Solving Financial Neglect

Last April the screen on my old PC died and I found it difficult to keep Quicken maintained. I'd have to plug it into my TV to see what was going on. And, actually, with the market crash I wasn't really too eager to get regular updates on our net worth anyway. =)

Well, finally, this week was the week to deal with the paper records. We seemed to have records drowning us everywhere we tried to deal with piles of paper. I have spent the last two full days sifting paper. It doesn't feel like it, but I've made a lot of progress.

I've got all the credit card accounts entered and reconciled. And I've got all the bank account records sifted and ready for data entry. My only problem is trying to identify non-payroll deposits; I wasn't always good about keeping those kinds of records and not all checks came with "stubs." I'll do what I can...

Our Friday evening dinner date is obviously off now that the house isn't clean. I kept waiting for our invitees to get back to me about whether the date would work and they didn't respond until this afternoon. Too late now. We'll have to go out somewhere for dinner if they decide to come.

Quilt Photo Album

I finally finished all three of the quilts for my brother Jeff's kids. It only took me a year....
Yeah! I am so happy.

Building a Fence

Yesterday, Jeff, and two of my brothers, James and Jeffrey, all converged on my mother's house to help replace the fence. They worked all day and only managed to put in most of the posts. They rented a hand auger, but it was having a problem. It delayed their progress by a couple of hours.

While I went along, I didn't help with the fence. It was tight quarters and there wasn't much I could do. I worked on the final edge of Veronica's quilt and I also washed our King Size quilt. I am so close to being done with all of them!

Found the Kitchen Counters!

I spent the afternoon working on clearing the kitchen some more. Unfortunately, there is still a pile of stuff I just haven't figured out where to put. But, for the first time since June (when we moved in), I have found the counters! Woo hoo!

Wow, looking at these pictures, it reminds me we need to glue the missing cabinet face trim pieces back on. Maybe we'll get it done now that the kitchen isn't quite the disaster. I'm still trying to tackle the small pile of stuff left on the table. Maybe we'll manage full room pictures tomorrow. =)

I'm also attempting, this week, to get our Winter Newsletter printed. I actually had the Newsletter finished before we left on vacation, but I never found anybody in Oregon to print it for us. I had been hoping to, but we spent a lot more time looking at houses than I had been expecting. We really didn't do anything else but look at houses and visit friends on our trip.

Quilt Finally Finished!

At long last, I have finally finished the lightning quilt. I started it back in 2005 originally. On occasion, I would pull it out and work on it, but it would always get repacked up to make way for another higher priority project. Finally, this fall, I took it out for the last time.

This morning I finished the last of the hand sewing on the binding. It's a relief to finally have this one done.

Sifting Again

Now that we have space in the garage, Jeff and I have embarked on finally decluttering the house. Though we moved in six months ago, we still have piles of boxes sitting throughout the house. So today we resumed work cleaning. We are working our way through the house and sifting everything. For the most part, we are getting rid of non-essentials, but there is a growing pile of boxes in the garage.

Today we started with the kitchen. We spent pretty much all day going through all the piles of stuff sitting around the room. We also worked on reorganizing cabinets so that they would hold more stuff. We made a lot of progress and we'll probably manage to get the kitchen picture-worthy by tomorrow evening.

While we were in Oregon, we borrowed all five seasons of Battlestar Galactica from Ross and Wendy. Today, we alternated watching episodes with doing housework all day long. Tomorrow we plan to spend the day in much the same way.

I expect that it will take us a couple of weeks to work our way through the house. But I'm looking forward to when we're done. Maybe we'll actually be able to have company again. That will be nice. =)

Safe Trip Home

As expected, due to the snow, we didn't get off back to California until Thursday morning. We set off at 5:19AM.

We had a lot of rain until we got down to Southern Oregon then we had fog. We reached the pass at around noon and while there was snow on the sides of the road, it was mostly clear with some rain and we did not require chains. Yah! We finally arrived back in Redwood City at around 5:40PM.

Our Shasta baby was a wonderful traveller.

Since it was New Years Eve, we ended up going to my brother's house last night for dinner and a movie. We had a very long day.

Luckily, this morning we got to sleep in. Today, we've spent the day recovering from our trip. I've done laundry and cleaning, etc. and we're looking forward to a productive weekend. We're planning to move all the excess boxes sitting around the house into the garage. Maybe we'll finally be able to get this place cleaned up and be able to host guests. That would be nice!