Archives for December 2008

Today I went shopping. BOOK shopping, and what fun it was. I already posted on the fact that we are taking book donations for the Italian branch of the Sloma Family Library. 🙂 In addition, I decided I would also stock up on a bunch of books in my favorite genre, fantasy fiction. I researched some new authors and series (I love Listmania on Amazon.com and scifan.com for this), made my list and then headed out to The Book Bin in downtown Corvallis.

Was that ever fun to take a big basket of books up to the checkout! I think it was one of my most fun shopping trips ever. Imagine this stack of 20 or 30 paperback books at the checkout. A box and two bags to take to the car. I don’t know why doing this was so much fun, but it I just get giddy thinking of that pile of books. I want to go read but I must control myself. (New mantra – save them for Italy, save them for Italy.)

There are some missing books here and there in the different series, but I’ve got my list now and I’m going to hit used bookstores wherever I can to fill in the gaps. How handy that we have a trip out of state planned soon. Any suggestions on used bookstores between here and Colorado?

Vote for my layout for the Pen Scrappers contest:

Please.

Pretty Please.

Pretty Please with a cherry on top. Tell your friends too!

Wow, things have heated up on the Italy move. December 16 is still the key date for the work permit, but now we have a targeted start of assignment date – February 1. We also have our “preview” or house-hunting trip scheduled from Jan 11-17. Patrick and Brandon’s first trip to Italy!

I realized today that means there are only 5 usable weeks left to get ready before that – there are 8 weeks total. With two weeks of Christmas break from work, most of that in Colorado, plus a week of house-hunting in Italy, that brings the time to get ready at home and work to only 5 weeks.

It feels incredibly short when I look at it that way! Today at work I started going through a “what MUST get done” list and scheduling it out. We did the same at home, thankfully Patrick will do a lot of that. It is going to be busy, busy, busy though!

OK, by Tuesday I was much better and today even better. It’s been a busy week at work though, because we have visitors here from Italy for meetings so it means more time than usual in meetings and lots of eating. That would be good, if I were a starving waif, but not so good for my current size. Oh well. Tomorrow is the last day of the meetings and then things will be back to normal, but with a lot of catch up to do.

Cute Brandon story…. the other night Brandon says “I love math!” He loves doing addition of 3 and 4 digit numbers, with the carrying. He even got out a piece of paper and made up problems to show us how good he was at it. So much fun! He really has been working hard at math, and it is paying off. It warms my heart to hear him say “I love math!” 🙂

After looking through pictures last night I played around with this one and got inspired to make a scrapbook page. It seems about the only thing that gets me inspired to scrapbook these days is a cute head shot of Brandon. 🙂

I’m home from work today, the cough I’ve been dealing with got really bad last night – waking me up a ton. So here I am taking it easy, and hating it. It is so hard for me to take a day off! There is just so much to do at work. I’m tired and need to go lie down and take a nap though. I know I am sick when can sleep until 10am and then am ready to go back to sleep at 1:30pm. That is just not normal. Zzzzzzzz.

This was what the Oregon Coast looked like this morning. Just Gorgeous! Beautiful, sunny, warm weather. We always luck out at least one day when we go camping at the coast in the winter, and today was the day. Saturday it was overcast and foggy all day, but we had a nice visit to the Aquarium and the Rogue Brewery for my favorite beer cheese soup. Another great camping weekend on the coast. Our trailer is now packed up and winterized, it is likely our last camping weekend before moving to Italy. See more photos at: http://ksloma.multiply.com/photos/album/4