Finally ... Central Air!

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Finally ... Central Air!

Sleep Is Overrated

Six weeks have gone by since I last posted.  Six weeks that feel like six days or six hours or sometimes even six minutes.  More things have gone on during the last six weeks than normally occur in our lives during a six month period or maybe even a six year period depending on how motivated obsessed and crazed we are I am.  I haven’t had a chance to write over the past weeks because as it turns out, when time is at a premium, sleep is more important to me than blathering on uncontrollably about every little boring thing that happens in my life sharing interesting and comedic events of my life with you.  But I’ve become attached to this blog and even if nobody has missed reading it, I’ve missed writing it.  So even if this post is short, filled with grammatical errors, isn't pretty and lacks entertainment value, today, while my stress level is somewhat lower and my brain is functioning reasonably well on a tolerable (although still not ideal) amount of sleep, I’m going to briefly jot down just what has transpired in the Land of Stilwellian since we I was taken over by an alien being who sucked out my change is scary/take your time/weigh the pros and cons then weigh them again/sleep on it/don’t jump into anything brain and replaced it with a jump into it/storm the beaches/full speed ahead/change everything! brain.

As they say in "Glee":  Here's what ya missed:

•  Ryan accepted a teaching position in Sheridan. 

•  We all jumped up and down clapping and I shouted “I guess we’re moving to Sheridan too!”

• We all spent hours and hours at Leslie and Ryan’s house painting, packing, cleaning, tiling and moving furniture.

•  We helped at Leslie and Ryan’s garage sale where we got rid of parted with some of our junk precious possessions.  

• We spent two days (a week apart) in Sheridan checking out the real estate in preparation for purchasing the perfect house “sometime in the next two years.”  The last house we looked at on the last house hunting day was "the one".   I nearly begged Dean to let me call and make an offer even though it had everything I said I didn't want.  A huge lawn to mow, septic, propane heat, and is five miles from town.

 

Our creek -- running alongside our property

Family Room

Front of House and Dean's "man cave" aka garage

View from family room of part of our 1.5 acres

•   Dean began searching for my brain.

And what's been happening the past six weeks: 

 *  I spent hours talking to “Luke the Banker” … oh, if only I had time to post about my experiences with “Luke the Banker” … oh, how I could go on …

 *   Dean tried to plant a vegetable garden.

*   I intermittently worried I’d jumped into this whole buy a house and move thing too quickly and had moments of fear and panic when my chest got so tight it felt like I might be having heart issues.  I didn't add chest pains to my list of worries though because I'd already learned from my ER visit last fall (when I was worrying about how I'd get us from the airport to our vacation rental in Edinburgh) that chest pains are just my own special reaction to stress.

*   It was hot.

*   Most days I was exhausted.

*   Leslie and Ryan moved in with us.  Our house went from two adults and two cats to four adults, three children, two cats, a salamander and all the paraphernalia, clothing and toys that accompany them.

*  Weeds took over the garden.

*   Pierce got a puppy for his birthday.

Baxter.  Angus' brother.

*  We got a puppy.

Sir Angus Wallace MacDuff (Labradoodle/Bernese Mtn. Dog Mix)

*   Dean intensified the search for my brain.

*  We spent a whole day stringing a fence and building an it’ll-do-for-now gate in the backyard.

*  We took turns getting up at night with the puppy.

*   Myra got two gerbils for her birthday.

*   It got hotter.

*  Our house now included four adults, three children, two cats, a salamander two puppies, two gerbils and all the paraphernalia, clothing and toys that accompany them.

  
*   Myra said she “loves rodents because rodents are small and they scamper.”

*   We decided to use the next two years to fix all the things we would need to fix before selling our own house.

*   I was still exhausted.

*  An electrician replaced a ceiling fan, under-counter kitchen lights and a couple of broken switches.

*   A roofer replaced some missing shingles.

*   Two people gave me bids on repairing stonework on our garage.

*  Abby came home for a week to visit.  Yippeee!!!  She asked why we are fixing everything now when we said we would take care of it over a two-year period.

*   I collected and tried to organize ten inches of paper from "Luke the Banker" and our realtor.

*  We took Abby to meet Jorge in Omaha and visit family in Lincoln.

*  Abby sent in the VISA paperwork for Jorge.  Yippee!  Yippee!!  Yippee!!!

*  Fires burned around Wyoming and Colorado, it was 87 degrees in our house when we returned home from Lincoln and it smelled like we'd lit a campfire in the living room.

*  We got a bid for central air conditioning.

*  We spent a weekend in Denver visiting friends.

*   We drove to Sheridan and closed on our retirement home.

