Well, it’s mid way through the year so here is a collection of updates on various random topics. Squirrel!

Michelle is now doing training for doing Casual HIMS coding for Alberta Health Services in Calgary in addition to the rural areas around Calgary. Hopefully that will give her more work and cut down on the gas bills and wear and tear on our poor little KIA Soul.

We are still in recovery mode financially after two years of schooling and took a bit of a hit when we had to do some unexpected bathroom repairs. We discovered that the wall behind the shower was weak and ended up having to replace the back wall along with the side walls.

You can see how the tile got pushed in and the grout between gave out:

So, everything got ripped out and replaced:

Did some repainting after the repairs were done:

It looks great now, but it was an expense we didn’t really need.

We were also over due for re staining our fence, so we tackled that as well. We’ve got a long lot that is along the alley on two sides, so very little is shared with neighbors, which meant we are doing both sides along most of the length. I dug out the power washer that we got as a wedding gift and took it to the fence. I hadn’t used it in a few years and was a little afraid it might not work but it did a great job!

It looked like this before the power wash:

Here you can see part of a washed panel on the left compared to the sections that haven’t been power washed yet:

Then we let the fence dry for a week and stained it the following weekend.

It sucked up ten and a half gallons of stain, but turned out great.

I’m still at Calgary Laboratory Services, which will be expanding to manage Laboratory Services for all of Alberta as part of the Connect Care plan. We still don’t have a new name for the expanded organization, but we do know that the software that will be rolled out across Alberta is called Beaker, which is part of the Epic system. If you want way more information, check out the “Provincial Plan for Integrated Laboratory Services in Alberta” report.

The crazy politics in the US continues to clutter up my Facebook feed and other social media. Trump has now started a trade war with Canada, and most of the rest of the world. The other big issue continues to be his policy of seperating children from their families at the border. I’m really torn between trying to ignore what’s going on in politics because it’s too stressful and depressing, and feeling like I need to keep track of things in case there is anything I can do to influence what’s going on.

My biggest concern is that the next Alberta provincial election could have a similiar flavour. The UCP party led by Jason Kenney is throwing around some ideas that I really don’t like, but it’s looking like they have a good chance of getting in. I’ve never liked him and can’t see myself ever voting for a party he leads. The next election has to take place on or before May 31 2019 so things are going to start heating up.

Then there is the whole mess around the Kinder Morgan and Trans Mountain pipelines and how those are being handled at the Provincial and Federal levels. The next Federal election is on or before October 21, 2019, and it will be interesting to see what stand the various parties take around that issue.

Or, I may just go back to painting miniatures and watching cat and dog videos and trying to ignore politics for awhile. The miniature painting is going quite well, and I even recently acquired an airbrush which I’ve wanted for a long time.  I’ll do some individual postings on that topic soon.

My Family Tree projects are sort of on hold for summer, it’s more of a winter activity, but the Knorr Geneology Facebook group continues to be very active and adding new relatives on a regular basis. We are now up to 126 members across multiple countries.  I’m going to have to take a day soon and catch up on a few things there.

The Grywacheski – Lozinski group on the other hand hasn’t really taken off, but I’ll try and put some effort into getting things going there in the fall or winter and see if I can get somemore people interested and signed up. We have 37 members in that one, almost all from one branch of the family, most of my Aunts and cousins and spouses. Need to try and track down and invite a few more distant relatives. I did just notice a couple comments on one of my Family Tree postings here that I’ll need to follow up on soon too.

Another thing still on hold is the remodeling of Michelle’s stained glass studio. Just seems to keep getting bumped by things like the unexpected bathroom reno. Still in the plans though.

I’ve been doing spin class two or three times a week since January, which I quite enjoy.  I may do a separate post on that and the challenge of finding bike shoes when you have size 13 extra wide feet. 🙂

Another topic that I’ll try and post more details on soon is the Little Free Library that Michelle and I won.  I now have everything needed to get it set up, just need to dig a hole for the pole and attach the Library to it.

That’s enough random thoughts for now, hoping to post more frequently and on more specific topics soon.