Andohalambo ch2-22

Here's another Andohalambo Hat. It looks much better in purple. Or maybe it's because I like purple more than blue. This hat took me a while since it lived in the car and I only got to chip away at it a very little bit at a time. This hat is a chemo cap for Cap Karma.

I haven't been doing much knitting lately. Much of my knitting has moved to the new house. We thought we were moving this weekend, but that didn't happen. We weren't ready. Still waiting on shutters for our living room & dining room, both rooms face the street. Still waiting on carpets. Still waiting on getting the electrical system upgraded; none of the outlets are grounded, and we need to add a few new outlets in various spots. We also need to do a little painting in our bedroom where part of a wall was knocked out to remove a pocket door.

We had a pocket door removed from the master bathroom on Friday 7/20. When DH arrived at the house on Friday morning, he discovered a note on the front door from PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric) informing us that they turned off our electricity the day before, Thurs 7/19 around 3 PM. Geez, they didn't even bother to leave a courtesy notice a few days in advance informing us that they were planning on turning off the electricity. That would have been nice so that we would know that we needed to set up service with them.

We had thought all our utilities were set back in June. We had received a notice on our door about calling a phone number to get our utilities set up. DH called the number, and we thought we were all set with everything. Well, apparently that only set up service for water and garbage. Oops. We didn't know that it wasn't the "one stop shopping" we thought it was, so we had assumed that calling that phone number had set us up for water, garbage, gas, and electricity.

We were a little worried about having our electricity shut off on the day we were expecting people to work on our pocket door because they had battery powered tools and were expecting to be able to charge their tools at the same time. Fortunately, we were able to get PG&E to stop by and restore electricity. So there were no delays with our pocket door removal.

The pocket door in our master bath was broken, it didn't slide open/closed. We had it removed and replaced with a regular door that swings into the bathroom. Much better. We also have a broken pocket door between our kitchen and dining room. I suppose we'll eventually fix that too. I really hate pocket doors. I understand that they are space saving, but they don't seem to work very well.

We got our dryer to vent to the exterior of the house. They just ran a hose from the dryer to the part of the wall (in the garage) where they could make a little hole to exterior venting. The previous owners had this little box contraption that was supposed to catch lint; you place water into the box, and then connect the hose from the dryer to the box.

I've packed some of my knives. The 8" chefs knife, 3.5" paring knife and steak knives have been packed into the boxes they came in. I think I can make do with using just my 6" chefs knife; it's the one I use most often anyways.

I've cleaned and lined half of the shelves/drawers in our new kitchen. I've already started to unpack some things into our kitchen cabinets/drawers to free up the boxes for packing more stuff. Everything will eventually get moved around until I figure out how I want things placed.

Been so busy lately that I almost forgot to mail in a Sears rebate for 12% cash back on the stove we bought. It had to be postmarked by 7/23, and I only remembered it on 7/22. That was a close one!

This photo was taken a couple weeks ago. You can see that our family room is filling up with boxes! We've actually moved more boxes into this room since the photo was taken. And there would be a lot more if I hadn't unpacked a bunch of boxes to reuse for packing more stuff. There's only so much we can unpack at the moment. Once we get our shutters in the living room, we can start moving boxes into that room instead. And we can start unpacking some of these boxes after we've moved some furniture (bookshelves!).

--<>--

So I thought I was done entering books into my Shelfari bookshelf, but I kept coming across more books to enter. Now according to my profile, I have 650 books and 2054 tags. How did that happen? And these aren't even all the books because I've tried to enter many which aren't in the Shelfari book database yet, probably because the books are too old or obscure. For example, I could only add one of Richard Kirk's books, Lords of the Shadows, which is #4 in his Raven series. I could not add books 1, 2, 3, or 5 of the Raven Series (Swordmistress of Chaos; A Time of Ghosts; The Frozen God; A Time of Dying). I'm still entering a few more books, so the final book count will probably be closer to 670.

--<>--

I finally got around to going to downtown SF to check out the new Westfield shopping center. It was a brief visit. I checked out the food court to have lunch at Bistro Burger. Then went up to the 4th floor to Cocola for a little more quiet while mom had coffee and M had fruit salad. Then we walked across the 4th floor towards Bloomingdale's. I needed to change M's diaper. I saw a restroom sign in between Borders and Bloomingdale's and thought I'd do the diaper change there. After walking a gazillion miles down a maze-like corridor, I discovered that there was NO diaper changing station in their public restroom. That was surprisingly disappointing for a "new" shopping center. You'd think they'd put a baby changing station somewhere in their public restrooms. Aren't they as standard as wheelchair ramps? So I had to walk back out through that long corridor, and then hunt down a restroom in Bloomingdale's. Yes, they had a changing station. :-)

The oddest changing station I've seen was at the Macaroni Grill Restaurant at the Hillsdale shopping center in San Mateo, CA. The table was set so high, it was at chest level! That was a bit awkward for me.

--<>--

I'm on page 312 (out of 759) of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling. DH finished the book earlier today. He keeps telling me I'm "getting to the good part". I think he'll just keep saying that no matter where I am at the book, lol. It took me one week to reach Chapter 14, pg 268. My goal is to reach pg 500 by next Saturday, and finish the book by the Saturday after that, just in time to return the book to the library.

I checked out an audio book from the library, With No One As Witness by Elizabeth George, and discovered that I was missing disc #9. I had discs 1 through 8. Now what do I do? How do I find out how the story ends?

I have started to watch The Sculptress, a movie based on Minette Walter's book. It's a long movie, so it'll probably take me 3 or 4 sittings to get through it all.

.