I haven’t written lately, we had a fun-filled weekend while Jeremy was here and then I started orientation and then work the next day. Unfortunately, i managed to pick up Strep from somewhere and began my first day of work feeling pretty crappy. I’m on the mend though….and will write the story of our boating adventure last weekend, as soon as I get a chance (and the pictures from Jeremy!).
The H.M.S. Dream Maker
She’s a runner! We showed up at TriState Marine this morning at 9:30 and a very nice mechanic named Kasey dropped everything to come take a look at it…tested a couple of things, put new spark plugs in, tweaked a few things and actually got it to sputter and start, but he thought the ignition module was bad….which sounded weird to me but what do i know? It was an easy fix and less than an hour and a half after we got there, we were pulling away, boat running like new!
I keep going out there and starting it to make sure it will still start and it starts first time! It is so awesome!
I finally got around to putting the lettering on it….for those of you who don’t know, HMS stands for Her Majesty’s Ship, which is actually a British thing….but it works for me too 
Dream Maker has a dual meaning…it had been a dream of mine for a long time to own a boat….and it is also the name of a very dear friend’s business. So…HMS Dream Maker it is!
I can’t wait to take it out on Saturday. We have a big day planned, Jeremy will be here (woohoo!) and Karen and Marie and all the kids are coming down and it will take a few trips to get everyone there, but we’ll pick a dock somewhere and get everyone settled in and make some food and then take a few at a time out for a ride on the boat and just hang out. It is supposed to be really hot this weekend, so it will be perfect!
P.S. Yes, that is a humongous tie down that you see in the picture, if you’ve seen my driveway, you understand why it is there. I live in fear that the boat will slide off the trailer IN the driveway and it would take a crane to put it back on…so that is just a little extra security .
Just another day in paradise!
My week so far has been taken up by trying to get the boat running. Here is the condensed version.
Saturday I yanked it out of the garage. I say ‘yanked’ because it was wedged in there and I know I took out at least one couch and multiple boxes of crap on the way out! I cleaned a bunch of stuff out of it….who was the smarty pants that told the kids to throw the bags of mexican clothes into the boat? I started waxing it. I tried to start it. Uh…no. Called around trying to find one of the many people who promised me they’d help me get it started…nothing. Got Lee on the phone, he said to bring it over to his house and he’d take a look. Changed the tire on the trailer that went flat when Karen and I wedged it in there last fall. Took off down the driveway, spare went flat halfway down. Cussed. Backed up 21 foot boat in my uphill, curvy driveway, surprisingly successful the first time! Back up the driveway, call Lee, call Les Schwab, new tire is $90, no used ones! Holy crap! Call salvage yards, get one in Nampa that has tons, but they close in an hour. Load up kids, drive frantically to town, nearly out of gas, stop to buy $20 in gas (barely moved the needle!), call salvage yard and beg them to stay open just a few more minutes, guy finally agrees. Get to Nampa to salvage yard, guy looks surprised when i roll trailer tire in…i DID tell him I needed a 14 inch, 7.75 inch wide trailer tire when I called. They don’t have THAT kind of tire! Sends me to used tire place further into Nampa. Go to used tire place, roll my trailer tire in there….girl that is all of about 5′ tall and 100 pounds finds me a trailer tire that will fit and mounts and balances that sucker. I was impressed!
I feed kids, come home, change tire yet again.
Sunday, church, potluck sunday after church, we eat, I come home and take a nap. Happy Mother’s Day!
Monday, I drag boat over to Lee’s, he looks at it, scratches his head….drinks an energy drink, smokes a cigarette (within inches of my boat motor which reeks of fuel!), scratches his head some more, backs Lisa’s van up, hooks up jumper cables…..boat is closer to starting but still won’t start. Another cigarette, more head scratching…tells me to take it home and charge the battery more and it should start. I back the boat back around the corner and down their very long driveway and get back home, hook battery up to charger again.
