Sometimes it rains...

So the wet season is here...definitely my least favorite season in Portland.

Rain, rain, rain...and I mean it's not that bad really. But you know us humans. We gotta complain about something, right?

Sometimes you have to let go...

So my last bike was stolen outside of a comedy club...I had this one: 

It sucks. I had it for less than a year and a half. And someone smashed my lock and took the bike. It sucks that people do this. I liked my bike. I had just replaced the cassette on it and gotten a new chain not long before that, and replaced one of the brake cables. This was 22 days ago. I filed a police report, also reported it on the Portland stolen bike registry. I was also checking craigslist pretty much daily to see if the thief posted it for sale. No such luck.

So I finally decided it was time to move on. I was checking out many used bikes online. But I didn't really find something that didn't seem extremely low priced as to make me wonder if it was also a stolen bike, or something similar to what I had. So Geli found this website for me, where I found this at a very good price(hundreds less than what I paid for the last bike!), and it's an even better bike than I had before:

This time around though, I am getting a tougher lock, and I am also registering the bike with the manufacturer and also with the lock company. That gets me insurance in case it is stolen again, then the lock company pays me for it. I really hope it doesn't get to that. But that's not up to me. I wish shitty people didn't do this...but that's also not up to me. I get it in 5 days! Stoked for that!

Sometimes spam is late...

So we sold the car, what? Some 4 years ago? And this is what I get, today:

So yeah, only about 4 years too late on this scam attempt. Where are they even getting this info? haha

Sometimes it is hot...

I know you EP folks will say we're crazy. But seriously...this is not normal, nor acceptable weather here:

So welcome to Portland Mari and Gabe...apparently this can happen in September, when it is pretty much fall.

Sometimes people astound you....

And not in a good way. The gullibility of people seems to have no end. The lack of any sort of skepticism or critical thought. It astounds me. People fumble through life without looking into things, asking questions, wondering if, how, or why something might be correct.

And of course social media brings it out of people and shows the world just how gullible they are. Here are just a few grotesque examples of gullibility just from this morning's feed:

Um what? October? We're in September. And Oct 2013 does not have 5 Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. So how credible is the rest of it and what connection could it possibly have with Chinese Feng Shui?! No money? How so? 11 minutes?! SERIOUSLY people?! 

It seriously blows my mind that the next though that follows is not "So when people die, it is directly his fault. He's apparently in charge of handing out 'days' to people. So when you don't get one, that must be him." How does that not compute?

What in the world is this guy blathering about? Spirit of excellence? Honor? What is this? Some medieval conquest involving wizards?! Do these people live in the same reality we do? Seriously...how does this not sound like a total load of bs to people?  

How did that miracle go? We should have almost half a million miracles by now since god apparently uses facebook shares as a method for handing out miracles and curses. Also, all should have gone wrong for the rest of us that ignored it, which includes me. Still waiting....

This is people apparently. It's embarrassing that even the most basic form of skepticism is not applied to the barrage of bs thrown at you on a daily basis. I don't even know what the thought process that would lead to accepting, agreeing with, and reposting all this bs would even be like. Because I mean, come on. Belief in deities aside, even if you believe in some sort of god(s), why in the world would they use social media for handing out miracles and money and condemning people?! Seriously....

Sometimes you find eggs...

Although technically Sophie found them. But here are some spider eggs:

They look as gnarly as I would expect them to! And like something out of a sci-fi film! 

 In such a nice place too, they were here:

Sometimes you find some bugs...

Sophie found this one too. She loves exploring the yard and is not afraid of or grossed out by bugs at all. She's curious, and investigative, which I love. This is one she brought me, to ask what it was. I have no idea. It looks like a trilobite or something from eons ago to me!

Love the camouflage too! 

Sometimes squirrels are bad...

I like them normally. But it seems I will need to keep a closer eye on them...

No matter how cute they are...

They have been doing this!

Digging in my newly planter garden! And then they see me, and make this face:

Like I didn't just see it digging up our radishes! haha

Sometimes you shoot a dragonfly....

Just not with a gun. These pics are like a month old, but hey, no time to process them with all the stuff that needs doing around the house. But here they are:

 

None of these are with a macro adapter or anything.We were just walking somewhere and saw it, and I used the 17-50mm Tamron, our "walk around" lens.

Sometimes you move a mighty oak tree...

Only, this one is not mighty just yet...I found what I am pretty sure is a baby oak tree growing right in front of our porch. So if I let it keep growing there, it will eventually block our living room window. So I moved it further out on the yard. 

The root was pretty long for such a little plant, so there was more digging than I expected since I wanted to be extra careful in order to maximize its chances of survival.

But now it is safely planted in its new home. And it's been about a week since the transplant and it is not showing any signs of dying, so I hope it keeps on growing.

Sometimes you plant some vegetables...

So we got the house a little late in the planting season. But we wanted to see if we could grow something anyway. I did some quick research online, and some vegetables can grow through the fall and even the winter. So we thought we'd give it a try. Also, it helped that I got all the seeds for free at the Tool Library(just like the library, but for tools. You can borrow all sorts of tools for free!). So I tried it in a small patch of neglected backyard.

It was fun, let's see what we can harvest, if anything.

Oh, and of course, I timelapsed it. So here's a quick video of that:

Sometimes you are baffled....

