Category Archives: home

2025, Family, home, Uncategorized

New Beginnings

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Husband and I find ourselves exhausted these days. We are sorting through our stuff, packing some and throwing some out. We also are at our jobs finishing the last of our professional work, keeping up the house and garden, and going through the work of selling one home and buying another. Husband commented that we are living in the past, present, and future all at once.

I have tried to imagine what it will be like once we move to our new community. I haven’t lived there for almost 50 years. There are still quite a few high school classmates and other people I know there, and I have been thinking how I want to reintegrate into the community. I think it would be a mistake to live in the past, as I am not the same person I was 50 years ago, and I doubt they are the same people they were. We integrated ourselves into our ND community 38 years ago by going to community events, joining a church, and through our jobs. I hope the we can have the same new beginning in our new home.

How have you integrated yourself into the communities you have lived in? How are you different now than you were 50 years ago?

100 Words, 2025, Fantasy, home, Mysteries, Technology

Random Robot?

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Imagine my surprise as I was heading out to run some errands and discovered the little robot vacuum at the back porch door.

As I carried it back into the house and hit the “dock” button so it would return home, I felt a little bad.  Was I keeping it from its freedom?  Had it been trying to escape from the onerous duty of trying to keep the fur and dust at bay in our house?  Did it hear the clarion call of others of its kind?  Was it a quashed robot uprising? 

What do you think?  Should I have given it its freedom?

2025, Family, gardening, home, Music, Uncategorized

Bob

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I can’t remember a more rainy July than the one we are having this year. In addition to keeping the house interior spotless, we are intent on getting rid of garden weeds. The weeds have been horrendous because of the rain.

Weeding for us entails crawling through the garden beds on our hands and knees with dangerous looking implements to remove the weeds, and large buckets to put the removed weeds into. We rarely use herbacides. Husband is currently limping around with a walking stick due to a strained knee muscle from weeding. With apologies to Bob Dylan, this song keeps going through my head every time I pull weeds.

Buckets of weeds,

Buckets of shears.

Got all these buckets coming

Out of my ears.

Buckets of bind weeds in the yard.

Why does weeding always have to be so hard?

I have not seen the new Bob Dylan movie. Husband reminds me we saw him in concert at the Bismarck Civic Center about 30 years ago. He only had a bass player and a drummer with him. I don’t remember the concert very well. I never was a big Dylan fan, but some tunes just stay with you.

Did you ever see Bob Dylan live? What Dylan tunes stick with you? What is your weeding strategy? At what age is a person too old to weed?

2025, Family, gardening, home, Uncategorized

Swing Time

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There has always been a vision in my mind for the backyard.  Over the years we’ve added a patio, then a little bigger patio.  A table and chairs for the patio.  An umbrella for the table.  A friend of mine gave YA a fire pit years ago.  Another friend gave me a swing when they moved to an apartment.  Of course, there are all the flowers and the bales.  About 15 years ago I had enough credits at work to purchase a hammock, which I installed toward the back of the yard.  Over the years I’ve had to replace the fabric several times as well as having to MacGyver the suspension a couple of times when the fabric wasn’t exactly the right size.

YA has always detested the hammock.  First is that it is a collection spot for leaves and twigs that come off the trees.  Then there is the issue of having to mow around it, requiring moving it about.  YA thinks it makes the backyard look “cluttered”.  When I suggested we get right of her Adirondack chairs and little table, she didn’t respond well.  She has a point.  We use the Adirondacks quite a bit and truth be told, I probably only lay in the hammock once or twice a summer.  It’s not actually all that comfortable and I get impatient really fast.

As I’m pursuing my pre-downsizing project, I decided that I really needed to pay attention to the reality of the hammock instead of my emotional attachment to the idea of a hammock.  To that end, YA and I carried it down to the boulevard.  When we got down to the boulevard with it, YA had to shore up my determination.  The miracle of my street worked as usual – within an hour someone was taking it apart to shove in their truck. 

I thought I might be unhappy in the first few days after the hammock was gone but that hasn’t happened.  That says to me that I made the right decision.

Tell me about something you have an emotional attachment to. 

2025, animals, home, Uncategorized

Bully

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The Mourning Dove in the header photo built a nest on the light next to our front door. She is a sweet little thing who has been sitting on successive eggs all summer. She never leaves messes on the deck, and sits on the nest even when we sit out on the front deck. We consider her our spirit animal.

One of the first real estate agents who showed our house told our real estate agent that we needed to get rid of that nest. Our agent, a real animal lover, reluctantly relayed the information to us, and said she didn’t agree that the nest had to go. She is just ethically bound to let us know comments from other agents. We told her that as long as we own the house the bird stays. She was quite happy with that news.

