SARQuest Training

Today Molly and I took Vaska and Ginger to personality evaluation day with the team from SARQuest. SARQuest is a Texas Gulf Coast search and rescue team. We're going to get them involved with Search and Rescue training. Both of them performed extremely well on the testing. We thought that Ginger would score better, but Vaska nailed it. Basically they are both very well suited for training. I guess it's on us now to learn how to do said training! At first it was a little touchy because they both take a little time to warm up to other dogs. Between working weekends and moving soon, it's going to be tough, but we'll get there. Stand by for future updates on training.

- Mike

Busy Week

It was a busy week at the Allyn-Meyer household. I was at the Canadian Space Agency in Montreal performing some remote command testing to the space station. Molly was at home taking care of the dogs and acting for the group lead at work (both tasks should take more than one person!). Montreal is a pretty cool town. I was only there from Monday to Friday, so I didn't get to explore a whole lot other than dinner and walking around. It reminded me quite a bit of Europe, but with everything that we have here. French is the predominate language, but one can get by on English. They are quite as repulsed to speak English as the French are.

We're getting closer to closing on our new house, and we keep showing this one. We're getting a pretty consistent turnout for viewings, so hopefully we'll sell it soon.

- Mike

Today is a day of thought.

1. "Much smoking kills live men and cures dead swine." George Dennison Prentice
I agree.

2. "Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood." - HL Mencken
This is the the beauty and the curse of "perception is reality." And I truly believe that is what life is - perception. So be ready.

3. "Suffering is defined as clinging to our narrow view – we are addicted to me”. Pema Chödrön
I think it’s ego that fears change or fears pain. It’s ego that resists the flow and ebb of this thing called life. Our suffering is so grounded in our fear of impermanence.

- Molly

The Show Goes On

Well, we continue to show our house. There seems to be a fair amount of interest, which is good. It's a pain in the rear, but we are interested in selling after all! Every time someone is scheduled to come by, we pack up the dogs and get out to do something to kill a couple hours. Here are some less then recent pictures of the dogs. Ginger (Yellow Lab) is on the top and Vaska (Golden Retriever) is on the bottom. They do a good job of keeping us on our toes! We'll add more pictures (and more recent) soon.

We're on the market!

Our house officially hit the market at the end of the week. We had a bit of a scramble there at the end to get it in place before the weekend, but we made it. We are also getting the tile guy in today to repair some of the tile that he screwed up the first time around. A couple tiles didn't adhere well enough, so the grout started cracking. You could see the tile moving when pressed, so that is way unacceptable! It should (we hope) be resolved this weekend.

If anyone is looking for a place in Houston, click here!

We got an inspection complete on the house we're trying to buy. We sent back a couple minor things that we're asking the sellers to fix. Nothing major, just a few odds-and-ends. We hope to have that finalized soon.