I got a surprising phone call this morning.

So I am out in the garden picking radishes (those Rat Tail radishes really do put out in the summer heat, record heat and I just canned 14 jars of pickled radishes) when Morg hollers out the door that I have a phone call. I thought "Who the heck would be calling *me* on a Sunday morning?" When I get to the phone and say "Hello." I hear "TJ?" I used to go by TJ but it has been a long time and as I was running though my mind who would be calling me that name, I came up with *one* person just as she identifies herself. Yep it was her. It was quite a surprise and we were on the phone somewhere around two hours talking and still didn't finish catching up but we had to hang up.

I am thrilled she called and I've really needed a friend recently just to talk about the ups and downs of life. The  email "support group" I used to use let me down real bad a few months back. I had been growing away from them for a bit, maybe less growing and more depression had to do with that since my sabbatical, now that I recall, took place during and after cancer treatment. But then I started interacting more and things seemed to be fine with the group. The group owner's wife  had a heart attack and he understandably was away from the list for a short time and people quit posting. I wrote a post that he would not want that and to keep the posts coming so at the time I was being quite active in the group. About 3 weeks later I made a post  and wrote about finding out my favorite aunt was dying. Since the list owner's wife was in the process of dying herself I harbor no ill feeling toward him whatsoever for missing the post, I know he would have said something. (I think he is the only one that reads my blogs and is hearing this stuff for the first time, but he has probably been wondering anyway why I have disappeared from the list.) But not one person made a comment, not one "I'm sorry" or "What a drag" or "Damn that sucks," nothing. I realized I had not really felt "supported" by the group at all since I had been back, it was friendly but…  I sort of have had a hard time even reading the posts anymore and have not posted. A support group isn't any good if there is no support for one anymore. A lot of the people had changed, maybe I was just too odd for an odd bunch.

So, having an old friend look me up was really nice. She and I had been through many things, good and bad, together. We knew each other since I lived in Bailey CO. I don't remember the exact year but it was around 1989 or 1990. We still have more catching up to do.

Trouble Ahead

 For a while now we have had only one vehicle, an extended cab pick-up truck; the kind with a small back seat. That was fine when the kids were small AND we had another vehicle for most trips. The truck is not the best in gas mileage and the main purpose for it was to haul hay and be a second vehicle when needed. There was another vehicle that got better mileage and had more room inside for passengers--it had a good payload too for those big store trips; but that poor vehicle was used heavily and eventually became non-usable. So, we were stuck with the truck as the only transportation. It is hard to go to the store when it is raining (not that it has rained here any time recently this year). The ride is rough (I do not know if I need to take a pain pill just because of the truck ride or if any vehicle ride hurts as I haven't been in any other vehicle since my surgery was kind of fresh). The kids have gotten a lot bigger too. But we have been managing.

Well, Ron was doing some maintenance on the truck on Monday. He discovered that a noise he thought was caused by one of the running boards was, in fact, was being caused by a broken frame. That is bad, very bad.

I have been trying to figure out how to afford the tires we needed for it.

I have no clue as to how to afford a new vehicle all together. I have been trying to figure that one out for over two years because of the whole "truck is too small for us all (etc.)" situation.

Now it is even worse because the new vehicle has to be able to move hay as the current truck is useless for that now. It is not safe to drive, really. We have a neighbor that has heavy-duty welding stuff and will be able to weld the frame to make it safe as a light -duty truck, hopefully today (Tuesday) but we have yet to talk to him.

We were in need of a second vehicle, now what? I am panicking a little..