And here’s what’s comin’ up:

 *  Central air conditioning will be installed in our Casper house on Friday (Sheridan house already has it!)

*  We’re still going to be getting up in the night with a puppy.

*   Stonework will be repaired on the garage.

*  A “for real” gate will be built.

*   A puppy door will be installed in the garage door.

*  We will help load up two adults, three children a puppy, two gerbils, a salamander and all the paraphanelia that goes with them and unload them in Sheridan.

*  There will be crying after two adults, three children a puppy, two gerbils, a salamander and all the paraphanelia that goes with them have moved to Sheridan.

*  We will be trying to live in and maintain two houses for two years hoping that what we need or want at that moment isn’t always at the other house.

*  We will be spending as many weekends and any other days we can manage up in Sheridan.

*   I have a feeling we are going to need new tires or a new car or both.

*   Dean's search for my brain will continue.

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Sleep Is Overrated

If It Feels Right ...

The last few days have reminded me how stressful buying a home can be.  Since last Friday afternoon my nerves have been tingling and in a nearly constant state of tension.  My heart has been pounding and my chest has been tight because waaaaaay before we thought it would happen we found the perfect retirement home and we are under contract. 

I am a person (so my daughters tell me) who thinks and considers and weighs all the pros and the cons about every decision I make – and then I think and consider some more.  I am not (so my daughters tell me) a person who looks at a house one time, wakes up the next morning and decides an offer must be made … now!  “What happened to ‘we have lots of time, we just want to see what’s out there but we won’t get serious for probably a year’? they said.”  “Who ARE you?  Where is our mom?” they said.  I’m not really sure what alien being has taken up residence in my body, but I do know this – sometimes you just know in your gut when a decision is right.  And even though my brain and body are exhausted from offers and counters and paperwork and texts and e-mails and realtors and bankers … I’m excited because this just feels right.  It feels the same as it did when I found THE wedding dress nearly 40 years ago.  When I saw it I just knew.  I don’t know how to relate it to men other than maybe it’s the same as when Dean laid eyes on my brother-in-law’s pellet grill for the first time, started drooling and hasn’t stopped talking about it since. 

I won’t have any photos of the house until after Thursday when we meet with the inspector to get his (hopefully) glowing report but I can tell you our dream retirement home is on one and a half acres, five miles from town.  There’s a nice deck off the back where you can sit and listen to the creek running alongside the property.  It has the large heated, insulated garage Dean dreamed of and there’s lots of space on the property for his “treasures”. 

When I told Abby we’d seen two deer on the property when we pulled up she asked if Jorge could come and shoot or hunt on “our” land.   Um, no.  Don’t think so.  Fishing in the creek might be an option but deer are in a shoot-free zone.  Her question did get me thinking about hunting though, and since I haven’t had a lot of time to blog recently – what with buying a house and being mentally and physically wiped out – I thought I would share a letter I’d written to my parents about 30 years ago (which my mom saved and labeled Cathy The Hunter) after a hunting experience Dean and I each had.  After re-reading it I decided it was probably just as well Abby got Jorge to the altar before he realized he was marrying into a family with limited no talent when it comes to hunting.

This was just after I cried and just before I pulled out the library book and held it up for Dean to refer to while gutting.

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If It Feels Right ...

Poopastrophe

It’s a given that most of us never get around to starting or finishing projects around the house until we find out we’re moving and need to sell our house.  And then once those projects are done we wonder why we hadn’t finished them a long time ago so WE could be the ones to enjoy them, not the people who buy our house.  Now that Leslie and Ryan have found themselves a part of that procrastinating group we all belong to, we have been spending a lot of our time the last couple of weeks helping them paint, tile, pack, clean and finish all those other little projects they knew they had years and years to complete because they were never going to move.

 

And, since we are also planning to move in a couple of years, when we haven’t been helping out at their house, we have been staining the woodwork we hadn’t managed to get around to for four and a half years ...

... because we were never going to move either. 

We’ve all been in pretty high gear for days but recently all of our engines have begun to misfire.  Our gears have been grinding and sometimes we can barely get from first gear to second.  It became obvious we needed to idle a bit.  So today Leslie and Ryan left to spend a night in Denver and enjoy a concert they’d gotten tickets for way before they knew their life would be crazy at this moment in time.  We are keeping the kids while they're gone because Ryan’s parents were busy and we couldn’t think fast enough to come up with a reason to get out of it.  Juuuuust kidding.  If it wasn’t for those kids I wouldn’t be entertaining you with this blog post.  I’d be sitting out on the deck … in my glider, drinking a gin and tonic … listening to the birds sing … waiting for Dean to feed me dinner.   Instead I’m at the computer, drinking a gin and tonic …waiting for three kids to fall asleep ... so I can too.

