I have been emailing back and forth with my instructor from Airframe and Powerplant mechanics school, where I got the license that allowed me to become an aircraft mechanic and ultimately get my current job working on the shuttle program.

Through my instructor, I have been requested for a phone interview to the school's PR representative, for their website as a "success story." I am a success? That is news to me. Hey, whatever- I'll take what I can get. Also, I was requested for another interview from the state department of education for a publication they produce for middle schoolers about career choices. It is amazing to me that I could be a good influence on school children. Go figure. Both phone interviews will probably be conducted in the next couple of weeks, in the office of one of my company's PR reps to be on the safe side. I requested sample questions from both interviewers so that I can at least partially compose answers that will be tailored to the audiences they are intended for. For example, I do not want to speak very technically and in depth for an audience of sixth graders, because it will be over their heads and will not have the desired impact.

This whole phone interview thing is a whole new thing for me. Have you had interviews like this and how did you prepare for and/or handle them?

Birds. They are such strange little animals with such strong personalities. Both of our parrots are little comedians, but they are funny in completely different ways. Charley is mostly funny in the things he says, particularly in the timing of them. He'll hear a loud bang and yell "Careful!" or the dogs will be making a ruckus in the next room and he'll say "Girls! What's going on in there?"

Holly is completely different. She talks but her vocabulary is very limited. She has more "funny actions" than Charley, though. When she's sitting on Andy's arm, she will reach up her foot to her head and clench it and flex it repeatedly. She's making the motion like she wants her head rubbed. It is so cute. The other thing silly she loves to do is not as much fun for me as it leaves a big mess for me to clean up. She goes over to one of her food bowls, the one that has a mix of pellets and seeds and nuts. She will take one foot and put it in the bowl and root around, then in a few quick swipes she grabs footfuls of seeds and pellets and throws them forcefully out of the cage. They go far, too! She will throw out half a bowl of food this way and thinks it is great fun. Of course the floor is a mess for about ten feet in front of her cage, but that is part of the fun to her. The dogs clean up the majority of it, but then leave slobber all over the floor.

Strange, strange birds.

Poppy posted the other day about questioning her own intentions when she did things sometimes. As in whether she was doing something nice just to make someone happy or if she was getting something out of it, making her feel that she was not as selfless as she had hoped.

I know for a fact that some of the nice things I do are motivated by me getting something out of them. Maybe it doesn't make me selfless, but I don't think it takes much away from the things I do- the end result is the same. Specifically, I devote a large amount of time and energy to writing award nominations for other people, many that I do not even know. I help the submitters by rewriting the nominations for them because many of them are not good writers and do not know what it takes to write a compelling award nomination. The other day, I even volunteered to help a nominator who is really mean and bitchy by rewriting her nomination, even though I do not agree that the team even deserves the award. I stopped and asked myself why on earth I would do such as thing as to volunteer for this. What was I getting out of it? What was my motivation? For one thing, I don't want to hear the nominator piss and moan about her nomination being rejected again. That is an easy one. But more than that, I think I am doing it just to be able to show the nominator what a good nomination looks like so she will realize why hers didn't win (twice), and stop blaming it on the ignorance of the board members, of which I am one. I think that makes me officially evil. Heh.

In my quest to purchase as many things for the new house in advance, I came upon a quandary. There will be several pocket doors in the house, and I don't really care for the pocket door pulls that are available. There are some high end ones that are okay, but they are unbelievably expensive. So, I settled on some neat bronze pulls that were salvaged from old buildings. They are from the late 1800s to early 1900s, and I found them on eBay, of course. The only problem was that the bronze finish didn't quite match that of the oil rubbed bronze of the modern door knobs I chose, and I want all of the door hardware to be the same finish.

I looked all over the internet to try to find a way to artificially age the bronze. I couldn't find much. One forum I stumbled upon said that you could use egg yolks to tarnish silver practically over night and someone suggested that it might work on copper and bronze as well. There is something about the sulphur in the eggs that causes the chemical reaction that makes tarnish. I hard boiled some eggs, smooshed the yolks, and placed them in a Ziploc bag with one of the door pulls for a couple of days, but it didn't seem to do much. If you ever need to tarnish some silver, this would be your best bet.

I found this stuff called Brass Darkening Solution that is supposed to age brass, bronze, or copper. I tried it out on the first door pull- it has to sit in the solution for a while. I left it in overnight and then rinsed it and put it in a bath of water and baking soda to stop the metal reaction to the acidic solution. Then I rubbed it with mineral oil to give it a nice sheen. I think it worked pretty well. Now I only have nine more to do.

