work work work

I know I need to post--Lauren has gently let me know!! Well last saturday we went outside and started to clean up our shrubs. Now that sounds pretty routine, however it was anything but that. As we started to cut back the shrubs the leaves disappeared and ugly wood stood out. Tech dad started to cut off the ugly shrubs and we really thought it looked so much better. After about three hours almost all the shrubs were gone and it really looked better. Now to replant--Caslon is going to help me with some ideas and I think we will come up with something passable. The upstairs room is now completed and put together. It looks so much better. It is amazing how much difference it makes to get wallpaper off. Vacation comes soon and it will be welcome after our long push!! We both say we are getting old for this but it does feel good to get things done!!

paint

This weekend caslon and photo guy came over to our house. It was such a busy weekend. We had 2 main goals, one was for caslon to go through her boxes and take them to her home. I think she was surprised how many she had here !! The other was to pick out paint for the bonus room upstairs. Now that was a tall order--it is so much harder than one thinks to pick out color. One color had too much green and it fought with the green carpet up there. But we managed and the colors are like carmel candy --light carmel and dark carmel. Audit guy and I managed to get all the cutting in done on the paint. I also plan to paint the bathroom downstairs and so photo guy took pictures of it as caslon had painted flowers along the bottom of it while she was still in high school. Needless to say we did not sit around very much so tonight is "chill" night. Audit guy has federal audit tomorrow so he is not in the mood to paint either. Hope you all had a good weekend. Til later...

Being Stubborn

Today my coworkers got a glimpse of my "strong,stubborn,bulldog"side!! One of the reference labs called us today and told us that one of our samples was qns-- that means in lab terms quanity not sufficient. It was a complicated grouping of tests done on a teenage girl last week. The processing of the blood was done by Lisa who is by the way a very exacting tech and extremely careful in all areas of processing. First of all, as background let me explain that before we drew this girls blood we got the manual out and made sure of each test and the quantity required. There was a total of 27ml of blood drawn, with a hematocrit of 36 we could figure out that was a minimum of 9 ml of serum sent to the lab. This was way more than the quantity required in the manual of the reference lab. So when the lab called I simply said I did not buy that there was not enough serum--perhaps they had lost one of the three tubes. She then started some story that they had ben bought out by another lab and the book was no longer accurate-also the methods are changing and now they need more serun. I told her that she did not convince me because new methods are doing the same test with less blood not more. We will not accept this as an explanation. She said do you want to talk to my supervisor and I said "yes" I then went and got Our supervisor and let them duke it out--guess what-- we got a call at 3 o'clock and our lab tests were being done !!!!Then our Sup. put in a complaint on their lab--we think the tube was in another dept. and the person was too lazy to get it and just marked it qns!! Lisa said --I never want you to get mad at me I want to stay on your good side--I hope I wasn't that bad but I can not stand it when they try to pass off some contrived story instead of the truth. If they had simply said I'm sorry we dropped a tube or lost the sample I would have accepted it. So sometimes it pays to be stubborn!!!

Invasion number three!!

Tonight as I was sitting in the driveway and talking to my mom on the cell phone I noticed a squirrel on the fence eating a nut. He then scampered to a big shrub and up on the roof in a flash! I stared at him--he stared at me and then promptly took off and ran to the end of our gutter and disappeared! I called dad out to look---he got out a ladder, went to the end of our gutter and voila!!! A big hole about the size of his fist!! After being inside a while we noticed the squirrel-- back on the tree outside-- so dad went armed with a can of expanding foam spray and some wire. After putting the wire in the hole and the spray, he seemed to think it may be closed off-- unless they have another hole!! Tune in later to see how this turns out!!

New Invasion

Well I think dad did a pretty good job of critter control last week!! However this week it is a new invasion--ants!!! They are marching in and we are telling them to " come to the table" and dine on our delicious terro meal we have set out for them. You almost cannot set anything down on the floor or counter. Oh well, they will soon be gone as that terro really does a good job. It was a busy morning as we had a missionary luncheon at church. It was tenderloin, make ahead mashed potatoes, asparagus with cream sauce and roasted red pepper, green italian salad with homemade dressing and mandaring orange cake for dessert! Now tomorrow morning we are taking a breakfast casserole, and cheese grits to S.S. Mostly it is a cooking weekend . Dad wanted to prove that a Northerner could make cheese grits!! Time to get some shut eye-everyone have a good day tomorrow!!