Category Archives: home

2022, home, Uncategorized, Weather

Fickle Finger of Fate

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Our bathroom remodel started the week before Halloween. We are working with a main contractor who designs everything and who subcontracts with a home builder company for the carpenters, plumbers, and electricians. The first two weeks the carpenters came and got everything prepped for the drywall installers, electricians, and plumbers. It took a couple of weeks for those folks to get their work done, and then we had a couple of snow storms that put everything behind.

For the last three weeks one young man has been working to install the shower and bathtub liners, grab bars, etc. He said he would be done on Wednesday of this week, but he ran out of caulk and had to go back to Bismarck to get more. He showed up again yesterday to install the shower doors, do the caulking, and finish the work on the tub and shower. He isn’t a plumber. He just installs the shower liners and tub liners and grab bars and such. To his dismay, he discovered that the hardware for the shower doors wasn’t in the large box the doors came in, and were back in Bismarck at the warehouse. He won’t be able install the doors until today. That is another delay. Until he is finished, the carpenters and plumbers can’t return with the toilets, vanity, and sink and install the flooring and new light fixtures.

Yesterday the carpenter phoned and said we needed to pick out the flooring so that he and his crew can come as soon as the tub/shower guy is done. We did so today, and found that it will take a good two weeks to get the flooring delivered. I am puzzled why he waited until now to tell us to pick out the flooring. I thought we had already picked out the flooring, but apparently that wasn’t the case, so the earliest our bathrooms will be done is the week between Christmas and New Year. That is two months of chaos.

Our home is in absolute disarray, and is full of drywall dust. Our tempers with each other are getting short. An enormous snow storm is predicted to hit our region on Monday, bringing up to a foot of snow. It may be very hard for the Bismarck carpenters to get to our town next week.

The only good news is that the downstairs bathtub/shower was usable starting yesterday. All that needed to be done in that bathroom was for the tub/shower guy to screw in the mixer handle that turns on the faucet in bathtub and caulk it. He did that, and then told me that the plumbers needed to come because there wasn’t any water coming out of the faucet. I asked him if he had opened the shut-off valves for the pipes to the tub. He said there never are shut off valves like that for a tub. I went to the basement, found the shut off valves that had been installed a couple of years ago by a local plumber, and flipped them open. He was impressed. The water is flowing, and now we will have two bathrooms for us and our daughter when she visits over Christmas. There won’t be new flooring, towel bars, or a bathroom mirror, but the essentials will be there.

When has Fate’s fickle finger mucked things up for you? Do you have a litany of woe? When have you bested the experts?

2022, Food, Gatherings, holidays, home, Seasons

Cookie Storm

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I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear that I’ve overdone.  Again.

I have rules about things around the holidays.   All self-imposed, so my own fault.

  1. No holiday music or movies until after dinner on Thanksgiving (YA always turns on the holiday station right as we leave from our Thanksgiving feast.)
  2. No holiday baking until the Friday after Thanksgiving.
  3. Tree purchased on Black Friday and put up some time that day.
  4. My best friend and her husband (and sometimes their kids & spouses) come to help decorate the tree, almost always the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
  5. Cookies and hot chocolate are served at Tree Trimming. Normally I make 5-6 kinds of cookies over the weekend for this gathering and then do the rest of the holiday cookies in the following few days.

These rules formed a perfect storm this year as my friend from Nashville arrived last night as well to babysit the house and the dog while YA and I take a trip.  I decided that I needed to get all the cookies baked before Tree Trimming.  I also had to get the house cleaned up.  AND, the front porch was coming down the final stretch.

3 days, 15 kinds of cookies, tree, lights, tree trimming, house clean enough for company AND the front porch is done.  I feel like I’ve been through the proverbial wringer and every muscle in my body has hired a hit man.  There is even a blister where the dough scoop hits my middle finger and I woke up during the night with pain in my hand and had to take an ibuprofen!  So I’m thinking that I have overdone it.  Just a bit.

