Mostly it was hold your camera/phone up in the air, snap it and pray.


Most of my pictures were pictures of someone else taking a picture...

Hola - Been a little while.

My first meeting as president of the condo board went alright. Mostly because I kept us on task. I can tell I'm going to have to be patient with an owner or two who will "sing the song of their people" over and over. Same tune too. The other big task is getting used to my gmail account and the condo board's gmail account.

Tomorrow is the Seahawk parade and even in this, the HR department is torquing me off with a unique ability of taking something simple and heartfelt and stomping the spontaniety out of it. Our HR will let us go but strongly "encourage" us (encourage with an underline in the email) to wear our t-shirts with our logos. Wrong on so many levels:

1.) This is a Seahawk thing, not an us thing (you might remember that I work for an non-profit with a Way at the end.) celebrating the Seahawks.

2.) Its lunch hour. Are you going to tell us when to eat also?

2.) its going to be 20F. Even me from Wisconsin, ain't no way I'm going to standing out there with just a t-shirt. Not with our health insurance. I'm layering and wearing a coat and that coat will be closed.

For frugalistas only, because I just bet this entry title is a magnet for weird. Not that this isn't weird, but back out before you are disappointed.

Careful readers of this blog might know that I work for a large non-profit. This is special event money season - where we get a fair amount of cash and coin. After hoisting several bags of coins to the auditors I said, "hey if you see any interesting coins, I'll trade."

2 days later we found our first silver dime. Happy to swap a dime from my wallet for that dime.

Ooooh, I'm going to heck.

You might know that I love following space flights. Perhaps you've heard that Voyager 1 reached interstellar space. What you might not have known is that it reached it about a year ago ... some measurements seemed to tell scientists they were there, some didn't and that's what caused the confusion. Its not like there was a big ol' sign like you see on the interstate.

So it seems to be with financial freedom. One kind of thinks that if they had $xM, then yes. But really, who knows? You could be there or several years out.

The raise kicked in, but I don't think its particularly enough. I'm going to back down my 403B contributions - they will still be quite high, and I will easily get all the match.

This evening I also got a letter for another vaccine study. I had a good experience with the previous one, and the payment for participating is quite nice ($540). I think I will collect more info.

Tomorrow I get paid (actually its the 15th, but we get paid the first business day beforehand). HR assured us that the raise starts this paycheck. 3%.

The timing is good - I have about 10 days to figure out whether I should back down my 403B contributions.

Seattle Greek fest this weekend. Time to stock up on good olive oil.

Yesterday I got a good haul in the Coinstar machine. Plenty of Canadian, which suits me fine because I might go up in the next few years. When I do, and I have a nice coffee, I will think fondly of the Coinstar machine.

My intimate emergency fund is growing - its at $10.54 and its been two months. I might not be logging my found money in, but I have been keen on finding it.

First off, I'm taking it relatively slow on the backsplash. Got what I want to do, am planning it meticulously, did my jury stick measurements, got the tile samples (which really look GREAT and will be the icing on the cake) to do the grout study.

But the pleasant surprise was a tiny-ish refund to the tune of $174. It came from the bank - apparently they have you pay just a hair too much to provide a little extra cushion for the escrow. After about 6 months, everybody gets into a rhythm, and the cushion gets refunded and my mortgage payment dropped by about $10/payment. Helpful.

Things are settling down fiscally, so I'm getting back in the groove, in a couple of different ways. I've reactivated my tip box at work, so I'm showing that some love. FYI, I have a little decorative box at work - the "tip box" - that I throw change, small bills in. When there's an office collection, I pull from my tip box, but in general every month I deposit what's in there.

6 weeks ago I was 175 lb naked and now I'm 170. Gym bug has not caught on yet, I'm just walking and always taking the stairs up and down. Since the gym is next door to work and a branch is two blocks from my house, it does require a lot of avoidance.

Looking at my net worth it has dropped a bit to the high 500K. If I hadn't bought the condo and hadn't remodeled the kitchen I would have been 70K up. You can't think that way, though. Money is a means not an end. I'm enjoying the end point and I know I will for a good long time.

Still no call from the court, so I have to assume that the jury I was an alternate for is still deliberating. I'll see if there is a way to search cases online. I was a little disappointed not being able to deliberate last week. I'm sure the jury that remains probably envies me.

