Category: home

On Sunday as the weather was, once again, sweltering we decided to open one of the water slides we purchased at Walmart. The day was hot enough as it was however the slide needed inflating and with the electric pump refusing to work it meant some manual labor and the day got even hotter. After what felt like 4 hours on the hand pump but was probably only 40 minutes the slide was ready and the pool was full.

I don’t think there is any need to try and describe what happened next, this video does the job perfectly:

httpv://youtu.be/XJMLQc-yLeY

The start of our Lake Chelan vacation involved a discussion between Tracy and I as to which bag should we pack. I said the blue one. Tracy said we haven’t got a blue one. I confirmed that we did and in fact we had a matching pair. Tracy corrected me and told me they were black bags. Clearly they are not. It’s as plain as something really plain that they are blue. I don’t know how she can possibly think they are black. Tracy doesn’t know how I can possibly think they are blue (other than that’s what color they are).

We asked Harry what color he thought the bags were. He replied with a “blackey, blue color”. Toby said they were blue. I can always count on Toby!

Clearly the straps are black but the main part is blue.

 

They have a bad (well deserved) reputation for being some what selective about the truth. Our experience with them when trying to find a place to live here wasn’t the greatest but to be fair that was more a lack of response rather than creative property descriptions. Judging by this sign, on the way home from Lake Chelan, maybe they are slightly more honest in the US? Either way, it made us laugh:

 

A global treat of a birthday! My first in the US, we visited a Bavarian town, ate Mexican food and watched the UK X-factor! And then we had a wonderful rendition of Happy Birthday, with some bonus dancing and fighting!

httpv://youtu.be/KuY9InpV-BI

Thanks for all my cards and pressies!

One thing that I forgot to post while Sally was here was an update on the alien/chipmunk outbreak we had here in Washington a while back. The awful symptoms reappeared just briefly with some pretty scary results:

Harry’s couple of weeks at school at the end of the summer term were in the temporary school that Bellevue use while the actually Spiritridge school was flattened and rebuilt. They do this to one school every year. This means that in a couple of weeks when Harry starts back at school and Toby goes to pre-school they will be moving into a brand spanking new school.

I drive past it everyday on the way hone from work and over the last few days they workmen have vacated the site and it is pretty much finished, And pretty darn smart it looks too:

 

Hopefully they will both enjoy themselves there – they certainly should, not everyone gets to start in a brand new school building!

As Sally took a few photo’s of the house and we pinched a copy of all them I thought I would post them on the site so that everyone can see the hotel that you will be staying in should you decide to pay us a visit. Not only is it on the verge of 5 Star luxury, it also come with a couple of funny faced boys thrown in for free!

[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157627396075221″]

 

No really. It is. You just need to look really, really closely. It’s definitely there.

Patience is the key – it will captured!

If he had been in the US then Bill Oddie would have presented this – Aunty Arnold Jet Lag Watch. This post will record progress and form a scientific research study which will enable all future visitors to understand, 1) how long they need to stay to enjoy some Washington Life in normal mode, and 2) create a benchmark for future visitors to understand how good, bad, indifferent the jet lag is and the best approaches to overcoming it. So without further a-do let the science begin…

Night one – arrival from the UK. Stayed awake until 10pm, slept until 2:30am, knocked a couple of sleeping pills back, slept until 5:30 ish and then went back to sleep for another hour. Good effort!

Night two – stayed awake until about 10:15pm, woke up at 4:30am and stayed awake. That’s okay – the second night is not normally as good as the first.

Night three – a bit lame, went to bed at 9:10pm, before the children, oh dear, even they managed to stay awake until 10:20pm (although, just to be clear, they weren’t meant too)! However… there was definite progress, she slept until 3am and then went back to sleep until 5am when the call of the cookie finally became too much! No pills were required aka she forget to take any.

Side note to night 3 is that Sally pointed out she couldn’t sleep properly if the dish washer hadn’t been packed with the evenings dishes. Tonight they were and we can see the immediate impact this had on sleep performance! Who ever would have thought that a packed dishwasher could aid the recovery from jet lag?

