What Else Could I Write? I Don't Have the Right.

Hey! I just wanted to let you know that I'm still here. I've had this weird combination with being freakishly busy at work (I know. I'm not complaining, I feel very lucky to have a job), almost constant migraines, tons of gardening, food cooking, bike riding and generally doing whatever the hell else I do around the house, and I haven't had time for blog writing. I have lots to tell you and I will try very hard to find more time to write here. Wish me luck!

Pretty Soon Now You're Gonna Get Older

Not all that long ago, in this very same galaxy, my daughters were in their early twenties and they came over for brunch on Mother's Day and didn't offer to help, and didn't offer to even clean  up after, and when I said something about it to them, they "joked" about being lame or whatever and still didn't help clean up and I was very disappointed in them.

I get that they were in their early twenties, and newly out of my house, and that made them more self-centered and they probably thought of it like they had to cook for themselves all the time, they might as well get a home cooked meal, and be catered to, or whatever goes through anyone's head when they're in their early twenties, but I was pretty hurt.

Fast forward to yesterday when the girls are in their late twenties. I said something about making dinner when they came over and The Youngest said, "We can talk about that later..." Which I thought meant she wasn't crazy about the food options I presented.

Fortunately, it was because she and her sister didn't want me to have to do anything. So, they came over with their men, and The Youngest brought her dogs, and Archie got to assert his dominance in front of them. Then we sat around and talked about what they were going to pick up for Mother's Day dinner. We ordered pizza from Wig and Pen and they went and picked it up and paid for it. It was so nice that they finally got it.

We had a lovely day. The food was very good, and the best Mother's Day present of all, is seeing my girls maturing and growing up. The saddest part of the day was standing next to them and realizing how much I'm shrinking. Eek!

The are the only people, besides John that I get anywhere near these days. Lucky for me, they are people I love spending time with. So, Happy Mother's Day to all you Mutha's out there, whether you have children, adopted children, foster children, step children, you help mentor other people's children, you have animals, or whatever other situation you find yourself in.

In a Little Cottage Cozy The World Seems Rosy at Sundown

 One of my co-workers is getting ready to sell her house. They bought a bigger house, when her son and her mom both lived with them. Now that her son is in his thirties and has moved out, and her mother died of her dementia a few years ago, they want something smaller with less upkeep. So, she took last week off to get her house ready to sell. Which basically means they are getting rid of tons of their crap and doing some projects to make it more attractive to buyers.

That got me thinking. Our house is about the perfect size for John and myself. but it needs a lot of work. What if we got our house ready to sell, but then didn't move? Wouldn't it be great to do that work just for us, and do the projects to make it more attractive and with less crap inside of it? So, that's my new goal.

Of course, I'm not worried about making it nice for someone else to want to buy it. That usually means making everything more neutral, and, as  you know, I'm not a neutral kind of person. I want our little cottage to be sweet and homey, and full of books and music, with a big kitchen where I cook wonderful meals. It doesn't have to be spotless, John and I like to LIVE in our house, which means we have linoleum tile on our kitchen floor, so we don't have to worry about something happening to it when John works on bikes in our house. I also want our yard to be full of flowers, and vegetables and have funky little sculptures and gewgaws, and whirligigs. I like quirky, funky places, like a Hobbitt house, or Snow White's cottage, and if woodland creatures wanted to come over and clean-up the place, I'd be receptive to that too.

 To that end, we are still working diligently on our place. Since we don't have a lot of money, we have to do the actual work ourselves, and try to find the stuff we need on sale. On Saturday, the store that used to be a Hy-Vee grocery story, but is now a Hy-Vee drug store (?) that has a huge garden center in the warmer months, had a sale of 15% off their landscaping and garden items. So, I took full advantage and bought a few more sculptures, and flagstone and some bullet pavers.

Then I started arranging them as a border around our very small backyard. I didn't get to do the digging and then the weed cloth and lava rock placement yet, but I'm getting a lot closer. There is just soooo much work to do, and never enough time to do it all.

