Sun., 12/17

I'm not being a very good blogger! I really need to make it a point to spend some time once or twice a week writing. It helps to clear my mind and express what's going on. Not that there's anything terribly important going on.

This will be my third Christmas without Mark. My first Christmas without Mom. Things were starting to go bad for her this time last year. The first part of November, the family got together for Will's birthday and she didn't feel up to going. I think that was the beginning of the end. She was there for Thanksgiving but I could tell she was not feeling well at all. It kind of felt like she was gritting her teeth to be there and tolerated it as long as she could. I kind of remember thinking that this was not a good sign because Thanksgiving has always been her holiday. The one she looks forward to all year long. She didn't come to Christmas at all, she just wasn't up to it. When you think about it that way, she had six pretty miserable months. I hate to think of it that way because that's a long long time. Makes me very sad.

Planning to get together with my sister next week. She's busy on her birthday which is the 19th, so we're going to get together on 20th, which is Mark's birthday. This would be his 69th...wow, where did the time go??

Life is pretty dull right now.  The last two weeks, I've worked Monday and Tuesday then mostly just hung out at home, puttering a bit with little chores, watching TV and doing puzzles.  Merry and I did go down to Villisca on the 7th to scatter Mom's ashes on Grandma Dora's grave.  It was predicted to be a nice warm day, and it was - perfect for the "hunt" of trying to find Grandma's grave.  It was a challenge... in fact, we were starting to think her stone had been stolen, but it turned out we were looking at the "directory" wrong and instead of being 10 east and 3 north from the road, it was 3 west and 10 north from the road.  We had tentatively planned to scatter her at the farm, but I just thought since Grandma seemed to be there when Mom was in her state of transition, it seemed more suitable for their "remains" to be together. Afterward, we had lunch at a little diner there in town - we had picked up Kris, Merry's friend, in Red Oak.  She knew Mom very well when they were young and Mom and Kris's mom were best friends.  Her mom passed about 4 months before Mark and we were there the day before she passed when she was in that unconscious state consoling Kris. 

I spend an awful lot of time missing the fab three...  It can get me feeling a little blue when I dwell on the fact that the three people I was closest to in the world are all gone. Now that things are pretty much as I want them in the house, I've lost my "focus" that has kept my mind and psyche occupied for the last two years.  Not that I couldn't find other things to improve, but I've kind of "shot my wad" monetarily for awhile.  I got to thinking... I've spent a LOT of money the last 2 years starting when Mark went into the home.  Had the house painted in Aug. 2021 to the tune of about $3000... Getting the basement "rehabbed" cost me about $3000 as well, but that doesn't include what I spent at the Furniture Mart on carpet, the TV & surround sound, which was another $4000 or so. (That stuff I'm still paying for as NFM offers no-interest financing.) That took me through to the start of 2022.  Then of course the hail storm and the tree falling on the house - that ended up creating a bit of a windfall.  I got about $24k from the insurance company and spent $4800 on the tree removal and a little over $15.5k on the new roof, leaving about $3700 left over.  In 2022, the last room in the basement ended up costing about $3500 for the ceiling, paneling, trim and all the labor which "ate up" that "extra".  Also in the spring of 2022, I had the sunroom & dining room windows re-glazed to the tune of about $1700.  I got my new HVAC system in the fall of 2022, which cost $6400.  And earlier this year,  I had the gutters fixed and one new window put in which cost another $4000.  And the big one in early summer... the generator for about $12k.  I figure I spent almost $30k out of my pocket in the last 27 months!  Some of it was stuff we'd put off for so long and it really needed to be done.  But a lot of it was fixer-upper stuff.  In other words, I could have lived with it the way it was, but my thought was that I'm at an age where if I don't get it done soon, I won't have much time to enjoy it. I mean, who knows how many more years of good health or living in this house I have left?

So now I need to just spend some time recovering from all the expenditures over the last 2 years.  I still need to deal with the stucco above the porches, but that seems to be more about finding someone who can DO it as opposed to scraping together the money.  Apparently stucco work is a dying art...

