Month: November 2013 (Page 1 of 2)

Our day started with a call from Luke, our up-and-at-’em son, at 6:25. After that Dad went back to bed for an hour, but I got started on the day. We were going to cook dinner in New Auburn, so that meant a lot of prep, getting everything together. I’d made the cranberry sauce on Wednesday. I packed the potatoes and cheese and all the fixin’s for that, washed and wrapped the sweet potatoes, grabbed the broccoli and a microwave pan to cook it in, and, most importantly made the meatloafs. And almost forgot the box of StoveTop stuffing. Then I remembered I’d need food for the rest of the day, too, so I packed some cottage cheese and granola and a banana and Dad and I both grabbed a couple bags of cookies from the freezer. (I know, I’m not supposed to eat cookies, but yesterday was a holiday!)

We got to the house around 10:00 to find that the pig tail for the stove we were testing (the one I picked up from the senior center when we replaced the two there with a double oven stove), so I drove back to Chetek and traded cars and brought that back. When Dad started putting it on the stove, he realized his tool box was in the car I’d left in Chetek. Ah, well. He managed to get it working, anyway.

Once that was working, we worked most of the morning on fabricating heat runs for under the dining room. Tedious, slow work. I finally ended up reading a book and just staying handy for when Dad needed me for something. Finally we left that project to finish another day.

Then we started mudding sheet rock. He mudded, and I screwed in screws that were sticking out, added more nails where needed, and measured and tore off the paper tape for all the seams. We worked and worked and worked on that and actually only got the greater part of one room done by supper time around 5:00. We took a few breaks, of course, but it is pretty slow going because there are a lot of seams.

Dinner was great! We had meatloaf, cheezy potatoes, broccoli, sweet potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce with yogurt. Not a turkey dinner, but even better as far as I’m concerned!

 It was a long day, with a lot of hard work, so we were exhausted. Good thing we have today off before we hit it again tomorrow.!

I don’t know what you are all up to today, but I hope you have a great day and enjoy your big meal and fancy desserts! And don’t forget to be thankful. I am certainly thankful for each and every one of you!

After reading Chloe’s list on Erica’s site, I realized that I miss knowing what everyone wants for Christmas. It doesn’t really matter because I’m not going to buy anything on the lists – I’m pretty much done buying. But it gives a real insight into what is important to each person that particular year and what stage they are in, if they are a kid. And trying to find things off the lists in past years was always a challenge, and I relish challenges.  I remember the year we looked and looked for a shirt Tim wanted, but couldn’t find it until we thought to look on Ebay, where we did find it.

This year I discovered shopping Walmart online. It combines the best of both worlds – the ease of shopping online and the inexpensive prices of Walmart. I think the online prices may even be lower than in the store. I even bought myself some p.j.’s that I’m going to have Dad wrap and give me, rather than having him pick something out at the last minute and spend way too much for something I only wear to bed!

We have nothing special scheduled for the rest of the week, other than church tonight at 6:30, and again on Sunday. Sunday I also get the choir together between services. I have two pieces picked out for Christmas Eve and we’re going to learn them in three rehearsals. There are not enough people willing to come every week to actually have a choir. But people will come for Christmas and Easter performances. They may only come to one rehearsal, but the congregation isn’t too hard to please, so I’m going to try not to stress about it.

Wow, it is cold today. Mostly because we aren’t used to it. But even still, 8 degrees is cold to wake up to. I went running, as I always do Saturday morning, and my legs got so stiff and sluggish from the cold.  I don’t think it got above about 12 all day, although it was nice and sunny. We worked in New Auburn and I made a big fire outside, burning scrap lumber, and that was nice and warm for a while. But I spent most of the time watching the fire from inside the house, since it got cool quickly as it burned down. I also did a lot of cleaning up and organizing and measuring spaces. Dad worked a bit on the heat runs that have to go under the dining room floor. I actually don’t know what else he did, but he kept busy.

