Catching Up

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I know that I am seriously in arrears, both when it comes to providing photographs and updates on our world. In order to address this problem, I have included below a few photographs from our time in Bandon, Oregon. We stayed at a beach house for two days on our way up the coast. We had the place to ourselves. Funny thing is, when we showed up the first night, it had been a gloriously sunny day. By the next morning the fog had set in and the gloom followed us up all the way to Whidbey Island, where, you guessed it, it was sunny the afternoon we arrived only to turn grey the next day. I guess that God must have answered my prayers for perfect weather!

Now that we’ve been here in Oak Harbor, WA for almost a month, I can say that it does indeed rain in the Pacific Northwest. However, we’ve had but 4.8 inches of rain this month, which really isn’t that bad. We’ve even had some sunny fall days, which I don’t mind tolerating every now and again.

Perhaps the biggest news on our front is that Sarah Rose turned one this past Sunday. Melissa promises that she’ll have photos and maybe even some videos up soon on her blog. Melissa made chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting for our small Protestant congregation. Sarah Rose enjoyed her first taste of chocolate. It seems that she has sadly acquired her parent’s taste for it, which is bad news for her figure and her adolescent pimply face (not that I believe that chocolate equals acne, but I need something to explain how I had such a bad case of it. An interesting aside: did you know that people can be denied admission to the service academies if the military deems their acne to be too severe?).

Anyway, for Sarah’s first birthday we bought her a really cool present, a house with hardwood floors and her very own room. It’s a small house, smaller than the one we had in Port Hueneme (I really do miss living in on-base housing, and all my friends there) with but a one-car garage and one-hole outhouse. Along with missing the master bathroom and extra garage space for my car and my junk, we also miss the laundry room. Oh well, at least we can say we’re homeowners and now I have an excuse to buy power tools.

Speaking of power tools, my biggest complaint about the house is that the walls are in bad shape. They’ve been patched and painted and had who-know-what-else done to them. As a result, the walls were lumpy in areas with really bad patch marks, nails pushing through to the surface, etc., etc. Naturally, this crisis meant that I needed an orbital sander to tame the walls before we painted. I was able to smooth out the worst mistakes but the walls are still in sorry shape, especially if you look closely enough. On a brighter note, the paint we’ve bought seems to be hiding the flaws fairly well (except for the larger flaws; we’ll hang photographs over those).

This week, Melissa and I have started painting. In the living room we’ve gone for a medium tannish color accented by a blue wall. It looks great! We’ll be putting beadboard in the lower part of the living room, dining room and hallway, so if you have any tips send them my way. We also intend to put crown molding up throughout, replace the hollow plain wooden doars with 6 panel doors, replace old door trim; knock out the dining area window in order to put in French doors to the backyard, which we can currently access from the house only though the garage back door or the two rusty fence doors. The next project we want to do is build a deck, followed by the instillation of an electric fireplace and a new range top for the kitchen.

Ok, now I am really done. Really.