At the Stock Show

Every January the National Western Stock Show is held here in Denver. Its a big ole stock show deal for real stock people. And us urbanites like to go & pretend we're western.

Mike & Frankie went again this year, to do a little flyball demo. Frankie is like a celebrity dog at the stock show. Everyone wants to pet her, and talk to her, and talk about her. Frankie thinks it's the greatest thing ever--she gets to do flyball, bark like crazy, and in between, people lavish attention on her.

I watched flyball & also walked around a bit...OK actually I made a beeline for the kids area, so I could see the petting zoo. Now I want a Dutch bunny--they are ridiculously cute!

She's really not going that fast, in fact she's pretty darn slow--it's just too dark inside to get a not blurry shot.

trim is good

No, it is not exactly the same height everywhere, but you'll just have to live with it.

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OK, I feel I need to address the 'not all the same height' issue in a little more detail. All the tall trim you see is original. It's like a foot tall, with various ridges and detail. Interestingly, even the original trim does not all have the same detail--there are two versions in our bedroom.

Our original (pre-adoption) plan was to have new trim custom made to exactly match (one version of) the original trim. ahahaha! As you might guess, that was going to cost a small fortune & got de-prioritized.

Even if we had done this, it would have been impossible to ever get seamless trim, because the old trim is all now weirdly embedded into the newer drywall. So you would still have trim that sits on top of the drywall butted up against trim embedded in the drywall.

So we didn't do that.

We went to Home Depot & picked some of the tallest trim they had, which also happened to have some similar detail. And them we built up another layer of shorter trim, and a layer of quarter round on top of it AND on top of the old trim, to try to blend it together in a not-too offensive manner.

No, we won't win an awards for historical accuracy or perfection. But unless you are actually looking at one of the corners where the height changes, I don't think it is too terrible looking.

And that is why the heights are different.

registration form released

The form to register in progress adoptions has been released. This is really good news. Seems like we won't get trapped in a huge black hole of red tape. Hooray!

If you want to know where we find this stuff out, it's here:

www.guatadopt.com

Which is good, because we certainly never hear anything from our agency.

These guatadopt people also participated in that Dateline show that just aired. We meant to watch it, but the DVR decided to record something else instead. Was it horrible? Do we sound like huge baby stealers?

save the date - March 22

Saturday, March 22, the day before Easter. If you're reading this blog you're invited to a Welcome Home party for Sara at our house. Assuming she comes home before then of course.

good news, hot off the press

OK, the Guate adoption authority, PGN, has published a location for the registration! Here it is, in case you want to swing by:

32nd street
9-34 zone 11
Colonia Las Charcas, Guatemala City.

This is very good! It's not clear that a process and/or paperwork have been produced, BUT, at least they are taking steps & moving the process forward. Maybe our lawyer will just camp out on the steps there, awaiting the next step.

Red tape, we curse you!

Nope, there's no news

Just wanted to reassure everyone that we're not holding out on you...no news news on Sara. As far as we know, everything is moving along as planned. We are still hoping that the whole 'you have to register your adoption in progress, but there's no place set up to register' issue works itself out soon....that's the only potential weirdness (we think) left to worry about. Other than that, everything still looks good for a February homecoming.

We've been keeping busy by kicking the home improvements back into high gear. More than a year after we put hardwood floors in upstairs, we have (well, Mike has) put in baseboard trim! The is very awesome, because before we just had a gap where the dog hair & dust bunnies all collected. It wasn't very finished looking. Because we left a really wide gap between the edge of the floor & the wall (what was the reason for that again? Because the floor sure hasn't expanded any...it's so dry here it just contracts ) we had to layer up three pieces of trim, one on top of the other. Lots of trim. Lots of cutting. Still caulking & painting--I promise pics once we're done. But overall, it looks a million times better!!!

There is also a light at the end of the tunnel regarding the stairs. The terrible, terrible 'stripping the paint off the stairs' project that has probably taken ten years off my life in chemical exposure. They are stripped (imperfectly) and stained (imperfectly) and now we just need to sort out the 'keeping ourselves & the pets off the the stairs for a few days' issue while we polyurethane, with the special, fast-drying, not-polyurethane (and not full of yucky chemicals) stuff I bought. Waterborne finish? Something like that. It's supposed to be less toxic & nasty.

THEN...one last big challenge. Painting the stairwell, which will involve some very creative ladder solutions. It's tall. We'll figure that out somehow.

And then we rest! And hopefully pick up our kid from Guatemala!