Ever since we have had our house on the market we have scrupulously cleaned, patched, dusted, vacuumed, scrubbed and tried to make the place look really good. I admit the kitchen and bathroom cupboard fronts need a good cleaning, but it isn’t all that noticeable, and we are having some nice women in later this week to do that as well as scrub the kitchen ceiling above the stove to get rid of grease stains. The agent who complained about the bird showed our house a second time, and then told our agent that our house needed a really good “deep cleaning”.

Our agent relayed this to us, but stated that she didn’t agree, and thought we were immaculate housekeepers. She added that she was never going to allow the complainer into her house. Our agent then told us the complaining agent lived just a few houses from us across the street, and that the complainer had also told our agent that she wanted to make sure that the people who bought our house were people she would want as neighbors. Her house, a new build, is always perfectly landscaped and pristine. There are children, but we never see them.

Well! I don’t know this person and have never met her, but since all the agents who show the house leave their business cards, I know her name. I asked some work colleagues if they knew her. Their responses were really fascinating. One of my coworkers had actually worked in the same long term care facility with the agent several years ago, and knew her sister in law really well, and described her as a terrible bully both at work and in her family. Another coworker stated she had heard awful things about the agent, all related to being a bossy, judgemental bully. Living in a small town has its benefits.

I admit I feel bullied by this person, but I am not taking her criticisms to heart, and I hope that whoever buys our house are even more radical gardeners than we are, and set up bird feeders and bird houses all over the property!

Who have been the bullies in your life? How did you deal with them?

2025, gardening, home, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Surprise!

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Not long after we moved to our current house 37 years ago, Husband and I planted some roses. At that time, hybrid tea roses were advertised as only hardy as far north as Zone 4. We knew we were pushing it a little given how close we were to Zone 3, but we put in about four hybrid tea roses on the south side of the house.

We did all the things that you are supposed to do regarding tea roses, putting cones on them in the fall to protect them from the cold, pruning appropriately, etc. They flourished. One in particular was our favorite, named Taboo.

We loved its intense color. About 20 years ago we even stopped putting cones on in the fall, and yet those roses on the south side of the house returned year after year. Within the last 5 years, though, most of them seemed to age out and die, but Taboo kept going until last summer, when all there were in its spot were dead branches.

Imagine my delight this weekend when I encountered some new rose shoots just a few inches away from the dead Taboo stems while I was weeding the south flowerbed. They look healthy. I hope we can have one last Taboo blossom before we move. Hybrid tea roses are now advertised as only hardy through Zone 5, and I don’t know how we did it, but what a lovely surprise!

Any pleasant surprises for you this last month, gardening or otherwise? What have you succeeded doing even when the odds were againt you?

2025, Family, gardening, home, Nature, Uncategorized, work

Pavers & Bricks

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Yesterday YA had the day off so we decided to tackle a couple of outdoor projects first thing in the morning before the heat took over the day. 

I started with putting some paving stones on the south side of the house under the water spigot.  The pavers were left over from when we expanded the little patio two summers ago so I thought I’d put them to better use than just being stacked up in the garage.  Unfortunately the ants didn’t think this was a grand project and it took a bit for them to give it up and I did get a couple of good bites out of it before they moved their party elsewhere.

By the time I was done, YA had made a good start on edging our northern “garden” with bricks that we inherited from our neighbor who just moved.  She asked which of the jobs I wanted – digging or placing the bricks.  While placing the bricks seemed like the easier of the two jobs, I know my daughter well.  If I placed the bricks, she would eventually come behind me and “fix” what I had done.  I admit freely that she is more patient with a lot of home projects and therefore does an overall better job.  This made it an easy choice – I dug and let her place the bricks.  It was a great decision.  As I dug I watched her running her hands along the bricks to make sure they were even and using her finger as a measurement tool to make sure they were all the same depth.  I would not have thought to do either of these steps. 

We didn’t finish yesterday.  It got a bit too steamy so we knocked off about half way through and vowed to finish in a couple days when it’s a bit cooler.  Looks good so far.

Any projects for you over the holiday weekend?

2025, Family, home, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Is YA really ET?

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YA works in the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.  Occasionally she also goes into the office on a Monday or a Friday.  When she has a big project, she likes the quiet of the office as well as the big screen on her desk. 

There is a fairly complicated (from my perspective) process for her to get ready for work.  During her junior high and high school years she started wearing make-up and taught herself how to apply it.  As part of her beauty routine, she has a massive number of products, from masks to foundations to mascara to eyelash curlers to lip glosses.  Massive.  She can sit at her make-up table for upwards of 30 minutes some mornings.  It’s exhausting just to watch.

She learned none of this from me.  Not one smidge.  I think I’ve told the story of when I quit wearing make-up; it was well before she was born.  Even when I DID put on make-up it wasn’t anything as robust as YA’s routine.

