We are finally settling in to our new home. All of the boxes are unpacked except for the ones hidden in closets and in the basement. I still have not ventured down to the basement. I told my husband that I have made it my life's work to never go down there. e thinks I need to to learn where things like water shut offs and things like that are. But I think I'll be fine.

Now that the main work of moving is over with I am beginning to think about my garden. It has been years since I have had a place to grow more that just a couple of pots so I am really excited about beginning this process. I want to do a few raised garden beds. I know I want one with herbs in it. I'm just not sure which herbs yet. I want another with a few plants like tomatoes and cucumbers and maybe some beans or something like that. I want to make a small area, maybe a tire or something like that for mint and maybe lemon balm. I know that those two things could take over the whole yard if I'm not careful. That's why I want to confine them. There is an area in the front of the house that has been used as a flower bed. There is also an area down the side of the house next to the driveway that has been used as flower beds. I don't have any idea what to plant there. I want something that looks nice throughout the growing season. I don't want plants that look nice for a couple of weeks and then the flowers die and the plant fades away. I'm planning on spending a lot of time this winter going over garden sites and such to get ideas. I am hoping that some of my faithful readers will also add suggestions to the comments for this blog. I'm really looking forward to posting pictures next summer of my gardens. I want my husband to plan out exactly where in the yard he wants to put his garage. Then I will be able to plan play space for our son and garden space for me. I'm sure I will be putting some potted plants around the deck as well.

It is so exciting to be able to plan for what I want to do next summer. I'm sure it will be a lot more work than I am used to but I can't wait to get started.

I think I'm going to go make some candles today. I haven't been able to make candles since we started this whole house hunting thing. My craft supplies were among the first things to get packed up. I got some yummy holiday and winter scents in the mail the other day. I think I'll make some Santa's Whiskers and maybe some Rendeer Poo. Okay, enough chatting for today. I'm off to stir the wax pot.

What a month it has been. Right after we moved in to our new house we had an earthquake. Then a few days later a hurricane. Of course there were several tornadoes that came along with the hurricane. Two weeks later we went on vacation to visit my daughter and her family and my middle son. We had a nice visit. The kids did a lot of fun things together. We went to the zoo. We went to a windmill. We went to Ms. Effie’s Country Flower Garden. We had a family reunion. We went to dinner at my brother’s house. It was a wonderful trip. But like all good trips, it had to come to and end. I was so regretting getting up at 5:00 in the morning to drive for an hour and a half to catch our train. All week I tried to convince my daughter that she should drive us to Chicago instead of to Galesburg. I was dreading the seven hour layover in Chicago. By driving there we wouldn’t have to get up early and we wouldn’t have a long layover. But she just wasn’t in to driving for six hours.

So up we were at 5 in the morning. We made it to the train in plenty of time. The trip started out pretty uneventful. Then all at once it felt like someone had slammed on the brakes. A few seconds later we felt a huge crash and then debris was flying everywhere around the train. We could smell smoke, a lot of it. But they weren't evacuating the train. Soon they announced that we had hit a trailer full of telephone poles that was trying to cross the tracks. They said we would have to sit there while they cleared the debris and checked out the train. They said it would be fifteen or twenty minutes and then we would be on our way. About an hour later they announced that a telephone pole had went through the engine that controls the air brakes for the train. They said someone was coming to fix the brakes. Then they said that another train was coming to tow us in to Chicago. We waited and waited. Eventually we started to see buses pulling up not far from the train. After four hours of sitting on the train they came through and told us that they had to fix the brakes enough to get us up to a train crossing that was a few hundred yards down the tracks. After another fifteen minutes or so, the train started to slowly inch it’s way up the tracks. And I do mean slowly. I could have walked faster and everyone knows I can’t walk at all.

We finally got up to the crossing and they took everyone off the train. Those of us who were going to Chicago got on one bus. Those who were going to places between Kewanee and Chicago got on another bus. There was a third bus for those who wanted to go back to Galesburg. So as I sit here writing this I am on a bus to Chicago. I’m sure this won’t get posted to my blog until sometime Thursday. But I wanted to share our wonderful experience. We have in the last month survived an earthquake, a hurricane, a few tornadoes, and now a train crash. What a month it has been.

Here's a link to the news article about it.

http://www.wqad.com/news/wqad-amtrak-crash-neponset-091311,0,1968433.story

When I get home and can publish this post I will add a few pictures from our trip.

