Thursday of last week a guy showed up and made a mock-up template of the tops of the cabinets, and Friday Richard and I went off to the granite cutting place to lay the templates out on our two big chunks of granite and figure out how we wanted them to be cut. It was interesting to see the granite after several months, since in my head I was remembering it as a brighter white, but I still like it, so that’s good. We figured out where we wanted everything, and they taped the templates onto the granite, and in two weeks they’ll come back with it all pre-cut and get it installed.

In the meantime, it’s been all cabinets, all the time around our house. At this point they’re mainly working on trim and molding and attaching the knobs and pulls. There’s a few pieces that have to wait until the appliances are in, but at least it’s starting to take more shape. And boy does it all look pretty against those blue walls.

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A few weeks ago we decided that, since we were due for an upgrade anyway, we would go get ourselves some shiny new phones. Richard found one that he liked with all the bells and whistles he was hoping for, while I poked around and eventually settled on a fairly basic model, because I prefer my phone to be mostly bell and whistle free. However, after I brought it home, we discovered that my shiny new phone was missing the only ‘feature’ that I had really wanted – the ability to send myself a sound and then save it as a ringtone.

Luckily we had 30 days to swap, so a few days later, off we went, back to the store, and this time I ended up with this cute little LG (image shamelessly swiped from the Verizon website).

It’s red, it’s tiny, and it does exactly what I want it to do, which is mainly to just be a phone, and it also let me save sounds as ringtones.

A little bit of poking on Google and we found a site where we can upload a song and convert it to a ringtone, so Richard and I have been having happy nerdish fun tracking down all manner of appropriate songs for our phones – the theme song from Red Dwarf, a snippet of the opening music from Battlestar Galatica (the new one, of course); even a Jonathan Coulton song about zombies. Anyone who knows Richard would not be remotely surprised by the fact that I have this particular ringtone associated with any calls coming in from him.

Our plan lets us get upgrades every two years, and we were both struck by how much longer the batteries last on the new phones. So much more convenient to only have to recharge the thing every few weeks instead of every few days. Plus, the camera on the new phones is *much* nicer than the one on the old phones, and even better, I can email pictures to myself (getting pictures off the old phones was pretty much impossible), and I can text to email, or email to text.I know, I know. Most of you have had all these cool features for years now, and I freely admit to being kind of a dinosaur when it comes to phones, but I’m still rather excited about my shiny new toy.

When it is gray and hazy outside, and also nasty, icky hot, and the entire region is blanketed with a layer of smoke so thick that the air resources board is telling everyone not to even bother going outside, no matter how healthy your lungs might be, it can be a very good thing to get out of town. Especially when getting out of town involves going to someplace that it not nearly as hot, and also about 100% less smokey.

Friday afternoon Richard dropped me off at the airport, and then pulled out our little GPS unit to try to figure out how to get back home without using freeways (since the massive construction project on I-5 is still ongoing), and I twiddled my thumbs at the gate until my older sister showed up, and shortly after that, we boarded a very tiny little plane and took off for Portland. Through the convenient use of cell phones, and also the fact that we were all wearing hot pink t-shirts that proclaimed ‘What Happens With the Sisters Stays With the Sisters’, courtesy of my older sister for precisely this sort of occasion, we managed to track down our younger sister, and then the three of us, with a brief detour into a Starbucks for some life-fortifying caffeine, trundled our suitcases off to the parking garage, fielding curious looks and clever queries like ‘oh, are you all sisters?’ Because, you know, the t-shirts weren’t a dead giveaway or anything.

Anyway. Off we drove to the Kennedy School hotel, where we would be staying for the next few days.

The Kennedy school used to be a public elementary school, before it was closed due to lack of funding to bring it up to code. At some point in the last ten years, a company bought it, refubished it, and turned it into a hotel. The principal’s office is where you check in, and the old cafeteria has been converted to a nice little restaurant, and all the classrooms were split in half and turned into hotel rooms.

Our room used to be the back half of a classroom, which means we got the coat closet.

We also got a small chalkboard.

(My older sister is writing “I will not call my sister a boogerbrain.” Why yes, we *are* all 12. Why do you ask?)