So……the kids arrived at 9:40 a.m. this morning all geared up in hiking boots, hats, jeans, long sleeves and carrying their special nature bags.  Off we went to the grocery store to buy our nutritious Lunchables and Crackerjacks.  As everyone was choosing between slimy fake turkey, oily cheese and crackers, or slimy fake beef, oily cheese and crackers or slimy fake ham, oily cheese and crackers, I realized  that I had forgotten to bring any washcloths so I went searching for some kind of hand wipes.  But since I never buy hand wipes, and we were in a store I don't normally shop in, I couldn’t find them.  I could have asked somebody but I just didn't feel like it so I decided we’d be fine just wiping our hands on our jeans.  We were going hiking and rock hunting after all.  We weren’t going to an afternoon tea at the Governor’s Mansion.  I had no idea what serious ramifications that seemingly innocent decision would wreak upon me a few short hours later.

Loaded with two small coolers filled with our nutritious lunches, two backpacks filled with extra jackets, water, sunscreen, camera, and water bottles, and three special nature bags, we headed out of town to our destination.  All went well.  We scrambled over rocks, 

discovered amazing fossils, 

helped speed up the natural process,


























 and had an awesome lunch of slimy meat, oily cheese and Crackerjacks. 

Near the end of our adventure Myra got a panicked look in her eyes and said she had “to poop.”  I hadn’t factored pooping into my equation when I chose not to pursue searching out the wipes.  All I had was half a kleenex in my pocket.  Once Myra made sure it wasn’t “full of boogers” she accepted it.  I found her a place near a bush which was nice and flat, had no cactus in sight and left her.  “Be sure to bring the Kleenex back,” I said.  “We can’t leave it out here.”

When I got back to where Pierce was waiting he had the same panicked look in his eyes and I caught a whiff in the air that had definitely not come from the few wildflowers we’d seen blooming.   I took Pierce’s hand and we headed to another “bathroom.”  Myra handed off the half a kleenex to me as she headed back the other way.   As Pierce and I walked I was trying to remember how I’d done this with my own girls years and years ago.  Did I just brace them as they squatted or did I make a triangle of my arms with their little butts pointing through the opening?   I found another nice flat spot, cactus free, and I pulled down Pierce’s jeans and underwear, still not quite sure of my role in this pooping matter.  Then I looked down and realized the whiff had been much more than just a spurt of gas.  Think underwear filled with gooey wallpaper paste.  Only brown. That tiny square of already-used kleenex was not going to cut it.

Squatting was definitely not an option now.  I quickly made a triangle of my arms and lifted him up hoping to contain the thick “paste” globbed onto his cheeks.  I knew immediately that I needed reinforcements.  As I held him up, jeans and overflowing underwear bunched up around his ankles, brown butt pointing through the opening in my triangle arms, I yelled “I need help!  I need help!  I need help!”  Emerson came running.  “I need a plastic bag or a coat or a shirt or, or, or, anything!”  She opened the two backpacks and I saw coats and shirts flying.  One backpack held plastic bags but they were filled with the remnants of our oily cheese and slimy meat lunches.  I wasn’t really desperate enough (yet) to use a bright yellow shirt as toilet paper so I said, “tell Papa I need help!”  She yelled.  “Papa!  Nada needs help!  She needs help!”  In the meantime I looked down at the ground and discovered Pierce had been hard at work and on the ground was, well, more “wallpaper paste.”  As he was calmly propped in my triangle arms, tiny brown butt hovering over the ground, his pants leg dangling dangerously close to everything he’d eaten in the last 12 hours, I continued to yell for help, Emerson continued to yell for help, and Dean hollered back, “Nada can take care of it.”  (Later he told me I “didn’t sound desperate”)

I couldn’t let Pierce stand up because the “paste” would plop down his legs onto his pants.  I needed to get those pants and the overloaded underwear off but I couldn't get them off without taking off his hiking boots first and I couldn’t take off his hiking boots while he was nestled in my triangle arms.   Pierce was completely at ease but my arms were becoming tired and Dean was 50 yards away nonchalantly gathering the coolers and water bottles we’d left when we went exploring after lunch.  Finally Emerson convinced him my situation was becoming desperate and he arrived with two nearly full water bottles.   Dean carefully got Pierce’s boots, socks, jeans and underwear off, and then I tipped Pierce’s butt up as Dean began pouring water and I wiped the brown sticky “paste” from his little butt with my hand.   Yes.  My hand.  Because a few short hours earlier I hadn’t thought we would need wipes. 

