. This is the best weekend of the summer.

Hiked through the woods.

Went into a stream.

Had a picnic lunch at the park.

Goofed around.

We also managed to pet a chicken named Marcus, but I didn’t get a picture of that.

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I’m a practical girl. No make-up, no frills. It comes from the engineer in me. If it works, there’s no need to make it pretty. So when I needed to place markers for stitches in my work, I used the plain plastic stitch markers. Nothing fancy, worked just fine and if I lost them, no big deal.

A few months ago, Hattie gave me my first set of beaded stitch markers. They looked so nice as I turned them around in my palm, the light scattering off the surface. I had looked at stitch markers before and I never thought about buying them, I had a perfectly good system worked out already.

But now that I’ve knit a few projects using the beaded markers, I don’t think I can go back to plain plastic. Every time I reach one of the beaded markers, I smile to myself and then slip it off the left needle and put it onto the right one. Then I shake it all a little bit and my jewelry wearing project seems to be happy.

Well. I’m offically down to 4 bikes now. Road, Full Suspension, Time Trial, Hardtail. I sold my Urban/Freeride bike today. That’s fine. I wasn’t really all that attached to it anyways. It was just my campus commute bike. I really should sell my Hardtail also, except that I’m emotionally attached to it, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it. It’ll probably just sit in my office gathering dust. Sadness.

Of course, next week, the stable will be back up to 5 when my folding bike is delievered. Yea haw!

Went to the DMV today and got MD driver’s licenses, got the cars registered and filled out organ donor cards and voter registration. Woo hoo! Oh yes, and Edda peed on Jeremy while he was at the window conducting official business. Shhh! Don’t tell anyone that Jeremy was covered in pee in a public place.

Finished my handwarmers, just in time for August!

Wow. Okay. I guess I haven’t stepped into a bank in years, btu this Washington Mutual branch that I went to today had and interesting setup. Instead of a row of counters with bulletproof glass and small windows to pass things thru, all the tellers had little island kiosks throughout the building. If you needed cash, they’d give you a reciept with a code on it, and you’d have to go to the cash dispensing machine to pick it up. I guess it cuts down on errors and such, but man, it felt weird.

Kids are both sick today. Everyone stayed in their PJs and had ginger ale.

For those of you who are watching the Tour. Who’s going to win? It’s still wide open.

We’ll know more after the TT in 3 days. I’m going to peg Kloden for the overall tho. He put in an impressive performance in the prologue TT and will try to limit his losses in the mountains. They’d all be fools to let Rasmussen go in the Pyreness tho.

And Contador from Discovery is looking really strong too. It’s amazing this guy’s acceleration on a climb. He puts in a move and just goes away from everyone. If he can do that twice on the mountain top finishes at Plateau de Baille and and Col d’Aubisque, then I think he can make up the 3 minute deficit. He needs to limit his losses in the TT tho.

Oh also just for kicks I saw this stage from a past Tour:

Now look at the time from Amboise to Blois. The pros finished that in about 45-50 minutes. Now Ted and I, didn’t quite ride that route, but we did travel from Amboise to Blois and we did it in about 3 hours. 😛

I was downtown trying to sign up Edda for some benefits from the county’s disability services agency. It used to be grungy and dark and deserted when I was a kid, now it’s all fancy, you have to pay for parking and there are hip condos and look! there’s a bar. Who knew there were enough bar goers around here to support a Gordon Biersch?

And speaking of benefits, there are a number of agencies around here that help out with equipment purchases, respite care, etc, but they aren’t well publicized and I have to hunt and peck to find them.

Tonight I hung out at my friend, Jaching’s place in Mountain View. I had done some tech support for her, and was going to do some more tonight, but she got her problem fixed yesterday. Anyways, I still went over to her place, where she fed me dinner, and for the second time, she made these amazing blueberry muffins. I met Jaching’s new roommate and later on, her old roommate and her boyfriend came and joined us. It was a fun night talking about dating, men, women, with a muffin in one hand and a wine glass in the other.

But there was a funny moment when we realized that all 5 of us had met each other over the internet. I met Jaching over Match, Jaching and her roommies found each other off of Craigslist. And her roommate’s boyfriend was off of Match too. There was a moment of like, “Oh wow. Damn.” … and then we were back to talking normally. Laff.

Michelle, a friend of ours from grad school, flew in today from sunny CA to attend a conference and she came over for dinner. One nice thing about living in the Washington DC area as opposed to Austin, Taiwan, upstate NY or Singapore, is that a lot of people we know often come by on business or pleasure and they stop by to see us! It’s nice.

Here we are posting sentry for the school bus.

We didn’t miss the bus today. Woo hoo! 1 point goes to suburban mom!

Also, I’ve been slowly clearing out the overgrown garden in front of the driveway. I’m using small 2-inch hand clippers. It’s suppose to be a zen/meditation thing or else I’m just crazy.

Before:

After:

I stumbled onto another nest – also motherless. I’m waiting a bit before I remove it because I’m just sentimental in that way.

Job-wise today. I’m trying to apply for various government jobs and I found one that I might or might not qualify for depending on how much I sell myself and my previous work experience. Every government job is listed online and there is a corresponding phone number to call if you have questions. Now this job that I’m thinking about applying for has a one-year training component and there are many vacancies and so I called asked her very general questions like – is it competitive? How many people apply and how many positions are there? She said that she couldn’t give out that kind of information. Then I asked when the training would start, mainly so I would know what kind of time frame I was looking at – you know if they said the training started in September, I would know that if I hadn’t heard by the last week of August, blah, blah, blah… Anyways, she was also not allowed to give that information out as well. Sigh, those HR people. Always so helpful.

Wow. Okay, so I’m taking a swimming class in prep for my pending tri attempt. Honestly, I’ve gotten decent at the freestyle. I manage to keep my head underwater for most of the stroke. I breathe out thru my nose so I don’t get a pool full of water in my nasal passages. I can tilt my head a little bit to get some air. Tho I do need to work on the path my hand goes thru the water, I can confidently say that I’ll probably make it in my swim. Breaststroke not bad. Backstroke I can do.

But today we tried to learn butterfly, and man oh man. it is hard. Dolphin kick? um… yeah. I just didn’t get it. Your arm motion is supposed to be exactly the same as freestyle, but I find the timing of the kick and the pull to be a bit weird. I guess I can safely say that I suck in the butterfly.