And now the upstairs...

I am finally able to give a tour of the upstairs rooms, as well as show off our Christmas trees. As we have a tendency to buy Christmas ornaments everywhere we go, we now are able to fill two trees. We will start with the trees.

And for the tour, we have the upstairs foyer (2 pictures), media room (two pictures), hobby room (one picture), guest room (two pictures), Sidney's bathroom (one picture) and Sidney's "suite" (two pictures.) As we have mentioned before, we have plenty of room for visitors, so please come and see us!

Sorry this has taken so long!

It has been pretty busy around here this past month. Kimber was traveling when I wrote the last post, and she is traveling again right now. The current trip took her back to Norway again, and then to Aberdeen, Scotland, where she is now. Once she is back, she will be taking vacation, during which time she and Sidney will do some "fun" travel for the holidays.

Part of what has kept us busy around here is my job search. I am in a bit of a tough situation in that I cannot work 12 hour shifts in the ER while Kimber is traveling (daycare here is from 6:30 am to 6:30 pm). Even though I have a Masters degree in nursing and twenty years of experience in leadership and management, I only have one year of actual bedside experience as a nurse. HR departments are hesitant about sending my resume to the unit directors for nursing management positions because they only view me as having one year of nursing experience and do not take the other experience into consideration.

For this reason, I decided to submit my application to a nursing staffing agency. This gives me the flexibility to work when I am available (when Kimber is not traveling), higher pay (it is basically a contracted position), and best of all, allows me to keep working in the ER (which is something I really love doing!) I completed all the paperwork and tests, and am only waiting to finish re-certification on Pediatric Advanced Life Support next week. The agency has assured me that as an ER nurse, they will keep me as busy as I want to be. This will also give me the opportunity to bypass those HR departments and get directly in front of the ER directors and prove my value. Perhaps if I educate them on the role of a Clinical Nurse Leader, they will be interested in creating a position for me.

As for other things, we spent a nice Thanksgiving here at home, then went down to Bolivar to spend a night with Kevin, Dawn and William at Kevin's beach house. The weather was cool, but the cold front that came through made the shelling pretty good. We found several really nice shells, and Sidney had a great time playing with William. We also had some really good meals while we were there, and of course enjoyed the company. On the ferry ride back, there were lots of dolphins swimming near the ferry, which is also always a treat!


Sidney and I have been dealing with the day-to-day stuff here. We did, however, venture over to Space Center Houston and the Johnson Space Center last weekend. The weather was much warmer (near 80F) so I wanted to take advantage of it. We got there early enough to get right on to a tram tour of the space center. The first stop was Mission Control, which is pictured here.


One of the other stops was the vehicle simulation building, where the space station module mock-ups they use for training is located. In addition, the building houses a full-size shuttle mock-up, two other shuttle cockpit models, and several vehicles being developed for future missions to the moon and Mars. You can see a couple of the new rovers in the background here.

During the tram ride, they play an audio presentation that tells about the history of the area and other space-related things. It was very cool when I heard one of the past shuttle and space station astronauts come on and talk about his experiences. His name is Clayton (Clay) Anderson, and he went to church with us when we lived in Friendswood five years ago!



The final stop on the tram tour was the Heritage Park, where rockets of the past are located, including the rockets that carried the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. It is difficult to describe how large the Saturn V rocket really is. Here you see Sidney posing in front of one of the earlier rockets, then in front of one of five exhaust cones of the Saturn V rocket.


Sidney enjoyed the Space Center Houston portion as well, especially the big playground they have inside. I think she would have spent all day there if given the choice. There are a lot of exhibits to see in this part, and one of the newer ones (it wasn't open when we were here before) is the Lunar Rock exhibit. Sidney is posing in front of moon rocks here, which are stored in a large vault.


One final note for this posting - Sidney is doing great in school. Her last progress report was all "A's". She is still enjoying reading, at which she excels. She also seems more settled in class. She is singing in the children's choir at church and is supposed to perform this coming Sunday.

I will try to get some pictures of the outside of the house (decorated for Christmas) as well as the upstairs and post them soon.

Downstairs Virtual Tour

Okay, not a lot of words on this post, but lots of pictures. This is the downstairs of our house.
Entry way
Office
Dining room.
Laundry room.
Foyer to garage.
Kitchen.
Kitchen and breakfast nook.
Living room.
Master bedroom
Master bath.

Progress

Kimber made it home from Norway okay on Friday. She was quite tired, having been up since 10 p.m. our time the night before, but she recovered from the jet lag well.

