It was a fantastic weekend, definitely one of the better ones I’ve had in recent times. My head is very foggy today as I didn’t get much quality rest last night. Also I got so much accomplished on the weekend that my brain has decided to take a vacation.

Spent 7 hours working outside on Saturday. Potted the herbs in the self-watering containers, planted one of the three raised beds with potatoes and strawberries after treating the wood with linseed oil, finished weeding between the paving bricks, and moved one of the two piles of unused bricks to an unseen location. Then our buddies showed up for a BBQ/Bioshock completion night. It was really wonderful and just a perfect day.

Sunday was spent playing Guild Wars with Jules and lazing around. My brain had shut off at this point and still hasn’t restarted. I think it’s because I took care of all the niggling thoughts by getting things done. It’s a strange sensation to not be constantly bombarded with thoughts.

Less than a week till Ivan’s here!

One of the funniest/most completely random things I can think of, and have been laughing at for years. You will find the explanation here.

I accidentally called my mother last night (I’ll get into this in just a minute) and she mentioned that she still checks this every day to see if maybe I had posted since the previous day, so today I upgraded all my plugins and the WordPress application itself so everything was up-to-date enough to work seamlessly. I’d been meaning to do this for months but have been so busy I haven’t prioritized it until just now. So here’s an update!

As I mentioned, my call to my mom was unintentional. I had called her for Mother’s Day on Sunday so her number was the last dialed on my phone. I recently bought a Sony Bluetooth headset to use with my iPhone for my bus journeys to and from work. Since it’s wireless, it has a power switch to turn it off, and since it’s meant to be synced to a phone, it also has a “answer phone” button. The two are roughly the same size and shape, but on opposite sides of the right ear piece. As you might guess by now, I hit the wrong button and it redialed the last called number. So we had a nice chat and at the same time I learned the merits of paying attention to which button I’m pushing. On a related note, the headphones are not that great, the sound quality is pretty terrible, and I get interference from what I believe is the fire station next to our house. I will probably invest in some better ones eventually, but they are okay for the time being. (I can never seem to find just the right pair of headphones, and this fact drives me absolutely insane.)

Speaking of family, Ivan will be here in a matter of days now (11 to be exact, and his room is finally fully-furnished!) and shortly after that my family will be visiting us in Seattle for the first time. We are very excited about both events and this will be a great way to kick off summer. We will certainly be getting a great deal of use of our brand new, serious-for-reals propane grill. We assembled it last night and gave it a try with some hot dogs, and were very happy with the results. I’m delighted to note we were able to get $100 off the thing by using our Amazon certificates we got for charging a considerable expense to that card, which was…

Plane tickets to France!

Sadly for the EU, the Euro has been tanking recently, but it was good for us as we got a fantastic deal. We will be in Villefranche-sur-Mer with Jules’ parents towards the end of October for about 2 weeks. I’m very excited and nervous about this trip, as I have never been to a non-English-speaking country before. Although I took French in high school, it’s been a long time and of course the regional dialect is different in the south of France, not to mention high school French is nothing like conversational French. At least for the most part I can read basic French, so I should be able to decipher signs and the like. Jules says his mum will likely make us go to the grocery store on our own just to stretch our lingual abilities. She is lovely and mean like that. :3 It should be fantastic!

Things have been a lot better at work recently. I finally am beginning to feel comfortable here, as if I am a real member of the team rather than someone on the fringes, as I have from the start. We had one major project which recently wrapped up that I was in charge of redesigning the entire user experience for, including all of the look and feel of the application as well as the placement of the page elements. I was given free reign to offer suggestions, which were taken to heart, and the client was very pleased. I feel like I’ve finally had a chance to prove what I am capable of and because of that will be given greater responsibility in the future. Additionally, we’ve recently hired on a new staff member who I have begun working closely with to develop a SharePoint practice in the company. Our personalities and working styles seem to mesh fairly well, so I no longer feel as isolated as I once did. I’ve also been going in an hour later and leaving an hour later, which has improved my alertness dramatically but has no negative impact on what I can get done during the day (no one shows up until after I do now, still!) I’d been worried about a crappy commute, but that hasn’t been as bad either, since more buses are running during rush hour. I’m glad I made that change.

