Pedal pedal pedal

Let's see... a quick catch-up before what I really sat down to write about.


I made it to tax time.  I got my stuff to the accountant a week before the deadline.  I called and emailed and reminded them that we would be leaving town for spring vacation and if they needed us to sign anything they needed to let me know so we could do that.


We went on spring vacation, hiking, driving, getting lost, driving too far, getting lost again, hiking some more we had a  marvelous time!  I have pictures I will post.


We came back.  No word from the accountant.  Tax day passed.  Still no word from the accountant.  I start to worry.  But with my head firmly in the sand I wait for them to call.


Hubby went to Sweden.  SVEEEDEN.  For nearly two weeks.


Hubby's friends from India came to visit.  For about three days.  They are congenial, kind, painfully well mannered.  A husband and his wife and their five year old daughter.  They speak English beautifully.  They stayed in Hubby's office, I actually didn't see too much of them, other than when they took me and the girls to dinner their last night here, and when I drove them to the airport.


Then this weekend came.  I try to keep us occupied when Hubby's out of town, weekends are tough.  I like having the other parent to foist child care responsibilities onto.  I have noticed I have a tendency to try and get things cleaned around the house when he's around, which might seem like a bad idea, but since his usual posture around the house is trying to catch up on sleep, and enjoying just being in the family cave, it kind of works to have me puttering around.  Sometimes.  Othertimes not so much.  But anyway despite my initial efforts to clean something because after taxes and vacation and company, not to mention STILL WAITING FOR CARPET in the basement the house is a disaster, it was absolutely beautiful outside.  All weekend.
Sunday afternoon Thing 2, who is the outdoors-motivated one of the three of us, couldn't get me or Thing 1 to jump on the trampoline or skip rope with her.  So I suggested we give the old bike riding thing another try.

One of my failings as a parent is my daughters, at 8 and 10, do not know how to ride bicycles.  Oh, they got to the point where they could pedal around, but neither one could start or stop themselves.


We haven't tried it since...  Geez... Maybe last year at this time?  Maybe the fall before that?  It's been a while.  I probably blogged about it.  Thing 2 had always been more enthusiastic about riding a bike than Thing 1, who drags her feet (figuratively) and whines (literally) and generally hates the whole idea.  Thing 2 has taken it as a challenge to ride better than  her sister so she was doing really well at the end of our last session.  Back then Thing 2 could pedal confidently around the school playground by herself, but needed help starting and stopping.  Thing 1 whined and wobbled with  me running along beside.


So yesterday I pumped up the tires and took them to an empty parking lot.  Thing 1 was whining the whole drive over can't we PULEEEEZ go to dinner instead?  But Thing 2 was eager.  
The other problem we have that I failed to mention is we only have one bike, a situation I plan to remedy soon.  But it meant they had to take turns waiting in the car and riding.


I took Thing 2 first.  It would seem she has forgotten most of what she knew.  She made me trot around behind her, helping her start and stop.  There was a slight slope to the parking lot we were in, enough to make them get some speed on one side and have to pedal pretty hard on the other side.  I'd trot along with her on the down hill to help her with the turn, then give her a push to get her up the slight incline.  She would pedal a little, then stop, and we'd start the round again.


She did pretty good, learned how to stop without falling down.  I was puffing pretty good, and rather expecting Thing 1 to whine her way out of her turn.  Thing 2 and I went back to the car, and Thing 1 bounced out and announced she was ready for her turn.


Thing 1 also seemed to have forgotten a little, but she also seemed to pick it back up pretty quickly.  After a quick lesson on back pedaling, she started putting her feet down and stopping nicely.  She even used the hand brakes a little.  Then to my absolute shock she told me she wanted me to not hold her at the beginning, and she'd start on her own.  I trotted alongside, coaching her, then she pulled her feet up and off she went!  And then she did it again!  When I'd reach for her to steady her, she'd say "No, let me do it," and she did!  She was riding from the beginning to the end by herself.


