The Sickmiller Express

Here a pic of Adam and I by the town tree.

It was taken last week around 39 weeks pregnant! Looks like I’ll make it to my due date (tomorrow), yay for healthy baby. Looking forward to more family coming into town this week.

We have been enjoying the community events that we normally aren’t in town for. The Christmas dinner was on Saturday. It’s probably my favorite event of the year. My mom went out caroling last night and they stopped by our house. This week we have Santa coming on the 24th (I think Adam will be playing the cornet there) and then a candle light service the same day (Adam also playing there). Then Christmas! Speaking of my mom I don’t want her to feel left out so here is a picture of her after falling on this giant snow pile.

Also, speaking of Adam playing he did some songs at the First Congregational Church yesterday. I really enjoyed listening to him, it was beautiful.

Well we managed to put ourselves into a situation! Heh. Both the north and south passes are currently closed but I’m not worried, nothing will happen (baby-wise). I have an appointment tomorrow morning and mom is flying in around 9:30 so I hope the weather calms down enough for the road to open. Denver and Durango weather look fine so I’ll think she’ll be able to make it. I wanted to go in early to get to a laundromat but I think we’ll aim for getting to the 9:00 appt on time. It took me at least two hours to decorate the tree yesterday. That is some kind of record. It is a very sharp tree so I kept resting to give my wrists a break from all the poking. That and I am suddenly tired all the time. I think I’m getting to the point that everyone complains about…. being large and uncomfortable and just wanting to have the baby. I’m not quite there yet though, thankfully.

Yay for snow and the Christmas season!

This photo was taken in the garden outside of the hospital in Durango. I had my 37 week appt yesterday. Everything continues to go great.

So I hope to start posting here more often. I think people are going to want more updates once there is a kid involved. I am not only OK with this turning into a ‘mommy blog’ but I think I am actually excited about it. Living away from so many loved ones presents a challenge and this is one small way to help overcome it. Tomorrow I hit the 36 week mark! This is a bit of a milestone and I’m looking forward to the home stretch. I think this past weekends birth class has helped calm a lot of my fears and excitement might finally be taking over. Now, for the highly anticipated highlight of the post. Photographs. Of me. Pregnant!

Dad Sickmiller, Megan, and I at the pumpkin patch. 30 weeks.

Blurry head-cut-off-accidentally bumblebee costume. 32 weeks.

Hanging around the house watching Adam doing handstands. 34 weeks.

Ok the transition from vacation back to daily routine is never an easy one but really, Kona, Hawaii to Silverton, Colorado might just take the cake. The flights home seemed particularly cruel and since they were ‘overnight’ we were basically zombies all day Saturday. If you can sleep on planes I REALLY don’t want to hear about it. The only thing that kept me perked up was the thought of doing some shopping at Anthroplogie. As soon as that ended (oh about 40 minutes after our flight landed) then it was all downhill from there. I did get some cute shirts, white to show off my awesome tan! Seriously! I got some sun while boogie boarding and snorkeling. Ok so mostly we hung out under trees or squished under a beach umbrella but there is a faint swimsuit line I promise. Anyway I think I was still trying to fool myself that it wasn’t WINTER where I live. Fast forward way too many hours and I’m waking up in my bed that I was only gone from for a little over a week… how can it feel SO DARN UNCOMFORTABLE. I tossed and turned all night and woke up feeling like crap, Silverton bloody nose and all. I grumped around all day yesterday and am trying to muster up some energy while I type this. I have a lot to do clean-up wise and am seriously dreading spin class. At least the sun is shining and I don’t have to think about lunch as Adam made delicious hot turkey and mashed potatoes last night.

It snowed last night. Only a little bit. Kind of makes me… oh I don’t know. WANT TO GO TO HAWAII. Luckily we leave on Wednesday. Starting to get really excited!

Back in Ohio, the earth was fertile, manageable, and easy to dig. Here in the rockies, the soil is…well, flush with rocks. When we dug out our current flower bed, I removed countless softball-sized and bigger rocks. But I struggled to get rid of the bunches and bunches of smaller rocks. This year, Danielle and I are going to try dense gardening, so great soil is a must. That’s where this simple soil screener comes in….