We ate dinner that night in the restaurant there in the hotel. It seemed appropriate, somehow, sitting in what used to be an elementary school cafeteria to start the meal with a basket of tater tots. And so everyone would know we had arrived safely and were not having any fun at all, I took this quick picture with my cell phone and fired it off to all the various parents / husbands.

We didn’t really have much planned for the weekend except to just hang out together, which is why we ended up staying up late both nights, talking and catching up. Saturday we ate breakfast at the hotel and wandered around the halls for a little bit, looking at all the artwork they’d hung everywhere. And then we drove to downtown Portland and spent a few hours wandering around the Saturday Market, which is this big open air arts and crafts market with all kinds of fun things to buy and see.

We found this really cute little shop and we bought batik cotton dresses for every girl in the family – the three of us, our mom, and the niece. We split an extremely large fry bread (elephant ear) coated in cinnamon sugar. My little sister got a henna tattoo on the back of her hand. We pondered various crafts and said ‘oh, what a cute idea’ a lot. Luckily my older sister and I came with completely packed carry-on bags, so we couldn’t buy anything because there was simply no room to take it home with us.

Next up, the zoo. We bought all-day passes for the local lightrail system, and figured out which line would take us to the zoo. We ate lunch there, and then set off to see how much we could see of all the critters, including black bears and mountain goats and the oldest whatever-kind-of-penguin-it-was in the US, and so on. There were signs everywhere about how you could get your picture with a Dairy Princess. I expect they were more geared toward the younger set, but my older sister decided that we couldn’t possibly pass up on an opportunity like this, so here you are – my sisters and I and a Dairy Princess. I know. It’s overwhelming, isn’t it.

We’d intended to check out the gardens near the zoo, but by the time we were done with the zoo, we’d about had it with the walking. It didn’t help that it was very hot out. So instead of wandering around outside anymore, we decided to go wander around somewhere with air conditioning. Powell’s Books seemed a great place to do just that!

Sadly we only had about an hour to wander, and it was very hard to remember that I had very little room to bring any books home with me in my carry-on. I did find a knitting book that had to come home with me, however, and my little sister and I had a lot of fun browsing through the huge selection of cookbooks, although I had to nearly drag her away by her hair when the time came for us to leave. But we had to go, because we had dinner reservations at Old Town Pizza, which is supposedly haunted. We did not see any ghosts, but we did get to eat in what used to be the old elevator, and our food was quite delicious anyway.

Saturday night, after all that walking, I decided that taking a dip in the soaking pool at the hotel sounded like a great idea. It’s not deep enough for swimming, but it was plenty warm enough and deep enough to just lounge for a little while. My little sister came into the water with me, and eventually my older sister came out and joined us, until someone from the hotel came out to tell us that the pool was closing, and gently shooed us away.

Sunday morning we decided to take care of the donut requirement of our Sisters weekends, so off we went to downtown Portland again, to Voodoo Doughnuts. They do all sorts of weird things to their donuts, like coat them with Captain Crunch or Cocoa Puffs, or sprinkle them with Tang. Naturally we had to try some of the ‘strange’ ones, so we each got two donuts. My little sister and I teased my older sister about getting boring donuts, but we all dragged out our cameras for pictures of the donuts *we* got. Here are my two donuts – one with Cocoa Puffs, and one that is chocolate, coated in chocolate, stuffed with chocolate.

And here is one of my little sister’s donuts – the Voodoo donut itself.

It’s filled with raspberry jelly, so when you bite into it, it oozes appropriately. It even comes with a pretzel stick, so you can stab it repeatedly in various places, should you feel the need. Definitely one of the more warped sorts of breakfast we’ve ever had.

We didn’t have anything else planned for the day, so we decided it was time to be girly. We found a convenient nail salon and originally just made appointments for pedicures, but ended up having so much fun we decided to do manicures as well. I now have little flowers with little beads in the middle on my thumbs and my big toes. I am not used to having this sort of thing on my nails and it is very distracting, but we all did it together, so what the heck.

I’m not sure that we did much of anything outrageous this trip, which maybe breaks a little with tradition. But staying in the converted elementary school was unique, and eating donuts with Cocoa Puffs and shaped like voodoo dolls was a little out of the ordinary, and so we have decided that as long as there is *something* during the weekend that we have never done before, no matter how small, that can still count.

