updates (pt.1 of 2) & apologies

I'm going to start by apologizing to all of our dear readers who have missed us for the last... how long has it been? Almost two weeks? REALLY??? OK, I'm so very sorry for making all of you wait that long to hear from us. It is entirely my fault because Stephen (and a few others, you know who you are) has been after me to post to the blog for almost that long and I really dropped the ball.

So without further ado, UPDATES!

I'm working now, as you should all know from Stephen's last post. Random House is treating me as well as can be expected in the retail world. The owners are good people and shrewd businesspeople. I handle the front sales floor on most days, which keeps me running around quite a bit, but I've learned a lot of interesting things about Russian fairy tales and traditions and Native Alaskan artists and their works. I've talked to Olga Borland (the owner, who is in the store on most days) recently about my employment and she says she's very impressed with my work ethic and that she intends to keep me past September, which was originally my seasonal cut-off date, as off-season pick-up help during inventories and store re-organization before the next tourist season rolls around. Until then, I'll continue to work about 35 hours per week in the store, as I have been for the last 2½ weeks.

Some of you might not yet know that we received our shipment from Arizona, which means that we now have a house full of boxes, packing material, and household items we don't need, in general. It's amazing that we purged so much stuff before we left and, after having lived out of three suitcases for 6 weeks, we realize now that we didn't need about a third of what we packed up to go with us. Lesson learned, we're slowly putting our home together the way we want it and getting rid of everything else. The good news in this is that there is a consignment clothing store nearby for nicer items and two donation centers in town for everything else, one of which is a Salvation Army store attached to a real Salvation Army church. The only significance in that is that neither Stephen nor I could ever remember having seen a Salvation Army church before, but both knew they existed somewhere.

There are plenty more things for me to write about, but rather than make this post too long and difficult to read, I'm going to invite you to stayed tuned to the blog and join me again either tomorrow or Tuesday for the rest of the updates. :)