Supplies:
The following boards of 1”x8” lumber:
(2) Two foot boards
(2) One foot boards
Several (about 12) Finishing nails
About (40) 1/8” Fiber insulated staples
1/2” Screen (I used 1/4”, but only because the store was out of 1/2”), about 16” x 24” (most screen is sold off of a 24” roll, so you’ll just ask for 16”

Tools:
Hammer
Wire cutters (less preferred but will work) or tin snips (ideal)
Drill
Rope/twine
(you only need the drill and rope for the handle, so don’t sweat it if you don’t have it on-hand)

The finished product will be basically a wooden rectangle. Start by marking off the angle of the board. I angle the board because it makes the box a whole lot easier to hang on to. I did about a 30-degree tilt. Once you determine the angle you want, measure how far the board is away from the sides and use this data to replicate the angle on the opposite side of the long board.

Prepare to nail the first side. You’ll need something steady to balance out the other side of the long board.

I find it helpful to draw a line representing the outer or inner dimension of the board to be nailed into. This helps me nail in the right place.

Secure the boards together by driving in two nails, one at the top and one at the bottom.

Repeat the process for the second one foot board to be secured to the same long board. At this point you should have a box without one of the long sides. Simply place the longer board on top, eyeball (or draw a line) where you need to drive your nails, and drive the nails to complete the box.

The finished box should look something like this. Next, we’ll add the screen.

Turn the box upside down and place the piece of screen on the box frame. The screen is quite rigid so you don’t need to worry about getting it taught like you might with other materials. Line up the screen as shown so that you only have two sides to cut instead of four. The screen can be a bear to cut.

Use the staples to fasten the screen to the box. I used 1/8” fiber insulated staples which have a soft shell that lets me start them into the wood with my thumb. After starting them, a couple whacks of the hammer drives them in nicely. A strong staple gun would have the same effect. Our household gun wasn’t strong enough for this project.

After the screen is fastened, cut the screen to allow you to wrap a portion of the end of the screen around the angled board. This cutting process will take a while if all you have is wire cutters. That’s all I had. Tin snips work better, largely because they allow cutting to the very tip of tool, whereas my wire cutters double as pliers and therefore don’t cut at the tip. After you fold the screen, staple it taught.

After cutting off all excess, the stapled mesh should look something like this. The process of cutting off the extra mesh was long and annoying.

At this point, you have a useable screen. The tilted sides make holding it pretty easy. However, to make handling the box even easier and also to help with storage, I added a handle at one end.

To make a handle, you’ll first drill two holes. Make an approximate line three inches from the top of the box. Measure three inches in from where the boards on both sides meet and put a dot. This will show you where to drill for a centered handle.

Drill the holes. I used a 3/8” bit. The size of the bit depends on the size of the rope you’ll feed through.

Feed a piece of rope through and knot it on the inside to keep it from coming back out the holes. That’s it!

Now dump your icky soil in, sift out the rocks, and enjoy the dirt!

There is nothing stopping writing on this blog. I must just be lazy. I also seem to be easily distractible. I accidentally just typed our website address wrong and it gave me the suggestion of an Adam and Danielle at wordpress and I just spent the last 10 minutes reading their blog. We’ve had interesting things going on too so content isn’t an issue.

February, our month of visitors, is already done and gone. We had so much fun. The week that Tracie and Chris came out will forever stay with me. My first skiing experiences at ‘big’ resorts and enjoying snowshoeing. It was so much fun having university friends out here to enjoy our little neck of the woods.

I’m totally getting distracted right now by The Colonel. We have a Guinness box in the middle of the living room and he just walked up and sat in it. Then he saw his toy a few feet away so he hopped out, got the toy and returned to the box for fun-time with a leopard print feathered ball. I could watch him play all night. Kitties can get totally into their playing. He’s being extremely noisy.

Anyway, even soaking in the hot springs didn’t keep me from being sore from all the skiing and the snowshoe trek. I wish I had the pics from the snowshoe trip. It was gorgeous. Big snowflakes falling and lots of powder on the ground. If we ask nicely maybe Tracie will link to her flickr in the comments. Pretty please : ) We had to trek across a beaver dam. Twice. Which got the blood pumping. We also did a Silverton shuffle which is something I had been wanting to do since we moved here. There were only 4 places open. It was my kind of shuffle. We also took 2nd place in a snow sculpture contest. We made a sphinx and two pyramids. It was spectacular. Now that they have seen the place we need to start working on getting them to move out here.

