Garden of Thought

Wow, what a year amiright? I was stuck in my old house until September with my hubby holed up in the new house because he wanted to isolate while he worked on it and on his online job. This was okay, actually, if frustrating for me as I fretted over the new house's yard getting overgrown and whined about not getting to see the spring or summer flowers so I still don't really know what this yard has in it. BUT I was with my daughter and son-in-law in the old house which also needed work, and got to be there for her through her Expectation, as we are expecting a wee one in just a couple weeks here.

In Sept my hubby decided to head back to our little condo in CA to continue his hermitage so I was finally able to move furniture in and be Home. For about a week. Then our state caught fire and I had to go back to the old house which had a functional climate system unlike the unfinished new one. A couple weeks later, I could finally return so I've really only been "Home" for 2 months though we bought the house over a year ago.

Got a lot of work done on it in that time, and there's more in progress (the saga of the bathroom floor, the epic tale of the woeful furnace ducting, the gripping tale of the bedroom ceiling...)

And now we find they may induce my daughter a little early (still very close to due though, so not preemie time) meaning I am lurching into Grand level life very soon indeed. Next weekend, if all goes as planned (or as planned as such things can be). Time to roll up my sleeves and help a clueless young couple figure out which way is up on a baby!

Hope all is well with everyone out there, I've barely been online so I feel like I've lost track of a lot of you, bless you all.

What a crazy year coming up... I feel like a pack mule. I'm busy helping my son prep to move out this next week (hoorah, he finally managed to get a place! Or part of one. A room in a shared house anyway). It's just me and him to move stuff and the room is upstairs so hopefully that will go without too many mishaps.

I'm hosting not one but TWO bridal showers in Feb (one for relatives and then a tea for friends the following week) followed by...

The Wedding in March for my daughter and new son-in-law! With the three bridesmaids being a)in Japan b)working and super busy and c)incommunicado and living far away it means pretty much all of it lands on me. Again. Oogh.

The new couple then need to move from the coast back to the city area to be nearer to his base. Guess who's the main person available with a car to help out? Present!

On top of that, we finished all our loan approval stuff and are actively seeking a single-level house so I'll be moving and selling this house as well (please God, not during the wedding).

I'm looking forward to Autumn already because by then most of this stuff will over. :-p

My eldest is engaged(!!!!) and looking at March with lots of spring daffodils and bluebells for flowers at her wedding. 0.o He's a great guy, I'm so happy with her choice but it will be definitely an adjustment in my family as I'll have TWO sons instead of one and I get to add the infamous "Mother-in-Law" to my list of secret identities. That being right up there with "Landlady" in most people's minds it should be interesting.

Also at work I learned to make soap with lye (lye is evil but it does nice things to fats), which has been interesting to me as I never did take Chemistry in school so I never got the "be a mad scientist" out of my system when I was younger. This is why I like my espresso machine so much, it goes WHOOOOSH when it makes coffee and grand clouds of dramatic steam go up and it makes me think I should don an Albert Einstein wig when using it.

So! Fair warning I may ramble on about wedding decor or stuff as this year goes along. And soap? Yeah.

Well, my grown son adapted to mostly having to buy his own food so far by mostly just eating what he still has access to - in this case, he is essentially living off scrambled eggs and rice and strangely content doing so. Still no job, little signs of actively looking for one. He had one lined up and muffed it by missing the deadlines for their background check info - I am ready to stick a 4th of July rocket in his rear and send him out the door that way at this point.

On a better note, today I get to teach myself to cut tiles so I can finally fix the surround on my fireplace that has had two blank spots where cut tiles fell off over the years. I did also let my son know that this house might be on the market as early as next year and he will not get to move with us wherever we go. :-p

My now-grown son has been reluctant to follow through on applying for work and had apparently grown quite comfortable in the nest - too comfortable...so I told him "Congratulations! You graduated!"

Explained that he was graduating from being a child in his parent's home to a paying adult renter. He starts paying rent in June - I cleaned out a kitchen cupboard for his food and a section of the freezer for him and let him know he is on his own. He has access to some staples and spices should he want to bake, etc. - I'm trying to be reasonable. Rent goes up $50 every six months til it hits lower market rate.

Sweetened the deal with letting him know this also means his bedroom furniture transfers to his ownership and that I will no longer comment on the state of his room or the state of his employment (or lack thereof). So far he's taken it fairly well, even when he only had mac-and-cheese available for dinner, and he's started applying for jobs.

Whew! My other two flew out on their own, but sometimes they need a little more encouragement.

