As of Late

Not much note-worthy going on here lately, as usual.  I can't believe August is already over - it flew by, and the poor blog has certainly suffered from my lack of attention and time to devote to it.  Such is life, I guess... only a few note-worthy events worth writing about... at least, note-worthy in comparison to the daily routine.

The (very old) elevator at work has been acting up for a while now - being jumpy, opening the doors with a little gap left to the floor, things like that.  They actually had to shut it down a few weeks ago to work on it.  Lately it started acting up again though, and it got more serious.  We got a few reports of people getting stuck on it, so we'd all wait a day or two, then gradually start back into the old routine of taking it.  One morning a few weeks ago, I was the first one on, and the doors started shutting.  I hit the button to hold them open for others, but it didn't work - one guy tried to stick his hand in front of the door too, but that didn't work either.  I was quickly shut in by myself, and I just figured the door buttons weren't working.  But sure enough, the elevator just sat there with no response to my floor request, door open request, nothing.  I'm sure it felt like longer than it was, but it had to have been at least 15-20 seconds that I was standing there and evaluating my options - call my office, press the call button on the elevator, etc... Thankfully, as if it decided it had sat there long enough, it eventually started moving and made its way up to my floor.  Six floors has never felt like it took so long... and I sure was glad to see those doors open when it got to #6.  I told myself then and there that I'd take the stairs on purpose from now on.  I also emailed the rest of my branch to let them know, since we'd already been getting a few alerts from people in weeks past who had encountered issues with it as well.  I've since been taking the stairs up and down every day, and let me tell you, six floors is a lot to start out with.  It has gotten easier over the course of a week or more doing it consistently, so here's hoping it continues to get easier.

Oh, and the elevator has had an "Out of Order" sign on it since then as well.

On the home front (well, near home), they've been putting up new housing developments around here like it's going out of style.  There is one close by on my way home that has gone from woods to dirt to tractor playground to suburbia, all within less time than the past year alone, and I've been documenting the craziness as I pass by...

There is also a new development going in very close down the street, near a large intersection (don't ask how silly the driveway location is).  New townhomes keep popping up in no time, and people are already moving in as well...

Along with this have been improvements to the road and intersection near the driveway... a la a new turn lane...

...as well as resurfacing an entire section of the road right in front of our complex, which meant milling out the existing surface.  I go that way to work every day, so for a week or two, I had to ride through the milled out section and its deep joints - aka BUMPS.  Wanna know the joy of these bumps?  The tractor trailer traffic that uses this road got to ride over them too.  This translated into noises, even in the middle of the night, that actually sounded like thunder at times.  J even said it sounded one night like someone was breaking in a door - which tells me it's a lot louder than most of the car door noise and thug music we tend to get used to hearing around here.  Anyway, last week the road was finally resurfaced, and the joint was filled in.  Not only was my daily ride smoother, but we finally weren't wondering if it was storming outside or trying to tune out all the truck traffic.  Not exciting for most people, but believe me, we were glad to see that fixed.

Oh, one more fun part of this project?  The new lane striping was started last week too, and J and I rode on it shortly after the crew had finished their initial work.  The lane this picture is taken from is the only through lane from behind it - as in, all traffic is coming into this lane...

Anyone want to venture a guess as to what went wrong here, or what you're supposed to do?  Haha, it still looks like this, so I guess we'll have to wait and see.

I also got my husband to watch The Devil Wears Prada, and he actually enjoyed it.  J and I don't usually watch a lot of movies, but every now and then, we'll DVR one and finally get around to watching it together a month or two later.  I'd recorded this one for me a while back (or us if he wanted to join, and he likes Anne Hathaway) and we finally made it around to watching it about a month ago.  This channel had been messing up sporadically, and wouldn't you know that 2/3 of the way through the movie, our recording stopped.  J was actually enjoying it too, so we both were pretty bummed.  Fast forward to a few weeks ago, and I found it on TV again.  We got to watch the entire thing from start to finish this time, and J liked it too.  Fun stuff.  Next up, I'll put in some James Bond time with him to even things out a bit.

J and I got to have a nice date night last weekend too.  We don't spend a lot of time out and about, so it's always a fun change when we do.  It actually turned out to be very relaxing and a nice time together.  We went to Olive Garden, and the waiter really took "glass of wine" literally, almost overflowing J's glass.  He even gave us the leftover half glass from the bottle.

And my Tour of Italy served me for more than two meals in total...

I've also joined Flickr, a photo-sharing website.  I take so many photos, but I never seem to follow through with the sharing aspect of it, which kind of defeats the purpose, unless I want to be the only one ever seeing them.  Facebook has photos, but the quality degradation is terrible due to compressing down such large files - Flickr is also public, and it also allows me to easily link more photos into this blog as well (vs. just a bunch of phone pics that I typically use now).  So once I start making use of that, hopefully photo sharing will become a bit easier for me to follow through with.

We just finished up a Labor Day weekend at the beach and home, so more on that later (hopefully sooner than later, actually).  Maybe a good way to start out on a good foot with some picture-sharing...

Oh, and before we left for the beach this weekend, I'd secured a huuuuuuge centipede (the normal-looking kind this time) via the tried-and-true cover-with-a-cup method for J, but we both forgot to get it before we left.  Came back yesterday, and we finally remembered to get it today... and it wasn't there.  Darn thing somehow got out... guess those hundred or so legs are stronger than I figured.  So now I feel the need to go pull up everything in there until I find it... we'll see.  But there is a WANTED bug somewhere in my house right now, and his visiting days are numbered...