Happy Place

Hello everyone!  I thought I’d try to write more often so my blog posts don’t turn out to be giant long tomes. 

I had a great week! It was cooler for several days, which in turn makes me a much more cheerful person. I just HATE heat. This week it’s back to the 90’s though. I’m trying to get some work done in the very early morning, between 6 & 8 a.m. I’ve started to work on the front porch. It will make the house look so much cuter, and more importantly, it’ll shade the whole front of the house from the sun, and should keep the house much cooler. I borrowed a posthole digger to set 4×4 posts to support the porch floor and roof, and right away ran into problems. It’s rocky here. I ran into a big rock only 3” down. I poked around and it didn’t seem as though I could get around it, and it’s too big to dig out. So now I have to go in a different direction, maybe dig as big a hole as I can, working around this rock, and then fill the cavity with cement and set in a metal post holder into the cement. I’m thinking if I clean off the top of the rock really good, the cement will bond with it and make it all a huge anchor. I have to anchor the porch really well or the high winds here will come in under the roof and blow the whole thing away. So that’s where it stands now, I have to go get the post holders and some cement. Cement is a bit of a problem because I can’t lift the 60-80# bags, I’ll have to leave it in the back of the car and scoop out of the bag until it’s at least half gone. I think that’ll work.

I made a cheapie $4 birdbath, using an old tomato cage and two 12” plastic pot saucers. (two because they’re really flimsy) The 12” size fits into the top of the tomato cage perfectly! I think I need to paint the bottom of the saucer though so the birds can see it better.

I also made a little oasis for the cute little stripey lizards that abound here. There are at least two that live under my steps and every time I step outside, they run like crazy (scaring the crap out of me every time!). I got this idea when I was getting water from my big tank and saw a lizard right there, so I dripped a little near him and he ran right over and got a drink! 

I accidentally left the water spigot on a teeny bit the other day and the next morning there was a huge puddle of precious water on the ground! Now my 275 gallon water tank is less than half full. The previous two years I only used one tank per year but this on is only going to last about 3 months, what with me wasting so much, and using so much to water the plants.

I continue to lose plants to some evil critter. I bought some plastic mesh baskets at Dollar Tree that I’m now using to cover the smaller ones at night, and some of the smaller potted ones I can move to the workbench every night and put them back out in the sun every morning. So far that’s working but when the plants get too big for the baskets, I’ll have to try and think of something else. Cages made of ¼” hardware cloth would work but would make it hard to harvest any tomatoes or peppers (assuming they actually get to that point).

I managed to replace my shredded tarp over the camper a couple days ago. It’s hard to do that by myself. I had just had the thought that I should carry my cellphone on me if I’m working on ladders when I was up on top of the stepladder stretching a really fat bungee cord from the camper over to the 4×4 post and somehow I lost my grip on it. Pow! Right in the kisser! Oh boy, did that hurt! I finished the job and then went right in and put arnica gel on it. It was really swollen with a big blister on the outside of my upper lip and a cut on the inside. I looked like Botox Gone Really Wrong. I thought, thank God everybody’s wearing masks these days! But that arnica stuff is amazing….by the next morning, I just had a small dark red spot in the center of my upper lip, not even noticable. The cut on the inside is taking a little longer to heal but it’s way better than I thought it would be when it first happened. 

I’ve been trying to get Roxie groomed, a little bit each day. She hates it and it’s a gigantic fight every day, usually ending because I’m afraid she’ll have a heart attack or something. After all, she is 13 years old now. Yesterday I decided to sit on the floor with her instead of trying to do it on my lap. With my wonky knees, I have always had a lot of trouble getting down to floor level, and even more trouble and pain getting up. Well I got down there, worked on her for awhile, and then got up on my knees to get up. IT DIDN’T HURT! I even tried crawling a little bit, and it still didn’t hurt! I haven’t been able to crawl without intense pain since 2001 when I originally tore the meniscus!  Wow. So I consider my knees fully fixed! At least for now. I owe it all to my wonderful doc, with his Traumeel injections, PRP and wearing the knee braces. 

I realized yesterday afternoon that right here and now, I was completely content and happy! I wonder how many people can say that. I’ve taken a more relaxed stance on getting the house finished. I’m done with stressing out about having the money to do anything. Yeah, it’d be great to have power to the house and refrigeration, but aside from that I’m find with living in the house as it is. I have no urgent need to have finished walls or floors. I’m not going to feel guilty about what I can and can’t get accomplished. After all, I’m retired.  I have no pain, I have energy and I just feel really good right now.  !!!  I guess I’ve found my Happy Place.

I’ve changed some things (I think!) about the type size so I hope you can read it easier. Please someone who was having trouble before, let me know if this has helped!