Those of you who don’t live in the Sacramento valley may or may not have heard about our current air quality issues due to the smoke from the hundreds and hundreds of wildfires that are burning across the state. So I thought I’d clue you in on just how truly bad it is outside right now.

This is currently the view from the balcony of my office.

I know that doesn’t seem all that exciting, and it’s a little misty but you’re asking yourself, so, how bad can it be? This is how bad.

See where I’ve circled? Normally, when the air is not thick with smoke, we can look right across the river and get a perfectly clear view of downtown Sacramento and beyond. Notice the distinct lack of anything resembling buildings in that shot? Yeah. It’s that bad out.

Now toss in temperatures in excess of 110, and 30% + humidity (Yes, I know, some of you east-coasters live with worse, but we are normally a *lot* dryer, so this is a big deal for us), a constant feeling smell of smoke and taste of grit in your mouth the second you step outside, and you get some idea of what life is like right now, here in the smoke-bowl of Sacramento.

Ugh.

They’ve been busy-busy in the kitchen the last week or so, although there hasn’t been much to photograph. Mainly it’s been all about the painting. We picked a gorgeous blue for the walls that looked amazing next to our little collection of tile and granite and cabinet samples, and I’ll adimt I was a little nervous that it would end up too dark, but it turned out exactly as we’d hoped. There was some initial confusion regarding the ceiling and what color it was supposed to be, but that’s all worked out now, and the ceiling is thankfully white. They finished off all the siding on the exterior, and put in all the framing around all the doors and windows, and there are even bulbs now in all the light fixtures (although we still don’t have actual light switches with which to turn those bulbs on, but that will come).

At this point, the initial phase of the work is nearly done, which means this week we moved on to phase two, which involved a wee bit of redecorating on our part. This morning Richard and I dragged the piano and the dining room table out of the dining room, and wedged them into the (much smaller) living room, in preparation for this:

That’s the view from the door of the office, into our dining room / temporary kitchen (note clever placement of refrigerator in front of main bay window, and assortment of alternative cooking implements lined up on either side) / staging area for the cabinets. Those four big boxes in the middle of the room are only the tip of the iceberg, because the kitchen currently looks like this:

The color on the walls isn’t nearly as dark as it looks in the picture but this is the best I can do right now (see earlier mention of lack of light switches). Inside that maze of boxes lies all of our new kitchen cabinets. Over the next week an industrious team of burly men will be unpacking and installing every single one of those. Conveniently, the box of knobs and pulls for all of those cabinets was waiting for me on the front porch when I got home, so somehow we managed to work that timing out just right.

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I finally gave up and pulled my two sorry little carrots out of the garden, since the tops had started to fade, and I wasn’t entirely sure how one tells if carrots are ‘done’ anyway. We’ve toyed with the idea of filling in some of the empty spaces with a few new starts – maybe a cucumber or even a squash, but so far we haven’t managed to work up any enthusiasm for that yet. The tomatoes, however, are still rampaging merrily along; in fact yesterday morning we harvested about four cups of assorted cherry tomatoes – most of them of the Black Cherry hybrid variety, since that one seems to be doing its best to outproduce the other three, and three more beautifully red regular tomatoes.

Last week’s harvest included two perfect green and yellow striped Green Zebras along with the usual red and cherry varieties, and the three remaining herb plants have finally decided to stop with the pouting and commence with the growing, so two nights last week consisted of some whole wheat spaghetti, a splash of olive oil, a liberal sprinkling of grated Parmesan, and these – tomatoes and basil, fresh from our garden. Delicious!

Shortly after they came to clear away the first huge fallen branch, I heard creaking in the big elm tree, and another branch started to bend. We kept an eye on it for the next few days, but by Saturday a chunk of it had bent far enough to hang down and touch the sidewalk, so it was time for another call to the city. This time they sent out an arborist, who circled the tree and made notes and wondered how long it’s been since it’s been trimmed and muttered things about how they’d need to cut here and here and probably here too. And then an hour or so later he returned with the city tree crew in their giant yellow truck, and they proceeded to take out another hefty branch and pieces of a few more. Later in the week yet another yellow truck came by to clean all *that* up, which was nice because it was enough tree piled in front of our house we could no longer actually park our cars there.