I talk to Gene about boat and how to get it started….Gene speaks mechanic speak and confuses the hell out of me. Gene advises me to take a spark plug out, reconnect it to the plug wire and touch it to the motor, while turning key. This sounds fine except for the fact that I do not have 18′ arms….the motor is at the back of the boat, the key is at the front. Gene tells me to do something to the solenoid to jump it so i can reach both…that idea scares the hell out of me because it involves sparks, so i decide to wait till the kids get home. Kids get home, clayton turns key while i touch spark plug to motor…no spark. I come back in, do research, internet says to touch to UNPAINTED part of motor. I kid you not, my entire motor is painted blue..there is nothing that isn’t painted.
I give up and go to put basketball hoop together..yeah thanks Marie, that was a BRILLIANT idea. Who’da thunk that in the 2 days from when we took it apart and i had to put it back together, that i’d forget how it went together? And did you know that thing is HEAVY? This project involves a bit of cussing too.
Conversation with Gene later indicates that I should take the battery into town, to an auto parts store and have them test it.
Tuesday: I get up and reluctantly disconnect battery from boat (after trying to start the boat for the billionth time), lug it to the truck, leave for town. Go to Olive Garden and eat lots of salad and breadsticks and soup and chocolate pie with Marie…oh yeah, that makes everything better! She’s forgiven for the basketball hoop incident. Oops..I don’t think I ever told her i was mad at her about that..oh well, no need to tell her now!
Take battery to Auto Zone and explain to the slovenly early 20’s wannabe mechanic behind the counter WHY i need to test it. Smile and nod my head as kid tells me long story about HIS boat experience. He expresses amazement that I only have ONE battery in my boat and tells me most boats have 2, a car battery to start it and a Marine Deep Cycle battery (what i have) to run the trolling motor. I nod my head and smile some more, all the while deciding that he is full of shit and has no clue what he is talking about, and is merely trying to impress me with his extensive knowledge of boats. I decided to go to a different auto parts store and get a second opinion.
Go get Gabe, take battery into Schucks. Middle aged blonde woman who has smoked way too many cigarettes in her life tests my battery, tells Gabe that she knows she is scary looking cuz she is fat and ugly, tells me battery is fine…oddly enough, I believe her!
4 pm Tuesday, Gene tells me to stick a screwdriver in the plug wire and start it and see if there is a spark, but be careful because it COULD knock me on my ass….enough is enough, the boat is going to a repair shop tomorrow. Becca don’t fool with ‘lectricity.
With any luck…the damn thing will be running by the weekend so we can enjoy the 90+ degree weather on Lucky Peak!
The New Job…
A couple of people have reminded me that I haven’t written anything about the new job…..
My friend Talitha, from church, told me a few weeks ago that she thought there was gonna be an opening at where she works (St. Lukes Internal Medicine) for a phone coordinator, which is basically someone who takes the calls for all the St. Lukes Dr’s in the Treasure Valley, making appointments, talking to pharmacies…basically handling all the phone stuff for the Dr’s. The pay was liveable and the best part..once I get trained, it is a 4 day a week job!
She talked to the HR woman in her office and then called me the next day to tell me to bring my resume by and talk to this lady (Heather), and I did, we had a little mini-interview and she asked me back for a second one…..and it all seemed to go really well. Then I heard from Talitha that they LOVED me and were definately going to offer me the job, but I had to play the waiting game. Because St. Lukes is so huge, everything goes through their main HR department…so it wasn’t until Monday that I got the call with the job offer. Incidentally while I was in the chair having my crappy hair done!
The list of benefits for this job goes on and on, they are better than the pay! I get 23 days vacation my first year, 401k with a 3% match that is vested immediately, they pay for life insurance equal to my yearly salary and i can up that if i want, long term and short term disability, a free membership to Air St. Lukes, which considering where I live could really come in handy if we ever had something happen, (they air lift everyone out of here, the ambulance would take too long), free health screenings, you name it, Flex spending accounts, you name it, we have it.
So today I go in for a health screening, drug test and background check, as well as HR paperwork, on the 19th and 20th I have hospital training and then on the 21st, I officially start work!