The day began with bat-eradication. There had been two bats in the house all week. Dad described them as HUGE, but they looked so small and cute hanging up in a corner of the room this morning. Dad wanted to try to shoo them out of a door, but I suggested that they might be asleep and that maybe he could just catch them. Which he did. Quite easily. But one woke up just as he was tying up the bag outside and he said its wings spanned the entire width of the big black garbage bag. Hard to believe, but who am I to doubt my husband’s word? And it was biting the bag with an evil grimace on its face. Pretty gruesome, I guess. Glad I didn’t see it!  But now we are rid of them and, hopefully, no more will find a way in.

I had my 3 month recheck on my new cholesterol medicine. My cholesterol was down from 259 to 182! And my HDL, which is supposed to be high was still nice and high at 60. The LDL went way down. Yea! That is a relief.

The car wouldn’t start. On the one day that my lessons are not here. So I had to call the Cameron people and cancel. And that left me with a couple hours of unplanned time. I checked into doing surveys online (I read about that in a Dave Ramsey post a couple weeks ago). It is a lot of monkey business to get signed up, and when you start, you do a lot of giving your age, gender, location, etc. and have them tell you that you don’t meet their criteria for that survey. But I eventually got going and completed several. You have to do quite a few to make enough money to get it sent to you, but I actually love doing surveys, so I’m okay with that.  I’ll let you know how it goes after a month or so. I think I’ll look forward to coming home and checking if there are any new ones in my email. I know I’m excited when there is one at work, and those they just donate $.50 to my favorite charity when I do them. So getting actual money is even better.

It is funny how much I’m finding that I feel I need to do before I turn the reins over to someone else. Today my two projects were organizing the “for sale” (for a dime) books and redoing the member phone-book. The book shelves had become quite over-filled with donations – we got a donation of a whole passel of hard-cover books last week and they were totally covering a table which was needed for card-playing. So I sorted all the books and got most of them arranged by genre. The member phone book needs to be updated every year after most of the memberships are paid. But I have it saved in booklet form on the computer, so I just need to go through the file and add new people and take out people that are no longer members. It didn’t take too long. All that is left is to print the cover on card-stock, then sew the binding. We don’t have a stapler to staple booklets, and I found that sewing it doesn’t take very long.  I only make two copies – one for the director and one for the nutrition site manager.

Fun visit. We got a lot of things accomplished. Like I found the missing bank statement so my mom could reconcile her check book. She thought those 10 or so checks that weren’t checked off in her check book had been misplaced and I kept trying to tell her that she had probably just misplaced the statement. But she just wouldn’t believe me. Until I found it. Dad was supposed to replace the heater in the donkey waterer and thought he’d just look a little for the one she remembered buying, but that no-one could find. He found it right away on top of the fridge in the family room. She’d dated it when she bought it – 1999 – it had been there over 13 years! So he was able to replace that and have the waterer ready for cold weather. We got her hair cut and toenails trimmed, too. At Dad’s mom’s we fixed a leaky faucet and took her out toe Marty’s Pizza for dinner. Good to feel needed!

Dad finally got tomorrow off, so we are heading down to Waukesha to see the “moms” tomorrow morning (Friday) and coming back Saturday evening. Then, that will be it until after the holidays. We are just going to be here for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Nice low stress days! Work on the New Auburn house days, probably.

I have a lot more to do at work, now that I’m getting things wrapped up and ready for someone else to take over. Today I worked on the orientation procedure. It looks like it will take me 2 five-hour days to orient my replacement.  Earlier this week, I worked on updating the policy and procedure book. I’ve also informed the people in my classes that I will be leaving as director, so I’m answering a lot of questions about that and assuring them that I won’t be “gone” gone, just not there all the time!  I’m getting more and more excited about the opportunities there will be once I’m not tied to working there 27 1/2 hours a week.

Doesn’t this look so inviting with the sun shining in?

And here are my teeth that I got fixed yesterday. Aren’t they nice and straight?

Maybe you didn’t notice, but the front two were very chipped and uneven. I must say it took a long time to get them like this – almost two hours! And I had to order a night guard ($500 – I’ve been saving for quite a while!) to keep from breaking them. That doesn’t come until two weeks from now, so hopefully I won’t break them off in my sleep. The fix is just a “tooth-colored” filling on the ends of the teeth.