On the home front, Jules has been working hard on his arcade cabinet front end. He has it mostly working for over 80 games, and now just has to record some gameplay videos for the previews. It’s looking great! I am almost finished with my Companion Cube blanket. I literally have half a round to do on the border and it will be completely done. I expect to have that up on Etsy by the end of the weekend! This has been a long time coming, as I expected to have it done in 3 months and now it’s been 5. Oh well, this always seems to happen, doesn’t it? I will probably take some time off from crocheting after this (I’ll try to anyway…I know myself and how I get when I have an idea I want to execute) so my wrist can heal. I’ve been wearing a wrist brace to bed every night, which has alleviated the majority of the pain I feel during the day, but I still have virtually no strength in the wrist, so I want to try to give myself a chance to recover before I go and ruin it again.

Recently I’ve been spending some of my weekends cleaning up the yard around the house. I got most of the dandelions out of the parking strip in the front yard but our 96-gallon yard waste container only had enough room for half of the weeds so it has remained half-done since then! I’ve been preparing the backyard for gardening and entertaining by cleaning out all the detritus and the weeds between the bricks (this year I left the moss though!) I cannot believe how many miniature pine trees are growing in the yard and it frightens me a bit to think about what would happen if we left them unchecked. I uprooted literally hundreds of them already, and there’s still more to go. I really want to spend a lot of time outdoors this summer since I feel absolutely robbed of last year’s summer due to unemployment and depression. I am determined to have a lush, successful garden and a beautiful yard all summer long.

Other things of note, our friend Whitney has gotten a sweet job with Double Fine so she is moving to San Francisco this week. We dropped by her place to get a Litter Robot which she was donating to our cause. The cats seem scared of it so far, but hopefully they will embrace its robotic charms and poop all over it. Which reminds me…a few weeks ago we discovered a secret stash of Emily pee in the closet under the stairs. When we opened it up, we unleashed an ungodly stench which we have been desperately trying to get rid of. Nothing so far has taken care of it fully, but I sincerely hope the combination of methods will yield some positive result eventually. She’s been pretty bad with that lately, which may be because Leela has been showing major dominance over her (and the rest of the cats.) There are a lot more fights than there used to be, in any case. Leelz has lost a lot of weight as well, so she can clean herself better, so maybe her self-esteem and confidence has gone up?

Our financial situation is stable now. This comes as a great relief to my sanity. I was finally able to open a Roth IRA with Vanguard, which was one of my goals for the year! We have all our credit cards paid off in full, and I’ve stopped taking every contract job that comes my way just to keep current. It feels really fantastic to be back into this position. It also feels nice knowing that we already have our France plane tickets paid for so we don’t have to save for that anymore either. Now we’re just free to pay back what we owe family members, keep current with bills, sock away some savings, and save for some major purchases in the near future. Jules and I keep a spreadsheet of “Wants for FABS” in conjunction with an Amazon wish list so we can plan things out in a reasonable way, rather than just telling ourselves, “sure, we can afford this, why not?” This has helped us stay on track.

One really worthwhile purchase we made awhile back was a NAS (network-attached storage) from Synology which has so many features I could barely describe them all to you! We store all our media files on there now (music, movies, tv shows, data) and use the Playstation 3 to play them across the network (gigabit), which essentially eliminates the need for a media PC (which is great, since Jules usurped that for use as his arcade PC for the time being!) The NAS is essentially its own computer, really! I thought the purchase was a good idea at the time, but now that I’ve lived with it for awhile I have changed my mind. It was an abso-freaking-lutely brilliant idea. I love being able to buy music at work and upload it directly to the NAS. It makes everything so much easier. This is really the solution we’ve been after from the start, but we just didn’t realize it.

Life has just been great lately! I am really happy, and have been making lots of positive changes to my life which improves its quality at each turn. I am feeling more fit, thanks to much pedaling away at the exercise bike and lots of outdoor work, so I am more confident in general. The house is still improving bit by bit as we fix up little things here and there (I love that part.) I am enjoying saving for large purchases before we buy them as it makes the acquisition of said items that much more special. I hope the summer continues to be as awesome as it appears to be headed towards!

Beginning today, I am planning to bring a daily digest of my Twitter posts over to this site every day so those of you who don’t keep up with Twitter can see what I’m up to. I don’t post exclusively on this site nearly enough these days so this might help keep things current.