Three of my grandbabies and my son at the zoo.
The beautiful Mississippi River
At the Park
A beautiful windmill. We bought a bag of cornmeal that was ground at this very windmill.
Family Portrait Grandaughter Kennedy, Me, Son Dakota, Son-In-Law Grant, Graddaughter Ciencia, Grandson Damien, Sister-In-Law Yon Hi, and Brother Glenn.
The teacup tree at Miss Effie's Country Flowers and Garden Stuffs.
The bed in the woods at Ms. Effie's.
Angel Cat

Earthquakes, Hurricanes, What's Next?

Well we have survived our first bad storm as homeowners. We ended up with a small amount of water in the basement and a large tree limb in the backyard. No other damage. And we never lost power.

We have been in our house two weeks now. But what an eventful two weeks it's been. We were here a week when Bob went on vacation. He had planned this trip for a year with a group of friends. And they had paid for the whole trip already so he couldn't really get out of it very easily. So with boxes stacked everywhere and some things still in the apartment, he left last Sunday. On Monday I hired two day laborers to help move the rest of the things out of the apartment. They helped with some of the work in the apartment and then came over here and helped sort through some of the boxes. That went pretty well.

On Tuesday I stayed home to work on unpacking. I was working away not really thinking of anything. Dakota had been out playing with the neighbors across the street. Suddenly he came in and said, "Did you feel the earthquake?" I thought he was just playing around. But when I stopped working and went on facebook, that was all they were talking about. Apparently there was a huge earthquake in Virgina that was felt all the way up here. Apparently it did some damage in New York City. I didn't feel a thing. I guess because I was walking back and worth I didn't notice it. I did notice a cabinet door that kept coming open. I guess if you were sitting down you noticed it more. I'm so unsteady on my feet that it would take a pretty big earthquake for me to notice.

Then on Thursday they started talking about a hurricane. By Friday, that was all they talked about on the news. A big hurricane was coming and it was gonna be bad. I sent a text to Bob to tell him that they may want to head home a bit earlier than they planned. Late Friday night I told Dakota that we needed to bring in all the things that had been sitting on the front porch. He was great about helping with all of that.

When I got up Saturday morning I turned on the news to see what the updates were about the hurricane. One of the first things I heard was that all mass transit was going to close down at noon. And that the bridges were going to close as soon as the wind speed got up to 60 mph. They didn't know how early that was going to happen. Now Bob and his friends had to cross the George Washington Bridge to get home. I sent him another text that the bride might close soon. He told me they were leaving New Hampshire then. Usually when they go on this trip they hang out until late in the afternoon before they start driving home. This time they left at 9 in the morning. All day long he would text for updates and let me know where they were at. The news kept getting worse and worse. But when I looked outside it was a beautiful calm day. It was cloudy but no breeze at all.

He finally got home around 4:00 in the afternoon. The skys were still calm. Well, the first thing that happened while he was unloading his stuff from the car, we got locked out of the house. The latch on the screen door decided to quit working on Friday. I had put a lego piece in the latch so it wouldn't lock us out but Dakota saw one of his precious legos in the door and pulled it out. We were locked out of the house. Bob had to put Kai through one of the windows that I knew was unlocked. (Because the neighbor had put Dakota through it the day before when the lock stopped working.) He then walked around to the back of the house to put his camping gear in the basement. That's when he noticed all the stuff in the backyard. While I had cleaned off the front porch, I had left three coolers, a watering can, two trash cans, a recycling can, and numerous flower pots in the back yard. So after driving all day, he had to bring all of this stuff into the house. He was not happy.

After watching the news, Bob decided that he needed to go get a pump for the basement. We called Home Depot to make sure they were open before he went out. But it was a waste of time. They were totally sold out of pumps. They were out of water also.

We kept watching the news all evening. But by the time we went to bed there was only a gentle rain and no wind. We kept waiting for the power to go out. We got up this morning to find that the rain had ended. But the wind was really bad. We put some of the bigger things back outside. But the small things will have to wait until tomorrow. He went down to check the basement and found one area had about an inch of water in it. He used the pump that we use in the fish tank to pump the water outside. It was small but worked great to pump out the basement. I'm really glad there wasn't any more water than that.

While Bob was putting the trash cans back outside, he noticed a large limb laying across the neighbors fence behind our house. He went out and pulled it off the fence. Fortunately it didn't really do any damage. The fence could be straightened back out pretty easily. So we now have our first supply of firewood. Yes I know, it will have to dry for months before it will burn. But hey, it's firewood.

