Busy as a Bee

Suprise...Surprise....Things got busy again and the blog suffers.  We've also been having some internet and computer issues at home which has prevented me from posting in the evenings.  So what's new??

1. The well truck is on our lot and ready to start drilling.  Its been there since the 21st and there's nothing more than a 18" starter hole (at least as of Tuesday evening).  I'm not sure why the guy hasn't started drilling yet.  One would think that you wouldn't leave your truck unattended on someone's property for that long.  Hopefully they will really start drilling soon!
2. The septic tests are complete.  They came back about as good as you can get it, so we're definitely happy with that.
3. We've been trying to figure out where to place the house on the lot.  I look at the lot and how the land is layed out and I can visualize where the house should be such that we use the best part of the lot for the backyard.  Rich tries to measure everything and wants to try to line the house up with the property lines (everything has to be straight you know... ;-)  ).  Thankfully, our builder is of the same philosphy as me.  The house doesn't have to be "straight" to anything, its just how it looks on the land.  Straightness is just perception when you actually get back into the woods.  We'll figure it out once we get the well drilled and tested and we start clearing the trees out a bit.
4. Because it sometimes takes us FOREVER to make a decision, we've been trying to look at things like siding color and wood floor choices now.  We figure if we can narrow it down to a few choices now, then we have a better shot of making a decision later.
5. We did have an open house last weekend.  We had one woman who came in and loved the house and yard.  The only problem is that she's definitely into Feng Shui.  So she was concerned about the direction of the house relative to the sun and that there were other houses "higher" than ours.  She had some WEIRD comments due to the Feng Shui aspect.  If she's going to be that picky, she might as well move to Mt. Everest and build her house there.  Then she can have it face whatever direction she wants and she'll be the highest house.  Nedless to say...we don't think we'll get an offer from her.
6. I'll be traveling for work a lot in the next few weeks.  I have a trip to Maine from June 8th to June 11th.  Then I have a trip over to the UK from June 13th to June 19th.  When I get home ont he 19th...I'm going to be SO glad to be home.  I won't want to travel for another year...but I already know that I have to take another trip in the fall.

I think that hits all the big things...at least for now.  There's another issue that I'm "grappling" with right now, but that's just having to make another career decision.  Nothing major there. ;-)  I'll elaborate more in a bit once I get my thoughts straight.

Hope everyone else is enjoying the summer weather we've been having!

Another Friday...

Despite my best intentions to try to post everyday, this week has been awful!  I looked at my blog this morning and I haven't posted anything in an entire week.

This week has been somewhat crazy because I had visitors in from our manufacturing plant in Maine.  They were up for a quality workout from Tuesday until yesterday.  I had no free time between 7:30am and about 4pm, at which time the manufacturing folks left for the end of their day and I spent from 4 until about 5:30 trying to catch up on all the emails that I didn't get to during the day.  The manufacturing folks were hourly people and since we were starting at 7:30am, they were done with their 8 hour day at 4pm and there was nothing we could do to keep them here later...they were gone.  Sometimes I think it must be nice to be able to work your 8 hours and just leave.  That doesn't EVER happen for me.  As it stands, its 11:30 on Friday morning, I've worked more than 40 hours at this point, and I can guarantee that I won't be leaving the office before 3:30 or 4 this afternoon.  Oh well.....

So things have been exciting for us this week in terms of the land we're buying.  The land is contingent upon a well being dug (and getting good water).  The well driller originally told us he had a month and a half backlog and he wouldn't get to us until sometime in late June.  However, because our builder has worked with the well driller lots of times previously (and more in the future) we were moved up the list and we're getting our well in next week! ;-)  Yay, Todd (our builder)!  We're pretty excited and hopefully we'll get a good flow rate and the water won't have any weird bugs and junk in it.

Monday we're meeting with Todd to review where to put the driveway and he's going to stake out where the house and driveway should be.  We plan to do a lot of the clearing ourselves, so once we know where things will be (and that the well is good) we'll start spending our time up there cutting trees down.

On the quilting front, I finished all 120 HST's for Shine on Bayou Cane and I'm starting on the QSTs.  I'll have some pictures this weekend of the sections already completed on the quilt.  I also have to start planning another baby quilt for a friend is who is due around November.  Any suggestions on patterns??

End of the Week

I'm always glad when Friday finally rolls around because it usually means that I have two full days ahead of me that R and I can do what we would like to do.  However, things have been pretty busy lately and I wonder how it got to be Friday already!  Not that its a bad thing...just kind of surprising that its Friday already.

Yesterday was garbage day again.  And you guessed it...it was windy!  ;-)  Garbage cans strewn all over the streets (thankfully without the garbage in them) made the drive through the neighborhood a little "difficult".  At least someone (probably my MIL) put our garbage can and recycling bin right up next to the house where it was protected from the wind.