As for my plants, most are either dormant or growing very slowly, but I'm surprised at how many are still experiencing growth spurts! Almost everything sitting in the south window in the living room is actively growing.  I'm sure that's because they get bright indirect light all summer long while the sun is north, but now they're getting direct sun, albeit not very many hours.  'Noelle', which got a HUGE leaf over the summer, has a new vine.  Skinneriana (or what I bought as that) has more than one new vine.  My texture-leaf kerrii, which has looked fat and happy but has not put on any new growth in over a year, has a pair of new leaves.  I have a couple different Dragons in hydroton and they both look ready to burst forth with new vines.  Variegated macrophylla has several new vines.  It all looks fabulous!

In the kitchen, the new hueschkeliana I got from Colorado Kathy is doing awesome, and my restart of my old one is looking happy again, too.  My wayetti growing in hydroton, that has been on the north shelf for many, many years is actively growing.  And the Dischidia ovata is climbing up over the higher shelf.  This is the time of year it gets pretty easy to start neglecting the plants in the GH.  I need to be diligent about keeping them watered enough!

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Mon. 12/18

Worked the airport today.  Ok, I'm using the word "work" loosely!  It was DEAD!  I had to spend the first hour doing one-on-ones because none of my crew was there.  Todd usually shows up EARLY, so I usually come in at 8:40ish, but they didn't call him in.  Jeff usually comes in at 9:00, but he hasn't been working because of an injured rib, but they called him so I thought "maybe he's better and will be there."  So I came at 9:00 and no, he wasn't there.  Gary usually comes in around 10:00.  It was freezing! The temp was in the 20's, but the wind made if feel like the low teens.  And because it was dead, I had to wait in the garage for cars to bring back.  So I got really chilled while I waited for Gary to show up.  Then, just before Gary got there and as I was driving out, I saw Todd coming in.  So we all got together and had a warm chase to do nothing in!  I probably didn't move even 10 cars and we finally left a little after 2:00.  There is just no point in them paying us to drive in circles and do nothing.  I couldn't convince them to let me call Erica to see if there was something else we could do...

I'm not sure if I mentioned that I had ordered three new chairs for the living room.  After I had it painted about a year and a half ago, nothing matched the new color.  So I decided I would splurge for my 65th birthday and get new stuff.  I got two very high-end leather sitting chairs that are even nicer than they looked online:

They're not snuggly chairs, but my living room isn't a cozy-type living room.  There is no room for a couch because of so many doorways (2 regular, and the double for the French doors), so three chairs is about the best I can do.  I see it more like an old-fashioned parlour, where you would sit and visit, but it's not a "gathering place" for the family.  They are very comfortable as well as classy...  And here is the LaZboy I got for my "sleepy" chair:

They only offered this in boring grey or beige at the Furniture Mart, so I special ordered it in this fabric.  It's really very nice, much more solid than my old chair.  Down side is that it touches the wall when it reclines because I don't want to pull it out any further.  But I love it.  I took the red chair to the basement.  I put the "cow chair" in the sunroom and put the sunroom wicker chair on the porch.  I had them put my old "sleepy chair" in the garage to have it hauled away.

 

In going through more of Mom's pictures, I found this one:

I love this picture, which I'd never seen before.  From left, it's Aunt Rosalie (2nd oldest), Great Uncle Tom, then Aunt Verla (oldest sis and the "real beauty" as Mom used to say), and Mom on the right, who was the youngest of the three.  Uncle Tom was her dad's brother.  She had very few memories of her dad.  Grandma Dora married her stepdad when she was only 6 and her dad had gone off to war right after she was born, so what memories she had of him were after they were separated.  Then Aunt Judi, the only one left, was born to Grandma's 2nd marriage when Mom was about 9 or 10.  Her stepdad never really treated the step-daughters very well - wouldn't let them call him "Dad" even though Mom, at her young age, wanted to so very badly...

 

Anyway, Uncle Tom is a great memory.  He was so kind, always soft-spoken and easy to love.  Aunt Mary, his wife, was a true tom-boy, and I always wondered if she was born today, would she have been a lesbian.  She wore men's clothes and kept her hair very short in a manly style.  But Uncle Tom adored her nonetheless!

They lived in a little shack house in a tiny town, had no indoor bathroom - just an icky old outhouse.  We had one, too, but we got an indoor bathroom by the time I was a few years old.  I just remember them as being dark and creepy and either very cold or very hot and being scared of spiders!  Thank god for modern plumbing!  LOL

 

Well, that's about enough for now.