I feel really lucky that our damage was so minimal. A lot of people that we know had a lot worse damage. So we have survived our first two weeks as homeowners. We have survived an earthquake. And we survived a hurricane. I guess we will do alright as homeowners.

Unpacking We Go

The last few days have been a whirlwind. We closed on the house Thursday morning. We moved the first things in on Thursday afternoon. It's been busy busy busy since then. By Saturday evening we had almost everything moved in. We still have a few odds and ends left at the apartment. But we have until the end of September to get everything out.

Right now we are tripping over boxes everywhere we turn. We finally tonight got the living room so that it looks like a living room and not a warehouse. Almost everything in the kitchen is put away already. The dining room continues to house a mountain of boxes. The mountain does seem to be getting smaller though. I think there is hope that we will eventually settle in here. I actually have enough dishes and things unpacked that I am going to try to cook dinner tomorrow night. It's really getting old ordering out every night.

I've had a great time buying all the little things that we needed for the house. My husband will never trust me to measure anything again though. I measured our bedroom as 11 feet by 15 feet. I thought that would leave enough room for the bed with a nightstand on each side and a little extra space. Well, he started to put the bed together and realized that it just was not going to fit. Apparently the room is only 8 feet 8 inches wide and not 11 feet. There is no other space the bed can go because of the radiator and the closet. Even if the radiator was not on the one wall, there would be no way to walk around the end of the bed. Remember I said the room was 8 feet 8 inches wide. Well our bed is 8 feet long. So I have a nightstand on my side of the bed. Bob will have to build a shelf on his side. You have to open the door and slide past it and then close the door to get in to bed. I'll try to post pictures soon so you can see how crowded it is.

The library upstairs is wall to wall books. Instead of stacking them in the closet like I told them to, the guys who helped us just dropped them in front of the door. So you can't really get in to the room. Anyway, the library will be the last room we put together. I had to stop calling it the Man Cave. Bob decided he didn't like that. Oh well. We do have 35 boxes of books sitting in the middle of the floor up there.

I'll take some pictures in the next few days and get them posted so you can see out new house. I totally love it here.

We Got The Call

Tonight we got The Call we have been waiting to receive. Everything is finally in one place and approved for us to buy our house. We have a closing date of August 11 at 11:00am. It's really happening.

This whole experience has reminded us of another time when we were waiting for The Call. About 12 years agao Bob came home from a camping weekend and said, "I want a baby. I want a baby now." We had talked of adopting a child but had never really done any more than talk about it. So we sat down that night and started making plans. We thought we would adopt a baby girl from China. My husband had been to China with his best friend so he knew what to expect there. So this seemed a logical place to begin. After weeks of home inspections and interviews by social workers and gathering all kinds of legal documents we were finally approved. All of our documents were sent off to China. Now we had nothing to do but wait. I'm telling you right now that I'm not a very patient waiter. We had to wait for nearly a year. That's what the backlog was for people who were adopting from China at that time. Finally in February, 2002 other folks in our group began getting their referrals. But we still waited. Our agency called China every night for weeks to try to find out where our referral was. Finally someone said that we had been denied. They never gave a reason just denied.

We had to back off and regroup for a bit. We then decided to transfer all of our paperwork to Guatemala. Again we began to gather paperwork and start the process all over again. This time though we got a call before we even had all the paperwork ready. They had a newborn baby girl they needed to place. A couple had applied for two children and received referrals for a boy and a girl. They did not know that they would have to pay double for the attorney though so they decided they would only take the boy. This left the little girl with no placement. We quickly accepted her referral. In May we flew to Guatemala and spent a beautiful week with the most adorable little girl you have ever seen. The day came when we had to return home. But the attorney assured us that we would be coming back within the month to bring her home. Two weeks later we got the call that the adoption had fallen through. Apparently the grandparents did not know about the baby. When they found out, they wanted her. We were devastated. It felt like we had now lost two babies but we had no funeral for either of them. I still have the pictures of this little darling packed away. Six long weeks went by with no word from the agency. We finally got a call that they had a little boy. We decided to accept his referral. Now we had to wait for all the paperwork to be processed. In October, to celebrate our fifth anniversary, we flew to Guatemala again to spend a few days with this baby. I tried really hard to not get as attached as I had to the last baby. But I did. About six weeks later we got The Call. Dakota Garcia Was now our son. When could we come and get him. A few days before Christmas in 2002 we brought our five month old son home.

