Cake.....Because F&*K Snow!!!

UGHHHHHHH......  We had a great Superbowl day - none of us cared who won and we really were just watching for the Ads!  My favorite was the one with the flag football player!  But....... 

It snowed all day!  And most of the night!  And it got deeper and deeper and our road got down to only one lane and hasn't been plowed still 24 hours later!

See the above photo?  Notice anything missing?  Yes!!!  The LOVE sign is gone!  No idea where it went!  It went missing in the last storm when the wind blew so foul and fierce that you couldn't breathe when you went outside!  It better be somewhere out there with the rooster that you aso can't see!  Because.... SNOW!

This is after about the fourth time we started sweeping off the truck!  Even the snow plow guy couldn't get in today!   This morning I texted my people at the school and said "UGHHHHH ......Slow moving team today!"  Meaning I was having trouble getting started with the day and might be a few minutes late (which I was not - to be clear)!  They responded with "Just be safe the roads are S*&T!"

Once at work getting fired up for the day, and mostly saying on the phone "Yes Virginia! There IS school today!", a co-worker brought in a pate with a lovely cake on it - already sliced and ready to go in our bellies!  She had a little card on it - as she always does when she brings in treats, in case there are allergies or just flavors that arent preferred.  She is an amazing baker!  I would marry her tomorrow just for her cooking!  I glanced at the card, but didnt read all the way to the bottom until a little later in the day......

The card says "Biscotti Pound Cake - Because F*&K Snow!"

May you be blessed with funny coworkers and amazing bakers on the days when you are a slow moving team, and know that you are not alone in your feelings about the newest round of snow!

Be amazing and Blessed Be!

Ringing in the New Year!

Well - its been a few minutes again since I posted!  Lots going on and I seem to spend a lot of time cleaning up messes.....

That these guys and their dad make!!

And Shoveling snow....

That keeps coming down!  We are at about 5 feet now that it has snowed, but it did rain about a week ago so that settled it down a bit to about 4.5'!  Just a bit.....

We have started into the 7th year without Rye now and it has always been a little (or a lot) difficult to ring in the New Year and do what feels like leaving him a little further behind.....even though he really has gone on ahead! 

I did some christmas cards and a short letter that felt a little stilted but was a start, and didn't leave me feeling like I was completely drained.  If you didnt get one - sorry - maybe next year -if you did get one you are a lucky one! I didn't start it until about the day before Christmas though.  Its a small step in the direction I need to go I think.  It has not got any easier exactly, but we are learning to navigate the seasons a little better now, and to do what we need to do so others don't have such a hard time, maybe....

It was fun doing Christmas all over the place!  It was a bit exhausting but still good to start to have good feelings about the "season" again, and not so much dread.  I think Reed and Keyona ended up with about 6 different Christmas stops they needed to make!  Everyone needs a turn!

Kids and families came over for New Years, and we had food, friends, family and fireworks!  It was an amazing show and the fireworks from everyone all around us and on neighboring lakes was amazing!  It was like being in the center of a fireworks extravaganza!  Everywhere we looked we could see the joy of people ringing in the new year! 

 I actually stayed up literally all night!  Our last guests left at 5:00 am!  It's very unusual for me to not crash at about midnight!  I don't necessarily sleep well, but Im sleeping in short bursts.  Overall since the sinus surgery I am getting about 2.5 hours longer sleep, and higher quality sleep though so that is another baby step in the right direction.I had the sinus surgery (read about that here) in November and my nose is not only sensitive to cold - as I was warned it would be, but I discovered also to smoke!  I stayed in most of the night and visited with the insiders and watched fireworks from the porch with the Grammas.

Quilting is fun for me again and not just a way to save my own life - as it has been for the past years since.  I have recently started - joined a murder mystery that the clues are in the quilt.  Murder of the Viking.  Each month, we get a chapter of a book, a quilt  block(s) pattern, and some special directions.  It has been super fun so far even though I have only done one month!  This first month has been a doozy for difficulty!  If they are all this time consuming I probably wont stay up with the group!  I will try however!  I am currently working on blocks and writing in the same space at the same time!  Multi taskers are us!

