Chaos Begins

The phone rang just as we were about to sit down to our lunch.

It was the delivery driver for the lumber yard, he could not find our house. Our house is difficult to find. Attila told him he would go out to the end of the driveway and wave the truck down as it passed.

The delivery is wood. Wood to build a new wall in the basement. Wood to build the new canning jar shelf.

Yesterday Attila began the process of moving things around in the basement, to make room for these projects. The basement is where we store things, our pantry, our canning jars, our canning equipment, all the possessions we have gathered over a lifetime. There is a lot of stuff down there. And it is all going to get moved around over the weeks to come. It will be chaos.

I cannot help with this project. I did quite a bit in the planning stages, but since I should not lift more than 20 pounds, it is best I do not participate in moving things around, or moving building materials around. During projects that involve activities I’ve done all my life, I am in danger of forgetting that I must not lift, this has happened. It is so challenging to admit restrictions, and change lifelong habits. Best to avoid projects that will involve lifting. So, Attila is on his own with this one. Attila refers to this is “modified duties” for life. I can do modify!

I will participate in the filling of the new canning jar shelves, and organizing the new room Attila is creating. I have a plan as to where everything needs to maximize our storage capacity.

The delivery has been dealt with, the wood safely stored in the garage, ready for tomorrow.

Part of the delivery was more re-mesh. It will be used to create a garden row support for our climbing beans, borlotti, and we hope for a good crop of those. This new area of the garden will go where the one of the ash trees was located, after it was killed by the Emerald Ash Borer. We had already purchased the t-bars for the new garden row, which will support the re-mesh.

So Attila is well sorted for projects in 2025.

My projects are more routine. I mill flour, bake all of our bread and other baked goods, make Kombucha, find recipes to use the ingredients we find at an affordable price or on sale. I also do all the administrative type tasks in our lives, make all the calls, pay all the bills, fill in all the forms (except taxes, I HATE taxes and Attila is good at that), and tie up any loose ends in the endless bureaucracy of modern life. I do a lot of research into ways to maximize our resources, which is surprisingly time consuming.

I’ve been wanting to visit my Mom and sisters for a while. I had hoped to visit in January, the delayed and somewhat complicated delivery of the raised garden beds dragged on for the whole month, in turn delaying plans for the visit. February arrived determined to flex its wintry arm, so that reliable travelling weather has not appeared yet, and if the weather forecast is accurate, the stormy wintry weather will reoccur regularly throughout the month. We won’t risk bad roads. So we are watching for better conditions to travel. We are a lot less willing to travel on bad roads now that we have a choice, and we are cognizant that during a storm we might not get home to Ginger in a timely manner. Ginger relies on us for life support, food, water, warmth, and companionship. He hates travel, or we would bring him with us!

Today Attila is preparing a special dinner, a cauliflower and turnip casserole, a recipe he created himself. We love it. Cauliflower was on sale last week, but the rutabaga was not, they are charging a lot of money for a root vegetable grown in Ontario. We bought the smallest one we could find.

So that is us, watching the weather through a stormy and wintery February.

Hope you are all safe, warm where it is cold, cool where it is hot.

Worldly

Weather

-4°C
Date: 2:00 PM EST Monday 10 February 2025
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 102.9 kPa
Tendency: Falling
Temperature: -4.2°C
Dew point: -12.7°C
Humidity: 52%
Wind: SW 15 km/h
Wind Chill: -10
Visibility: 24 km

Quote

“The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”
John F. Kennedy
1917 – 1963