Right now I'm relaxing at home, but I do have some goals for the day this week. Goal #1 is to catch up on my house cleaning - which I am doing 30 min or so at a time by using mini-projects. For instance, I scrubbed out the tub out yesterday afternoon. Ah, heaven! Goal #2, unfortunately is work related - performance evaluations. One more section for me to write on my own eval, and I scheduled the meeting for my direct report who went on family leave.

Goal #3 is to finish my commission. So far, everything is glued - I stick the mosaic onto a board using thinset, then grout. Grout cures for a week and voila. But so far, it looks good... Paulette, the finished piece will appear near you!


Sunday I hit the mother lode. I was at a yard sale, looking, and I talked with the owner who told me that she had a lot of stuff due to "projects". I mentioned my mosaics. Turns out that she used to do stained glass and asked me if I could use stained glass. Could I! . I bought what I think was about 10 lbs of glass for $5, it was a nice variety too. You can see the stained glass above and below the numbers.

Other things - I finished by change finding for the third year in a row (yes, oddball me I started in mid-july). $90.35. Thank you loose change losers. And yesterday, I found my 6th silver dime for my precious metal portfolio.

No interesting deaths that I know about - nobody had Andy Griffin, or Kitty Wells. 4 people in our group have Bashir al-Assad.

So lets see...

Thursday I checked out a free talk by a fine art mosaic artist at a little rent space. I'll be filing that spot away for next winter - you can go and grout there. It turns out that Seattle is a small hotbed of mosaickers, so I'm going to tap into that.

Friday we put down the deposit for the space in Buenos Aires. At least according to the pictures, it looks sweet. Its a high-end four bedroom, four bath house with other amenities. The cost per person per day for our group is about $49. The only issue is that the place is fairly far away from the center of downtown, the history, and the sites, but it is close to the subway. Right now we have the airline tix, the living quarters...now to think about what we will do for 14 days. I say to give the guys an argentine grilling class.

Saturday was a double hit: the Greenwood Yard Sale and ticket to the Rat City Rollergirls. A co worker skated with them but is now retiring, so we all wanted to see her skate one last time. I had a fair amount of luck at the yard sales - DJ friend and wife are expecting, so I got 4 baby outfits for $10. I went a bit pricey because 3 of the outfits were new (one of them still had the tags), and all looked cute, clean, and were of different ages. I also got 2 sets of outdoor glasses for $2, a grout float for .20, a chisel for .10, and a DVD player for $2. Normally I wouldn't take the chance, but our DVD player is acting up, and the player I got was tidy and the remote was clean and tidy also...so it looked like a good gamble. If its not, well, 2 DVD players will be donated. Most of what saved me money was taking a picture of interesting things, rather than actually buying them.

Best thing I saw was a complete 3 inch telescope


Funniest thing I saw was this from the tool sale


Best blast from the past were these TV tubes in a bucket. It so reminded me of when the TV repairman made house calls, came in with his case full of these tubes all lined up.


The Rollergirls game was tremendous fun for $12. Not quite sure whether it was 'real', but then again, all sports are performance. There was a lot of humor if you looked at the skate names, skate numbers, referees.

We saved a bit by knowing the right bus line. Sneakily, we parked about 1.5 mi from our house, took the direct bus from there, then took the bus back to the car. Unfortunately for my diet, the arena food was expensive and not in keeping with 555 principles. . I got a chance to see what the sports setting of my camera did.

Coworker, conferring:


What the action generally looked like. The skatenames were a hoot...stuff like 357 Semi-Automatic, Ann R. Kissed (say it out loud). 30 in this picture was Shovey Chase. One of the referees was called Hanging Chad.


Glad that the referee was secure in his, um... referee-ness. This was the second game, so the skaters were different.


And Sunday, we had two hits in the death bet. The leader is still ahead , but the rest of the pack has now spread out.

I left work early this afternoon. For me that's 4:30pm. There was a little whiff of tear gas in the air. I did manage to get out before the total transit snarl up. The protesters held the bus up for about 5 minutes before we got through. Not many people waiting until north of downtown.

TV cameras aplenty along Second Ave at noon.

DH left work - he's a seasonal temp for the IRS - early also. Matter of fact, that office shut down as soon after the first wave of window breaking happened. We were south and a bit west of the high end commercial corridor that got hit (again - those very windows were hit during WTO).

The new trick of the season was the sign used - party on the top (the sign itself), metal knob business end at the base of the stick. Protestor whacked windows with the business end of sign.

Fun fact 1:
The two accounts comprising my 403B are FINALLY going merge sometime this week. Everything should be done by the 1st week of May. Rumor had it that it was delayed because HR had to find one ex-coworker, get him to decide and sign and if necessary, get him to create an IRA somewhere else.