So that was last weekend; or rather, the weekend before last. The week that followed was a busy one, and I’m not entirely sure why, except that it felt like I was doing a lot of running but not getting much done. It didn’t help that Wednesday I got up at 4:30 am to catch the 6:15 flight down to Santa Monica for an all day meeting, and then took the latest flight back home. Plus there have been conference calls and meetings and it just felt like I spent all week accumulating things to do, but never getting a chance to do them.

In other news, look what we pulled out of the tomato jungle last week.

We put in four different varieties of cherry so I think all four are represented there, although I haven’t the faintest clue which is which. This weekend we harvested even more; or rather, I climbed around in the tomato jungle and tried to look for signs of bright red or bright yellow or deep purple, and Richard held out his hands and acted as a bucket. The purple cherry tomatoes are the biggest of the bunch, while the gold ones are so tiny I was not sure whether they were ripe, until I touched a few and realized we’d left them too long on the vine.

The tomato plants themselves continue to grow wildly, and are now trying to take out one of the nearby trees, and they are completely covered in little green tomatoes. This almost makes up for the fact that all four pepper plants have now shriveled up, even the one with three tiny red bell peppers hanging on it. Everyone I have talked to has the same problem with peppers, so apparently it is not just us, but I still reserve the right to be a little disappointed. Of all the carrots I planted, only two are still growing, and while the garlic is doing wonderfully, it’s not exactly something you can just pick and eat right out of the garden, and despite yet another taste test – this time with one of those big fat purple cherry tomatoes – I still find raw tomatoes completely revolting (shudder), so I was really holding out hope for those peppers. Ah well. Next year we’ll put in beans and peas, and maybe even some cucumbers, and we’ll relegate the tomatoes to their own separate space so the rest of the yard will be safe from their marauding. And maybe I will try peppers again, just because I still hold out hope.

You know, it’s never a good thing when the first thing your kitchen designer wants to talk about when he calls you is not your kitchen, or the progress, or the issue of ceiling lights discussed the week previous, but the fact that oh, did you know that part of one of those big huge trees came down in your front yard? Um. Why, no, I did not. Gah.

My jaw dropped the second I turned onto my street, coming home. It may be hard to figure out why (uh. or NOT).

Here’s another view, just so you can get the full magnitude of the reason for the dropping of the jaw.

After I picked my jaw back up off the floor of the car, I parked and got out and my neighbors (who had already done their own jaw dropping earlier, apparently) and I shared our awe, not so much over the fact that a limb that size came down in the first place, but that it did so without hitting *anything*. It did not hit a house. It did not hit a car. It just went right down into the one perfect area where it couldn’t do any damage to anything at all.

I thought it was high time I gave another update on the state of the kitchen – one that actually included photos, for a change.

Thursday morning the inspector came over and signed off on both the structural work and the insulation. The structural inspection was the one we were the most concerned about, mainly because of the necessary addition of the new supporting beams, but everything passed. So Friday, when we got home, instead of exposed studs and plywood, we saw drywall.

The funny thing about construction is that rooms always look bigger when there is drywall. It seems counterintuitive that adding drywall would change the perception of a room’s space, but I remember this exact phenomenon when we were building the house in Dixon – that when it was just a foundation, it looked tiny, and when there was just the framing it looked a little better but still small, and it wasn’t until they got the drywall in place that all of a sudden it looked big.

Anyway. The addition of drywall means that the view of the kitchen from the dining room door went from this

to this:

From standing in the little alcove where the floor-to-ceiling pantry used to be, it went from this (where you can see where the original back door used to be):

to this (look, we actually now *have* a door!):

And the walk-in pantry (in what used to be the junk room/enclosed back porch) went from this:

to this (complete with pocket door):

Oh, and because I’m sure you’re wondering, that odd thing in the middle of the room is part of what will eventually be an island.

Last night I had re-auditions for the women’s choral group, mainly so that the conductor can figure out any new placements for the coming year if necessary. So I turned my phone on vibrate during the sessions and I forgot to turn it back onto ring until much later in the evening, as I was getting ready for bed and started hearing this weird noise and finally realized that it was my phone, telling me that I had a message.