I’m taking a huge cut in pay to go into something like this, but it is stable. No more getting laid off because of the housing market (or anything else) and in time, I can get my pay back up to where it was and I can live off of what I’ll be making.
So that is the new job!
And here it is…..
I’ll be honest…after the cut, it is a LOT better. It could grow on me. I still think i’ll incorporate some blonde highlights….but I think it is liveable for the moment…
My hair….
Is about to get a LOT shorter. 
Thanks to Lori’s instructor at the Paul Mitchell school….we had a plan to make it look the way we wanted and one of the other instructors told her to do it differently, which didn’t turn out like i wanted…so this guy tells her to put this color wash on that will darken it just a tad. Yeah…how about dark orange/copper. It was horrid. To make matters worse, Marie and I tried to fix it last night, she trimmed it crooked, the color turned it green…and it is fried. So…I’m going to have dark hair for a week or two, until it recovers enough to take it back to blonde…and i’m going to have to cut it off. I’ve spent the last 18 hours intermittently choking back tears because I was so proud of myself for growing it out for 2 years. Now it is just going away . I know…it is just hair..it will grow back, but i’m still upset. Lori feels pretty bad, even though it isn’t her fault….and it seems like no matter what i try to do with it, it just gets worse…so i’m going to attempt to get in this afternoon for a haircut. I’ll try and get a pic up when it is done.
Kayaking!
Checking one more thing off of my list of stuff to accomplish….Marie took me kayaking today!
We loaded up and headed out to Lake Lowell. Despite having lived about 10 miles from it for almost 2 years, I had never been there. It is a smallish lake and perfect for something like this.
After some initial laughter from Marie on my ‘technique’ and the fact that I have absolutely NO rhythm, we finally got something of a groove going and made it all the way across the lake. The fish were jumping and splashing and in we saw some really big ones in the shallows on the other side!
We are a little sunburned, it was our warmest day yet this year, in the low 80’s, but we had a lot of fun!
My New Bedroom!
One thing I NEVER do is actually spend time to decorate my own space. I mess around with the rest of the house but even that is low on my priority list when it comes to buying accessories and making everything match. Wednesday, I was doing some shopping with Karen and we found, in the clearance bin at Penny’s…the coolest dragonfly pillows. Karen got them for me and it got me wondering if I could put together a room using the pillow as the design inspiration.
Now, I KNOW if I had the money to just go buy the things I want, I could design a very nice space, but I wasn’t wanting to spend that much and these pillows are kind of an odd color, so I enlisted Marie’s help. We met up at Ross, and despite a few disagreements about the sort of things I should put in my room, her shock that I didn’t even own lamps or matching bedside tables, and my own insistance that I would NOT put fake plants in my room…we managed to agree on some pretty awesome stuff! Some of it is totally not stuff that I would have ever picked out on my own, but that is the exact reason I asked for her help and the end result is FAN-Freakin-Tastic! I LOVE my new room, it is peaceful and comfortable and beautiful!
Unfortunately, I could not find my camera card for the before photos, so I took them with my phone and the lighting was really bad, so they didn’t turn out that great.
(please ignore the pile of laundry and the unmade bed….)
Before: VERY dark, mishmash of stuff that I’ve accumulated, emerald green cheapo curtains on the french doors, yes…that is a litter box….and did I mention DARK?
After: Bright and cheery, soft, matching colors…..the sheets are a Khaki color, the comforter is kind of a mint green, gold, tiny bit of copper and khaki stripe. The copper matches the pillows. The pillowslipes in the front are the same green as in the comforter. The curtains over the french door are kind of like crinkly silk, and they are the same gold as in the comforter and the edges of the pillows.
I pulled my matching end tables out of the garage (Julie, remember these?) and put them in there, the new lamps, no clutter…..
And did you notice this on the table on the right?
Marie and I had a good laugh about that…and decided it was a ‘must have’.
This is one time that I have to admit that the photos do not do the room justice, the lighting is weird up there.
Thanks for looking!
My Big Fat Redneck Weekend!
There could not be a more appropriate title!