I've been SLOWLY making my way through squaring up 120 half-square triangles (HSTs) for "Shine on Bayou Cane".  Somehow it takes MUCH longer than expected to square up those little buggers.  I've definitely spent more than an hour doing it and I'm only about 1/3 of the way done.  Maybe I'm slow at cutting, or it may just be my engineering tendency to get it JUST RIGHT.  Eventually I will get them all squared up and be able to start sewing the next step on the project.  I'm just trying to enjoy the process right now and not really feel pressured to get it all done really quickly.

I'm not sure how much posting I'll be doing this weekend as we're celebrating Mother's Day on Saturday (yeah - I know...a day early) and we're meeting with our builder to figure out what we need to do to get a test well dug on our land that we bought.  Hope everyone has a good weekend!

Oops - Updated

Late yesterday, R went to get the tires changed and oil change on his car.  He walked into the dealership and explained what needed to be done with the car, and then commented that the key fob "stopped working".  They didn't ask any questions and he didn't volunteer the information that it stopped working AFTER it went through the wash.  So we got a new key fob free of charge. 

I couldn't help but laugh when he told me the story because something similar happened to me in college.  When I went to college, we were advised to get a battery backup system for my PC to make sure I wouldn't lose any valuable school work if we lost power.  One of the mornings during the first month of school, I was rushing to get ready and couldn't find an open outlet for my hair dryer.  Without really thinking, I plugged it into the battery backup since it had open outlets.  The hair dryer ran for a few minutes and then I heard a little pop and it cut out.  I figured it was the hair dryer, but then the battery backup started beeping.  Because the hair dryer pulls so much more current, it fried the circuits in the battery backup and it wouldn't work.  A few days later, I went to Office Max to return it and get a new one and all the store asked was whether it worked or not.  I said, no it didn't work (didn't mention that it stopped working after plugging my hair dryer into it), and they replaced it for me....free of charge. 

Now....I did read online that it shouldn't have fried the circuits by putting the hair dryer on there, it should have just popped the safety circuit and stopped working.  So there really was something wrong with it, but with the combination of the battery backup and the key fob...it was a little something that put a smile on my face.

Just remember this little story though...don't go plugging in anything that pulls a big current (like irons) into battery backups for computers!  Especially if you use something to protect the electronic circuitry on your sewing machines!

Oops!

Sunday was a pretty busy day for us.  R mowed the lawn while I was at the grocery store and then we both spent most of the morning tending to our flowers (fixing the obelisk, fertilizing flowers, watering roses, pulling weeds).  We managed to shower just before lunch and then in the afternoon, we took a ride up with R's sister, her husband and her daughter, Allie, to our "expensive pile of dirt" where we plant to build our house.

Before we went up there, we didn't know if we were riding with R's sister or not, so R put his wallet, keys and cell phone in his pants pockets.  We had a great time hiking around the property and got home all sweaty and icky again.  Off came the sticky clothes and thrown into a pile in the laundry room. 

Later in the evening, R wanted me to wash the pile of clothes just so they weren't sitting there.  Now...normally I search through R's pockets because who knows what I'll find in there, but this time I didn't because I saw him empty the pockets when we came home.  So everything went through the washer and then got put into the dryer.  We kept hearing this funny banging noise from the dryer, but just thought it was the waistband hitting the side of the dryer or something.

Well, just before bed, R decided to gather up all his stuff for the next morning.  All of a sudden he says "I think I know what that banging was"....sure enough, in the pants pocket was his car keys...with the little electronic key fob.  We pushed the little buttons...nothing from the car.  At least the key itself still works, but now we'll have to get a new key fob.  We even checked to see if we could get the battery out of it to see if it was just the battery, but we think the whole thing will need to be replaced.  Needless to say, R was in a bit of a foul mood after finding that out last night.  On the good side, he's going to the dealer today to get his snow tires taken off, so hopefully they'll be able to replace it and it won't be too expensive.

Stash Busting 2010 - Week 18

Its been a while since I posted for the stash busting effort, mostly because I was on a mini-hiatus from blogging.  But during that time I have gotten some quilting done.  I finished up the Sixties Charm quilt.  This is the first quilt that I quilted on my mid-arm machine (Viking MegaQuilter).  It came out pretty well I think for the first quilt.

This past week I've spent most of my time pressing and cutting fabric for the next quilt.  Its from Judy Laquidara's book Weekend Quilts.  Sorry about the picture being a little fuzzy, I think the batteries on the camera were dying.

So here's the stash report

Used this Week: 8.43 yards
Used Year to Date: 25.23 yards

Added this Week: 0 yards
Added Year to Date: 0 yards

Net Used for 2010: 25.23 yards

Wow!  I have over 25 yards used this year and nothing bought.  I'm doing pretty good so far!