What a Busy Few Weeks

Oh goodness I am exhausted. My two stepdaughters decided to come out for a visit from Colorado with their kids, as it turned out it was only two out of the three grandkids that came though; it still doubled the house population. The planning stage was confusing, back and forth on when and how long, etc. One of the kids is autistic also. We are no strangers to autism here as my eldest (Ron's third) child, Tink, is autistic. But autism is as individual as each unique person. And he used to have a tendency to dump things out, like shampoo, medicine, cereal, etc. and our house was not set up well for him. We had almost all of our meds and bathroom stuff in boxes in the kitchen because we needed to redo the hallway outside the bathroom. To say it had been going slow is an understatement, I had been waiting for Ron to finish something before moving on to painting and he was apparently waiting for me to paint before he finished doing the door to the tub works. But the hall had to get done before they got here for safety and space reasons. I went ahead and painted but I still think it should have been done the other way around, as it is something didn't get caulked that should have and now I am not sure it can be because we hung a set of shelves in the spot and it leaves that spot with only a fingers width to get to the gap between the wall and the door frame for about half of it. And the other half will really show up when caulked if I don't go back and repaint that area. Anyway, the floor also was needing tiled. We have had the tile for a while, and the paint, so at this point no money was needed to do it. Then I noticed that where the hall floor met the bathroom was not equal, the hall had a dip right there that at its worst point was about a half inch. So we had to get some  floor leveling stuff and it had to go on in a few layers because of the depth of it. The put the whole thing behind a little bit and they final date of them showing up was still not decided. But I got it done and the floor tiled. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the white paint turned out to be a light gray. I was concerned about that because this hallway is dark, it just swallowed light, but luckily it would not clash with the medium gray that I was planning on painting the trim work. The paint was also a semi-gloss (planned) whereas the old paint was a flat, semi-gloss reflects (and cleans) better than flat paint and brightened up the hall more than I expected especially with a darker color than I had wanted. Then adding a light colored tile to the floor--my golly we can see in the hallway now! Now for the fun part. The date had been decided and we still had a few days but the free-standing cabinets we had in the kitchen needed to be emptied of food and other kitchen stuff and moved to the hall and filled with bathroom stuff. Of course this still leaves the kitchen a flippin' mess and after quite a few years of trying to explain to Ron the free-form box shelves I wanted in there I gave up and defaulted to regular shelves--which we didn't have. We bought the shelf brackets and got those hung and Ron fetched some shelving wood from the neighbor and got some shelves put up, not all. We are running out of time before thy get here at this point but we still could get almost all of it done--but the kids left a day early. So, when they got here there was still food in boxes on the floor. Oddly, we still had more kitchen floor than we have had in a while. We got a couple more shelves up on their second or third day here and we are down to just two boxes on the floor but the renovations pretty much came to a standstill as our house population doubled. The hallway looks great though.

So the kids were here for eight days, eight hectic days, from Thursday to Thursday. It was a good visit though. And the one grandkid doesn't dump things so much anymore, thank goodness.  We went into town on Friday evening to watch the annual firework show, the kids were all excited, Tink just *loves* fireworks. We got there a bit early so we could get a good spot and the kids could use the playground, both boys are eleven. About ten  to fifteen minutes before the show was probably going to start it was announced that it was cancelled due to the drought conditions. It made sense but I really think they could have cancelled it earlier in the day, we were not the only ones out there and inconvenienced. We stopped by the fireworks tent in town and bought some of our own to set off to alleviate the kids tension. We did our annual show on Wednesday, the actual holiday and the night before they left. Some neighbors showed up to join the fun. For the first time we accidently set a couple of fires with them. We were prepared, even with no drought we keep a bucket of water to douse used sparklers and Roman Candles, and we have the hose nearby and ready. One of the fires might have happened even in a normal year, the one that set it off had sort of blown up, well, that is a bit strong but misfired would be too mild of a description. Ron got his hand a little burnt, nothing serious. We also went to Baker Creek Seed's Bakersville in Mansfield. It is a old timey village. Ron took Morg and the non-autistic grandson out shooting; Morg has been shooting off and on for a bit now but the grandkid had never fired a gun before. They all had fun but Ron was real happy he got to take the kid out the very first time. I was up until 3-3:30 every morning talking to the girls, they would sleep in and I had to get up for chores.

The heat for the last few weeks has been unbelievable. We have been breaking records left and right, including the hottest day of June since record keeping began. The weird part is that the humidity has been low, very low. The weather folks have been calling it a "saving grace" but I really think we would be better off with a tad higher humidity. When each breath robs one of vital moisture and after ten minutes outside, in the shade even, one needs to drink a pint of water just to replace what you exhaled, it is too damned dry.  This is the Ozarks and we have been real close to single digit humidity. And breezes do no good to help cool because the sweat  dries too fast to get the body wet to catch it. Between a sauna and a dehydrator, I prefer the sauna.

The good news is that we are expecting a cool-down and some rain after today (another record breaker but there is moisture in the air).

I write this in MS OneNote and the paste it to the Blogger site. As I was getting ready to post it I go to the Blogger Dashboard and get a warning that Blogger does not support my browser anymore, I use Firefox, and I should switch to the Google Chrome because not all features will work otherwise. Screw you Google I dislike Chrome and you are getting more and more domineering.