The message was from my older sister, and she started it by saying ‘Here you go, live in concert’. Then there was some garbled noise for a little bit, until eventually I finally heard what she was trying to share with me – Pat Benetar, playing “We Belong”, live in concert. And because my older sister remembered that that was one of my very favorite songs back when we were teenagers in the 80’s, she called me on her cell phone, in the middle of a huge concert, just so I could hear it.

My older sister turned 40 this year, back in February. My whole family has been fighting a (sometimes losing) battle with weight for a very long time, but she decided that she didn’t want to be overweight any longer. So she set herself a goal of losing 40 pounds by her birthday, and she made it. She also decided she wanted to do another big walk (like the Avon Breast Cancer walk she and our sister and I did two years ago) so she got together with some friends and they all signed up to do Team in Training for a marathon in San Diego this weekend. Shortly after they all signed up, unfortunately, her friends backed out, due to life getting in the way, but my sister, despite facing doing it alone, stayed in. She managed to raise more than what she needed for the Team in Training donations, and she got herself a treadmill and somehow, in between teaching and ferrying two small boys to various sports practices every single night of the week, and also even coaching some of those teams, and fighting through bout after bout of strep throat until the doctors finally decided that her tonsils should come out, so also having to go through surgery, she kept on training for this walk, all by herself. And this weekend, she got on a plane and she flew down to San Diego, all by herself, and she did the walk, as much as she could in the time alloted, on her own.

Because this was an actual race and not just a walk, there was a set amount of time to finish it, and so she didn’t get a chance to do the whole marathon, when I talked to her today she was feeling kind of down about that. But the rest of us are all pretty amazed and proud of her. Honestly, if this had been me, I would have likely pulled out when the rest of my group did – I am very bad at situations where I don’t know anyone, and the thought of participating in a big huge event all by myself is sort of horrifying to me. But she stuck to it, despite a lot of uphill battles with finding time to train, and dealing with being sick and surgery and everything else in her life.

Both my sisters are truly awesome people and I am proud of both of them for everything that they’ve done with themselves so far. But I am especially proud of my older sister for everything she has accomplished in this past year. Losing all that weight and doing all that training means that she looks seriously good for being an old lady of 40 years (I can make this sort of ‘old’ comment only because she lives too far away to smack me when she reads this, and also because I am only a year behind – heh) and what she did to raise money for this walk, and train for it, and then do it, is a huge achievement.

I took yesterday off because it was my 39th birthday and I quite firmly believe that one is not meant to work on one’s birthday, if one can help it at all. I had high intentions of spending some quality time with my remaining XML assignments and my laptop. But alas, I succumbed once again to the lure of Civ IV. And besides, it was my birthday. See earlier note regarding no work on birthdays.

I have received a number of lovely gifts, including a gift certificate to Amazon (I see some new knitting books in my future!), and the completion of our set of all 8 seasons of Red Dwarf on DVD (I also see lots of Red Dwarf watching in my future – Richard and I really do love that show), lots of books (of course), and a Flying Spaghetti Monster for my car, because I NEEDED one, oh yes I did. It can go right beside my cat Fish magnet, and also the pirate Fish that Richard got and extra of, and handed off to me. Now all I need are an alien Fish, and a Cthulu Fish, and I think I’ll be all set with the full Nerd Pantheon.

Due to the distinct lack of kitchen, the fact that my older sister is currently off in San Diego doing a marathan, and the fact that my mom (and her new knee) are still not very mobile, there was no grand family gathering. Instead, we went out to The Melting Pot for dinner, where we ate huge amounts of veggies dipped in cheese fondue, and followed those with all sorts of goodies dipped in dark chocolate. And then we came home, and because it was my birthday, I got to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now, and that is to rearrange the bedroom furniture (You have your version of fun; I have mine. Heh). While I am antsy to also finish off painting the library and cleaning and puttying and painting the baseboards, that part of the downstairs improvement must wait until the kitchen is completed and the cats have somewhere else to go, but rearranging furniture could easily be done. Of course, this meant that I got practically no sleep last night, since now that the furniture is all moved around, the cats had to explore everything all night, and include a running commentary on the whole experience. Luckily I have the rest of the weekend for them to get over the new arrangement and for me to recoup my sleep, and to finally tackle those darn XML assignments that still remain to be done.

