Thursday, March 22, 2007

My Day Off

On Tuesday I took a day off from work to get some stuff done.

First, I went to have my passport taken care of since there is a possibility that we might be going to Singapore this summer. It ended up costing about $200! Thank goodness I only need to do that every 10 years. Jake and I want to go to Hawaii and Canada as well this summer, but it sounds expensive to go running around the world for three weeks, so I'm not positive we'll be able to afford all three places. I do know that I will be going to Hawaii for at least a few days for a conference. And for those of you who might be thinking about our last trip to Hawaii, yes, that also was for a conference. And yes, I have also gone to Florida and Canada on conferences. Now everyone is going to think my job is easy with vacation/conferences galore. I guess it's not a bad deal when I think about it.

The second thing I did yesterday was go to the assessor to get a floor plan for our property. The icky inspector who I had mentioned in a previous blog has struck again. By the way, his name is Richard - very appropriate if you think of the nickname. Anyway, he made a comment in our records which reads "Bootlegged house behind main house built 2005 - no permits". Now, the thing is, our property is and has always been a duplex. It's on all the records everywhere (inspectors office and assessor). It's even in their own office. So now I have to go back to Richard's office with the plans for the second house that date back to the 1950s and try to get this taken care of. I might just have to kill somebody.

The third thing I did was go on a bike ride. I was rather proud of myself that I went out by myself and went. It took some motivation. Mom and Wendy will probably remember that black top trail in the foothills that we used to visit with the stream by the trail. It was just as nice as I remembered, and although not challenging (which is good since I was by myself and wouldn't want to be hurt in the wilderness with no one around and a cell phone out of service range), it was still good exercise and felt good.

Lastly, we went to see the movie 300 in an IMAX theater. It was good, and I'm glad that we went. For some reason the goriness didn't bother me very much and it wasn't scary either, but it had a neat look to it.

So that was my day off. We don't have students this week since we are in between quarters, so I feel like I've been on vacation. It feels good.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Just Random Stuff

I don't have much to say, except that I've been pretty busy lately. We've had members of Jake's family staying over the last two weekends, which is fun, but takes up a lot of time.

We also had an open house last weekend. I think the house is finally at a good price. We were above what we should have been at before. Too bad we didn't try to sell a few months earlier. Oh well.

I haven't done a whole lot with my new job yet. I'm still doing a lot of the old stuff, but things are slowly sliding my way that deal with the new position. It's actually felt like a pretty good transition.

We haven't been mountain biking in about three weeks which is quite depressing, but between jobs and family, it's hard to find the time. :(

Mostly I've been reading like crazy - I'm in one of my phases right now and cleaning off my book shelves. I've always just thrown a book on the shelf when it was done, so I'm trying to read through them all. Once I'm done reading I mark it either as a "Keep" or a "Donate". So far it's working very well, and I feel like I'm making good progress getting rid of some that I wouldn't really want to read again. Pretty interesting to actually feel like I'm accomplishing something while reading, since usually I feel a bit guilty since I could be doing something else.

Not much else to report, and I'd better go since I've got a student I need to help.