One of my coworkers is a field tech, so he goes out to many facilities for various issues. And today, he ran into this:

Someone, perhaps several people thought it prudent to do this! Make the bathroom into the networking closet...I love how the modem(silver box to the left) is just hanging off a water pipe. And of course they made "drip loops" for the cable, but under the toilet tank!! That this exists is just baffling to me. And by the way, my friend says there was plenty of other places they could have used, so he was confused as well as to why they would do this. So yeah....nice networking closet.

Sometimes you break the restroom...

When we moved in, we knew some work would need to be done to the bathroom. This is what we started with:

And you can't really tell in the pictures, but towards the toilet, the floor was uneven. It was pretty bad, like  huge bump, and then an incline down towards the wall. I just thought it was uneven. I had no idea that it would be rotten swollen wood....

We knew there was some moisture issues in the bathroom. But nothing of the scale that we found...We pulled out the vinyl to check what we were dealing with, and it was pretty bad. Completely soft wood that was water damaged and crumbed to the touch. So we started removing some of it. And this is what we got now:

So yeah, we need to fix this quickly. Hopefully by this weekend. I foresee a trip to a home improvement store and lots of work this week! haha

Sometimes you go plum picking...

In your front yard! I had seen squirrels feasting on the plums, and it was cute. Although they are wasteful eaters haha They would eat like half, then throw it! I thought they weren't ripe yet, cuz well, they're green.

Then I was out gardening, saw one fell from the tree, no squirrel around to throw it. Checked it out, tasted it, and it was damn good. So we went plum picking! First day it was kinda dark, so we just got a bowl of pums. Next day we got Sophie's sand bucket full of plums. So we made a plum pie. It still baffles me that food just grows on trees and out of the ground. I don't know why that seems so crazy to me...

So with such a surplus of plums, we made a pie. Sophie had been wanting a pie for a long time. So we made one out of plums :)

It's not a looker, but it was yummy :D And we have been eating plums like crazy since haha

Sometimes you wash the deck....

So cleaning the deck was on our list of things to do. And while I expected it to look better than it did before, I was definitely not expecting such a radical transformation! Took me about six hours of work total, over the span of 3 days. But I could not be more pleased with the results. Here is a before and after of the washing of the deck:

Probably the best $10 we've spent in a while(that's how much the wood cleaning solution cost). And here is a timelapse of the cleaning and the sealing:

Sometimes you paint the same wall 7 colors...

So we've been working on painting Sophie's room for a long time now(like 3 weeks). Mainly because we almost only get to work on it on the weekends, the walls needed a lot of prep work before painting, and it is a huge room(13ft x 21ft / 4m x 6.5m). So after nail, staple, and tape removal, because for some reason, the previous occupants decided that taping over nail holes, then painting over the tape was an appropriate solution, we sanded, and spackled, and sanded and spackled(probably not the right word lol) some more...

Sophie insisted that we make a checklist, since she was getting impatient with her room, and wanted to see some sort of progress:

Finally, we were ready to paint. We started with the blue wall:

Then we painted the white parts, which was the ceiling wall, and 2 other walls. Then Geli came up with the design for the feature wall. We finally got around to doing that wall yesterday. We started last week though, and painted white along the "border" lines of the design. So it would be dry by the time we were going to tape over that. Then we taped what would become the white border lines, and got to painting:

Here are almost 6 hrs of work timelapsed into less than one minute:

Sometimes you garden...

So I go in to work at 8am, and Geli leaves like at 6:30am. Sometimes(not often lol), I am up when she leaves. So I go outside and try to tidy up the garden/yard. I really like it. Last week what stopped me from doing more gardening and clean up was that the trash can for yard debris/compost was full. In one day I filled it up. Same today. The yard was very neglected(and yet it doesn't look that horrific, yay Portland!). So even just taking out all the dry weeds/plants that have accumulated fills up the full size trash can for yard stuff. Pretty crazy. So yeah. I didn't take any pics of this yet . So when I think the garden looks alright, I will take a pic haha

Sometimes you organize....

Your videos on youtube. Probably just to procrastinate, cuz there's tons to do in the house, but since Sophie had been wanting to watch videos of her when she was little, and I didn't like clicking on each video to play it, then back, or opening a million tabs, I organized them into 2 playlists in chronological order(only because 200 is the limit, else I would have done one):





Now, we really should get the house in order lol....tomorrow, Sophie soccer in the early morning(9am!), and then grocery shopping, and then the house in order, and painting Sophie's room!

Sometimes you pick the colors....

So we finally decided on most of the color schemes for the house. We're still missing the kitchen one. But other than that, every wall, inside and outside is getting a coat of paint. Here is what we picked:

For the living room/dining room/hall: Gray walls / white trim 

For Sophie's room, we're doing one feature wall with a design that will use red, orange, purple, yellow, green, and blue. There will be an accent wall of blue, and 2 white walls:

For the exterior we're going with dark gray, white trim, green accents(door, porch furniture, patio furniture):

Our bedroom will be one accent wall bright green(w00t!), black walls, white trim. One of the walls will have tons of black and white pics on it too:

So there you go...we'll have plenty more pics coming as we tackle these projects. Probably more than you care to see haha. Also, paint is way more expensive than we anticipated. Way more....and we shouldn't be allowed to go into home depot.