(Anna’s M & M, White Chocolate Madadamia, Lemon Snowflakes, Peanut Blossoms, Frosted Sugar, Malted Milk, Cream Cheese Spritz, Peanut Butter Bon Bons, Vanilla Crescents, Pecan Meltaways, Speculaas, Soft Ginger, 2 kinds of fudge).  Yes I know this is only 14 – the 15th debuted it’s way right into the trash.

When was the last time you over-did?

2022, Family, Food, Gatherings, holidays, home, Uncategorized

What a Deal!

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Husband’s son Mario has come to Winona for a 10-day visit, and brought the whole famdamily! It’s a complicated, blended family with 3 girls: 20 years old, 17, 13; and a 2½-year-old boy and his 3-month-old brother. Their mom is a dream.

Happily, they are staying just around the corner from us, at the home of Mario’s mom. (She bought this house in 2021, having no idea at first that her former boyfriend would be sharing the back yard fence.) What serendipity! We just walked over there this evening with our contribution of salad and fixings, played with a little kid, held a baby, ate, talked with teenagers in front of a (real) fireplace, helped clean up, made plans for tomorrow, and walked back home. I met more of their relatives, and there will be an even bigger crowd for the big Thanksgiving blowout on Friday. If needed, we can “overflow” over to our house, which holds about six.  : )

I was a little nervous about so many of them coming for so long, and of course this is just the first day.   But we’ll all be fine – there can be an easy flow back and forth. Who set this up??

When do you eat your Thanksgiving meal?

Family, home, Kids, Travel, Uncategorized, work

A Brand New Start

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It was a year ago that we lost our Steve.  I’m re-running one of his posts (from February 2020) for the day.  You can answer his intial question or share a Steve memory!

Today’s post comes from Steve Grooms.

I have been marveling at what my daughter accomplished this past year. Last winter she, her family and I were living in Port Huron, Michigan. She couldn’t find a job, for the local economy is depressed. My son-in-law had a job he detested, with no possibility of finding a better job. I lived in a senior citizen complex near their rental home, staying alone in my room unless my daughter was visiting me. Nobody was very happy.

It became painfully clear that my daughter and s-i-l had to move and set up new lives. Since I cast my lot with my daughter’s family when I sold my home in 2014, I would have to move too. The experiment of living in Michigan was mostly a botch.

Because my daughter was not working, she was the obvious person to do the research and planning necessary to make the move possible. But, oh my, what a fiendishly complicated task that would be.

Breaking this challenge down into smaller pieces, my daughter needed to:

  • Pick a new town and neighborhood to live in where all four of us (three adults, a kid and a large old dog) might be happy.
  • Find a new apartment or rental home where my daughter’s family could live, doing this research while living in Michigan, unable to look at rental properties in person. This would be especially difficult due to the shortage of affordable housing.
  • Find a senior living community for me. It had to be near her home near her new job . . . wherever they might be. Once again, my daughter had no way to visit the various facilities under consideration.
  • Find movers who could relocate two households 800 miles without charging much.
  • Devise a way to get three automobiles from Michigan to Minnesota, a feat complicated by the fact we had only two drivers.
  • Find a job for herself (a job near her new home and my new apartment, wherever they would turn out to be). This decision, too, had to be done without the benefit of a visit.
  • Find a job for her husband (or at least identify a process which he could follow to find one).
  • Find a great new school for her fourth-grade son.
  • Do all the physical work of boxing up two households for the move.
  • Clean her rental home and my apartment.
  • Accomplish all of this and make the actual move in less than three months.

I wonder if that list adequately reflects how complicated this was. The sixth item alone is daunting. Everything on the list was inextricably connected to all the other issues, which made the overall project extremely tricky. Each choice depended on several other decisions, and there seemed to be no obvious place to start.

My daughter was amused by how her research turned out. The Minnesota metro region emerged as the clear favorite for many reasons but especially its strong economy. St. Paul seemed the most attractive city in Minnesota. The most desirable place to live in St. Paul, her research said, turned out to be Highland Park. So my daughter’s search for the ideal place to move led her to exactly the neighborhood where she had grown up.

We made the move last June. I believe this is the most difficult my daughter has ever faced. As of the middle of January, 2020, every single item on the list has been met successfully. My daughter now lives in an apartment a few blocks from her childhood home (although serious house-hunting begins this spring). And everybody, even the old dog, is delighted to be here.