So there we were; Pierce was in my triangle arms, tipped up so his little skinny butt was nearly facing the sky, Dean was pouring water on him, I was smearing the “paste” around and hopefully off of him, while girls and Pierce are all laughing.  At least we were in the middle of nowhere.  Two quarts of water later he was clean (enough) and we decided it was time to call it a day.  Other than Myra running into some cactus (which required some miniscule needle extractions), a tree branch (which resulted in a few tears), and a rock, (a few more tears), the walk back to the car was uneventful.  We stopped for ice cream on our way home and nobody even wrinkled their noses when we walked in to the shop. 

It was a day of learning.  The kids learned about rocks and fossils

 and what “going commando” means.   

 I learned never to go anywhere without hand wipes.

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Poopastrophe

It's Albert's Fault

I hate telephones.  I’ve hated them since I was nine or 10 years old and a little boy in my class decided he liked me.  He didn’t slug me in the shoulder but I knew he liked me.  I knew it because he would call me on the telephone after school.  I don’t remember what he said during those conversations but I remember I stammered out monosyllabic words as I stood squeezing the receiver in a sweaty hand wishing he would just hang up and never call again.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that for a shy, awkward little girl, those phone calls were torture.   Every time the phone would ring I would hold my breath and chant in my head, please don’t let it be for me, please don’t let it be for me.

Even now, years and years and years and years and years and years later, every time our telephone rings, I tense up.   How’s that for a Pavlov’s dog reaction?  My brain knows the odds are I won’t hear anything sad or distressing when I answer that insistent ring, but that doesn’t lessen my fear that I will.  I brace myself for the worst until I sense that the voice on the other end of the line is trauma-free.  They don’t call me the Queen of Worry for nothin’.  

Ryan and Leslie have had their own anxious telephone moments recently as they waited to see if they would be moving to the garden spot of Wyoming.  A couple of weeks ago their hoped for phone call finally came.  Ryan was offered a teaching position and his acceptance tipped the first of many dominos that comprise a move.  I had no idea how fast the course of our life would also change until we became one of the many toppling dominos.  Within minutes of hearing of their impending move we I decided we should retire to that very same garden spot. 

Now before you start shaking your heads and tsk tsk’ng – they asked us to move up there.  It was their idea. They looked us in the eye and said, “pleeeeeze, will you move with us?” And it wasn’t because of the sobbing and keening noises I was making.  Really.  I wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.  They just love us and want us to be near.  I don’t even think free babysitting figured into it.   It’s not like we’re moving right away anyway.  We still have 2 ½ years to work.  Okay, I have 2 ½ years to work but I’m sure Dean wouldn’t dream retiring before me just so he could live near his grandchildren.  

So see, there‘s plenty of time for them to change their minds and beg us to stay right where we are.  But they’d better do it quickly because once I make my mind up I’m the Countess of Control, waving my magic wand and knocking down dominos like no other.  Not the least of which was talking to a banker and discovering we not only could, but should, pay off our mortgage ― which we did on Tuesday … Ow!  Ow!  Ow!  Sorry. I got a bit dizzy spinning around on my toes and cracked my knee on the china buffet ...  which led to a market analysis on our house, which led to realizing we had a few projects we should probably finish begin working on so we’ll be ready when it’s time to sell our house.

That led to calls from contractors who will do the things we couldn’t do even if we weren’t slower than a snail trying to push itself through goo.  I still cringe a little when the phone rings because now I’m wondering what the estimate on the other end of the line will be.  But mostly I cringe in case it’s Leslie or Ryan calling to say “stop!  What were we thinking??!!!  Pleeeeeeeezee, pleeeeeze, pleeeeze don’t move!”  I wonder how much they’ll cringe when I tell them it's too late.

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It's Albert's Fault

Grayed Out

Shrouded by clouds and mist

Memories rise unbidden

Spaces are too large

Life flies but days crawl

 

Paths twist and turn and trip

Hills rise up into mountains

Salty rain spatters

Will the path smooth and straighten?

Or should the journey itself be enough?

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Grayed Out

Myra isms

→   I'm too small to have fun.  Small people never have fun.

→ Have we been good?  Are you going to tell Mom anything about us?
          
               ◊ I don't know.  What do you think?  Should we?

                → No ..........   Yes    ..............    Maybe .................  I don't know.

→ My front teeth are getting ready to get loose.

               ◊ How do you know they're getting ready?

               → They're packing up their stuff and getting ready to leave.

→ How do you know?  You're not the smartest person in the world.

→ Deano sometimes Meano.

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Myra isms