Retirement, sweet retirement. I remember packing as much fun as possible into those few three-day weekends we had when we were working. This while also trying to catch up with the laundry and cleaning the house. I honestly don’t know how we did it all. The truth is, we often didn’t. Or, more accurately…we didn’t do it well.
I was never one to have my house spotless when the kids were growing up. I quickly learned what was “good enough”. Now that we have all this “free time”, we keep a much neater house. Little is a typical teenager and in the nine days she’s been here, her room is pretty trashed. I’ve truly forgotten what it’s like to have a 14-year-old girl at home. I asked her at supper last night to pick it up this morning. We’ll see if she’s any better at it than her mother was at that age. lol
The year is half gone already. Last year was 36 months long. This year seems like three so far. We enjoyed a much slower pace yesterday. While Mr. FixIt mowed the fenced yard, Little and I made up some sourdough bread and put the loaves in crocks in the garage fridge overnight to rise and ripen. If you give them a cold, slow rise you can get a bit more tartness. My sourdough is never really “sour”. It’s just such a lovely texture…especially when toasted or made into French Toast. Yummmmm!
Little is sure keeping us busy! I’d forgotten what it was like to have a 14-year-old in the house. They like to sleep…a lot! They like to stay up late and read and then sleep the day away. But that isn’t happening at Nana’s house. We have other things to do so she’s up and at ‘em much earlier than she would like.
When I was a little kid, I was playing in the Guthrie’s back yard. Our ball went into a shrub and I reached in to get it. I pulled my hand out in a hurry because it felt like something burned me. My clearest memory of that incident was how puffy the back of my hand got. And it hurt. It lasted for a few days and went away. I remember being told I probably got stung by a caterpillar, but I don’t recall seeing one.
Those five days went by WAY too fast. Oh, my…how I miss my girls. It was a really hard year anyway, then to not get to see my Colorado peeps on top of it made it seem worse. But we sure crammed a lot of fun into five days. Yesterday was a lot more low key. We hung around the house most of the day. My daughter did some laundry so they’d have clean clothes for the rest of their trip. I baked a Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie to have for dessert last night. When it was cooling, we headed to town.
Mr. FixIt and I took Little out to the field a couple days ago for the “Annual Blueberry Harvest”. It was a bumper crop this year for our one little blueberry bush. We didn’t get any last year. I think the year before we had maybe half a teacup. Each year the bush gets bigger and bigger and will soon outgrow the cage Mr. FixIt built over it to keep the birds out. There were still several on the bush that haven’t ripened so we are enjoying fresh blueberries…a few at a time to make them last.
Little is hilarious. She has such an excellent wit…quick and dry and unexpected. She’s always been years ahead of her time in that regard. She teaches me so much about life and being who you are. Yesterday was the big family gathering to introduce Mr. FixIt’s clan to mine. I told the kids we’d just make pizzas and homemade ice cream. Simple enough.
This was taken a long time ago…they’re 14 and 17 now!
OMGosh! Yesterday was crazy busy! When I went to town the other day, I totally forgot to take a water sample from the pool to check for the chemical levels. I really wanted to make sure everything was ok for the girls to swim, so I took a sample in yesterday. I have to say, I’ve never taken a sample in where they didn’t adjust something so I had to make a purchase. But yesterday, they checked the levels and said it was all good! So, one less thing to worry about.
I’ve seen these around the last few weeks. The first one was about a month ago and it wasn’t a half inch long…just a hatchling, or thereabouts. About a week ago, I was driving to town to join my high school friends for coffee when I noticed another one on the windshield wiper. It was about an inch long and, unfortunately, it was swept away before I could find a place to stop and rescue it.
Mr. Virgo’s Clock…I hung it, set the pendulum in motion, the time on the clock said 6:07. I turned to check the time on my Echo device…6:07!!! You can’t make this stuff up!!!
We start every day with a semi-plan. We may not know exactly what we’ll accomplish every day, but we have a general idea in which direction we want to go. We’ll be moving right along at a respectable clip when all of a sudden, something pops up and sends in a completely different direction. That’s what happened yesterday.
