December 17, 2007:  Hey again, I'm just at work and sitting on a miserable conference call waiting for my turn to speak, which at this rate will be about another hour.  Last week was nuts around here at work.  A friend of mine out here dropped the bomb that he is getting a divorce, which was a surprise to us for sure.  He'll have a rough few months but I'm sure he'll be alright though I suspect I might be doing a bit more drinking with him over those months.  Our boss was let go last week as well, which was also a bit of a surprise.  He's been doing some things that have caused us a lot of extra work and even caused some customer affecting issues so we figured it was a possibility if he didn't get it together but we never expected it to go down this way.  It's going to be tough to pick up all the half done projects that are left but in the end I think it will be better now.  On a completely different note the couch that we ordered almost 2 months ago came in on Thursday and after we got it home and stripped off the 4 layers of packaging realized that it had stains on it and was generally just wrecked.  So it went back in the truck and back to the furniture store and now we're back on the hunt for a couch for the big room.  Hopefully Lisa is able to track one down that we like tomorrow and we can at least get it on order, maybe in 2 more months I'll be able to post pictures of the completed and furnished big room.  As for that room it's finished for the most part other than the furniture.  We're going to hit a nursery this weekend that specializes in large indoor plants and if we're lucky we can find a cool tree to put in that room.  If we find one I'll get some pictures of it and the furniture we do have in there so far and update the 'Projects' page.  We had a busy but productive weekend.  Lisa worked and I did some stuff around the house as always.  I was able to get all the old wood trim primed in the small bedroom earlier the week and I got the final coats of color on it as well.  Lisa finished up the paint on the new doors Saturday night and got them up Sunday after putting the first coat of color on the walls.  Before I could paint though I needed to fix about 50 dings, dents, stains, and holes in the walls.  This is the smallest room and it was easily in the worst shape of all.  I'm hoping to get the second coat on tonight or tomorrow and get the room put back together later this week, depending on my evening work schedule.  Since we painted the family room last year and started replacing all the doors and painting the orange looking wood trim we wondered if we should paint the mantle to match but never could commit to it.  Well, we decided to go for it and painted it the same color as the trim.  It needs another coat but so far it looks really nice, it was the last of that orange colored wood trim in that room so we can finally say it's done.  So my call is about over and that's about all that went on with us this weekend.  Oh, I almost forgot, Lisa stood in line for a Nintendo Wii this weekend at Target for a friend, I guess they are very hard to come by so the people in line with her had all been trying to get one for weeks so they were psyched to finally have one in their hands.  Anyway, that's about it for me, have a great week and I'll get some new pictures up soon. 

December 11, 2007:  Good afternoon everyone, hope things are going well for you all, things are good here.  I had an interesting rest of the week with work and training, some fun, some not so fun.  Training went well but we had a bomb dropped on us toward the end of the week, a bunch of stuff that someone had been sitting on for a couple months and by the time we were told about it everything on the list was basically on fire and needs to be dealt with yesterday.  Our flight home was great, had a few drinks first which certainly didn't hurt.  Saturday morning we started on the big room paint and quickly realized that a scaffolding was the only way to reach all the way to the top of the wall.  I was able to get one from the local rental place on the cheap and it made finishing the paint super easy.  That was finished by the end of the day Sunday and someone even came by to pick up my fish tank too.  So we have all the furniture in that room but the new couch, which will be picked up the day after tomorrow when it comes in.  We have one more room, the spare bedroom, left to paint and we decided to just knock it out know and retire the paint brushes for a while (hopefully for a long while).  After putting 4.5 gallons of paint on the walls in that big room neither of us are real excited about more painting but it would be great to be done with it.  This is also the last room with the old wood colored trim around the windows, closet and floor.  It also has a set of bi-fold closet doors that will be replaced, Lisa is getting real good at painting those so she should be able to rock these out.  Other than all that things are good, it's snowed a few times but nothing to get too excited about, and the weather has been ok for winter.  Have a great week and we'll talk again soon! 

December 5, 2007:  Hey again everyone, just a quick update tonight at I'm currently out of town at training.  I just wanted everyone to know that we are fine and not flooded like you've probably been seeing on the news all week.  We did get about 5 inches of snow over the weekend and lost power for a total of probably another 24 hours before the real bad weather arrived.  I flew out Sunday night just as the heavy rains and wind were arriving, it was a turbo prop plane and quite a ride.  Lisa reported that they got some wind at the house and a lot of rain but we are on very high ground, about 1000 feet higher than the city of Seattle, so we were fine.  Anyway, I'm off for now, I hope to get some pictures of our progress on the house this weekend.  Enjoy the rest of your week. 

December 1, 2007:  Well, it's December already and we can't believe it.  The power has already gone out twice today so it looks like that is a sign that the festive month is here.  It's been a rediculous week for me at work, Lisa has been busy but not quite as bad as the last few weeks from the sounds of it.  I worked two nights downtown from 1130pm to 4am and one at home from 10pm to 3am all on top of a mostly normal work week.  I try to come in a few hours late each morning or leave early if I will be up all night but it doesn't always work out that way.  I got more paint on the walls for the big room and tonight I was even able to get a whole first coat, including cutting in, on the front and back walls.  If I hit it hard tomorrow and Sunday I may be able to get most of it finished before my work trip next week.  I'm losing almost a week of evenings for this training trip but I should still be able to get it done in time for the couch to arrive just before Christmas.  The small leather chairs that Lisa has had her eye on for a while just went on sale for 25% off so we picked up two of them this week, pretty awesome savings.  They are still boxed in the garage because there isn't room to paint and move around with them in the room.  I'm really hoping to get it done quick.  I am able to paint the really tall walls with a roller but I can't get all the way to the ceiling so I'll need a scaffolding or something to do the cutting in, probably when I get back.  There aren't any new pictures yet but at the end of tomorrow I should have made enough progress to take a few shots for the site.  Well, sorry for the short update but it's late and I'm beat, we'll talk again next week.