Of course I was performing my job as cheerleader admirably, nearly wetting myself with the jumping up and down.  She beamed.  That's the only word for it.  She was so proud of herself.


And I didn't get pictures!  I was too busy running alongside or jumping up and down!


Yeah!  


I am going to include the Southern Utah pictures though. Because I am too lazy to start another blog about it by itself.

This is Little Wild Horse.  The girls made it beautifully, quite the little hikers.  We didn't do Bell Canyon, though, just up and back Wild Horse.

 The wind was blowing so hard while we were in Goblin Valley we didn't stay very long.  We got sand and grit in our teeth and ears and coating every exposed surface.

 I've always found these vinyl family silhouettes kind of odd, then I heard someone say they are an invitation to pedophiles.  My favorite was a set I saw of the deadbeat family, mom and daughter pregnant and smoking, dad and son slovenly and slouching.  These are my second favorite.  Why they stopped there, I don't know.
"Keep goin, Vern! Just go ahead and wrap them all the way around the van!"

 We did the long hike to Delicate Arch, and again the girls did fabulous.  No complaining, just tripsing along.  It is so nice to have them at this age!

We did have a lot of wind, again.  

All in all a lovely trip, a great spring break!

Tax Time Loometh

Every year since my husband turned the taxes over to an accountant, who then turned most of the bookkeeping over to me, we've filed an extension and end up filing sometime in September or so.
I thought this meant I had from April until September to do all that bookkeeping stuff I SHOULD have done from January to December.  Turns out I still have to have it all done by April, but the Accountant doesn't have to have his part of it all done until he's good and ready, which can be any time between May and September.

I reconcile two accounts; the business checking account and Hubby's American Express account, then I have some magic to do with his Per Diem calculation and taxis and meals and figuring out where he was on what days, waving my magic wand, and coming up with a number which then I write on a check and pay the household account for in retribution.  I don't understand it, but I follow the instructions carefully laid out for me by the nice accountant. 

Last year (2010) I had kind of stalled out in February, and didn't pick it back up until October, which is a totally stupid time to decide to catch up as everything else in my life starts hurtling toward the holidays, which are a grossly time consuming season for me.  One problem with waiting is then it gets hard to find the statements to match the QuickBooks files up to, and after a while they no longer make them available on line.  It starts getting difficult to accomplish it at all.  But for the 2010 taxes I got it all completed and to the accountant by the middle of March, then I vowed that NEVER AGAIN will I let the bookkeeping get so far ahead of me.

This year (2011) I apparently made good on my vow long enough to get things up to date for that minute.  I had entered up to March in one account, and April in the other before I stalled out.  However I didn't pick everything up to work on furiously until Oh, about a week ago.
So the house, the kids, the laundry, dinner... everything is coming to a complete halt and hanging around my ears until the Quickbooks stuff is all entered up to December.  The per diem stuff may take longer, but I don't have to show that to the accountant immediately (shhhhhh).


I'm just taking this moment here to complain about it.  As of this moment I have finished the checking account through 2011, and I'm on May of the Am Ex account, but I haven't started the whole per diem stuff.  The accountant said he'd sure appreciate it if I could get this to him by the end of the week.  


Ummm... unless I stop eating and sleeping I'm not sure that's going to happen.  And did I mention we have this whole remodel thing going on in the basement?  The contractor told me I have to have a closet in (see previous post) so they can finish the baseboards in that bedroom before the painter comes.  Sigh.

I am not an island

I have learned to singlehandedly take care of many things around the house. I'm sure this is true for many many people.  I know I'm not alone in my alone-ness.  A lot of people have to find ways to do things alone that require multiple people.  Or maybe they're smarter than me and they call a friend.  But I consider myself moderately handy, like being able to do things, and usually can do it myself despite the obstacles.
As part of our remodel we are putting in a bedroom downstairs.  One of my issues with bedrooms is the closet.  I hate how the doorway is cut smaller than the closet, so you can't get to the stuff on the sides, or the top shelf.  Then we discovered the IKEA closet systems which go all the way to the ceiling and all the way left and right.  

