Ahhh, information at my fingertips. I've forgotten all of the words I wanted to look up, the odd things I was curious about, the information I needed to get. I feel bad for Mike, he got us a Verizon account because of it's reliability, but the house we have been blessed w/ & lived in for the last 3 weeks is in the dreaded dead zone. No phone, internet or tv, which we didn't have anyways. He did buy a small tv/dvd player so we wouldn't have to keep adjusting the laptop for movies. He would make a commo run twice a day to the top of the hill to get any messages. He's getting pretty skinny w/ all of the hiking he's been doing.
The children have been nuts since we moved in. In the RV they lived outside a big portion of the day. Now our kitchen has the same amount of living space as the entire RV. The useless adjoining dining room (useless as a dining room) plus the kitchen is all of the living space I think we need for whenever we can build a cabin up high. Probably not for years though. Anyways the house is so big they seem to have forgotten about outside. There is still no furniture & they're only using one of the bedrooms so they've got nearly 3 big empty rooms to play in. I think our household goods will be here around the 3rd, it depends on Ft. Bragg. It will be good to have a real mattress, vacuum & pots to cook in again.
Our house is wonderful, but on closer inspection it wasn't as clean as we'd thought. The previous owners were smokers & there are weird drips on everything, like way up high near the ceiling. Soda drops? I don't know. The light fixtures in the bathroom were dripping mud down after a hot shower, I guess they'd never been dusted.
Mike's new enemy is the ladybug. He has to vacuum them at the end of everyday or he goes mad. Really, they tend to stick to the windows & lights, so it's not hard to find them. They start moving around sluggishly in the afternoons. We don't have a garden set out (high on my list of things to do, it just involves clearing out lots of trees) but they are supposed to be wonderful for eating things like aphids & other pests.
Yesterday we were blessed again w/ the selling of our RV. It goes to a lady who is living on her family's land in a house built in the 1840's but is so far beyond repair, only 1 room is habitable. I hope she will be equally blessed w/ it. So now we can pay our plumbing bill!
There was a record rainfall here last week that caused the kitchen sink to back up & finally not drain at all. I was doing my dishes the old way in the dishpan & throwing out the water on the driveway. I was enjoying it too, the deer are out after supper & the splash of my water would scare them away. We did what we could w/ our snake & Mike crawled under the house & fiddled around until he decided he was about to break something, so he had me drive out to call a plumber. I was surprised w/ what w/ all of the manufactured homes out here how few plumbers are willing to work on them. The sink pipe had no slant & ran parallel to the house over the beams & emptied...somewhere. The plumber just cut off that line & rerouted it to the main drain to go right into the leach field. I'm glad we use natural cleaning products!
However, they couldn't give us an estimate & just said that they would bill us. That was last week.There is a definite difference here in how time works. AT&T took 3 weeks to install. The banks, real estate, mortgage company & all drivers are also slower minded. Minded is not the right word, but many priorities (such as getting paid) do not seem as urgent, & everyone is so much friendlier during whatever transaction is being processed. I find it to be a good tradeoff, especially as we have no particular hours to keep.
We've been keeping regular school hours since we've moved into the house though, they have a 1/2 hour of play after their room chores are done & then we start lessons about 9:00, 9:30-11:00. I switched their wake up time to around 7:00 at daylight savings, but I still wake them up. At 11:00 I push us all outside to play. They're favorite game is running to the top of the hill & then down again screaming. Generally the mail has come by then.
It may or may not be a work hour when our goods are delivered. For me yes, maybe after lunch for them. I've not got even a spade to work w/ & I could use the pickax & shovel for digging. I'd like to try double dug beds this time, but nearly none of the land is flat excepting the leach field. We plan to tear apart one of the dilapidated sheds & convert it to a chicken house for our first livestock endeavor this spring. Mike got some goat slaughter/ butchering practice in already w/ the lady who sires out her billy to my brother in law. The guy who used to live here says coyotes are no problem here like they are for my brother-in-law, but there are a couple of mountain lions in the area. I wish I had never seen those shows on Animal Planet, I'm not sure if I would rather meet that or a bear.
I guess that's enough for now. I'll try to post once a week & tell of our adventures. So much time has passed I'm sure I've forgotten things, but I trust everyone is good & I'm glad to have been catching up on your blogs too.
Vanessa
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