It is also a funny challenge mystery since I have always said that I won't work with pieces less than 1.5" square!  Thats my smallest! Not doing anything smaller!!!  Annnnnnddddd........ some of the pieces in these blocks are 1" square or 1" strips!  Im good with the strips, but those tiny, tiny squares!  Ugh!  Changed my mind once the blocks started going together because I have fallen in love with it but...the dread was real to start with!

First set of "Murder of the Viking" blocks.  I have no idea what the clue is in these blocks!  Ill let you know if I figure it out!  I am also working on another mystery quilt that should be a short piece of work, as well as a couple of baby quilts.....and really about 20 quilts at a time!

Baby quilt with turtles on it!  I have been obsessed with teal, blue, green, and turtles lately!

I have also started to do some of the Home repair and upkeep that we have been putting off or just not doing at all!

My new lampshades - the old ones had been cracked and broken in the earthquake about 5 years ago - I had not been able to find anything that I liked to replace them so we had turned the cracked part towards the wall until the day came when finally something worked with our decor (the whole living area has the same light fixture designs)....Thank goodness!

This is one of the old ones - Im not sure they will even be good for anything upcycle - but you know Ill give it a good gosh darn try!  They made it 18 years and so I think thats not a bad return on investment so to speak!  The new ones are metal and so should last through almost anything that get thrown at them - even by Ike or an earthquake!

"Who?  Me?  I think not!"

I hope that no matter how your Holiday Season went, the ups and downs that always seem to go with that time of the year, that you are able to see the joy in the fireworks, the growing light, a full moon, or just a happy new set of lamp shades that an Ike and a Brix, can't eat!

Blessed Be 2023

Oh Ike! You Naughty Boy!

It was a bit of a crazy end of year for us again - ended up getting an extra few days off of school due to terrible weather and roads again!  I got quite a bit done but it never seems like enough for some reason, and we had family and friends over at New Years Eve and we had lots of fun.

We survived the Hub and Bub of Christmas and the New Year, but when the snow and ice finally settled, we did not survive Ike and Brix first day home alone!!

It had been about a month since the "boys" had been left alone for any length of time - maybe an hour here or there - but not for a whole day.  Brix does fine no matter - Ike not so much!

I had called Hubby to see if he got home or if I needed to come let dogs out between my work and my hockey game?  "If you want to be happy wherever you are going, do not come home!"

I asked how bad it was?  Ill clean it up when I get home I said.  "Days!  It will take days for you to get it cleaned up!"

I was greeted with this:

Ike has learned to open the paddle handle doors that we have all over the house and he likes to "play" with my things!  

He dragged all of the extra cushions and storage items out from under the bed.  Chewed up a few of them.

That is an entire "my Pillow" (not the small ones) that he chewed up and left all strewn over the stairs and the living room!  The fillling in this pillow took the longest to clean up!  It sticks to everything!  Great pillows though!

And a chair that he had to pull out from behind the door and another chair?!?

And.... all of my reading and writing materials, notes, notebooks....etc

That in the bottom of the above picture is a brand new window shade (luckily not an expensive one) that I had leaned against the wall ready to install!  Trashed!

I am working on putting my writing prompts and some of my gardening information that I had saved, back together in some semblance of order.  There is a lot missing, and hopefully my old brain will remember what I needed for each folder/project!

There is plenty left to keep me busy working on for about my whole lifetime in this box still.  It started out as two boxes.  I guess he maybe was doing me a favor by making me go through some of this stuff, but.... wasnt ready to see some of it again yet.

But the very worst part - the absolute worst is this:

Yes - those are teeth marks on my laptop!  My one year old laptop!!!

And one of the hinge covers is gone and Im not chasing poop to get it back!  I havent found but two small pieces of the mouse that went with this! Pretty sure he ate the rest!