Time to watch daily, and see where the money goes. Its been awhile since I decided, but I think I'm having it go as a very big contribution. After it goes, then I figure whether I should rebalance.

Fun fact 2:
Got a piece of mail regarding my old shares in M&I which got sold to Bank of Montreal (BMO). Apparently some shareholders are forming a class action suit, charging M&I CEO with collusion with BMO. I'll be watching that with interest. Methinks the results and $2 will get me a coffee.

Work has gotten a little quieter and I'm back to the two main projects. Still a little challenging but at least I've returned to sanity. Right now I'm taking a few days off - Friday, today, Tuesday, Wednesday. I didn't really plan on taking off Easter, and out here in Seattle, there isn't a complete shutdown for Easter holiday.

I've reading a lot of spending diaries. Apologies that I'm not participating. I do feel quiet keenly that as soon as I'm away from work, I spend much more. When I'm working, my daily costs are basically one bought coffee ($2), and whatever daily groceries ($10 - $20) I go for. Starting on Friday, my spending jumped to a good $50/day with bought breakfast, bought entertainment, and bought lunch. Out and about, I do find more loose change ... but that doesn't keep up with the spending. .

This last Friday, I used a friends and family coupon and saw the Gauguin exhibit. Still $18; however it was cheaper than buying the plane ticket to Paris. Plenty of Gauguins - Breton ones, Paris ones, Martinique ones, 1st trip to Tahiti ones, 2nd trip to Tahiti ones - but the real stars of the show were the war clubs, craft boxes, sculpture and tattoo work of Tahiti and New Zealand which was his source. The other lookers were pretty mellow - it was senior Friday. Some looked like they could have seen Gauguin himself.

Weather has finally improved, so I got caught up on grouting three pieces. I showed lawyer friend a picture of the piece I made for him for his housewarming. I was relieved that he was thrilled with it.

I'm back up into the 167-168 range. I'm in the process of going through my food diary and seeing what I can change in my diet, looking for triggers, just looking for patterns. I did this this morning with a coffee sitting on a bench overlooking the Ship Canal. Very relaxing.

Oh yes, no one had Mike Wallace this year. I had Mike Wallace last year. As I've said repeatedly, I'm good at picking people, its the year I'm crappy at.

Work is easing up a little. My boss, the director of the department, is on leave and the biggest project she had me on was developing the department budget. Got it done today which means I can finally, finally go back to digging myself out of the swamp of work.

I had a number of interesting experiences this week. Wednesday I went to the pre-construction open house to the Northgate light rail station. Our quick way to get home from I5 is going to be used as a staging area. No surprise and sacrifices have to be made. The big controversy is more parking versus a pedestrian bridge coming from the community college. Its building up to be a choice between one or the other - depends on whether you think the cars are coming from the north or to the west.

I left soon after a 70 yr old woman complained that the station will block her view of the Olympics. A quick calculation is telling that by the time the station is built, the view is going to be the least of her concerns. To be fair, this project is not made for her particularly. Its not even made for me, who is pushing 50 next month. 9 years from now I'm thinking of retirement, not commuting after all.

The next wacky thing this week is finding out that Saturday a

Again, got paid a couple of days ago.

Turns that in addition to the 403B, we had (in the process of 'had-ing') a 403A. HR is merging the two so we are in the process of deciding what to do with our money in our 'As'. Choices are:

Roll it into the B
Roll it into another deferred-tax bucket
Cash out.

Since I don't like paying extra in taxes and penalties, cashing out is not an option. I picked rolling it into B.

Put 58$ of several months of tip box squeezings into savings. I was going to do it physically, but the ATM line at the grocery store didn't make it worth it. So I pocketed the money and moved $58 into savings. No line there.

Congrats, Paulette. You pulled ahead in dead pool today.

You come home at the end of the day, throw your keys in the bowl and set your groceries down and you remember:

Hey, I got paid!

Such was me yesterday. Work is easing up a little but there is another big rut roh. Data is off, and while it is not my fault booking what we got and officially how was I to know ... well, I feel responsible. Especially when the COO is asking. Especially as I got a Kindle gift card as a thank you about it Monday.

And I spent it already. On a couple of e-books on Argentina and Buenos Aires, and another paper book on mosaicking.

Tonight Coinstar was my friend. I passed by a couple of people using it, bought something, then passed by it (unoccupied), and picked up the three coins the couple left. One was a 1963 silver dime. Its the fifth silver dime I've found (and I keep those). Last time I checked, the silver in a silver dime goes for $2.