What is the hardest thing you have ever done? Have you ever discovered that you needed to make a brand new start?

2022, home, Uncategorized, work

Making Progress

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Although not everyone might think so, the following photos suggest to me that great progress is being made with our bathroom remodals.

Things have been stalled for a couple of weeks due to weather and getting the plumbers to finally show up, which they did on Tuesday. For the upstairs bathroom they had to move the pipes for the toilet over about 3 feet to make room for a larger vanity and sink. They also had to set up new pipes for the shower, and cap pipes for the old shower. They had to do some work in the attic and in the basement for running the pipes.

The downstairs bathroom didn’t need any new plumbing. The tub there just gets a liner and new surround.

The carpenters are coming next week to finish the drywall. After that, the main contractor can come to install the new flooring and fixtures. This is taking longer than I anticipated, but seeing the progress this week has given me hope that our home will soon be back in order. I am not a patient person, and the uproar that this remodel has caused has been hard to deal with.

Would you rather be a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter? What is giving you hope these days? What are some satisfying projects you have seen to their conclusions?

2022, Baboon Achievers, home, Uncategorized, work

The Rockets Red Glare!

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Hallelujah!!!  Joy of joys – let the heavens part and rain down the praise of angels!!!

Yes, it’s really me.  All the painting is done – the breakfast room, the kitchen and the windows on the front porch.

As if this isn’t momentous enough, I cleaned up and organized the tool room in the basement before putting all the various tools away that have been cluttering up the porch and the dining room and the breakfast room for weeks.  I hadn’t planned on the clean up/organization.  In fact, my initial plan was to dump everything into the tool room and then ignore it until after the holidays.  Then at the very last minute, I changed my mind.  Assuming it would take a lot longer than it actually did, I was thinking I would do the clean up on day and then sort out all the tools the next day.  But it went swimmingly and once I got going, I just kept going. 

One big black garbage bag got filled with junk as I emptied every cabinet and drawer so I could clean them.  It’s amazing what you find when you do this.  We have 8 of those paint keys that they give you when you purchase paint.  We have 12 scrappers.  We have six handles for scrubbing pads.  We have four bags of steel wool, each with a different amount in it.  But the most amazing was the tape.

It seems like I am always buying tape and now I know why… we keep taking it to the basement when we’re done with a project.  The photo only shows the tape that survived – several rolls were too dirty or dried out to keep.  I brought all the tape up so that it’s in the dining room chest of drawers; hopefully this will keep us from buying more the next time we have a project!

What do you have too much of?

2022, animals, Art, Business, Fantasy, home, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Resume Refresh

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Photo credit:  Markus Spiske

There’s been a lot of resume talk at our house as YA has recently moved to another job at her company.  She hasn’t actually shown me her current resume but I know she updates it regularly so that it’s up to date all the time. So it’s ready at a moment’s notice, if the need should arise!

Last week when we talked about sheets, K-Two said

“I got really good at making up mattresses for isolettes, bassinets, and cribs during my career – a skill no longer needed. And if really pushed, I could probably still change the sheets of an occupied bed.”

This got me to thinking how imminently practical (and refreshing) it would be to see solid skills like bed-making show up on a resume, instead of the boring vanilla stuff that you see on most resumes these days.

I started to think about the very practical skills that I could list on a resume.

    1. Can organize errands based on opening times and order efficiency
    2. Can coax almost any grumpy person into a smile
    3. Can get a pill down even the most recalcitrant kitty
    4. Can make 15 pies in one day

Any good skills for your resume this week?

2022, gardening, home, Uncategorized

Urban Agriculture

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Ben wrote this weekend of how expensive things were getting. One thing that hasn’t seen a price increase is the composted manure at Stockmen’s, our local stockyards. The stockyards folks have neat piles of manure in various stages of decomposition, and are happy to supply urban gardeners with very affordable fertilizer.

Husband and I drove to the stockyards last Friday with his pickup, paid $22, listened to a lot of mooing, and watched as his pickup bed was filled up with some really nice manure. It was a great deal. It would have been really great had it been sheep manure, but our stockyard deals mainly in cattle.

