This Just In

Blaze finally decided I could take his picture on the new cat nap perch.

This has quickly become his favorite spot.

More Later
Bruce and Pam

A Bridge To No Where And A Good Place For A Cat Nap

10/31/2010
Halloween

We are not one to celebrate the holiday so nothing special is planned and no candy handed out.  One of the neighbors down the street goes all out so we will let him have the fun.

I has been a beautiful week here with cool days (70's) with a light breeze.  It is basically November and the leaves have not even started to change yet.

Some of our projects are coming together now.  The bridge for Pam's work area was installed today.  Built from Aspen and designed to fit her Craftsman Style Desk.  We bought the desks when we moved to Schertz in 1998.  We have re-purposed them several times so this is their latest incarnation.

The ottoman for the office was also finished.  This is the second ottoman I have built and it went together easier than the first.  Finishes the reading area of the office off nicely.  Pam added a throw that she crocheted. I added a coordinating pillow made from leftover upholstery fabric.  The fabric is a sage green and goes well with the fabric that will be used to make the office curtains next week.  The last outstanding project for the office is the new set of curtains.

Now to the good place to take a cat nap.

Blaze likes to keep me company in the office and especially likes laying in the window so I made him a cat bed that is upholstered to match the ottoman.  He has already given his seal of approval but refused to be photographed in it.

Pam has been taking a quilting class.  She has finished the front and will be adding the border this week in her last class.  I think it looks pretty good.

She has also just finished a crocheted throw as well.

Hopefully this next week I will finish the inside of the closet and can get on to some other projects.

More later
Bruce and Pam

Not Quite Done But Getting There

For the last couple weeks I have been working on the Craft Room.  Putting back a closet that I had torn down about 6 years ago to be able to get more computers in what was then the office.  Now we need the storage for fabric and craft materials.  So it goes back.  I also removed some wainscoting that seemed to be a good idea at the time but, did not end up being a great idea after all.  New crown molding was installed as well as new baseboards.  The closet was put back as the builder originally had it and like all of the closets in the house it has a nook above.  Unlike the others I used a wood deck instead of sheet rock making it more usable for storage  space.

And of course like the other rooms I painted the ceiling as well as the walls.  Put up a new ceiling fan as well as smoke detector and a new vent as well.  House is 9 years old and we have lived here for eight.  It is surprising some of the things that already need to be replaced.

In a return to furniture making, I made a new work table and a bridge for Pam's area.  Still haven't decided on the remainder of the room bu,t in the next few weeks we will finish up the appointments for this room.

The fun begins.  Closet is framed.

 New fan is up and crown is in.

Closet is back

 Furniture starts being put back

Tomorrow the new table and the bridge are installed.

More later Bruce and Pam.

One Down, Many more to go.

10/11/2010

One of the things I am finding about retirement is that there are no excuses not to get projects around the house done.  This was the case this last week.  We had two guest rooms and a very crowded office/craft room.  After much discussion it was decided to empty out one of the guest rooms and to make it the office/reading/music room and the old office would become just the craft room as it has the hardwood floors.

In a happy turn of events one of our nieces was moving into her first home and welcomed the bedroom set that we gifted her.  I then went about emptying out the room of other items.  Now we have been in this house just over 8 years (a new record for us the previous being 6) and this is the only room we have not repainted.  It hasn't gotten much use in that time either.  However, the builders paint job was not the best and the color was a little to mauve for us.

So first I painted the ceiling.  We use a bright white satin finish.  It looks and stays cleaner than a flat finish ceiling paint.  Two coats of course.  Then is was time to change out the bright brass ceiling fan the builder had put in.  An antique finish Hunter was chosen.  I also sized it correctly for the room.

Now it was time to add the trim.  We have slowly but surely added crown molding to all of the house and this was one of the last rooms that had not been done. It adds a lot to the look of the house making the room look more complete. 

I did a two piece crown through out the room  There was a little cussing and fussing as I had not done any in about a year and it took a few screwed up pieces for it to come back to me.  But with that done I now went on to paint.  We have done the whole house is one of two colors and they are close but the bathroom and laundry room walls have a little more yellow in them.

With the walls done it was time to address how to furnish the room.  We had decided we wanted a comfortable chair in the room.  A computer desk for the larger computer and a desk for the laptop as well as a place where Pam could sit and write while I am on the computer.  Some bookshelves were also in order.   The shelves and the small desk came from Target.  It only took me about four hours to put the whole bunch together.  Surprisingly they are wood.  Very similar to IKEA furniture.  The only thing not finished in the room is an ottoman I am building for the chair and a new set of curtains.  We have not found what we wanted and have decided that I will just make them now I just have to find the material.

Not quite as many guitars on the wall as before but the room turned out well.  My contractor was pleased. He thinks I work to slow.  This room took almost a week  Started on Tuesday and finished on Sunday.

He has given it his seal of approval.  His assistant was too busy to have his picture taken but he voted thumbs up on the room as well.  Both are now contemplating the next project.  The craft room.

