As soon as Mark can sneak himself out of work we will be leaving for Lake Ann Bapt. Camp. It is up by Traverse City. This is their annual Memorial Day Work Bee. We spend the weekend getting the camp ready for the summer camp season. A lot of families from our church go up and it is a lot of fun. We spend Sat am & pm working at different projects (setting up teepee's, sorting food, or painting) till almost dinner time. We are fed great during the weekend and when we aren't working, we get to play games and disc golf. Sunday is chapel services and family time. Then we work Mon. am till lunch, pack up and come home. The weather is supposed to be more like July 4th then Memorial Day here.
Hope everyone has a safe and good holiday weekend.
Friday, May 26, 2006
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Babysitting...contractors
As if I wasn't busy enough around here this week. The lead contractor decided he was ready to have some guys start painting here this week. And from the last 2 days, it isn't encouraging. They came Monday and started on the garage. They are supposed to "wet scrape" since it is lead paint. Well, that is hard to do if you leave the water bottles laying around the yard and you have a cigarette in the hand that isn't holding the scraper. So the paint chips that they are taking off aren't staying on the plastic very well either. They scraped the garage and spot primed it. Then they started on the back of the house. When I looked at the scraping on the garage, it wasn't done. They did some more on it yesterday as well as more on the house but were only here a 1/2 day. When something is primed, that means it is ready to paint, right? Last night there was no way that the scrapping was done but yet 3 sides of the house were spot primed! This morning I have talked to both the contractor and the city supervisor for the lead program. They both assured me that they weren't done scraping. No one had an answer then as to why they had spot primed over areas that still needed scrapped. They have only taken a few of the hardware left from the old storm windows off and only after several were spot primed over which tells me if I hadn't complained they would have just been painted over and left there. And with my complaints about the chips not staying on the plastic, they have brought a hepa vac to clean them up. Today they have stayed till 10:15 and disappeared again. My best guess is that they will be back around 3:30 to clean up and put away for the evening since the contractor usual transports one of them to and from the site. At this rate, there is no way the work is going to be done before the kids get out of school on June 8 and heat and humidity is to set in this weekend. In the mean time, I can't open windows during the day when they might be here working and the kids can't play in the yard. AAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!! I don't have time for this. I have way too much going on to have to babysit these useless....... (I'll let you fill that in). Well, thanks for listening to my rantings. I better get busy.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Profile
Trying to get this photo into our profile. It doesn't seem to want to work for me so I guess it'll have to wait. I have other things to get busy with right now.
Pictures
I'm trying to figure out how to post pictures. And it looks like I did it. These are some that Mom sent to me from when we were in Alpena for spring break. I hope that I can get an electronic copy of the family picture taken at church last Sunday for Mother's day. Then I can add that one to the profile. But I better post this and send the church photographer an email before I forget.
Monday, May 08, 2006
Gone
Well, Mom's gone home for now. I've actually been gone for 4 of the last 5 days. Mom came last Monday to lend a hand here. I earned a trip to Chicago through recruiting with my Avon business. We were getting to go on a tour of our "branch" there that does both manufacturing and distribution.
Mom and Joshua took me to meet up with 5 other reps down in the Hudsonville area last Wednesday around noon. We drove over to Chicago in our uplines minivan. The trip went fine. Even with construction there wasn't any problems. There was a pizza party at the branch Wed. evening and then some shopping as well as visiting at a Ruby Tuesday in our hotel. Thursday we toured both areas of the branch, had lunch, and headed home. Coming home didn't go as well as getting there. It took us 2 hours to go about 40 miles through Chicago. We stopped for more shopping at the outlet mall in Michigan City, IN and then had dinner before heading home. The ladies finally had to be done shopping because the van was so full we almost had to put some bags on their laps. I know that my feet were a bit squished from packages. Mark ended up picking me up at about 10:45 p.m.
Then on Friday, I had to unpack and repack. 3 other moms from church and I were taking our girls to a "Secret Keeper Girls" Conference in Fort Wayne, IN. It was a complete surprise to the girls! We pulled them from school early and were already packed and ready to leave town before they knew anything was going on. This is a conference designed for 8-12 year old girls and has to do with dressing modestly in order to keep the "deepest most beautiful part of themselves" for the man that they will marry. More info is available at www.purefreedom.org. The same author offers retreats for older girls which some of the teens went to this winter so we wanted to check this one out. It was really great and a lot of fun!
The conference was from 7-9:30 and then we had a hotel room at a Holiday Inn. It was a fun time! We had 4 moms & 5 girls and were able to travel all in 1 van. The girls were able to go swimming for a while on Saturday after breakfast. Then, since it was 1 of the girls birthday, we had cake in the hotel room before we checked out.