None of that annoying shelf behind the door jamb.  They have multiple options for shelves, drawers, racks, and shoe storage.  We are hooked.  They are cheap.  It's a match made in heaven.  I'd add doors because it's not part of a walk-in closet. 

The bedroom is nearly done, with the nice big open space just waiting for the closet.  I drive to IKEA and purchase my closet system, which weighs approximately seven billion pounds for each of the two base units which will sit beautifully side by side in my closet space. I got them on the cart thing myself, but a nice passerby stopped to help me get them into the back of my car.  While I am a fully functioning independent person, I have been known to accept the kindness of strangers.   I even bought some closet doors, which I decided on the way home I definitely don't like, but then I had the brilliant revelation that I'd just return them later and have the cabinet maker guy who's working on the house make me four little closet doors that will match the door to the room!  And the molding!  (pictures will come later!) It will be custom fit, it will go beautifully!  I'll pay more for the doors, sure, but it will be wonderful!  Wonderful, I tell you!


My contractor and his daughter (who has been helping him with my house) helped me get the two huge boxes through the removable open window, into the basement, the same way they've brought in all the lumber, dry wall, tile, and other equipment for remodeling so they didn't have to carry it through the house and down my tight turned stairs.  Soon after they brought in the closet they replaced said window with the real thing.  They go to lunch and I go to work assembling my closet.  I am excited.


I am alone.  But I am undaunted.  I have always assembled stuff from IKEA by myself, despite the little warning:

Taken by itself this image is somewhat confusing.  It looks like uneven-eyed Picasso inspired people wielding hammers should not approach the IKEA products.  Or maybe you just shouldn't hammer on them.  But next to it is the explanatory image:

Oh, I see.  Two people are okay.  Or maybe it's hammering is okay as long as you have a friend with a pencil behind his ear to watch.  Whatever.  I am alone.  But I remain undaunted.  Until somewhere around step 11 when I had to stand up the side and attached bottom of the closet structure, previously laying on the ground and attached by two tiny sticks and three screws.  It took some doing but I succeeded without breaking anything.  Then, I was supposed to sort of simultaneously attach the other side, and the top of the closet structure, forming a box, again with two little dowel sticks and three screw things.  This is where I started having trouble. The first time the side that I had carefully balanced slid out from under the top, the top fell down, knocking off a corner, and bending the screws, breaking the dowels, and ripping out the screw holes.  

Yes, I should have stopped there.  But I found some wood glue and a vice the contractor had in a box in the hall, did my best to patch things back together, straightened the screws as best I could with a couple of pliers, and started again.  The second time the whole thing leaned too far and fell over and I couldn't catch it, the screw holes on the other side were ripped out too. 


And now this is me:

Only I have more hair and accessorize better.  Other than that, it's a pretty accurate depiction.


The contractor said he'd probably be able to glue most of the pieces back together and would be able to help me another day.  


So much for being a do-it-myself-er.

Long time gone

Hubby flew to Sydney yesterday.  He's been in Melbourne, before that he was in Brisbane, before that he was in Wellington, before that he was in Auckland.  It has been a loooong couple of weeks.  He comes back home on Wednesday late afternoon.