Talked to a co worker who was a font of mis-information about investing. I don't think I'm going to bother. He did tell me about the old gomers who gave him the advice. Wonder what kind of retirement those gomers have.

Can't wait for Sunday, to kick back with the Duvall friends, some homemade pizza and a bottle of Mikes. Too bad I don't have a dog in the fight - critiquing the ads will have to do.

Again, insanely busy, which is normal ... my January is like all my other Januarys in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 blah blah blah.

Lately though I've been excited (yay) and then there's one little hitch so I have to "rut roh" and eat a crow drumstick. This menopause thing is getting to me; I used to have a mind like a steel trap. Now it seems to work like a Venus fly trap.

A couple days ago I found a dollar bill, yesterday a wheat penny.

Tax paperwork is trickling in - I have to double check, but I seem to only be missing a couple of Div 1099s. Get those, and I can see what the lay of the land is.

But another yay this evening. DH and I have plans to go to Argentina in September. At least that is the plan. Several other couples are involved - the plan is to rent a house in Buenos Aires and use it as a launch pad. Fingers crossed that it works out.

Yeah, this time I'm one of those Seattle snow weenies. I left work early, caught the bus, got home before the sun set. In my salad days I would have been out there snickering, but these days ... I'm not going to be the problem.

If I wake up to a couple of inches and more snow, doesn't matter whether the office is open or not, I'm staying home. I've got plenty of PTO and I can't imagine that any "fire" at work couldn't wait a day or two.

Of course, nobody had better die tomorrow. Wikipedia is going dark that day due to a protest on SOPA. Also get any lolcat craving out of the way today, they will be dark also.

I thought about putting Paula Deen on my list. Even tasting that cooking will get you in trouble (you have to taste quite a bit and the often-ness of it probably keeps you craving that stuff), and keeping it secret for 3 years just says denial to me.

Spent $14 getting enough food to last a couple of days,

It turns out that the twilight zone moment was a practical joke pushed too far by a Customer Service rep. I mentioned it to the Customer Service rep's supervisor to chat with him a bit. The way to have played it was, "yes it was a joke, isn't it funny?" and left it at that. Comedy is a fine line ... and that line is very fluid. When things ease up a bit, he could have played it further but as it is ... show a little restraint.

(Yes, restraint is mighty rich when you are MCing a death bet, but there it is.)

Got home and opened an offer from Chase. If you start a checking account (no doubt with direct deposit), Chase will give you a 200$ gift card. Yippee! Yeah, no.

Collected two more forms for my taxes. W4 and a 1099 from ING.

We are all waiting for snow apparently this weekend. French toast hankerings have begun.

So far, healthy as a horse, so I'm working like a horse at work. You might remember that book pledges/work data at a non-profit that rhymes with "you don't say". I had a MOMENT tho at the end of the day.

It started off from the generic Customer Service inbox email asking both a co worker and I we should book a 2.8M gift, read below. 2.8M, huh? Okay ...

Then you read the email. We've been trying to contact you, yadda yadda yadda, and we will give 2.8M if you give us $145. And full of typos.

Is this a joke? I wrote.

Received an email back: I called them (yikes, you can't be serious! I counted the digits and it was an INTERNATIONAL number), the money was to resolve an issue that we had in the past, and I talked with accounting and they were wondering how to book it.

Oh boy ...

Co worker, who was with me on this, told the emailer to take it to the COO.

Emailer: fine, but I'm planning how to spend my raise.

Of course we got word from the Customer Service supervisor that it was a scam, but man, I don't know where to begin. I'm fairly certain, although not 100% sure, that it is a practical joke. (the other option is complete idiocy) Its just that this is NOT the time of year to toy with us. Its just not appreciated!

I'm almost done with the deciding about who to give and what to get them for Xmas, and with the exception of one item, I am done with shopping for the hardest recipient: MIL. Since she now has a Nook, I aimed for a couple of BN gift cards hidden in a homemade cheese-based gift basket. Collection phase is over, wrapping, packing and shipping remains.

Noticed that two of my dividend stocks WEC and SYY are raising their dividend. WEC especially is nice - 6 cent per share increase. To cheer me up because stock prices are so volatile, I totaled the dividend payments I would get if I stopped now and decided not to re-invest. $260.

