Oh my - missing in action!

G'day all!

I am such a slacker!  I have not blogged for weeks.  Pics for this post bear no relation to the content - they are the pics I have to hand.  And I hope they don't look as blurry as they do in preview mode cos they look awful.

It has been a busy few weeks.  I have built a lot of IKEA furniture (and have some pics to show for it).  I am a bit afraid of one particular item as it has now tasted blood (thanks to me being clumsy with the scissors opening the cardboard packaging) and I am not sure if it will want more.   The scissors have also tasted blood and we all know where that can lead....

Northern shoveller drake in his usual position.

Now that I am almost done with buying stuff at IKEA, I wonder if we should have joined IKEA family?  But too late, she cried, as she waved her wooden leg.  We are pretty much done.

The weather has varied from awful to OMG I'm so HOT!  These last couple of days have hit a whole 17-18-19-almost-20C!  And to think I thought that 20C was cold only four months ago.  Spring is definitely sprung, as any of my friends on G+ would be aware - I keep taking pics of flowering prunuses and malus-types on the phone and posting them there.  However, I reckon G+ is a dud - it is not engaging people the way Facebook does.  Still, I refuse to have a FB account.  Wonder how long that will last?

Tree.  Now with green leaves.

(Blogger wants to keep a nice white box there and won't let me delete it - the picture handling is still buggy it seems.)

Hmm, today (well yesterday now) marks four months in Seattle.  How time flies though I really thought that maybe Spring would never happen.

Are we all settled in?

Tortoises!  Red-eared sliders, alas.  Not indigenous.

Mostly.  We almost have all the furniture set up the way we want it.  You should see our plans for our bedroom - they are ambitious.  It all started when I said we should have a seaside theme for the room as the dresser (from guess where?) is blue.  Well then DH had to try a method of soundproofing to see if we could reduce the sound from the neighbour's noisy fan.  But the new fake wall is ugly and is being decorated.  I'll document it as we develop stuff but for the nonce, I will leave it to your imagination.

A Western Pond tortoise?  Wikipedia says they are locally extinct.

The study looks like it is going to be eclectic (read mismatched and bright) and the lounge/dining will settle towards green and maybe some turquoise if I can work that in somehow.  The kitchen alas is black and white.

I pretty much finished the knitting of my new cardie, and then realised the neck is much higher than I want it to be.  So I will rip it back a bit and work out a better neckline for me.  I want it fairly low - it should not cover the bulgy inner parts of my collarbones.

An immature male Mallard?  Or female something else?

We have been having a surprisingly entertained time watching a tv series about the Tube in London.  To watch it, you would think all of the Tube's workers are lovely, but I am sure there are plenty of mongrels on both sides of the fence.  Anyway, it has been making me want to go and ride around on the Tube a lot 8-)  Alas, I am a continent away and the Tube is not really that much fun (though on my only trip to London, it sure was amazing getting off at Green Park and going for a random walk to all these places I'd only seen on the tv - Downing St, Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, thingo cathedral, Buckingham Palace...).

Cherry? blossom.  These trees are going nuts.

In a week, we are off to Oz for BiL's wedding.  I will have to change SiL2b to SiL after that, though really she's been SiL for quite some time now, they simply don't have the piece of paper saying so.  I just like to say SiL2b.  And I cannot wait to get my 18 month/21 month scans done cos I need to know if there are any problems.  I've been having lymphoedema issues recently - I started increasing my exercise level and my boob has puffed up which then impacts my arm.  I am pretty sure that it is because of increased exercise combined with hormones.  Looks like I'll have to go slower on it (ok, it doesn't pedal the bike or walk or anything, it just pretends to look pretty with a great fat scar on itbut it whines when the rest of us do things and take it along for the ride).  And whoever invented hormones should be shot.  Useless things - they just get us into all sorts of trouble.

Aircraft carrier - USS John C. Stennis

We were excited to see this ship go steaming (nuclearing?) up Puget Sound.  From a distance it looked like a very odd container ship.  Nathan said it had a 74 on the side, which sealed it as a US navy aircraft carrier, the USS John C Stennis, which is based just up the bay a bit.  Oops, sound.


anon!