Raving Amicks

With Tyler’s help during President’s Day Weekend (he had a three-day weekend back then), I reupholstered our dining chairs that he had picked up for $10 years ago. They originally had dirty and cracked white vinyl on the seats, plus they were really hard and uncomfortable. Now they have high-density foam seats covered with beautiful white leather, and our butts sigh with delight each time we sit on them (or maybe it’s just the leather sinking into the foam that sighs). One of the chair seats isn’t quite as taut as the other (surprisingly, the second one we did), but they’re still infinitely better than before. Now I just need to strip and re-stain them during a summer dry spell and we’ll be dining in style.

Osa also approves of the new seats:

Used my X-mas present twice. Helps make great pizza. Ya’ need lots of cornmeal evenly spread out under the dough to make sure it slides off cleanly. Thanks Mindy & Tyler!

The snakes were enjoying the spring rays today.

On the same note my friend Adam McRae and I came up with a name for dad’s snake the other day. We’re calling him Neville which seems to pair with “Benji” the other snake pretty well. It only took about a decade to name two pets but I think the wait was worth it don’t you?

I convinced mom and dad to get out of their comfort zones and take a cross country ski class with me on Mount Hood. I’m still shocked that they actually agreed to do it, but in the end we all had a lot of fun. The class was only 2 hours long but we managed to take away quite a bit of knowledge. We even journeyed out by ourselves after finishing our beginner’s class exploring a few different trails.

It only took 2 years to make it happen but the bike is finally finished. The process started long ago by taking the whole bike apart and stripping the paint off the frame. And after a failed attempt to paint the frame myself using good old fashioned spray paint I decided to go to the professionals to get it powder coated(the fork silver and frame a creamy white). I then put on the finishing touches such as silver brake lines, and silver colored fenders and rack. With the last and most important ingredient being two beautiful white and gray Ortlieb back roller classics courtesy of mother and father. (Thanks guys!)

before

after

I can’t believe I made the train today. My bus came a couple minutes early and I was pretty sure I was screwed. The only other bus I could possibly take was ten minutes up the hill and even then I doubted it could get me to the train on time.

So then I whooped out my tubephone and discovered that the ten-minutes-away bus was leaving in less than five. And since I had nothing to lose at this point, I huffed it up the hill with my overfilled backpack and suitcase.

Wouldn’t you know it? I just barely made it. Which is good too, cuz the train also left early (though, with me on it). Hooray for creative bussing!

And now, if you’ll direct your attention to the eastern sidebar… and assuming you have logged into your Raving Amicks account, you will notice that I have updated our stalker page for Mason. Please peruse it at your leisure.