Last week we kind of sat around.  This week we kept ourselves busy.  My niece, who we'll call Niecey, is Thing 1 and 2's most favorite person in the world, came up for a sleepover.  Friday night I took all three girls snowshoeing at night with a group from church.  Niecey had never been snowshoeing before, my girls had been once.  Turns out snowshoeing in the dark is predictably harder than going during the day.  Also it was steeper, in any event we didn't make it to the top of the hill to see the moon rise... Thing 2 became very frustrated and started falling down a lot.  Everyone was kind of stumbling, the terrain is irregular and the snow trips you up, but Thing 2 seemed to take it more personally than anyone else.  When she started loudly crying we turned around, as reports indicated the incline got much steeper from there.  And, having a sobbing kid that I'm driving forward at night on a trail full of people I don't know is certainly not my idea of a good time.  There were Banbury Cross donuts and hot chocolate waiting at the bottom.  We took Kelso, who was of course more of a problem than I had hoped.  He was fine once we got on the trail, he stayed pretty close to us, but he was going back and forth, and knocked Thing 2 down once when  he pushed past her, and he growled at people on the trail a couple of times, and I'm sure by the end of the night EVERYONE knew our dog's name as all three girls kept calling to him the minute he was out of their line of sight, even when he was quite close by and didn't need to be called back.  They were quite worried he'd run off.


Saturday afternoon the three girls played in their rooms a lot, and went outside a couple of times to play in the snow.  Thing 1 figured out a way to go snowboarding, sort of.  She's really excited about it, and I think it's time to put them in ski or snowboarding lessons.

My brother came up later on Saturday to get his daughter, it's always nice to have him up and I got to show the remodeling off to him.  I love how he has always been very positive about this house, commenting how much he likes it and how well it suits our family.  Which it does.
After they left we went to dinner at the home of one of Thing 1's friends.  Her dad was out of town so it was a girls party.  We just had Costco pizza, but it was really nice to talk to the mom, who I like talking to.  The girls had a few incidents where the friend turned off the lights, pulled some heads off her dolls, and apparently tried and succeeded in freaking out my girls, especially Thing 1 who has a low tolerance for dark and creepy.  She was ready to leave quite a while before we actually did.  But they made cotton candy and all in all I had a lovely time.  It's nice poking my nose in other people's houses, and though there are things I really like about their house, overall it's probably not one I would have really considered.

Today we're just sitting around.  I sort of "accidentally" forgot it's daylight savings time, and we missed church. 
Not a good excuse, I know, but it's what we did.


A nice weekend, despite Hubby not being here.


Not much going on, just thought I'd catch up a little.

Aloha

We just got back on Saturday from a week in HAWAII!  

It had started as a week in New Zealand, where Hubby's going for the next week, then it looked like a week in Sydney, where Hubby's going for the week after his week in New Zealand, then reality finally struck us full in the face and we realized a week on the other side of the planet really means three or more days getting there and back, a couple days of jetlag, and actually only a day or two to enjoy New Zealand, or Sydney.  So Hubby had the brilliant idea of all of us going to Hawaii, then he'd go on to New Zealand and the girls and I would come home.


We had a marvelous time!  We relaxed!  We enjoyed ourselves in a wide variety of ways!  I'm going to make a list:


We 
snorkled (twice)
beached (twice)
ate out (twice, once at Bubba Gump's and once at a luau, and once at Denny's which doesn't actually count)
slept late (a lot)
stayed up late (a lot)
got up early (once)
cooked
drove (a lot)
read (a lot)
napped
paddled kayaks
boogie boarded
swam in the ocean
swam in the pool
got a Sharpie tattoo of a turtle (one of us did, anyway)
made fish out of palm leaves
learned and forgot some Hawaiian words
ate poi (yuck)
ate a bunch of other foods on the luau buffet



We saw
Sea turtles resting on the beach (4 different turtles, 2 different beaches)
black sand
white sand
blue water
black volcanic rocks (more of that than I thought ever possible)
glow from a volcano (OOOH SOO COOL!)
2 different vacation rental homes
palm trees
verdant green stretches of hillside
the Captain Cook monument
dolphins
swimming sea turtles (I didn't see them, though)
TONS of different kinds of fish
an eel
coral
dancing natives

It was a wonderful trip, we had a great time.  I think, however, if we're going back to the islands, we'll probably choose Maui or Kauai over the big island.  There was just too much black volcanic rock.  Maybe if we'd stayed on the north side, my opinion would be different. But we stayed on the south west side, where there is black volcanic rock, and more rock, and more rock.  And over there some more black volcanic rock.  Sitting on top of a bed of black volcanic rock.  Surrounded by a wall of black volcanic rock.  In front of an entire landscape of black volcanic rock.
There may be more pictures later, because I did get some good ones.  But until then, here are a couple that I emailed to myself.