John also ordered new linoleum floor tile for our kitchen. Since our house was built in 1950, we got black and white squares in keeping with the period. We'll see how long it takes to get here, but we'll have more than plenty to do around here while we wait.

For now, I plan to keep plugging along on getting my house ready to sell, and then staying put and enjoying my whirligigs and gewgaws.

Gimme a Break! The Game is Survival! Gimme a Break, And Plan My Arrival!

Soooo, I'm going to talk about how lovely last weekend was. Not just the weather, but all the things we did. I'll start off with projects. I know not everyone else is as weird as I am (Okay, almost no one else is), but I love to do projects, especially ones that make a huge difference, and are pretty when they're done.

Right when they were starting to close everything down for Covid-19, I ran to the paint store in case it wouldn't be open for a while and I got paint for our front screen door. Our house came with this cool, old, screen door and any house nerd who sees it tells us how amazing it is. The big problem with it, was that it was a 1970's brown color with weird, tan trim and on a 1950's white house, it just looked unattractive and odd.

If you know me at all, you know how much I love color. Bright colors. So, a few years ago, I started looking for pictures of houses with colorful doors. I found one that I loved that was bright blue, not teal, or aqua, but a lighter, bright blue. When I went to the the paint store, I checked out different paint samples and asked the woman what the best kind of paint was to use on a metal door. She was very helpful, and I found exactly the color I was looking for:

On Saturday morning, John got out the Borax and cleaned the hell out of that door (and boy-howdee! did it need it). Then in the afternoon, I started painting. I got the first coat on by the evening and got up early the next morning to apply the second coat. I think it looks great. It's exactly what I wanted, and man, is it bright. It's amazing how much different our house looks just from painting the door. We've had tons of compliments on it, and on Sunday, my friend Bridget, who owns her own house painting company was across the street at the community gardens and yelled over to me how much she liked it. I figure, if a professional house painter is enthusiastic about it, I did okay. I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't like my bright blue door, but those people don't have to have one on their house either.

While I was working on the door, John went to work on our side yard. It's not very big, but it was one hell of a mess. It had tons of volunteer trees, and a few of them were right up against the house. So, John finished the project I started, digging those up. If you want to talk about a shitty project where you're basically hacking at the earth to get to some roots, there it is. By Sunday morning he had finished that thankless job. Now, this weekend we're going to dig up all of the fern starts there, then use some of our tax return money to buy some more brick pavers, weed cloth and lava rock. I wanted to finish that project by last weekend, but now I'm shooting for this coming weekend. Wish us luck!

We also headed up to the small town where Coadster lives with her boyfriend to drop off her bike and some seedlings for what my daughter is calling their Victory Garden (she is and always will be a World War II nerd). When we were there, she told John that the Aloe plant that he gave her for Christmas a few years ago, had grown out of its latest pot, so he took it back with us and repotted it in this HUGE ceramic container. Hopefully, it will be a few more years before he has to repot it again.

After all of our chores were as done as they were going to be for one weekend, we did our favorite thing - Bike ride! Bike ride! Bike ride!

We are very lucky to live in Iowa during this pandemic. We can ride a couple of miles and be out in the middle of nowhere. We love it that there are more animals than vehicles in Amish country.

And the majority of vehicles we see have a very different kind of horse power than in town.

We rode almost 50 miles and it felt so good to play outside where there wasn't any danger of catching Covid-19. It was almost like it didn't exist for a few hours. Exactly what I needed - a break from it.

When we got home from our mental health break, I made veggie lasagna and my favorite salad for dinner. It has fresh spinach, raspberries, feta cheese, red onion slices and pine nuts. It is pretty damn delicious.

Anyway, I'm glad we had such a lovely weekend, because work this week has been hell. May first is decision day, and we are inundated with calls and emails from students wanting to either cancel their admission, postpone their admission, or a firm promise that we are going to have classes on campus this Fall. If only we knew what the future held for all of us...