But first, there are some new books to be read, and freshly baked bagels to be consumed (I did an early morning run to our local bagel place) and cats to annoy, and possibly some more Civ IV to be played. Because yesterday was my birthday, after all, and the non-working part of birthdays can sometimes be allowed to spill over onto weekends, if one plans it carefully enough.

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Oh, and as an aside, our phones mysteriously started working again. Neither we nor the contractor can figure it out, but so far (fingers crossed) they seem to be playing nicely again, so perhaps my theory regarding the squirrels was right all along.

They have been focusing on electrical work all this week and part of last week, to the extent that every day when we come home, there are more wires poking out of the ceiling, and more little holes in the walls (in the kitchen, and popping up in other places too, like the guest bedroom, and even outside). Richard and I wandered around outside last night and noticed that they’ve pulled out huge chunks of the boards underneath the part of the kitchen that juts out over the under-deck area, exposing a veritable maze of pipes and hoses and wiring. Considering this house’s history, I have to wonder how much of what’s there is still in use, but it would be too much of a hassle to try to track every single line, so it’s just going to stay where it is, much like previous owners left at least two incarnations of embedded drip hoses all over the yard.

Of course, one of the downsides to having work done on wiring is that at some point, someone has to turn the power off to the section being tweaked, and considering the age of this house, it’s not unsurprising to discover that electrical circuits have not been set up quite like you might expect. Tuesday night is when we discovered that all the ceiling lights in the entire upper level are all apparently on one circuit, or connected to one wire, and that circuit was interrupted. We tried flicking circuit breakers randomly – some of them are labeled but although I suspect the labels were quite informative to the person who put them there, they don’t make much sense to those of us who weren’t around at the time – but nothing seemed to work. Luckily, all the wall plugs worked just fine, since that meant the fridge and the microwave and the computers all still had power. And after I did a ‘Oh hey, by the way, you might not be aware of this’ plea to the work crew Wednesday morning, by the time we got home that night, all the ceiling lights were back to normal.

The latest casualty of the kitchen renovation, however, is a bit harder to puzzle through, because this time it’s not the electrical stuff, it’s the phones. The phone line to the house is obviously still active, since the DSL is still working quite happily (always an important consideration in house with two nerds who are online ALL THE TIME), but none of the phones get a dial tone, and when I tried calling the house number with my cell phone, all I got was a busy signal. We dutifully unplugged and replugged the phones upstairs and downstairs, figuring maybe one of them was a little askew, enough to convince the system a receiver was off the hook, but that didn’t get us anywhere. Although, no, that’s not necessarily true – what it *did* tell us is that the guest bedroom downstairs is still hooked up to that phantom second line that we turned *off* when we moved in a year ago, but unfortunately getting a dial tone on a line whose number no one knows isn’t exactly useful.

During the renovation, the work crew has taken out a bunch of walls, and in some of those walls were two phone jacks and all their associated wiring. So I suspect that at some point today, when they were finishing up whatever it is they were doing with all the electrical wiring, someone also tried to deal with the errant phone wiring, and somehow, some wires got crossed. I figured whatever the problem was, it was probably up in the attic, and if we could just get up there and find the phone wire, maybe we could fix it ourselves.

Except that, as of today, we cannot get into the attic. They have installed the attic pull-down ladder in the guest room ceiling, since there is no longer any place to stash it in the ceiling over the kitchen space, but because the ceiling in the guest room is higher than the ceiling in the little enclosed back porch was, the ladder does not reach all the way to the ground, and until they install the necessary extensions to the ladder, getting up to the attic just isn’t going to happen.

So…right now we have no phones. The good news is that most anyone who might need to get in touch with us has our cell phone numbers, and Richard and I have fired off emails to our family letting them know why there is currently a permanent busy signal on our line, and I gave our contractor an ‘oh, hey, by the way’ call, and now all we can do is sit back and find the amusement in the fact that of all the utilities to lose during a kitchen renovation, phone service was one we did not expect.