Thursday, November 15, 2007
Donna's Busy Day
This post is a reaction to the question: "What do you do with yourself now that you're not working?"
We normally get up around 6:45 am every day, and this morning we were a little lazy about getting up. Jim is in Costa Rica for a week, which means I have to take the kids to school in the morning, so by 7 am we were all up, and getting ready for the day.
I dropped the kids off at school around 7:45, and noticed that there is a LOT more traffic on the roads. I think that the Snow Birds have arrived, and probably a lot of Thanksgiving relatives are in the area as well, because there are a lot of cars on the road. After dropping off the kids I went to the Post Office and then to Miller's Hardware ("The Ladies' Harware Store"!) and bought replacement parts for a toilet in a rental house. I dropped that off at the house, and then had to drive in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go because there was so much traffic on Aloma Avenue at 8:30 am that I couldn't make a left hand turn. In the midst of my traffic dilemma I got a call from Angelo, but to my surprise it was EJ who said hello! That was a very nice surprise.
I then went home to work on some paperwork. I need to get new homeowner's insurance because mine will be cancelled in March, but I was going to change it anyway, so it's not a problem. I also got a notice that our mortgage company never paid our 2005 taxes for a rental house (it took the city THIS long to let me know?) so I chatted with a lovely guy in the Philippines for about an hour trying to get that straightened out. Then I tried fixing my laptop (no luck, I'm going to have to bring it back to Best Buy). By this point Jim had called 3 times, and he asked me to drive downtown to check out his commercial building there because his tenant is having a problem, so I went to check that out. MORE traffic. No sign of the tenant, so I headed for home, but decided to call my friend Wendy who had invited me to lunch.
Wendy was in a bad car accident last month, and is still finding it hard to get around. She's using a wheel chair or a walker, and it makes outings challenging. Today she just took her walker because I had trouble earlier in the week trying to get her wheelchair into the back of my car. I thought I was pretty strong, but that wheelchair is pretty heavy, and I can't really manage it. Anyway, we went to Hot Olives on the West side of Winter Park, and had a great lunch. Well, I had a great lunch. Unfortunately Wendy's jaw is wired almost completely shut, and she is on a liquid diet, so she could only have soup. The title above is linked to Hot Olives if you want to check it out.
Angelo won't believe how much this part of Winter Park has changed. It is very trendy with lots of restaurants and little shops - more upscale than Park Avenue.
After lunch I did more paperwork, started to work on Catie's party invitation (She wrote it: "It's great to be eight, so let's selabrate!"), ordered flooring for the wood floors in the rental the plumber ruined when he left the water running for 5 hours and flooded the bathroom and the bedroom, and got someone to fix the kids' bikes so that we'll be able to use them this weekend when the weather turns chilly.
Left to pick up the kids at school around 3, parked instead of going through the car pool line so that I could buy some lunch tickets and pay for their charges. Kevin handed me his homework folder which I was supposed to sign, and which I promptly left at the lunch ticket office, and only remembered it hours later. Oh well. They both go to math tutoring at a school called KUMON on Mondays and Thursdays, but we decided to do that after Kevin's fencing class, which started at 4:20 and runs for an hour. Went to KUMON from 5:30 to 6, and then finally home. What a long day for Catie and Kevin.
I had already made the turkey soup stock in the morning, so when I got home I added Kevin's requests: rice, potatoes and noodles, and snuck in some onions and carrots, which he carefully picked out before he ate the soup.
It's almost 8 pm, Catie's bedtime, and Kevin follows around 9. I'm usually in bed not long after they fall asleep!
We normally get up around 6:45 am every day, and this morning we were a little lazy about getting up. Jim is in Costa Rica for a week, which means I have to take the kids to school in the morning, so by 7 am we were all up, and getting ready for the day.
I dropped the kids off at school around 7:45, and noticed that there is a LOT more traffic on the roads. I think that the Snow Birds have arrived, and probably a lot of Thanksgiving relatives are in the area as well, because there are a lot of cars on the road. After dropping off the kids I went to the Post Office and then to Miller's Hardware ("The Ladies' Harware Store"!) and bought replacement parts for a toilet in a rental house. I dropped that off at the house, and then had to drive in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go because there was so much traffic on Aloma Avenue at 8:30 am that I couldn't make a left hand turn. In the midst of my traffic dilemma I got a call from Angelo, but to my surprise it was EJ who said hello! That was a very nice surprise.
I then went home to work on some paperwork. I need to get new homeowner's insurance because mine will be cancelled in March, but I was going to change it anyway, so it's not a problem. I also got a notice that our mortgage company never paid our 2005 taxes for a rental house (it took the city THIS long to let me know?) so I chatted with a lovely guy in the Philippines for about an hour trying to get that straightened out. Then I tried fixing my laptop (no luck, I'm going to have to bring it back to Best Buy). By this point Jim had called 3 times, and he asked me to drive downtown to check out his commercial building there because his tenant is having a problem, so I went to check that out. MORE traffic. No sign of the tenant, so I headed for home, but decided to call my friend Wendy who had invited me to lunch.
Wendy was in a bad car accident last month, and is still finding it hard to get around. She's using a wheel chair or a walker, and it makes outings challenging. Today she just took her walker because I had trouble earlier in the week trying to get her wheelchair into the back of my car. I thought I was pretty strong, but that wheelchair is pretty heavy, and I can't really manage it. Anyway, we went to Hot Olives on the West side of Winter Park, and had a great lunch. Well, I had a great lunch. Unfortunately Wendy's jaw is wired almost completely shut, and she is on a liquid diet, so she could only have soup. The title above is linked to Hot Olives if you want to check it out.
Angelo won't believe how much this part of Winter Park has changed. It is very trendy with lots of restaurants and little shops - more upscale than Park Avenue.
After lunch I did more paperwork, started to work on Catie's party invitation (She wrote it: "It's great to be eight, so let's selabrate!"), ordered flooring for the wood floors in the rental the plumber ruined when he left the water running for 5 hours and flooded the bathroom and the bedroom, and got someone to fix the kids' bikes so that we'll be able to use them this weekend when the weather turns chilly.
Left to pick up the kids at school around 3, parked instead of going through the car pool line so that I could buy some lunch tickets and pay for their charges. Kevin handed me his homework folder which I was supposed to sign, and which I promptly left at the lunch ticket office, and only remembered it hours later. Oh well. They both go to math tutoring at a school called KUMON on Mondays and Thursdays, but we decided to do that after Kevin's fencing class, which started at 4:20 and runs for an hour. Went to KUMON from 5:30 to 6, and then finally home. What a long day for Catie and Kevin.
I had already made the turkey soup stock in the morning, so when I got home I added Kevin's requests: rice, potatoes and noodles, and snuck in some onions and carrots, which he carefully picked out before he ate the soup.
It's almost 8 pm, Catie's bedtime, and Kevin follows around 9. I'm usually in bed not long after they fall asleep!