Then we had my birthday weekend. On Valentine’s Day we took them to the airport and did some grocery shopping. Romantic! Since it was a festival weekend in town there were fireworks. I actually made a loud exclamation of awe because there was one that I swear I had never seen before and I thought it was just that pretty. I’m not an exclaimer generally speaking. On my birthday we went over tp Kendall for some skiing and a soft pretzel. We got home and had some delicious cake and opened gifts. I love my birthday cake so much I took a bunch of photos. Pics of all these things are on my facebook. If you don’t have facebook. Go get it.

A week later my mom and aunt came in to the Montrose airport where we met them by the door. Surprise! I had really been looking forward to them coming out. We took them skiing at Kendall and despite what they might say they did a really good job. I forgot how tiring it was for me when I first started and had to pizza-pie everything. We spent a portion of the time just walking up the hill a ways and coming down which is incredibly tiring. not to mention the altitude adjustment. I eventually convinced my mom to get on the lift (the easy part) and then told her she would fall getting off (the hard part) at the top and not to be embarrassed or freak out. She totally slid down on her back the moment her butt left the chair (hahahhah) and then freaked out. Luckily she managed to slide off to the side and there wasn’t anyone on the five chairs or so behind us. They didn’t even have to stop the lift. Success! She then managed to ski through some rock (everything was starting to melt) and went down a steep icy slope, on her back, and stopped just before hitting a tree. Getting up was the hardest part for her. I kept having to take off one of her skis so she could stand. It took awhile (including me skiing down, going to the bathroom, riding the lift up again, and then skiing back to her and Adam) before she was able to get one long run in and make it all the way to the bottom. It was pretty cool skiing with her. I had it in my head that my parents were anti-ski.

Ok that was kind of a wordy description. This was only the first day in town! We went snowshoeing, shopping, soaking in the hot springs, and for the grand finale snowmobiling. The snowmobiling was particularly fun. None of us had been before and we had a blast. A friend of mine owns a snowmobile tour company so we went on a tour through them. We went further and higher than I expected and we had a lot of fun. Bumps through the woods, roller coaster type hills and then a big climb up to the high point. The views at the top were amazing and we all had SUCH a great time. I have the best picture of the four of us up there. Yay for awesome family.

It’s March already and springish weather is here a bit early. It even rained when mom and aunt Carla were here! In February!

To answer my mom’s comment on the previous post, Yes, DirectTv does indeed talk back. On Monday morning our DVR box inexplicably died. Well, I guess Adam was able to explain it. He said they only make them so that they last 1.5 years and then tell you you have to sign another 2 year agreement when you call to get it fixed. I spent 40 minutes on the phone pushing the power button then the reset button then both at one time. Then I had to move it to another outlet (all of which i had already tried). It wouldn’t even turn on. Seriously, their answer was to say that we could send ours in and they would send us a new one. I’ve heard that any time you deal with them they renew your contract another 24 months so I asked if that would happen and they said yes. I said I would rather cancel my service then sign up for another two years with them and asked if there was anything they could do for me. He put me on hold an came back with…. their convenient service plan. If I paid an extra $5.99 a month they could then fix it under my service plan. Oh, and I’d have to renew only for one year. I then asked what the cancellation fee is and he transferred me to customer service (he was in tech support). So I asked her what the cancellation fee was and she said she could get me the service plan just for the next 9 months (which is when our original contract runs out). I said no thanks I just want to know how much it’ll cost me to leave today. I finally got my answer and got off the phone. It looks like this will be our last week with them. We had another box (non-DVR) and I hooked it up in the living room. Its already a pain to not be able to rewind the news to show Adam the ginormous storm clouds out in the Pacific. I will miss the product but not the company.

A new Mac mini is in the mail so we can hook up our TV to the internet and stream shows from the web. Apparently this means we REALLY need a HDTV. I’m still holding out though. I secretly love our CRT. Which is no longer a secret.