And there it is.... not even the spinning wheel of death!  Just the poor sad Dell insignia and the obvious broken screen!  Pretty sure he used his giant front paws and jumped up and down on the top of it!  I can totally see him doing that!

I have had a few people ask if the dog is still alive?  He is.  

Trying to change the sheets on the bed after most of the mess was cleaned up.  Ike tries to help.

It did not take me days to clean it all up - other than the paperwork that I had to go through.  I was up until midnight on a work night getting it some semblance though.  It did take me a few days to calm down and to see that the "baby dog" really still is a baby dog and he just got started and couldnt stop!

Fortunately, the laptop that I replaced with this one, that had just froze and didn't seem to be able to be unfrozen, I tried to turn it on and it came on and did a giant update and I am using it now as I type!   I had to make a few changes to it but it has just about everytiug that was on the dead one and so far so good!

I hope that your New Year is prosperous and everything you need it to be, and if you have messes to clean I hope they are easy.

Blessed be and mess free be!

A Slip and Slide Stairwell No More!

 In getting ready for a surgery recently, I had lots of folks ask if there was anything I needed before I would be laid up for at least 10 days?  Im pretty good at pre planning lots of things from the cleaning to the food prep so that we have an easy time if I am to be out of commission for any time at all.

There was one thing that I needed that I couldn't get done, and Hubby was not seeing the need for what I was describing - his mind wasn't able to see my idear!

October 30, 2022

You see - We have this space at the bottom of the stairs to the front door, and in the winter this space gets a hole in it right at the bottom of the steps!  The snow plow pushes snow around it but somehow it ends up being a hole (might be a Ike thing also....?)!  The hole gets very icy - no matter what we do!

So the process is....slide into the hole - catch yourself on the wall - proceed up the stairs!  Simple right?

Not so much when you are 80!  Which some of the parents and one of the Grammas is!

This is the summer version of it and it works great - I can sweep the little patio and keep it clear of sand and gravel from coming in the house. But in the Winter everything gets a lot harder!  Keeping the hole from forming in the front step is one of them.

So when the opportunity came to grab a pallet that the school had no use for, I raised my hand and then asked for help to get it into my car!  The guys I asked were the woodshop teacher and one of the Special Ed teachers who is always willing to help.  They asked me why I needed said pallet and when I told them, they made me this.....

Bottom of the stair hole destroyer complete with sand strips for good traction!  No more sliding anywhere in this area!

We tried it this way first but the tractions strips and the holes in the sides work better the other way (like the first picture).

And thank goodness they did too, because last week started the Snowmageddon!

This is after just the first foot of snow fell, and you cant see my pallet step saver, but it is there and there is no hole in the bottom of the stairs.....

Snow still falling!  No bottom of stair hole though!

Second foot of snow and I have swept these stairs a few times already!

Here we are after the third foot of snow fell and I have got it shoveled from the stairs and the pallet step!  You cant see it but it is there and it has worked wonderfully to keep from having that hole at the bottom of the steps!

And yet another nearly foot of snow!  We have had 4' total in the last week and we are scheduled to get even more this week!  So thankful for no hole at the bottom of the steps!

Hubbys truck after the third round of snow fell and before the wind stopped and the main road was plowed.  We had to wait until the main roads got plowed as the road coming to our house had drifted shut for a long stretch where it comes around the lake - completely closed!

Finally it quit snowing and blowing, and the plow guy was able to come and plow us out a bit.  We got shoveled Hubbys truck out, the garbage box shoveled a path to, and almost got a path to the fuel barrel shoveled out, but the outside light kept going off, and it was getting dark so.....tomorrow we will tackle the rest of the fuel path and the path to the greenhouse.  We will hope that the reports of 16" more snow this week are wrong - but they haven't been so far!

I just have to make it to this!  Few more months!  

Maybe it will get me in shape for gardening by doing all this shoveling?

I can only hope!

May you be warm, dry, may all your snow be very light, and may you have friends who are able to see your vision!

Blessed be!