I have been working my ass off in school lately, and really enjoying it. I think that makes me a giant nerd, but I can live with that.

I have been working on my "course project" lately, which is a paper that is supposed to be five to seven pages long. As is probably typical of most bloggers, I have no problem filling five to seven pages, but the trouble comes when I try to limit myself to only that. I cannot seem to condense it to fit. I can write until the cows come home on certain topics, and this is one of them. So far, I am at twelve pages and have been unable to cut any further. Andy says that many people would love to have my problem; that they would have a hell of a time writing enough.

That is just me, though. I write a lot, I talk a lot, and so on. I see my talkativeness reflected in Charley, our parrot. This weekend, I was home on Sunday working on inside projects and Charley yapped non-stop for at least fourteen hours, I swear. He was just talking and chirping, and screeching and hawing.

My wordiness gets really bad when it comes to work. I write lengthy emails to get certain things across to people, but I know I end up overwhelming them with the amount of information I send. Maybe it is part of my whole subconscious modus operundi

We got a bill from the surveyors for that stupid cross-hatching that the county wanted on our site plan, that only the surveyor could do or it was not acceptable- $440! I am just adding it to the monumental list of what they have cost us through their incompetence- they'll pay for it later one way or another. Seriously, we are not going to just let all this abuse go unchecked. They will have to deal with us, but it will be after we get our certificate of occupancy. We know better than to mess with them before we are completely finished with the house.

I am still here; nothing much is going on. I feel like I used to be able to yammer on about nothing endlessly on my blog before, so why can't I do so now? I can't figure out what has changed.

Speaking of change, we are going through all kinds of change at work as the transition from the Shuttle program to the Constellation program looms ahead. My area had lost a lot of personnel to other areas and we are getting ready to allocate a bunch of empty office space to engineers working on the new program. This translates to lots of work for me because one of my side duties is to assist the IT department in moves and changes happening in my area.

On the house front we think we have found a lender that will work with us. Our mortgage broker is hesitant to get our hopes up too much before the ink is dry on the underwriting, but he has a good feeling about this one. You've got to figure that lenders have to lend money to someone in order to stay in business, right? We have nearly perfect credit, so you would think they would be jumping at the chance to lend us money, but the recent collapse of the housing market has them all running scared. Sooner or later someone will have to take a chance on borrowers like us, or else they will all go out of business. We should find out something this week some time. Fingers crossed yet again!

Not much going on here lately. I have been very busy with my school work, trying to finish my current class up. I know I am going for the best major for me because I find my coursework to be very interesting and get quite absorbed in it, hence my lack of posting.

In other news, we did actually get our building permit for real this time and should be starting soon. We are just waiting to get the financing straightened out. I told our builder how I had it in my head that we simply MUST be in the house for Christmas, and he said he thought we could be there by Thanksgiving, which would be even better. From the beginning, my goal was for us to move in by Christmas of 2007, and sadly I saw that dream slip away. But this time we have a real chance of making it. Fingers crossed and many prayers.

This morning at work I had to go get something done in the OPF (Orbiter Processing Facility) area, and I arrived just in time to be stuck on the other side of the clear that was established for the roll over of Endeavour to the VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building) for stacking. Since I was stuck waiting, I took some video and photos with my phone to share with you.

A whole weekend gone and I haven't got a thing to write about. I spent the weekend doing mundane (but necessary) things such as grocery shopping, school work, dog grooming, and taxes. On another note, we heard from our builder Friday that the county had called and said our permit was ready to be picked up. Let's hope it is for real this time.

Here is Andy's video from today's launch- you can see my big head in the way in the first part of it.

Here are some photos I took:

Ramona is driving me nuts. She is the cutest thing, but she has some terrible habits. The one that is sending me over the edge is the digging.

I have never had a dog that was a digger before. Poodles aren't particularly known for it, but Ramona has discovered it and there is no stopping her. Since she has the dog door, she can go out and dig whenever the mood strikes her. Lately, she has been running out there, digging a hole up to her armpits, then running back in leaving big muddy footprints all over my floor. Then I have to wash her feet in the sink and clean the floors. She will repeat the process over and over again, gleefully.