Finished re-staining both the back and front decks, including steps and railing.  Added new spiffy no-slip strips to the steps and re-painted the railing so it's a slightly metallic chocolate brown instead of weird faded chipped peach and rust color.  My guess is about 50 years ago when the house was built that railing probably was painted to match the cedar siding but time has not been kind to it.  Much, much nicer now.

Between all that and the new mulch, the place is looking a bit jazzed up, I'm quite pleased.

My son is moving back in tomorrow, looks like he may be able to informally apprentice with our church custodian to learn custodial stuff, then hopefully get his foot in the door with the custodial company he works for before summer is out.  Here's hoping!  He's got to get started somehow and he hasn't had any callbacks on anything legitimate yet.  Not that he's looking forward to helping strip the wax off the gym floor - the current project at hand - but at least he's still game to do what needs doing.

My daughter and her roomie were given a lead by a coworker that there was a one bedroom opening up in a good complex, so they gave it a whirl - the manager said they could have it if they signed the lease that day and were willing to move in that very night, and so they did!  They took sleeping bags and slept in their otherwise empty apartment just because they could - it even has a great view of the pond and fountain that decorates the little rec center.  The competition here for housing is fierce - when we went to start moving things in the next day a lady showed up at the door saying she thought *she* was supposed to be moving into it instead the next day, we just shrugged, let her know they already had the papers and the keys and to take it to the manager... didn't see her again.... I hope they just had the wrong apt for their sake, it's a big complex.

And to top it all off, both girls can even walk to work from that location which will save them a fair bit of money.  We moved her furniture today, wow what a whirlwind ride - when she woke up that morning who knew it would be the last time she ever slept in our house in her own bed, just like that?  Away she flies, and all is well.

Well, my daughter was rear-ended while sitting at a stoplight the other day (totaled her beloved little car, dude who hit her admitted he was looking at papers in his lap, he'd only had his new car for two days...) SO - we had to go looking for a chiropractor as ours had retired a couple years ago and we hadn't replaced him. We found a winner!

See, there's a house I've noticed along the main drag, one of those where it's been converted to a business with parking where the lawn used to be. The reason I've noticed it is two full size skeletons on the roof who keep changing their poses (currently in a bathing beauty pose and dancing with the chimney). Inside, we found, was a crazy bohemian chiropractor who travels all over the world whenever he can. His office is full of geegaws and crazy bits from various countries and his two cats are very chatty. Plus he knows what he's doing. ;-)

Best of all (to me), while my girl was being worked on for her whiplash I got to go to what he dubbed "The Torture Chamber" - behind a batik curtain I lay on a warmed hydro massage bed the entire time and watched a BBC documentary about Japan on the flat screen affixed to the ceiling. :-D I'll take a silver lining, sure!

So, my mom brought me a yellowed, folded piece of notebook paper she'd found inside one of her books - "A budding writer!" she said as I unfolded a childhood story written for some class project. "You must have been remembering when we went on that boat, and you always loved swimming."

Um, nooo. Actually I faintly remember this - I just really liked the sound of "bubble jumper" and wanted an excuse to use it. Really - that was about all the impetus of the entire story, but you know moms, they like to think their offspring are prodigies from an early age (hey, I know know MINE are!) ;-)

I read the painfully inane tale in which I gave an account of going on a submarine called the Bubble Jumper, very briefly went diving and discovered a large solid gold pitcher (...which I could not even lift. I signaled my friend over and together we swam back to the Bubble Jumper...it was the size of a (chair, crossed out) large dog..."

Wow. I had a pretty strong friend if the two of us were able to just swim back lugging a solid gold pitcher the size of a chair! Oh, excuse me, a large dog!

I can't decide if I'm amused or embarrassed by the existence of this tale.

I don't do New Years resolutions, but as I look ahead to the last kid to graduate reaching that goal in June I realize it's time to shift gears more thoroughly to a Grown Up household instead of a Kid household - whatever that means.  Frankly, the "empty nest" sounds pretty good some days, though I love my kids, and I sincerely hope they can each find their feet well enough to get their own homes before too long.  Besides, my house is FULL of extra furniture and stuff they've stashed away for their "own apartment someday."  

For a baby step into this next season, I'm thinking I'll be winding down my Etsy shop and looking into getting a part time 'real' job this next fall - I love Etsy, but it isn't remotely enough to make a dent in our mortgage and I would very much like to work on getting that paid down.  We'll see what happens, I'm not particularly marketable but there may be something that comes to hand.