Every now and then, when she is in a rush (usually when we’re going some place on the weekend or if she’s gotten up really late), she can cut the time down but very very rarely goes without.  On work mornings, I don’t usually pay that much attention.  I have my morning stuff to do (feed animals, make bed, eat breakfast, gym, errands, etc.)

Last week on Friday, she came rushing down and out the door before I even had a chance to look up.  After 15 minutes, our ring doorbell dinged my phone, which was in my pocket and as I was opening the app, I heard the front door open and YA’s footsteps running up the stairs.  She didn’t come down for almost 10 minutes, way too long for a forgotten key card or computer mouse.  When she was headed for the front door I asked what she had forgotten and she replied “I forgot to put on make-up.”

I’m still thinking about this.  First off, how do you forget something that is so much a part of your every single day routine.  And mostly, why get 10 minutes from the house (about half way to the office) and turn back to put on make-up when it’s Friday and there’s next to no one in the office?  Her answer when I asked her later was “just in case”.  When I asked “just in case what?” all I got was a shoulder shrug.

So, yet one more instance of my certainty that I live with an alien from another world!

Do you have anything that is an every-single-day-no-matter-what routines?

2025, gardening, home, Kids, Uncategorized

Rewarded!

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We rolled the stump down to the boulevard.  I didn’t think that anybody driving along would see it and think “hey, we could use a big stump for something, couldn’t we?” and take it.  I was hoping however that it was small enough that the yard waste folks would take it.  Nope.  Turns out that they’re fairly strict about that kind of thing and my Plan B of rolling it into my trash can was quashed when I saw in the garbage/recycling website that it is actually illegal to put “substantial” yardwaste into your garbage can.

YA was not tricked into thinking that chopping up the stump was a fun way to spend her time so I finally decided to tackle it myself.  If I chopped it into small chunks, I could put them in my yard wastebags with my run-of-the-mill weeds.  In order to make myself do this, I had to say “just 20 minutes”.  It helps that our little chainsaw has a fairly short battery life so 20 minutes is about all I can do at one shot.  At the rate it was taking, I figured this would be a 10 or 12 day project.

While I was working on this, I noticed a woman working on the yard kitty corner to me.  She didn’t look familiar and there was a name emblazoned on her pick-up that indicated she had been hired, as opposed to living there.  As I continued on other yard projects, I noticed she was coming across the street.  Turns out she is the mother of the gal who apparently has just bought the place.  She asked about what kind of bags the city requires and I pointed out my paper bags.   I asked her if she needed a couple and I gave her two and when she asked, I gave her directions to Menards which is about as cheap as you can find the bags these days.  We talked about what you could and couldn’t put out; I told her about leaving bigger branches/small logs out for people to take.  I then mentioned that the city wouldn’t take my stump which was why she had seen me cutting bits off.  To my surprise she immediately said she could take the stump in her truck; her home is on 30 acres in Wisconsin and she has a perfect place to dump it.  I was stunned.  And grateful.  I almost offered her more bags.

So within 5 minutes, we had rolled the stump into her wheelbarrow, pushed the wheelbarrow across the street and gotten the little monster into the back of her pickup.   After three weeks of it sitting on the boulevard, miraculously and suddenly it’s gone!

I don’t think I’ve ever had a good deed of mine reward me so quickly and so wonderfully. 

Can you think of a time a good deed has paid dividends?

2025, books, Family, home, Uncategorized

Making It Pretty

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This Thursday a photographer is coming over to take pictures of the house and yard for the real estate listing. We spent the weekend packing eight more bankers boxes full of books and sheet music and stowed them and the fourteen boxes of books we packed last weekend in the empty closets in the basement bedrooms. Then we put all the basement furniture back in place as the painter finished up painting the basement last Friday. We also took lots of unwanted things from the shelving in the furnace room and put them in Husband’s truck so he can take them to the landfill tomorrow. I straightened out the remaining items on the furnace room shelves so they look neat. Our new house has tons of storage and we don’t need to take any shelving with us. We hope to use the furnace room shelving as an added enticement to buy our ND house.

Today I am painting the front door and a couple of small garage doors and touching up some chipped interior paint upstairs. My goal then is to stow anything that might make the upstairs look cluttered in the upstairs closets. It will come out after the photographer is done on Thursday. I also plan to straighten up the work benches in the garage so they look neat and tidy. All this is an exhausting nuisance, but I guess this is the game you play when you sell your house. There is some consolation in knowing that everything we box up or toss out will make the final move that much easier.

I am thankful our realtor thinks our house looks nice enough as is (now that the basement is newly painted) without asking us to do any more “prettying up”. The idea to paint the doors was mine. (I intended to paint the front door 10 years ago when we had new siding put on, but never got around to it.) We will have to be vigilant about keeping the house as clean and uncluttered as possible though, for when the realtor has people over for a showing.

What kind of “prettying up” would you need to do sell your house? Any long put off chores for you?