Vancouver area

We have visited a few gardens today in the Vancouver City area. It was cold today, but it didn't rain in the afternoon like we expected it to. Here are a few pictures. Tomorrow we will take the ferry to spend time at a garden on Vancouver Island and then hang out in downtown Victoria during the afternoon. There are lots of interesting shops, historic buildings and museums, etc in downtown Victoria.

Tulips, eh?

Here we are in Canada. We flew in to Seattle at lunchtime and then drove out to the Skagit Valley to spend the afternoon looking at the tulip fields. Most of the Dutch bulbs that are sold in the U.S. are grown there, as are many of the fresh cut tulips used by florists. And yes, lots of Dutch tulip bulbs still come from Holland, too.

They also grow a lot of other things in the Skagit Valley. Tulips are grown on a 5-year rotation to prevent tulip diseases, so the valley is a patchwork of tulip fields and other crops that are grown in each field until they can grow tulips again.

Here are a couple of pictures from one of the tulip fields.

One more time-we hope!

We are home now and have had a chance to look at all the work that the painters did while we were gone. The colors are fine. As a matter of fact, we have decided we could have gone with even deeper colors.

I thought that the texturing looked awfully coarse, though, and that there were some distinct blobs of texture that were just begging grandkids to pick them off. I also noticed a few places where I thought the seams should have been done a little better. When someone from the company came over to take pcitures of the job, I showed him all those things and we also noticed a few other things that should have been done better. He decided that he needed to send a crew back out to work on some of the seams, fix a few spots and completely redo all the texture and repaint (at their expense).

I thought I had this all planned out so that we would be done before my "work season" and all of the traveling that we had planned. No such luck. Now they will have to work around my schedule to get things taken care of. So we will not be finishing things up any time soon. But once we do, it will be nice.

I think she'll still have frostbite!

Here we are in Sheboygan, next to Kohler (Wisconsin). Unlike Ann Arbor, this little area actually has some gentle, rolling hills instead of being flat. We have spent the day lovin' up the boys and just chillin' (in more ways than one- it's cold and rainy here). We'll have plenty of fun this weekend, though. We'll check out the new house and look around Kohler.

On another note, Steven called to let me know that the painters were really concerned, once they were done, about the color of paint I chose for my stairway walls. Sort of a "are you sure she meant to have a color so shockingly unattractive" concern. Not the kind of thing someone with paint-color insecurities wants to hear. It didn't look so bad when I put a couple of test patches on the walls. I guess we'll just have to see when we get home. In any case, it's just paint.

Dust

This is supposed to be the "big week"in the basement. Today they are going to texture the walls and they plan to paint on Tuesday and Wednesday. So today they have been sanding all the drywall to get it ready for the texture. The dust is pervasive! My cleaners came today and left at about 11:00 a.m. It is now 1:00 p.m. and there is a film of fine, white dust visible on everything upstairs. JJ left with a layer of white haze on his clothes. I have washed my hands several times and within 15 or 20 minutes they look dusty again. Only two more days to go and we will be done with the dirtiest part of the work!

We are going to take our time with the carpet, furniture and kitchenette. We know what we want to do, we just want to make sure we can pay cash for it, so we will have to see how much is left in savings once the paint dries. Another plus to waiting is that it will be warm enough to open the windows and air out the "new carpet" fumes. It is supposed to rain and snow and be cold off and on this week, so we will just have to put up with the paint fumes until we leave.

My goal is to have a nice place for Christmas Eve stories at the end of the year. We might even have a dinner or two down there. Michael and Tomoko have been really great to host all the family events each winter but I think they will be glad to relax a little more during the holidays.

Yikes!

I got a haircut yesterday. Because of the style, I can let it grow out for a while and then get a few inches taken off and start over again.

This time, I forgot that my hair tends to "tighten up" once it dries after the haircut. When the stylist asked if the cut was short enough, I told her to take off a little more. Bad decision because now it's about the shortest it's ever been. Oh, well.

The End of an Era (and beginning of another)

Today we ended an era at our house. For the first time in at least 24 years, we do not have a pet. It has been so long that we are essentially beginning another era, the petless era. We plan to stay petless for at least a few years so that we can travel without the inconvenience of a pet sitter. I don't foresee another pet until sometime in the distant future unless someone special like Dugan suddenly needs a home. On the other hand, I have learned "never say never" because life is full of surprises.

'Ui'ana'iki (Her Hawaiian name means "a little squeak" because she never had much of a voice) was a different sort of cat than our other 3 cats. She was the poster kitten for "scaredy cat" and for most of her life she lived in fear of something that we never did understand. Within a few months of the passing of cat number 3, 'Ui began to come out of her shell, revealing a sweet, affectionate, sometimes whacky personality and we came to realize that 'Ui was meant to be an only cat.

In the past year she had really warmed up- keeping us company every evening and spending her nights curled up on the foot of the bed (see "Open letter to a cat" posted Nov.2007), joining me in the recliner whenever I sat still long enough for her to notice, going with me to the door when the doorbell rang and even tolerating the "soft" touches and attention of Jeremiah Jr. every Monday and Tuesday. She played daily games of chase-and-race through the bedroom and hallway and was frequently engaged in earnest battles with the rug at the back door. Lately she had taken to quietly creeping farther up the bed to sleep between us each night once she thought we were asleep.

We knew she was meant to be a Seaver cat when Dad finally got his long-awaited MacBook Pro. She was immediately drawn to it, rubbing her face against the edges of the open laptop with such ardor and intensity that soon a trickle of kitty drool ran down the brand new screen. For the rest of her life, she was an ardent fan of Apple laptops, bestowing her affection each night as we checked our email and read the family blogs.

'Ui'ana'iki was never a tenacious mouser, territorial protector of the yard or even a melodic meower and didn't like to be picked up or handled, but she also didn't need insulin injections, annual shaving, special food or accommodations for the visually impaired.

Shy, quiet and a little reclusive to the end, she was nevertheless interesting and pleasant company and she will be missed.