Full steam ahead!

So...as you may have guessed, I'm hardly "in Hell" anymore. As such, it's no longer a huge effort to keep going. In fact, things are going so fast, I can't keep up.

1. Scooter's here!!! She's in school. She thinks it's harder than her school in Omaha was, but she loves it. Her new favorite (which is weird, since it was her least favorite in Omaha) is gym class. They have a great teacher who does really creative and fun things. She has, at a minimum, 20 minutes of homework each night. Usually, it's closer to an hour. 20 minutes reading, always, and most days math and some sort of language arts work as well. It's tough.

2. My dad WAS here!! We took him to the coast for the weekend, where we tried to kill him. Just kidding (am I?). We took him on multiple short hikes and walks on beaches as well as a bike ride and a climb up a wobbly spiral staircase to the top of the Astoria Column. If the exertion didn't get him, the giant pot of clam chowder topped with a 1/4 cup of butter might have done the trick. It didn't. We were sad to see him go on Wednesday, off to Wisconsin and their cheese and beer. I hope he makes it back to Hawaii in one piece.

3. The sun is shining (at last), and the cherry trees that were in bloom along the streets near my work are now dropping cherries instead of flower petals on my head as I walk at lunch.

4. Pennies are still everywhere. Yesterday, though, I found a dollar bill while walking with my daughter. I found 2 pennies when we were downtown on Monday with Scooter and Dad. I'm beginning to think that Scooter is good luck. I'm also finding more and more articles of clothing laying around on my walks. Today, I found a sock, a jacket, a shirt, and maybe a pair of underpants. I'm wondering if I should start collecting clothes to wash and sell on craig's list or something. Maybe not the underpants...

5. Work is crushing me. There's just so much to do, and you wouldn't believe how much I've learned in even the last 4 months. But the volume and complexity of what we're working with here is amazing. Everytime I learn something new, I want to call up my old employer, and offer my services for re-doing all of their horrible reports. That, and apologize for writing all of those horrible reports...oops.

6. We're about to move into a larger apartment. That, and everything surrounding it, has also kept us busy. Hopefully, sometime in July, things will settle in again, as we wait for Scooter to return from Omaha. I've got a triathlon (sprint distance) scheduled for July 30th, so I'll need things to settle in order to focus more on my training. After that, it's a long, slow month until Scooter gets back, school starts up again, and we start this boat back up again.