Home again

My last post was pretty short, but I got side-tracked and then busy with some short trips.

I'm so glad to be home from my traveling. As much as I like to travel, it's always nice to be back. I've had two meeting trips in the last two weeks, the first to New Orleans and the second to Salt Lake City. Both meetings were really good, and the travel gods were looking out for me. No delays, cancellations, or other travel-related issues. In fact, I caught an earlier flight coming back from Salt Lake City on Friday night and got in earlier than I expected to. So all in all, routine travels with excellent, worthwhile meetings.

I'm glad not to be traveling for awhile for a couple of reasons, though. Besides just being glad to be home for awhile, I've been really pushing it to keep up with work and travel too, so it's nice to have only work facing me now. I have some deadlines to make, although I've managed to make a couple of them while traveling.

Besides work right now, I need to remember that Christmas is soon, and Christmas shopping shouldn't be put off. Especially because a lot of gifts will need to be shipped this year. I'll be going to east Texas rather than Colorado, so I need to get shopping done and stuff mailed to Colorado in time to arrive there during the holidays. Which makes the time between now and Christmas entirely too short.

Up-date on the house stuff: I chose a carpet color. Believe it or not. Someone is going to call me and arrange to come out and measure the house. And ever since I got home from the store, I've been looking at all my stuff that I will need to pack up and move. Can you say "despair"? It's going to take me months just to pack all this stuff and put it in the garage for the duration. I suppose I should start now, but I'm not going to start until I have a date that the work will start. Plus I didn't choose a counter top, and I'm told I should have those done before the floor. Plus I do need to finish cleaning out space in the garage. I worked on that yesterday again. Two more bags of trash. It really is getting close to being done, but I've got one serious area that I have to tackle. And I'll need to get used to parking outside so all my stuff and cats can have the garage. It's all becoming more real now that I've actually chosen a carpet color.

The color is darker than my current carpet, but not a dark color. My current carpet is some off-white shade, or was when the house was new. Now it's mostly 'stained and dingy', if I had to give it a color name. The new color is more of a light taupe. I did my best to see how it looks with a little carpet square in the house. Hopefully I'll like it when it's installed. *laughing* No. I WILL like it when it's installed. I would tell the name of the color but I've forgotten. They have too many colors with too many names.

I bought a robot vacuum cleaner about a month ago. A Roomba iRobot. It's the most amazing thing. The little thing just wanders around the house, and cleans like crazy. It seems to clean better than my big upright vacuum, plus it goes under the bed. Of course, my cats are less than thrilled, especially about the fact that it goes under the beds. Addy stalked it all over the house the first couple of times I used it, while Zoe ran from it hissing and spitting as it seemed to follow her around the house. Now days, Addy stays up on the furniture and ignores it, and Zoe sits in the kitchen until it's done. The cat-kids are not exactly good about making adjustments to their routine. I got them one of those fountains that's always running because Addy especially likes to drink from running water. It took them about a week to come into the master bath again (where I'd put it), and about three weeks for both of them to drink from it. They like it now though. They just don't deal with changes well.

So why'd I buy the robot vacuum? No reason. It seemed like fun, and besides laughing at the cats, it's been really nice to just turn it on and go do whatever I was doing. My house is staying a lot more vacuumed, I can tell you. Now if they'd just invent a robot duster, I'd be set.