I have read up on the internet about dogs that dig, and most of them say it is because the dog is bored, or is suffering from separation anxiety. Neither is true in Ramona's case. Bored? She has every toy under the sun, plus five doggie siblings to wrestle with and two parrots to annoy. Separation anxiety? I think not- she even digs when we are home. I think she just loves the feel of the dirt between her toes and delights in the fun of it. That is my theory, anyway.

I have tried some of the remedies I read about on the internet- I have sprinkled her "favorite holes" with red pepper flakes and black pepper to no avail. Some of the suggestions said to bury dog poop in the holes to deter them from digging. Well, that would make digging even more fun for Ramona- it would almost be like a treasure hunt at that point because she likes poop. Go figure.

It is not really an option to keep her inside, because the whole reason for having the dog door is so that the six of them will go outside to pee and poop. Any benefits gained in not having to clean up muddy dog feet and footprints would be negated by poop and pee on the floor, so the dog door needs to stay open.

Anyone have any other ideas? How do I keep my stinky Mona Jean from digging up the yard, leaving big holes for poor little blind Cody to fall in, and muddy footprints all over my house? Help!

Even my guarded enthusiasm wasn't guarded enough as it turns out. Perhaps i shouldn't have said we had our building permit. Actually the county had called and notified our builder that the permit was ready to be picked up. When he got down there, they told him that they needed a notice of commencement form signed and notarized. We had done that on the front end, and the form had been filed, but it has been over a year now, so the damn thing "expired."

On top of that, they had found a new issue. They wanted to see elevations of the covered walkway between the house and the workshop, and those elevations must be submitted for both the house permit and the workshop permit. This confused me, because we had decided to connect them with a covered walkway in order for the two to be treated as one structure per the county's own definitions, when they ad a problem with the position of the workshop being forward of the house on the lot. But they still are forcing us to get two permits, presumably so they can collect an additional permit fee from us. It is complete BS. Anyway, our builder is completing the elevations tonight and will turn them and the notarized form in tomorrow to get the permit. I will be amazed if he gets it. I think this is just the latest in a long stretch of other "issues" they are going to spring on us. There is a special place in hell reserved for these people, I am sure.

This evening we heard that our building permit is complete and ready to be picked up. We are happy to hear it to say the least, but have been screwed with so much that we are still very guarded in our happiness. It doesn't seem quite real yet.

Remember this post where we had to replace the vanity in our downstairs bathroom after we found a leak and nasty mold?

Well, after we removed the grey vanity, the grey tile of the tub surround didn't match, and there were several broken/chipped tiles. We finally fixed all the tiles and then had the whole tub surround reglazed like the bathroom upstairs, and the result is pretty nice.

Keep in mind that the bathroom looked like this (below) before we bought the house, and it seems a lot more impressive!

Today Andy and I were doing some errands and I spotted a bird shop that we had never been in before. We went in just to look around and there were some very interesting parrots, but Andy was especially transfixed by one bird that appeared to be not quite right. It was a rather large macaw of strange coloration that we did not recognize. The bird's feet were not normal looking by any means and he seemed to have a very hard time just sitting on a perch or climbing around the cage.

We heard the pet shop owner telling someone else that the bird was handicapped- that he was born without the flat part of his feet and as a baby his feet were completely balled up. They had worked with him and stretched his feet out as much as possible and he is doing fairly well now, but he will never be quite right. The bird was a cross between a Scarlet Macaw and a Blue and Gold Macaw, which supposedly happens in nature, and is known as a Catalina Macaw. It does make me wonder if he turned out that way due to the cross breeding of species.

Still, I can't stop thinking of this bird. I felt that I wanted to take him home and take care of him. Andy really liked him a lot too. I think he felt the same way- that this bird needed special care. We must both be a little sick in the head (since we already have ten animals), but at least we are alike.

I think everything is going to work out okay with the house, but of course things can never be easy.

I talked to our builder last night and he will work with us however he can, even if it takes a side deal to ensure that we can start building our house. He said we have been through too much to give up now, and I agree. Unfortunately our permit was still not ready today, and we had a little scare. We got a certified letter from the county today (those are never good news) and I was very worried. It said something about a private lake that was dug in violation of code.

We weren't sure why we were getting the letter as the pond on our property was dug several years before we owned it, and luckily we finally got in touch with the county natural resources department. We found out that they will not normally issue a building permit to a property that has violations. In our case, the "violations" occurred several years before we owned the property, so we could not be held responsible. Still the letter they sent made it sound like we were in for some real trouble. In actuality, it was just more of a CYA type letter. Whatever.