Been Busy

I can't believe how much time has passed since my last blog entry. I guess I've been keeping busy enough not to have time to sit around on the computer so much. I probably wouldn't have checked in today either because I have lots of stuff planned for today, but I got an email from a friend who had received an email from me when I got mixed up with that REUNION.COM outfit. This friend was a little confused because the email address was different from the one she had on file for me. She said she started signing up for a reunion.com membership but then decided not to until she heard from me directly. She is way smarter then me. I just plowed right through and sent all those emails.
Let me make it completely clear. DO NOT SIGN UP WITH REUNION.COM ON MY ACCOUNT. I believe they are a big scam outfit. I canceled my membership the same day I took it out so even if you did sign up with them looking for me I wont be there. I think most peoples email providers filtered those emails from me as spam since most of them were rejected and sent back to my email which then handled the rejects as spam.
Now to bring everything up to date.
I went out and bought the house paint yesterday so you know what I will be doing the rest of this summer. We will be painting the house to match the color of the shop. I can't think of anything I hate to do more then paint. When we lived in Pierre I started painting our old house. The color that Mary had made up was a waaaaaay too bright of a blue. I got maybe a quarter of the house painted with it and gave up. A few months went by and I just couldn't finish painting. I hated the way it looked and it was really hard to paint because it was cedar shingles so it had to be painted with brushes. Finally a friend of mine got so tired of seeing the partially painted house that he showed up one day with his own brush and said if I would do the parts that had to be reached by latter he would do the rest. We painted the hole thing in the hideous blue as an undercoat and then painted it again in a dark brown, which was about the only color we could find that would cover the blue. I think I inherited my hate of painting from my dad. All the other houses that were built on Garfield avenue in 1949-50 were sided with wood that had to be painted about every 5 years. My mom knew my dad hated painting so they held out for stucco so all that ever had to be painted was the trim. They had aluminum widows install shortly after the Anderson window company opened and not to long after I left home they had the rest of the trim replaced with aluminum trim. The garage was still wood sided. The builder didn't have enough stucco when he built it so they just had it sided with cheap wood siding. That stuff never would hold paint. I painted that damn garage almost every other summer from about 6th grade on. Even after moving to Alaska I the FAA sent me and the kids home to Minneapolis every other year as part of my contract for working in Alaska. It would be 100 degrees out and I would be out painting the garage. I think I painted it once more after my dad died in 1990 and then Ma had it sided with aluminum siding so all I had to do was paint the garage door when I went home. Now even that has been replaced with aluminum. So this summer I will be spending with a roller in my hand. Our house is sided with what is called T-1-11 which is what most houses that people with middle class income is sided with. It is basically a sheet of plywood with a finished surface on one side. Our houses previous owner had just had the house painted before we bought it so the paint is in pretty good shape still. The trim around the windows is starting to peel but the paint on the siding is still sound.
Normally on Sunday morning I get up and watch Meet the Press from 7 to 8 AM. This morning they had a tribute to Tim Russert, the moderator, since he died of a heart attack Friday. His death really got me thinking again to live life like each day is your last. Tim had just had a complete physical the end of April that included a stress cardiogram and the doctor had pronounced him completely healthy. He was being treated for high blood pressure and high cholesterol, just like me, but they had them under control. He had just turned 58 like my sister when she died and a close childhood friend of mine. Susie smoked and drank too much so she really wasn't a surprise and Bob had a disease that had been treated for years that finally took him so he really wasn't a surprise either. But to hear of someone that you watch on TV every week die like that is kind of scary. This mornings tribute to him was very tasteful and I'm glad I got to see it.
Time to start my chores for today. I promised Mary I would get her bike ready for her. It has been sitting under the deck since we moved up here and the chain was rusted solid so you couldn't even peddle the bike. The tires are completely shot too so I have to replace them also. I've just about got fixed so she wont have any excuses now.