Taz-Tangs Corner: Catching up with old friends

Hiya!

Well.... got some sleep, and coffee in bed with a kitty-hug chaser, so my day is off to a blooming start!

I must have slept pretty deep, because Mike told me at one point Perky shot up, looking at the bedroom door, and Mike told him there was a bear sleeping in there....... not sure what he meant by that, not sure I want to know either! ROFL.

We're having corned beef and cabbage today instead of yesterday... Had to get the corned beef from base, since it is not known here, and Mike brought it home at 5... so unless we wanted to eat dinner at 3 in the morning..... we postponed St.Patrick Days dinner. I am going to make a second attempt on the scones recipe that Helen from RetroDesign sent me while ago. Not sure if it was the cook or the oven, but the last batch didn't fare too well. Only 2 came out the way they were intended. 2 were hockey pucks and could have easily been designated "lethal-weapons-when-thrown" one was soggy, and after we found out and put it back in the oven turned out indescribable, so looking at the evidence, I really lean towards blaming the oven :-)

I got confirmed yesterday, what I had been dreading for a while now... I have sorely neglected the blog. I will try and fix that, but I cannot promise anything. Life has had a way of interfering with plans lately........

Catching up from where I left off....

Mike is back to work for 4 hours a day since Monday. He's tired when he gets home, and frustrated. He can't sit still while others work, and it bugs the bejebees out of him to sit at the register, and see everybody else unload pallets. I'm glad he sticks with the plan (so far at least) but I wonder if the frustration won't be worse than the work....... In between customers he straightens shelves and stuff so he doesn't feel totally useless. Not sure if his boss is aware of that, but I won't tell on him :-)

Ann is working on a couple of projects, so StarSongStudio's has been a little quiet lately. I did play with a couple of kits, old and new, but I have to go thru the blog to see which ones I showed already before I post any of them. The page of Jesse from yesterday was from Anns kit APRIL PROMISE that comes out, I believe, next month, as well as this one....

this one, somehow doesn't feel "done" but everything I tried to add made it look messy....
Let me know if you have any idea's?

I did get my pages done for Ivy. At least 2 of them. I have to re-read, but I think we're supposed to do 3 a month now, and 2 challenges plus visit the gallery and post there. Have to check if it's my turn to do the Bingo page again..... So I'm kinda busy with that.
The new mega is spring/flower related. Very pretty colors, lots of different things. It's HUGE.

I also made the mistake to take a look at the 1930 census..... and found Mike's stepfathers' family. This sparked a frantic search for the rest of the tree information, still securely hiding in boxes, somewhere. Mind you, the house is not huge, it's not even big for that matter, but we have at least 20 boxes still packed, and stacked taller than me...... Now I can't wait for the 1940's census to come out next month to see if John had younger siblings! I also found out that his grandparents came from Wales.

We decided we are going to strip some walls and paint them, put the "computer room" together, so I have a stationary place to do the books, scrap, research and hide when Mike watches "Mikey movies" aka, Walking Dead, Underworld, House .... that kind of stuff. Sometimes I can take it, most times I cannot, so I put my headset on and mentally vanish. Sometimes though, it's like I can't tune it out, no matter how high I turn up the volume, so it will be nice to be able to shut a door or 2 in between.

My niece gave me an aquarium. She was cleaning out her room, since she bought the swimmingpool, and asked if I wanted to have one, otherwise she was going to put it on Marktplaats (the Dutch equivalent of Craigslist) I had been thinking about it, but always put it off as, what if it doesn't work out, you spent all that money on a tank, heater, pump, fish, plants and whatever else is needed (I learned a long time that just planning on the obvious expenses usually ends up in some kind of wake up call) and you're stuck with it, with really no where to store it..... so this was kind of the answer. I'm now the proud owner of an empty tank, and a stack of library books for the beginning aquarium owner. It's fun. My niece and my sister both are very well informed about all things fish, so if I have a brain bubble, and don't quite get what I'm reading, I email them with the question and get an answer I DO get. It was funny, because when I got the tank, she asked what kind of fish I wanted, and plants, what I wanted out of the tank.... You should have seen her face when I told her that all I really wanted was fun colors and movement! LOL.
I looked at different sites and decided that Guppies were the most colorful, and the most forgiving if I screw up. Their water values are a little less precarious, their temperature range a little bigger and their overall "keep" a lot simpler than most other warm water fish. Simply put, they're great to learn to take care of more than goldfish, without putting them in danger if you do it slightly wrong. I also want an algae eater or 2, maybe a snail and a couple of shrimp (non edible!). Nicky has a Pleco and it looks like it belongs somewhere in the mesozoic era. SOOOOOO COOL! Still trying to decide on plants, groundcover, backdrop etc... but nothing will happen until the room is done, so we don't have to move a full tank around to keep the paint fumes away from it. It's going on my desk, so I can enjoy them while I'm working.

I am trying to figure out what the jobmarket is all about here. There only seem to be 2 kinds of jobs available..... Cleaning, construction, or high educated ones, and I can't do any of those. The in betweens do not seem to show up in any of the jobsites I've looked at. I'm going to get together with someone from the unemployment bureau, and see how exactly you apply, what your resume should look like and how come there's no jobs advertised besides the ones I've been seeing. Hopefully I get a better answer than when I first went there... I was told that the last 24 years didn't mean a thing, because it was work that wasn't done here, and besides... nobody uses data entry people because everybody types their own stuff. Now, the last part, I can see, the first part seems a little radical. One thing I don't like, I have seen a lot... The need to attach a passport photo to the resume. Maybe it's just me, but it kinda feels like if they literally don't like the looks of you.... you don't stand a chance to get a job. I'm not 20 anymore and easy-on-the- eyes....so that makes me a little paranoid, I guess. (Never thought that I might need cover-shots to get a job that had nothing to do with modeling.....This could be a whole new way of using photoshop! LOL.)

I think Perky is finally settled. He actually instigates playing! He has never done that before and we though he didn't know how to play..... He got play mice for Christmas from my nephew and he LOVES them! He will walk by it a couple of times and than, all of a sudden he'll pounce on it, flip it, catch it and runs off with it. Even in the middle of the night, we can hear him sliding around the corners. He so reminds me of the cartoon chases, where all 4 paws are scrambling to get traction! It's good to see, although waking up to him galloping across the bed, out butts or heads in the wee hours, is a little disconcerting....

I'm going to post the pages I've done so far, and call you "updated". I think I have everything covered that happened over the last month or so.