That is volcano glow behind the girls!

The most beautiful beach, which was a 30 minute hike over, you guessed it... volcanic rock!

Notice the very black sand beach on which the turtle rests.

 
all right that's enough for one night.

What is the good angle of a bathroom, anyway?

The cabinet is getting installed today.
I've gone back and forth with the granite guy, they need six pages of signed forms and agreements, and then a separate contract, with diagrams of where the faucet will go, model numbers for the sink basin and faucet, and assurances that anything not already specified in said contract will be an additional cost.  He's having trouble attaching files to an email, so he sends faxes, which I receive as an email.  I don't fax because of our phone line being a cell phone line, so I print everything out, sign it, and then had to learn how to make my new Christmas gift printer send scans back to the computer.  It's been a really busy day in which I actually accomplished nearly nothing.  But there's a cadre of workmen in my basement, hopefully accomplishing a lot.  Not the granite, mind you... this is all prep for the granite.

When it's all done, I hope to have some photos like you would put in a magazine.  In the mean time, I have shots like this:

 

 Hopefully the glamor shots will come later.

More remodeling dust

The remodel of the house continues, with day to day dramas that are wildly important that day, but sort of get washed over with the next day's drama.


We got a bid back on the greener of the two pieces of granite, never heard about the other one.  It was high but reasonably so.  Fine.  We proceed and meet with someone at the tile store to get some help narrowing down our options.  I choose, I buy tile, the installers come and tile the floor.


I get a phone call from the granite guy, apparently that particular piece of granite was sold a year ago, the boss just forgot to mark it.  He can't sell it to me.  For crying out loud they're already cementing the matching tile to my bathroom wall!!!
I frantically drive down the mountain to look at more bone yards.  I don't find much, whatever good stuff I find is, again, already sold.  I can't decide if the greener granite guy was lying to me (did someone come in with a check in hand saying I'll pay you right now?!?)  I decide to call him the next morning to see if the other piece he had, the Sequoia, is available.  
I call and he says he'll give me a bid on that, and there is another piece of Victoria Regia (the green one) available but the finish is different.
I drive ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE VALLEY to look.  The Victoria Regia is horrible, all gray and scratched, you can't see the colors at all. Yuck.
He says he'll give me the Sequoia for the same price as he quoted me on the nice Victoria Regia, even though their cost for it is three times as much.  Again, I don't know if he's blowing smoke or not but he assures me the Sequoia is more of a showpiece granite, and a really nice piece.  It is nice, it matches my accent tile really well, and even has a little green vein running through it I hadn't noticed before.
I take it.
The tile guys had to stop because now we're waiting for the cabinet, and then the granite countertop will go on top of that, and then the tile guys can finish.  So far it's gorgeous, I'm really pleased.  I'll have to take pictures.  
The new windows should come tomorrow, the tile guys will continue tiling the shower area but then they'll have to stop.  The contractor wants to paint tomorrow, I haven't picked a color yet. The cabinet comes Monday, the granite template and installation will be after that, the shower floor material will be ready on Wednesday.  The doors should come the end of next week or beginning of the next.
But tonight I'm just happy the kids are in bed and the kitchen is kind of clean.  I haven't started on taxes and the calendar I usually make my mom and family for Christmas is nearly done.  I've changed it, it's going to be a March to March calendar.

I'm sure there were other, more significant things I should be writing about, but I can't remember them.  It's all lost in the remodeling drama. 


Oh, and the drama that we leave on the 16th for AUSTRALIA!! hehehehe