We only had about 2 snags. The rooms were supposed to have 2 double beds but instead had 1 queen size. The 1 mom had brought an air mattress so it worked out fine for them. In our room, we had them bring a rollaway bed. Rachel used that and I just crashed in the recliner. I was so tired that it wouldn't have mattered where I slept. Rachel wasn't too thrilled with the bar supports of the rollaway though. The second snag came when we were trying to start the van to leave the hotel and come home. It wouldn't start. The battery was dead. (We had forgotten to turn off a dome light we needed to read the directions the night before.) Thank goodness for a AAA membership. After the hotel couldn't get it jumped using their mini-bus we called AAA. They were there within 1/2 hour and since I told them battery problems they sent a van that carries them around. He was able to test the battery. It showed only 25% charge but the health of the battery was at 0%. His batteries would have been over $100 but he was able to tell us where an AutoZone was easy to get to. He gave us a jump and while part of the moms stayed at a playground 1 block from the hotel, 2 of us went to AutoZone and got the battery replaced for $50 and we even were able to get him to put it in for us.
We took our time coming home. We found a gokart place and stopped to race. Then we had to stop for ice cream before getting home. It was a good time but was 8:00 before we got home on Saturday. I was too exhausted to do much of anything yesterday.
I'm still pretty tired today but have to get myself moving. Lots to do. The nice thing is that I don't have to worry too much about laundry because Mom keeps up with that and keeps my kitchen clean. What a blessing!
Well, I better get at it.
Mom and Joshua took me to meet up with 5 other reps down in the Hudsonville area last Wednesday around noon. We drove over to Chicago in our uplines minivan. The trip went fine. Even with construction there wasn't any problems. There was a pizza party at the branch Wed. evening and then some shopping as well as visiting at a Ruby Tuesday in our hotel. Thursday we toured both areas of the branch, had lunch, and headed home. Coming home didn't go as well as getting there. It took us 2 hours to go about 40 miles through Chicago. We stopped for more shopping at the outlet mall in Michigan City, IN and then had dinner before heading home. The ladies finally had to be done shopping because the van was so full we almost had to put some bags on their laps. I know that my feet were a bit squished from packages. Mark ended up picking me up at about 10:45 p.m.
Then on Friday, I had to unpack and repack. 3 other moms from church and I were taking our girls to a "Secret Keeper Girls" Conference in Fort Wayne, IN. It was a complete surprise to the girls! We pulled them from school early and were already packed and ready to leave town before they knew anything was going on. This is a conference designed for 8-12 year old girls and has to do with dressing modestly in order to keep the "deepest most beautiful part of themselves" for the man that they will marry. More info is available at www.purefreedom.org. The same author offers retreats for older girls which some of the teens went to this winter so we wanted to check this one out. It was really great and a lot of fun!
The conference was from 7-9:30 and then we had a hotel room at a Holiday Inn. It was a fun time! We had 4 moms & 5 girls and were able to travel all in 1 van. The girls were able to go swimming for a while on Saturday after breakfast. Then, since it was 1 of the girls birthday, we had cake in the hotel room before we checked out.
We only had about 2 snags. The rooms were supposed to have 2 double beds but instead had 1 queen size. The 1 mom had brought an air mattress so it worked out fine for them. In our room, we had them bring a rollaway bed. Rachel used that and I just crashed in the recliner. I was so tired that it wouldn't have mattered where I slept. Rachel wasn't too thrilled with the bar supports of the rollaway though. The second snag came when we were trying to start the van to leave the hotel and come home. It wouldn't start. The battery was dead. (We had forgotten to turn off a dome light we needed to read the directions the night before.) Thank goodness for a AAA membership. After the hotel couldn't get it jumped using their mini-bus we called AAA. They were there within 1/2 hour and since I told them battery problems they sent a van that carries them around. He was able to test the battery. It showed only 25% charge but the health of the battery was at 0%. His batteries would have been over $100 but he was able to tell us where an AutoZone was easy to get to. He gave us a jump and while part of the moms stayed at a playground 1 block from the hotel, 2 of us went to AutoZone and got the battery replaced for $50 and we even were able to get him to put it in for us.
We took our time coming home. We found a gokart place and stopped to race. Then we had to stop for ice cream before getting home. It was a good time but was 8:00 before we got home on Saturday. I was too exhausted to do much of anything yesterday.
I'm still pretty tired today but have to get myself moving. Lots to do. The nice thing is that I don't have to worry too much about laundry because Mom keeps up with that and keeps my kitchen clean. What a blessing!
Well, I better get at it.
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