We had our parent-teacher conference with Sidney's teacher yesterday. It was very positive and her teacher is quite pleased with Sidney's progress. She is still reading well above the expected level and performing well in other subjects. The only "negative" to come out was that because of Sidney's very active imagination, she tends to drift off subject easily. She makes up stories within the story she reads and has conversations with herself about what she reads. Big surprise, huh!?!

We are also doing the "fine tuning" on the house. We only have the pictures to go up still, and we are doing things like moving towel bars to places that make more sense, etc. I also stained a wooden stool we use in the kitchen to match the cabinets.

I promise that the next post will have a picture tour of the house! Oh, and we are really close to 5000 hits since we started tracking. Any ideas where number 5000 will be from?

Little Brown Mouse

I finished sewing Sidney's mouse ears last night. Here she is wearing the costume. There is a tail on back, but you can't see it at this angle. You can see the mouse in the picture of the cover of the book in the previous post.


This afternoon I also finished putting all the glass and moulding in a cabinet we had redone. As there are three large pieces of glass, four doors with glass and three glass shelves, it was quite a project just to get it all put back together (without breaking any glass!) It will go in our dining room, as it is a near match to the formal dining room set.

The Gruffalo

It is Red Ribbon Week at Sidney's school (the anti-drug campaign) and there are lots of different activities. As it is Halloween week as well, many of these things involve costumes, pumpkins, etc.



One thing that is happening is a pumpkin decorating contest (no carving allowed). The pumpkins are to be decorated as a character from a favorite book. One of our favorites is The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson, a British author we were introduced to in Norway (illustrations by Axel Scheffler). We decided to base our pumpkin on the Gruffalo himself. It was a bit of a messy project involving spray adhesive and fuzzy yarn, but I think it turned out pretty good. I tried to incorporate each "descriptive" item given by the Little Brown Mouse about the Gruffalo from the book:





"Terrible tusks and terrible claws,
and terrible teeth in his terrible jaws;
knobbly knees and turned out toes,
and a poisonous wart on the end of his nose;
his eyes are orange, his tongue is black,
he has purple prickles all over his back."

There will also be a character parade on Friday, and Sidney will go as the Little Brown Mouse. While the Gruffalo is the title character, the mouse is actually the hero, as he is quite clever in the ways he avoids being eaten by the various other characters in the story. I am currently finishing her costume by sewing (by hand - I don't know how to use the machine) the ears for the costume. So far, it looks pretty good. I will add a picture of her wearing it later.

Doing things again...

Yes, Houston may not have the mountain hikes that Norway had, but there is still a lot to do here. This weekend, Sidney and I took advantage of it and had some great fun!



We started out by meeting Kevin, Dawn and William to go to the "Wings Over Houston" airshow. It was at Ellington Field, a base that houses a lot of NASA facilities and aircraft. One of the static displays Sidney got to go inside was the actual 747 built to carry the space shuttle. We also saw several other displays (here, Sidney is standing in front of a B-52, on which the tires were taller than she is) and some great demonstrations.



Featured demonstrations this year were the "Tora! Tora! Tora!" re-enactment by the Commemorative Air Force, a Vietnam air power demonstration, and several acrobatic flyers.



There were also current military jet presentations, like the F-16 Falcon and the F-18 Hornet. Sidney and William were quite impressed with the loud sound that these two jets made. The humidity was also high enough that it created some spectacular effects in high-g turns and high-speed passes.



The final demonstration of the day was the Air Force Precision Flying Team - Thunderbirds! Sidney got an autograph from one of the pilots, and (after a little bit of a wait) they put on quite a show.




The jets look fantastic in their red-white and blue paint with the "thunderbird" silhouette painted underneath. It is very impressive seeing not only the high-speed runs, but the precision with which the various formations are flown. Just look at how close these two were flying to each other!

We left the airshow and headed down to the Bolivar peninsula to Dawn's beach house, Luna Bella. It was one of only a handful to survive Hurricane Ike two years ago, and they have done a lot of work to get it back in beautiful shape. Kevin liked it so much that he also bought a beach house there - Kay Caye, and Dawn's parents had one built next door named Shell Station.


The weather was great, so Sidney and William spent much of Sunday morning playing on the beach. We then came in and cleaned up for a wonderful lunch with Dawn's parents before heading back home. We would have liked to spend more time, but Sidney had homework.



On the way back, we were able to see some of our favorite animals - pelicans and dolphins. Sidney and William also enjoyed feeding the seagulls from the back of the ferry.

Kimber is in Norway right now and will return on Friday. She is going to try to bring some reindeer sausage home to keep Sidney from having reindeer withdrawal. We will be happy to have her home, and will (hopefully) have almost everything done in the house before her return!