Last night I lost my ATM card at the grocery store. Today I appeared at the credit union, bright eyed and managed to get a new card in about 15 minutes. I'll miss that (the CU at the grocery store is leaving as of Monday). I rarely lose stuff, so it was fortunate I got it all over with. I mentioned their move and the guy who got me the new card told me that they will keep one of the two ATMs, but will remove it as soon as another bank or CU goes into that space.

Finished the first week w/o our boss, who is on maternity leave. One down, twenty five more to go.

Have to get it off my flat-ish chest. HR asked about comments to the performance evaluation ... which is already fraught. I mentioned that the math is kind of gooby on it. A column says %, and you have to put in a decimal. For example, if you wanted the 50% thingee, you don't put in 50%, you have to put it in as 0.5. Its small, but dammit either fix the math or fix the column so you're warned that you have to put in the decimal.

HR minion mentioned that others mentioned it. Fine. Then came the back-handed slap that the HR minion mentioned to the HR VP (who came in late and asked for a summary) that "some managers were challenged by it".

I am not challenged this at all. Repeat: I AM NOT CHALLENGED BY MATH. And I said so. Don't get me wrong, I love a good "challenge", but I was very insulted by the word as used. I was tempted to snark that this gooby math was HR's challenge, not mine. Instead, I mentioned that if you want to present data of any sort, all the units have to be comparable. Basic science. Its like having one column in dollars and another in pennies.

Yet another skirmish between HR and me.

This afternoon we got a missive from HR. Instead of having 2 accounts (retirement, 403B), all participants will have just 1 account (403B). I think that the retirement account is what our non-profit gives you, and the 403B is your contributions. It takes us 6 years to vest, and the vest appears only in retirement. We were assured that the monies will merge rather than the retirement disappears. We'll see. If its true, its a lot easier to asset allocate or rebalance only 1 account. Could well be a super sneaky way to alter matching, vesting, and its a way to hide when the non-profit places the money into the account.

I had a nice lunch time conversation with several temp staff helping our non-profit fundraise. I learned the loss leaders for a six or seven different grocery stores, and everybody knew that all the weekly specials changed on Wednesday. Lately I've been eating an avocado for lunch; found out that they were 88 cents each.

I've been keeping up with the tip box and have been still finding change. I'm again not feeling the urge to put on a costume this Halloween, but there are going to be a couple of potlucks for it - I can be festive in that way.

The raise wasn't too shabby. I think I will increase the savings transactions to compensate before I get too used to it.

I looked at my own Chase rewards and I've activated the 5%. One of the categories this month was charitable giving. I'm toying with the idea of giving by credit card vs giving by payroll deduction...work the system a little bit.

My boss, a co worker, and I went on a work field trip this afternoon. Over the walk there, I picked up a nickel and penny ... so I was busted on my change finding habits. My boss got a kick out of it, though.

But the real fun will begin tomorrow morning - the pay raise kicks in this next paycheck.

I can't get too used to the extra though. I turn 50 in April, so come January I have to think about pursuing that 403B catchup. Scary, but I thought pushing my 403B to the max was scary. (For you who haven't thought about this deeply - everybody else in the world - I got an inheritance, which is taxable. I hiked up the 403B to get the tax break, figuring that when the taxable money was spent, I'd drop the 403B to a more reasonable level. Still have plenty of taxable money.)

Waiting for the weekend!

It turns out that I use my electronic stuff just fine for about 9 or so years. Back sometime in 1994- 1995, I got my first "laptop" - a subnotebook brick. 386chip ... I was riding high ... and at the time, the internet was mostly usenet so we all grunted and got on with typing. My critter did suffer from Y2K ... all my files were written in 1900.

By 2003- 2004 DJ friend (and co worker) had a friend selling Dell laptops. I was a hair nervous buying from him, but as of yesterday, it was what I went online with, and it still works today. It is, however, a good 5-6 pounds. In other words, these days its a tank.

The night I blogged that I was trying out the netbook from DJ friend I wrote the check for $250 - includes the DVD/CD drive, and a wireless mouse. In return, I loaned him a 12 year old copy of Word 2000 for his wife's job search. In return of that, DJ friend's business partner who does sound mastering needs a laptop to run the mastering software and tanks work well. Since the laptop was an old friend, I didn't want to just toss it and storing it in the attic was wasteful too. Giving the laptop to him was a perfect solution! ...And it was 8-9 years so I got a good cost to use ratio.

So I got a serious lightness and speediness upgrade for $250, DJ friend got Word, DJ friend's business partner got a laptop that he can use.

