Hodgepodge

We have been working on the house a lot over the last month. A friend of ours has helped and done a lot of the work himself, with Nathan helping when he could. We now have window sills on most of our windows, painted a few rooms and put 5 inch baseboards in with crown molding in what we are calling the mushroom room. We finally put tile in for our back splash in the kitchen. It looks a lot better than the ripped dry wall we had for the longest time, that's for sure. Our white appliances look a little funny right now, but...that will just have to wait for now.

We have our last 3 windows on order and as soon as those get replaced, we will be able to put in shutters to cover 4 windows. Unfortunately by the time that gets done, the 105 degree weather will be gone. Until next summer anyway:-)

We are also in the middle of painting the dining room. I'll post pictures when all this other stuff is completed. I'm hoping before October, but we'll see :)





Monday night (tuesday morning) we stayed up late to watch the lunar eclipse. OK...Nathan stayed up to watch the lunar eclipse and woke me up at the beginning, middle and end. We actually only watched it go to a full eclipse, but didn't stay to watch it go back. A friend of ours described it accurately saying that watching an eclipse confirms that the Earth is moving. Watching it made me vaguely remember watching one on our deck late at night when I was a kid.

Carpooling

A co-worker of mine lives fairly close to us and we've often seen each other on the road on the way to work. She is soon going to be living even closer so we have talked about carpooling. Our hospital has a carpooling program where you can get 5 gallon per month gas vouchers. That's about $15 a month in gas. There is also a section of the parking structure, with prime parking spots, reserved for carpoolers. It's tempting.

This morning I called to look into the program and was disappointed. It appears that the program is designed more to alleviate the parking structure congestion during the week than to encourage helping the environment by carpooling. A few of the "rules" to receive the gas voucher through carpooling is that we would need to drive together 2 out of the 3 days we work. This won't be too difficult as long as we can get the scheduler to work with us.

Here are all the rules to receive the voucher:

1. Must drive together 2 out of the 3 days we work a week
2. Must start work between 6am-10am (we start at 7am)
3. The days you drive do not count if it is a weekend (we work every 3rd weekend)


This bothered me. This means that people working nights and weekends can't benefit from carpooling. Good thing I work days, but... I'm still bothered.