This time The Call was not about a baby. This time we were waiting for a call about the house we want to buy. But so much of the process has been similar. This time we had to find the house we wanted. We had to gather all kinds of documents. Then we had to wait for them to be processed. Then we had to get more documents and wait for them to be processed. And we have waited and waited. It seems like forever. But it really has only been a few weeks. We made our offer on the house on July 2. I am just so excited about this move.

With our first wait, I spent the time making baby clothes and buying baby furniture. This time I'm making curtains and buying things for the house. And packing. We have boxes piled to the ceiling in the dining room. One more week and it will be ours. One more week. It feels so much like that last week we had to wait to go to Guatemala. It seemed like it was an eternity. A week from today we will be homeowners.

Packing, Packing, Packing, Keep them boxes packing

Yes, We're still packing. I think we ended up with 35 boxes of books before all was said and done. We did finally agree that the stuffed animals can live in plastic bags if you leave the top loosely open so they can breath. Oh and we found a new law that says that sticks, rocks, and pine cones from Ridgefield can not be moved into Teaneck. They are forbidden to migrate and will die if you try to do so. Wonderful law if you asked me. It allowed a large grocery bag of pine cones, a bag of rocks, (not fancy rocks, just plain old garden rocks,) and three arm loads of sticks to be taken outside and dumped. The fancy rocks, colorful, fouls gold, and things like that were all packed. I got everything in Dakota's room packed yesterday. But today I found several things out that I thought I had packed yesterday. It seems he is unpacking almost faster than I can pack. We are getting the work done though so we will be ready to move when the house closes.

I have rearranged the furniture in the new house in my mind a dozen times already. It is hard to imagine where things will go. I look at the pictures and try to imagine how it will look with our stuff instead of what's in there now. I don't think a day goes by that I don't think of something else that I need to measure. Currently I am wondering how much space is left at the end of the cabinet in the kitchen. But the next time I will be in the house is when we do the walk through the day before we close.

The things I will miss about this apartment:
1. The long walk up the hill from the parking lot which includes many many stairs. (NOT!)
2. The upstairs neighbors waking us up early in the morning or in the middle of the night with their noise. (NOT!)
3. Teenage parties right outside our bedroom windows all night long. (NOT!)
4. The people behind us who seem to be forever under construction all day and then party all night. (NOT!)
5. The landlord stealing or cutting down plants that we have outside. (NOT!)
6. Maintenance people who try to steal Dakota's bike if he leaves it outside even if it is chained up to the porch. (NOT!)
7. The parking lot that fills up by 4:00pm so you have to park a long ways away if you come home after that. (NOT!)
8. Friends of the upstairs neighbor who look in our windows while they are waiting for them to answer the door. (NOT!)
9. Maintenance men looking in the windows while they are working on the front of the building. (NOT!)
10. Maintenance pouring toxic chemical on the lawn to remove unsitely "weeds". (NOT!)
11. Someone to mow the lawn for us.
12. Someone to do snow removal.
13. A great hill for sledding.
14. Dakota will miss his friends.

Gee, I guess there really are a few things that I will miss. But so many more that I won't miss. I can't wait to get in to our new house.

I Resign

We are getting ready to move so I have been packing and sorting things out that haven't been touched in ten years or more. I came across this poem and thought I would share it with you. It was date 4/22/2000.

RESIGNATION

I am hereby officially tendering my resignation as an adult. I have decided I would like to accept the responsibilities of an 8 year-old again.

I want to go to McDonald's and think that it's a four star restaurant.

I want to sail sticks across a fresh mud puddle and make a sidewalk with rocks.

I want to think M&Ms are better than money because you can eat them.

I want to lie under a big oak tree and run a lemonade stand with my friends on a hot summer's day.

I want to return to a time when life was simple; When all you knew were colors, multiplication tables, and nursery rhymes, but that didn't bother you, because you didn't know what you didn't know and you didn't care.

All you knew was to be happy because you were blissfully unaware of all the things that should make you worried or upset.

I want to think the world is fair. That everyone is honest and good.

I want to believe that anything is possible. I want to be oblivious to the complexities of life and be overly excited by the little things again.

I want to live simple again. I don't want my day to consist of computer crashes, mountains of paperwork, depressing news, how to surive more days in the month than there is money in the bank, doctor bills, gossip, illness, and loss of loved ones.

I want to believe in the power of smiles, hugs, a kind word, truth, justice, peace, dreas, the imagination, mankind, and making angels in the snow.

So... here's my checkbook and my car-keys, my credit card bills and my 401k statements. i am officially resigning from adulthood.

And if you want to discuss this further, you'll have to catch me first, cause.................






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