More Later
Bruce

We Are Back

The last few weeks have been a bit challenging on the computer front.  We started having problems with an add on to Microsoft Word that I had installed quite a while back for real estate.  I haven't used it in quite a while but it over time had started to mess up the registry.  Not a big problem just uninstall it right.  Not so easy.  It didn't want to go without a fight.  After a week or so of running every registry cleaner I could find I finally was able to make it go away and restore at least some functionality to my Microsoft Office Suite which was trashed in the process.  However, that turned out to be quite a bit more than just reinstalling as I had upgraded Office 2003 to Office 2007 instead of buying a full copy.  Turns out that was a bad idea.  After much pouring through tech sites on the web I found an article on how to get my old Office 2003 limping along.

I then decided the better part of valor was to install a new email client, Office Suite and Internet Browser.  Open Office works quite well for what Pam and I need and the price is right, free.  It reads and write all of our old files.  My new email client is Thunderbird by Mozilla, it handles spam much better than outlook and has some neat features outlook does not.  And finally the new internet Browser is Firefox also by Mozilla.  All have given new life to my office PC.  I was actually out shopping for a new one on Saturday.  Now there is no need.

On another front I have been working a temp job for the last four weeks and probably have four more to go.  I don't know if I will make it the full four weeks.  I am sitting in front of a computer from 8:30 until 5:30 every day typing pretty much non stop.  Short lunch break and lots of typing.  Not exactly my cup of tea.  I have never in my career done anything remotely similar.  The closest I could come would be when I was scheduling the High School back in the 80s and that only lasted for about a week.  Foreclosure Listing Coordinator is what I am doing for this company.  However you would never guess that is non stop email.  Oh well.  Live and learn.

Hope all of you are well.

Bruce and Pam

A Short Trip Down Memory Lane

When Pam and I first got married we were pretty creative.  We had to be to live on a starting teacher's salary.  We built or remodeled most of our furniture and apparently had a pretty good time doing it.  We have recently begun to revisit some of those types of projects now for hobby more than for necessity.  It seems we not only enjoyed building the funiture or crafts but also got exactly what we wanted rather than buying what was offered.  In the last year or so we both returned to sewing, Pam makes cards and I have returned to carpentry.  She has enrolled in a quilting class starting in October.  I fully intend to drag back out the lathe and the woodcarving tools (still in the planning stages) in the near future.

The jist of the story is that I finished a project that has been on the board for a while.  It has just been too hot to get out and build the frame for it.  However, a recent brief reprieve in the heat sent me scurring into the garage to get the frame put together and below is the result.

This ottoman was the first upholstered project in about 25 years.  For good measure I threw in a matching pillow for the chair.  Designed and built from scratch the neat thing is the fun we had finding the fabric and then also that we can redo it anytime we want.

Smokey had to put his two cents in after giving it a good sniff.  Blaze is small enough he can fit under it and I left a secret hiding place inside for him.

Blaze's favorite project is still the new cat beds I made for the bathroom window (kitty TV) that match the new curtins I made.

Blaze also likes to sit on the back of my chair.  That way he doesn't lose track of me and miss out on getting a cat treat.

Pam started making Baby Quilts for the teachers at here school that were expecting.  Little did we know there would be a baby boom.  This is just some of them.

For most of these we included recieving blankets, burp cloths and wipee and tissue holders that match.  For several I made matching gift sacks (diaper bags) from the same material.

Most were coordinated to a theme (at least color wise) that they had established for the baby's room.  Several were baseball themed.  Finding baseball material is not easy.  I ended up at several fabric outlets on Harry Hines (Dallas' Market District) to find something that would work.

Well this was a long post so until later.  Ciao

Bruce

Saturday September 4th

Well, the heat here in Dallas has finally broken and we have returned to more normal temperatures for this time of year. 

The last few weeks have been busy.  Pam has returned to work and the school year is underway.  I have managed to close out my Real Estate business.  Tying up loose ends took a little more effort  than I expected and reworking my phone back to a normal phone (or what I consider normal phone) turned out to be a lot harder than I expected.  After many hours on the phone and in the AT&T store though I did get it done.

I am also back down to one email.  I you have anything  beside the Verizon.net email it will no longer reach me.  It has been a real treat to stop receiving the 50-100 emails per day I was getting.  Not to mention dropping the email off my phone has been great.   I know I spent a lot of years teaching people and schools about technology.  However; I am not sure with what I seeing around me these days that it is necessarily a good thing.  So many people have a zombie like look on their face as they walk around with their smart phones, ipods, ipads, etc.  Seems like they are forgetting how to talk to an actual person.  Pam and I go out to eat and see families sit down and every member pulls out some electronic gadget and proceeds to entertain themselves.  I seems we are losing the ability to appreciate silence.  I still freak out the car salesman when they want to go on about the sound systems in the cars and I look at them and say I wouldn't even have a radio in the car if it didn't come with it.  I seldom turn it on.  They look at me like some sort of alien.  Pam usually has to assure them I am not pulling their leg.

I will step off my soap box now.  I was approached shortly before the end of August to do some temp work in September, October and November.  I start training on Sept 3.  This will be interesting as I have not been tied to a desk in quite a few years.  This is largely handling paperwork on foreclosed properties.  We will see is this is something I do more of in the future.  While I have retired I have always intended to have some thing to do at least part time.  One of the things Pam and I had discussed not only for me but for her when she retires is to temp 4-6 months out of the year to have play money to travel or pursue hobbies.  We will see how this works as to if the future will be part time jobs or short term full time temp work.

The nice thing is to have the luxury of figuring it out.  Pam and I hope all are doing well and until the next post, God Bless.

Bruce