Night four – excellent progress. She stayed up until 10pm, then went to bed with no pills and made it through until 6am. Of course to make this truly scientific we should start factoring in the number of empty wine bottles on the kitchen side each morning to see if there is any direct correlation! I’m sure there isn’t.

Night five – another lame performance! Only stayed awake until 9:30pm (plus an alleged 30 minutes of reading) which led to one of the worst nights so far. Tossing and turning until waking at 5:30am. It maybe because it was hot last night although it could also be the drink at lunch time, wine tasting and a glass or two more once home. Scientific research is not as easy as you’d first think.

While the results are far from conclusive – even when the study had been running for a couple more days – I feel that is more a reflection on Sally and her freaky sleeping behavior rather than the methodology behind the research. If she was normal, then I think jet-lag would have been over come after 5, maybe 6 nights, which goes to show that if you are considering coming out to Washington (and everyone is welcome) then you need to stay at least 10 days, probably 14, to really enjoy yourself and have some “normal” time here in the right timezone. Fact.

 

Living close to a lake it is good knowing that all the windows and the patio doors at the back have some mosquito netting across them which stops the bugs coming in as night approaches. The windows have the netting across them permanently  so they can be left open all night – which is super useful on these hot summer nights. The patio doors have slide open doors that you close across when the patio door is open – air in, bugs out.

Up until last night everything was working perfectly, although the door sliding version was a little stiff at times. After getting home from a late afternoon and evening in Seattle (including a trip up the Space Needle and a lovely dinner at Lola’s) we sat out in the garden and relaxed. As it got late Harry and Toby went off to clean their teeth although it came to an abrupt end as Harry walked splat into the mosquito net door! After a moment or two of confusion, much laughter and talk of GanGan walking into the patio door, Harry and Toby continued up to clean their teeth.

An hour or so later (and a couple of glasses of wine later) I was sitting in the lounge and heard the door netting claim its second victim of the night. Not content with capturing Harry, the door tricked Aunty Arnold and she walked slap into it!

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, just that it was funny!

 

We all felt a bit weird after dinner. Not sure what it was but it sure had a funny effect…

Tracy turned into a chipmunk:

Harry into an alien:

Toby got a swirly nose:

And I turned into a frog:

And if that wasn’t enough, check this out:

The chipmunk is my favorite!

We thought we’d moved into a nice part of town, in a quiet little cul-de-sac. This week Tracy got the gossip.

As you stand at the entrance to our close we have a house on the corner that an ex-judge lives in. All good news and respectable there then apart from he is an ex-judge because he is addicted to coke and has been in and out of jail several times! They don’t come out their house much, in fact we’ve never seen them and I’m not sure they even exist. If they do however, I’m sure they are very respectable these days though – even if they don’t keep all of their front garden up to the required standard.

On the opposite corner is the VP of the home owners association and her husband. He came to say hello the day we moved in but we’ve seen no sign of him since. As it turns out this may be because he spends all day in his shed drinking. She told us off within the first week for not putting our bins away and she’s not best pleased about the fact that we leave our cars on the drive. She also called the police when our next door neighbors children were young and ran around in the front garden naked – fearing that they would attract the wrong sort of people. And if all that was not bad enough “she has a pair of binoculars you know”. Need I say more? I do? Oh well, in that case, apparently their children don’t like them.

Next door to them is the bat cave. Whenever these residents see a fellow neighbor their garage door magically opens and they disappear into it. They remain hidden until all human life form has gone before re-emerging.

Between the bat cave and us is a single mum who doesn’t like children. We have been asked if “we’ve been shouted at by her yet?”. We haven’t. Not yet anyway. Apparently she used to terrorize the children of the previous tenants. Woe betide her if she does!

Then we have our neighbors on the other side who seem reasonably normal apart from they seem determined to move the entire contents of their garage into our house. As if we hadn’t received enough useless “stuff” from them, we got home from soccer last night to find another box of other “stuff” on the doorstep. Never mind, it keeps our bins full.

Which just leaves us. Rather worryingly, it seems we are the most normal of all. Not sure what that says about us or our neighbors. So there we go. That’s our neighbors. Allegedly.