It is very well rotted and crumbly, and mixed with good clean dirt (no weeds or seeds). We spent Saturday morning shoveling it onto our vegetable garden. It had to be done this fall, as it is such a rich mixture it needs a winter to “cool”, as it were, or it will burn young plants. We do this every other year. We had enough to add a 3 inch layer of it to our garden. I will till it under in the spring. The only downside was that it was a lot of work climbing in and out of the pickup bed, raking and shoveling it, filling up the wheelbarrow, etc. We eventually backed the pickup into the garden and unloaded the manure right off the tail gate. We were both really stiff and sore by the time all the manure was unloaded. I think we used every arm, leg, and shoulder muscles we possess getting this done. I look forward to really big veggies next summer. I am glad I don’t have to do this for another two years.

What is the most physically exerting activity you have done in the last while? How do you treat sore muscles? What fall tasks do you dislike the most?

2022, Family, Health, home, Kids, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Never the Twain Shall Sheet

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Twice a year I take all my bedding off my bed – quilt, pillows, shams, allergy covers, dust ruffle – give it a thorough hot water wash and a long hot dry before putting it all back together again.  This is part of my allergy abatement policy.  I struggled for years before my adult-onset allergies were diagnosed and even 25 years later, I remember how miserable I was.  So I take my allergy precautions pretty seriously. 

The sheets get changed every Saturday in addition to my twice-a-year routine and as I was choosing which sheets tro use, I decided it was a good time to organize the linen cabinet.  I discovered that all of YA’s sheets (yes, we have separate sheets; I like patterns, she likes solids) were all messed up with bottom sheets on different shelves than the matching top sheets.

When I asked her about it, I got the rolled eyes and a comment that she has only used bottom sheets for years and why was I just noticing it now.  Then I asked about WHY no top sheet and she said that it’s a waste to get two sheets dirty instead of one and recommended I look it up.  Apparently it’s a trend; you can even purchase just a bottom fitted sheet instead of an entire set. 

If you don’t want to get a top sheet dirty, then aren’t you worried about getting your blanket, duvet, quilt dirty?  Seems way easier to me to wash a top sheet than a duvet cover or quilt.  Just one more thing about which I am clearly behind the times.

To add insult to injury, I like to put the top sheet pattern down so that when I get into the bed, I have pattern on all sides.  Based on what I see online, I’m in the majority on this (it is apparently controversial), although I was dismayed in my online search to see Bedding 101 by Martha Stewart in which she walks the reader through how to make a bed.  Seriously?

So what about you?  One sheet or two?  Pattern side up or down?  Need help from Martha making your bed?

2022, Family, home, Kids, Mysteries, Science

Parental Psychology

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I never took any Psychology classes during any of my college years.  I have nothing against Psychology (and have benefited from it greatly during my life) but I just wanted to get my science requirements out of the way and Psych wasn’t offered when I needed a science class.  Most of my psychology education comes from various Scientific American articles I’ve read over the years.

I think it’s safe to say that as a parent, one REALLY needs psychology.  You just can’t make it through parenthood without figuring out your kids AND figuring out how to get your kids motivated to do what they need to get done.   YA is almost 28 and I still struggle with this occasionally.

One of the things I have figured out is that sometimes you have to come at her sideways.  She is too cool to get enthusiastic over some of my projects; when I brought home the haunted house kit (see photo above), she turned up her nose at it a bit.  If she had been with me when I purchased it, she would have indicated it was not a good idea.  But a few days ago I said “I’m going to do the haunted house tonight if you want to help”.  She responded with a non-committal grunt but when I got everything set up on the dining room table, she showed up.  And she did most of the decorating herself.   This works pretty much all of the time… Easter egg dying, jigsaw puzzles, yardwork, cookie decorating.  It even worked once on a snorkel sail when she was crabby and I said “Fine, you don’t have to go… I’ll see you later.”

If you take this route though, you have to be prepared to do the project by yourself; I think you really have to believe this or they hear it in your voice and then you’re sunk!

How to you talk your loved ones into things?