Happy birthday Guinness!

Our little gray bunny (ha. Giant Gray Bunny) is 8 years old today. Geriatric bunnies rock.

Post-interview joy

I keep saying that I can't wait till I have a full-time job so I can stop working so much. Spending inordinate amounts of time working on job applications and maintaining three totally different projects takes a lot of time that's unfortunately not relegated to normal working hours...

I had my interview for a position I really want this week. It seemed to go pretty well. I hope it did. But being done with the interview means that I didn't have to work on job talks or applications... and I took a break from catch-up for everything else.

Instead we:

Made molasses-oat bread
Made blueberry jam
Planted all the daffodil and tulip bulbs we bought after we moved into this house
Went thrift-store hopping to look for furniture and scored a great coffee table
Went to Shasta's favorite place (twice) (the dog park - i.e. the Happiest Place on Earth)
Explored the international food store (again)
Found (and purchased) an awesome arm chair and ottoman
Redecorated the living room (now it looks like it belongs to people who aren't college students! and displaced Shasta's (formerly my) chair to the bedroom, where no one can see it except us)
Made pea soup (this took forever)
Made muffins (twice) (date-lemon-walnut and raisin-lemon-walnut)
Raked the yard
Moved the shed
Went to the farmer's market and got caught up on the pluses and minuses of growing different types of greens (you can get 5+ harvests off of Toy and a different kind of bok choy)
Fixed our plumbing woes (OK, Jim did that all on his own)
Read two novels (Steph) and most of one (Jim)

And even slept in.

Before (the blue is, obviously, painters tape. The splotchiness on the walls was the previous owners' deliberate choice):

This is a terrible picture of Jim. Never mind that, and just admire the grossness of the walls.


After:

Better!

ok, I think I have my new favorite game...

..figure out the internet's priorities by doing image searches in google.

When I looked up a picture of a mouse (of course, thinking of the rodent kind, being the biologist that I am), this is what I get:

...just, wow

I was looking for an image to illustrate how different cultures view particular species differently, and I was going to focus on the very friendly example of dogs (which are adored in the US and despised as unclean in other countries).

And I knew that black dogs were harder to find homes for once they're in the shelter (that's part of the reason we picked Shasta). But holy crap, really???



What do all these puppies have in common? And what does that say about us?

It doesn't seem like much...

...until you count it up. My work email was telling me I was getting close to my quota, so I needed to clean it out, so first stop the send folder. Guess how many emails I've sent since January 1 this year? 493! You don't even want to know how many I've gotten...(I've already cleaned my inbox up twice so far this year).

Great Falls

...is gorgeous. (Ha. I didn't even catch that pun. Jim did.)

Lookin' good Morris

Here's some pics of the Morris chair in it's new and improved cleanliness! It's still pretty comfortable too!

It looks all elegant with the plant, lamp and rug "Pour me a brandy, Jameson-there's a good lad!" :P
I wish I'd taken pictures of what the old under-seat cloth looked like, then you'd really appreciate how much better this is...

The real work was under the hood, though, with new twine for the springs and some reinforcement for the broken one--you can see the piece of copper tube in the upper left of the picture (although even as I write this, Shasta tried to eat an extra piece that had rolled into a corner of the room, so maybe not my best plan).

All in all, a pretty good clean-up.