I must confess, that even though I can portray the perfect image of class and style, deep down there will always be a part of me that loves to get down and dirty and do ‘redneck’ things. I love NASCAR, target shooting, going really fast, doing the unexpected…..stuff like that!
Saturday morning I woke the kids up early and handed them each a garbage bag and we covered every inch of this property and picked up scraps of paper and stuff that was hidden under the snow all winter, most of which the dog dragged out. We loaded all of that into the truck, along with the trash from the past few weeks (no garbage service up here) and took it to the dump. It was such a HUGE relief to get that done, it had been on my mind a lot lately because as the snow melts, it was looking worse and worse. The kids and I stopped at Donna’s Place and got ice cream on the way back, I don’t eat a lot of ice cream because of the whole lactose intolerance thing, but every now and then I do, and Huckleberry was my flavor for the day!
It was such a beautiful day out, when we got back, the kids headed off to play and I just sat in the sunshine for a while. My friend Leigh is up from Florida visiting, and she and her 4 girls and her older two girls’ dad (Steve) came up for the night. I had some ribs and a tarragon mustard pork loin on the grill (Sweet Baby Ray’s is the BEST BBQ sauce ever) and they brought hot dogs and brats. We ended up going up to Mike’s (Gabe’s dad) house to beg a couple of beers from him to cook the brats in, so Leigh got to see his new little place up by me. We ate until we were stuffed (ok, I ate until I was stuffed)! I made Leigh and I a couple of pomegranite martinis and we had fun laughing and giggling like a bunch of little girls.
In the middle of it all, I was trying to have a conversation with Jeremy by text and Leigh managed to snag my phone from me, and a wrestling match ensued in the process of me trying to get it back. Steve captured video of the whole thing on his phone…and is threatening to put it on youtube. I did eventually get my phone back, though she gave me a run for my money. She has more bruises than I do though…so it’s all good!
After that, we did a little target practicing, with first the bb guns and then my .357 came out, and then Steve brought out his M1 Carbine rifle.
(yes….that is rib bones and shell casings…all on the same plate. Welcome to my world!)
We got pictures of the girls shooting but Leigh didn’t send me those .
Something odd though, we have new neighbors, they’d just moved in that day and their kids wandered up to play with our kids….and despite the shooting and stuff (We are all extremely safe when we shoot), no parents ever came up to check on the kids. I don’t know about you, but if my kids were playing at a new house and i heard gunshots, I think I’d go check it out! To this day, I haven’t met the parents.
Once it started to get dark out, we came in, made a fire and watched some movies till we all fell asleep.
Sunday morning we got up and Steve made us all breakfast (chorizo and egg breakfast burrito) which was really good, then we all left for church. Marie and I had made a plan based on what Tim and Karen had decided by church on Sunday, that we’d either go play in the water or go help them pack and get ready to move, but they weren’t able to make it to church, so we called and they had stayed up late getting the kids to and from an event in town, so they were gonna get up and figure out what to do and we were to show up in a few hours, so Marie and Leigh and Steve and I and all of the kids went down to the boat launch to hang out. It isn’t filled up with water yet, but it is slowly getting there. The kids waded in the water, Leigh and Marie and I just hung out on a blanket and soaked up the sun.
After a while, Leigh and Steve and the girls had to head back into town, so they left, Shon (Marie’s oldest) and I went to hike up the mountain…he made it to the top but I was barefoot and having a hard time getting much traction (it was really steep) so I stopped about 3/4 of the way up and waited for him to come back.
Then…..we decided to do a little 4 wheelin’, so we went and did some doughnuts and kicked up a bunch of dirt and stuff. We left there and I pulled over at one of my favorite little spots called Mary’s Beach, which is a little place off the road where there is a path leading back to a little beach. As we were walking down, we heard motorcycles and Marie said that one of them looked like her boyfriend, Randy, but since they went on past, she decided that it probably wasn’t. We heard them come back though and went back out and sure enough….it was him and his friend. They’d seen us down there kicking up dirt and she was pretty embarrassed to be caught goofing off like that!
Thanks to Leigh for taking these pictures, I seem to be leaving my camera behind these days!