On a side electronics note, I also got the ad version of a 3G keyboard Kindle. Wow, so light and reading things are just so easy. I'm a little bummed that I appear to have to pay a small second subscription on a home delivery subscription. If I love reading the paper on the Kindle, I might drop the home delivery to just weekends or something.

It will be strange, though. I wonder what stuff I'll be using 8 years from now.

Yesterday, at work, I listened into a web broadcast put on by the national HQ of our non-profit. It was about preparing for retirement. It wasn't bad - there were a couple of pieces of knowledge that were novel and useful to me - but there is a lot of the "it depends on your individual situation" and "see a financial planner" ... not to mention, the ever popular "keep an eye on your financial planner."

Weasel words, I think. If you have to know enough about financial planning/personal finance to keep an eye on your financial planner, wouldn't it be cheaper to be your own financial planner?

Anyway, I'm on a jag here. There are a couple of hobby clubs, book clubs, etc - I wonder if there is a place for a personal finance club at work.

Anybody out there start one or participate in one? If you have, how do you structure it, keeping things simple for the newbies and interesting for not-newbies?

Everybody at work is now back from vacation, and the temporary fundraising staff is here with us on our floor - the pace at work is picking up.

Right now I'm working on the audit - my boss is pulling transactions that the auditors are interested in tracking and I'm making sure that my facts are straight on them. Today, though, I looked at the list the auditors gave, traced the details ... something is wrong, wrong, wrong. With the auditor's sheet. Strangely enough, it cheers me up when the auditors screw up. Only people, I guess.

I am feeling a bit grumpy at some of my co workers, though. One especially who works in a different department. I formatted a sheet with leading zeroes and she whined at me to do it again. Drives me insane about it (and other things) - it takes all of fifteen seconds for anybody with reasonable Excel skills to fix it. These days in the recession, we are on the second leg down - you show idiocy, a "not my job" attitude, or weakness it's over. It just is.

On the food front, the farmer is nearly ready to deliver - tentatively we can gather everybody around on the 24th. Free museum day appears to be canceled.

...and speaking from someone who lived in NC, I want to remind you to save yourself a bit of post-hurricane frustration. Check to see whether your place of work is up and running, or at least that the power is on. No sense trying to fight traffic dodging downed power lines, flooding, downed trees to get to work and there the power is also out.

I had a cheap way to check, although these days it does depend on the workplace physically having a primitive machine - the fax. I used to dial the fax machine and if I got the screech, I knew that the fax was on and the power was on.

I know, I know, who has a fax machine these days? But if you do, remember that the fax sits on the shelf and is plugged in, ie. only works if the power is on.

So why not call your voicemail or see if you can remotely log in? It might work, but your voicemail and your email servers might be offsite to provide protection during times like these. In other words, connecting to them might give you a deceptive answer.

Been quiet - I've been paid, and I've been waiting for something fiscal to happen.

This stay-cation was broken up. I just came back for two days in case the auditor had questions for me. I met with the auditor for all of thirty minutes. Sigh. But these two days weren't a total waste. I evaluated one of my employees and was evaluated by my supervisor, and I caught up with my emails. I will only have three days worth of emails rather than nearly three weeks.

Didn't win anything on the Gumshoe, but I had fun. I'm in the process of drawing and designing my third mosaic piece. So far I've gotten some free flat pallet wood that forms a back and a frame - I can funky it up, mosaic on the flat, and stain the frame up. Another artist, whom I took the mosaic class with, offered me some pine back boards. They were originally for the backs of wheelchairs - flat, smooth, nice. So far - free stuff!

I got a mystery gift today. Somebody paid $20 for me to get a twenty minute massage. I suspect it was my boss, but I'm not sure. I'll ask her tomorrow.

Yesterday was the Greenwood Seafair Parade... somehow the pictures I took didn't really turn out, but I'll see if I can find some good ones for fun.

The crafty patch is thinning out some. The non-crafty, but creative project of getting my database to play nice in Office 2010 is nearly done. It loads and mostly works - only two buttons don't. Of course they are the two buttons that I use in January, so sigh, project not completely done. But done enough for August.

Video for what our department does has been written and filmed. Now it has to be rendered into a file format and edited ... then done!

We are planning to get another 1/8 of a cow. This one is larger, so it will finish a bit slower (late August instead of right now) - good for a little time to save some money. Bigger means that 1/8 is going to run more than 50 lbs, so I've gotten another buyer who we can sell some to if we don't have enough freezer space. The farmer is offering us two possibilities - one is an Angus, the other a