Five girls and Paul

And if you count the dogs, it's 7 females in the house, and Paul.

The interns for this fall are staying at our house for a week until their living quarters are ready for them to move in (after Labor Day).

It doesn't affect me so much, because I'm still sharing a bathroom with only 1 other person. However the other 4 girls are sharing the other bathroom. And Paul has taken to hiding in our bedroom more often when all of us girls are home. Maybe too much estrogen in the room...maybe.

Anyway, that's what's going on with us these days. Later!

Our New Desk!

Okay, I know that "normal" people don't get this excited about desks and organizing. But I'm not normal. My favorite store is Office Max (though I don't buy anything there because it's too expensive). My favorite shopping season is Back to School because all the binders and pencils and pens and notebooks and back packs are in the aisles. But I'm getting sidetracked.

Okay, here are some pics of what we upgraded to. The bookshelf with all the books actually belongs to Dustin and Erin, who are moving to Dallas. So they are going to need their bookshelf back soon, which gave us the perfect excuse to look for a desk with bookshelf space, too.

Here's what we came up with from Ikea.I like that it all closes up so you can't see what's inside because it's pretty cluttered inside. One day that will change, but not today.
Even the bench has storage space for files, and then for whatever else fits to the left of the files.

I'll admit that all the books didn't fit in our new desk, so we had to use the college wire shelves that you stack using connectors, but that's okay. One day when I get up the nerve to throw out/donate all my books that I haven't read in over a year, I'm sure we will only need the desk to house everything.

I just can't get rid of the thought that maybe one day the environmental science textbooks might be used. I know it's ridiculous, and the truth of the matter is that anything in those books can be found on the Internet these days (which definitely uses much less of my house space than the books do). But I just can't do it. Maybe it's because it would be admitting that I won't be using my college degree again. I don't know. Like I said, one day I'll have the courage to toss it all...but not today.

Well, I'm off today since I worked the weekend, so I actually went to the mall in Austin to look around. I've decided that I'm really not missing much by not living close to a mall. I get so frustrated walking around malls - they take up so much of my time just to realize that they don't have anything that I need or want. Another reason that I'm a country girl convert. The reason I happened to be in Austin was because Paul had to catch an early morning flight, so we spent the night at a hotel which was fun.

Paul is in Virginia helping his mom get the GMI server back in order (http://globalmosaic.net/). It started a re-booting cycle that it can't get out of, so Paul was sent to the rescue with all his computer know-how. So I'm a bachelorette until Thursday. Thankfully Chloe is here to keep me company (summer staffer from the UK), and so are the dogs.


Until next time!

Summer's over, and Retreat Season is here!

Well, it did finally stop raining. And ironically we celebrated by taking our family of 12 to Schlitterbahn (water park) and spent all day playing in water. We heard them say "Schlitterbahn is now open" in the morning, and we heard them say "Schlitterbahn is now closed" in the evening. I was definitely waterlogged after that! But we had a blast and it was great to have a day away from work to hang out and have fun. All of us stayed together on every ride, which was pretty cool.

The last day of camp was August 10th, and Paul and I celebrated by staying at Round Top Retreat (http://www.roundtopretreat.org/) from Sunday night through Tuesday morning. It was nice to get away and not think about anything work related for 2 days. But then we came back to our real lives and headed straight into Retreat Season. Our first group arrived Thursday (Aug 16), and left this afternoon, and the 2nd group arrived this afternoon, and will stay through Sunday. So we definitely hit the ground running after summer ended!

I don't have pictures to post with this one, but I wanted everyone to know that we survived summer, and are headed back to a "normal" schedule - at least in camp standards it's normal.

One more note, we did go to Ikea and bought a great desk for ourselves. I'll eventually get a picture up because I'm excited about the prospect of getting more organized and getting our "stuff" more simplified. It was part of our re-organizing that we're doing, which included getting rid of 7 trash bags full of clothes that don't fit, are out of style, etc. We can almost see our closet ceiling and floor now! It was a great feeling to purge the house of all that stuff.

Okay, off to bed. As part of our "normal" schedule, I need to be in the kitchen at 6:45am tomorrow to help with breakfast for the group. Fun, fun, fun!