Rude Sunday Morning Awakening

Early Sunday morning we were peacefully sleeping when suddenly the house shook violently, a sound similar to a jet engine surrounded us, and every car alarm in the neighborhood went off. Many thoughts went through our minds - tornado? Plane crash? Sonic boom? It didn't take long for us to decide that sleep was more important than our curiosity and we went back to bed. I finally saw an article late Sunday night explaining what it was - the attempted demolition of an old BASF plant just right across the river from us. I say "attempted" because (in typical Portsmouth style), the demolition didn't exactly happen. Click here for the story and video.

And I really want to know...who the hell schedules a demolition for 7:00 on a Sunday morning??

Home Improvement Frenzy

I'm not sure what exactly got into us, but we have been on a home improvement frenzy this weekend! Actually, I can attribute some of my fervor to my fear that we will never be able to sell the house should we actually get transferred next next spring. There are so many things that I want to do that will make the house show better. A lot of it is pretty much on the surface, but at this point I'm all about appearances.

The whole exterior of the house desperately needs to be painted, but the porches are something that we can tackle by ourselves pretty easily. This weekend we started with the side porch - the smallest and easiest of all the porches. On Saturday we cleaned, sanded, and primed it, then on Sunday we painted. We switched from the previous blue-gray color to a light greeen. I think I'm going to like it, but I'm not entirely convinced.

We also did some painting inside - just a couple doors and some touch-up in the kitchen and laundry room, but it's all progress! I actually really enjoy the painting. Probably because it's not that hard to do, but it makes such a difference. I wish we had been better about doing some of these weekend projects throughout the last year rather than waiting until my transfer panic set in!

BEFORE: The side porch, in a bluish gray color

AFTER: Rob working on painting the porch a light green color

One of the other projects was clearing out all the dead vines from the latticework that stretches from the ground to the second floor porch. It had gotten a little out of control!

Kitty was completely worn out from working in the yard all day!

How I Spent a Lazy Sunday (by the cats)

Kitty: Sleeping on mom's computer bag (it would be so much easier if she'd just lay it down flat!)

Black Cat: Sleeping on the clean clothes that just came out of the dryer (don't mind the bald spot on my belly...)

Grayson: Sleeping on the printer (talk about a printer jam!)

Oliver: Gracing the house with my beautiful presence (did you expect anything else?)

Reasons Why I Wish Rob Were Home

1. Needed to move the heavy coffee table to put down the new rug
2. Had to go solo to the Operation Smile fundraiser in Va Beach on Thursday night (although hanging out with the girls was fun)
3. Big scary spider in the bathroom sink
4. The lawn needs to be mowed
5. Wanted breakfast in bed this morning
6. No one to snuggle with at night (snuggling with Black Cat doesn't count)
7. The wireless internet went out and was a pain to fix
8. Need someone to prod me to go to the gym
9. Foot massages
10. But mostly...I just miss him. I miss having him by my side, holding my hand, listening to me talk, telling me I'm beautiful, laughing at my jokes. Just eight more days...

A busy week...

Luckily, though, keeping busy makes the week go by much quicker! I can't believe it's already Friday. First a confession: I didn't go to the gym at all this week. That was one of my goals while Rob was gone - to hit the gym hard. Hasn't happened.

Instead, I went over to a friend's house on Tuesday. She just moved to Ocean View, so we snuck some wine to the beach and enjoyed a great evening. Too hot to stay too long, though, as it was in the 90s, so we finally left for a restaurant (and air conditioning) to continue the night!

Last night was another night of hanging out with coworkers and enjoying wine - but this time for a good cause! It was a fundraiser for Operation Smile held at Casby's in Virginia Beach. The highlight of my evening? Drinking a shiraz called Razor's Edge (the irony being that the Donor Database system I manage for OpSmile is called Raiser's Edge!). We had a fab time, and hopefully also raised a lot of money for a good cause.

As I've mentioned earlier, Rob is out to sea until June 15 doing sea trials on the mighty USS Bush. He mentioned that there were quite a few media people scheduled to be aboard, and sure enough I saw an article tonight about the ship and what they're doing. http://tinyurl.com/lezsqh That was just in the local Newport News paper; apparently there are national media on board as well. I'll keep an eye out for those articles and post them when I find them!


No big plans for the weekend. Hopefully it doesn't continue to rain all weekend! Today I could barely see on the way home because it was downpouring so hard.


Hope you all have a good weekend!

Is Nothing Ever Easy?

Call it Murphy's Law. Or maybe just Rebecca's luck. Rob left this morning for another two weeks at sea. When I got home this evening, eager to send him an email, the wireless internet wasn't working. Couldn't happen yesterday, when he'd be here to fix it! No, it had to happen today so that it could waste a huge portion of my evening. First I called Cox, thinking it might actuallly be the cable connection itself. After spending a half hour on the phone with them, it was clear that the problem was the router, not the modem. At least, that's what the incredibly polite automated trouble-shooting voice told me. So then I called Belkin, the maker of the router. I got a real person this time...someone who was obviously in India. Definitely NOT as polite as my automated customer service agent from Cox. It was a long painful process, but another half hour later I was finally back online.

I guess it's a sign of our tech-obsessed world that I actually experienced severe anxiety and depression at the thought of not having internet tonight. Life without Facebook? No Twitter? I might as well just go to bed at 7:00 and try to move on with my life in the morning. But now all is right in the world and I have a lot of surfing to make up for. I bid you adieu for now!