No Such Thing As Temporary

When Dad builds anything, he doesn't mess around.


By goodness, these chickens are gonna live here and love it!


A lot.


Linoleum on the floor, FRP on the walls, sliding windows, floor vents, a drain, and even electricity!


Our chickens will definitely be coming home to roost!


The bunnies aren't complaining either!

6 Weeks In A Cast

In mid-February, with a new pair of crutches and an air boot strapped to my left leg, I hobbled onto a plane to spend time with my mother, who elected end of life care with Hospice after a long battle with ALS.

Earlier that week during an evening downpour of falling rain, I made the mistake of slipping off a hidden curb submerged in dark puddles of water. Thirty minutes later I found myself in the emergency room with a confirmed foot fracture that left me agonizingly helpless and frustrated during that difficult time.

Several weeks later, Dad was able to arrange time off for a much needed change of scenery for me, and we took the girls to the snow so they could play while I rested with my feet up (literally)!


This one was for Grandmama, because we know she would have insisted on climbing right up there next to the girls. Everything Grandmama did was always oversized. I guess that's why we miss her so much.


How I miss you my dear, sweet Mother. You were and will always be my SuneeOne.

Animal Projects

We brought our day-old pullets home on April 29, and kept them in a box in the kitchen for nearly 6 weeks under a heat lamp. That would be exactly 38 days for anyone who was counting. Uhhh, that would be me, of course.














Being new to the chick thing, I never assumed these TINY little birds could be so capable of turning my living area into the equivalent of a smelly horse stable, but it did prompt Daddy to immediately begin the task of building a shelter for the chickens...

and the bunnies.

Yes, ALL nineteen of them; two mothers and their seventeen babies that arrived in May, five weeks too early and fifteen kits too many, after the owner informed me of his lung cancer diagnosis. Instead of picking out 3 eight week-old rabbits from the two litters in July, we took home the entire bunny bunch and set them upon the porch, which, by the way, did not fair well for us in the scorching temperatures of summer. 19 rabbits urinating and defecating upon the concrete does not create a pleasant smell, especially when the winds kick up in the direction of your windows, but especially after walking through the front door to escape the fumes of the porch, only to have the aroma of chicken crap slap you smack in the face.

Dad said he always use to dream of having animals and being a farmer. I think he may have changed his mind somewhere in between the months of April and May. I believe we were both probably thinking we'd rather starve to death if the only alternative in the near future to obtaining food was growing/raising it ourselves.




















The children, however, were so taken with the animals that I considered as I watched them care for these babies, that perhaps this was one clock we might not wish to turn back.

Changing the Way I Think About Food

I do not believe in global warming.

But I have, this past year, made an effort to examine with a more critical eye, the world I live in, and to broaden my understanding of what I've come to term as man's ambitious agenda in the 20th century to trade health and safety for simplicity and ease. For years I considered myself too busy to acquire more than an awareness of the danger of chemicals, pesticides, and antibiotics found in foods and topical agents I applied daily to my skin.

Not anymore. Not when I can finally say with some learnedness, that there is a real danger in consuming any products containing even trace amounts of antibiotics, chemicals, and estrogen that have the potential to create inflammation in my body, and in the bodies of those I love and care about. I'm talking about how Cancer grows.

Anticancer, A New Way of Life, by Dr. David Servan-Schreiber, is a book we must all read. NOW. David, is a brain-cancer survivor.

His book has encouraged and empowered me to persevere in the garden beds we built and planted back in April that have since come under weekly attack by pesky ants, aphids, earwigs, woodlice, beetles, and all the rest I don't yet know the names of.















When the mice made their debut in June and July to thank me for such an abundant bounty by eating nearly every blooming flower and seed that was growing with the promise of becoming an organic fruit or vegetable, I considered for weeks what Daddy might say, 3 raised beds, and nearly a thousand dollars later (and a few baskets of tomatoes to show for it), if I told him I wasn't cut out for farming after all.



It was blatantly clear to me (okay, all of us) by August that every painstaking effort to grow anything would be continuously sabotaged by the forces of nature, unless of course, one considered the unfriendly environmental commitment to pesticides.


I couldn't. Because Taco, our little Americana, was counting on me to keep her environment safe. So were her little sisters.

It's A Celebration

Kissed by the sun on the Golden Gate Bridge!

Thankfully, all of our plans the following day were indoors. Our first stop was Mrs. Grossman's factory in Petaluma to see how her stickers are made. I can't say that any of us were terribly impressed. We were escorted to a room to watch a very long and boring video before viewing the factory, and the tour proved to be as unimpressive as the video.

We did enjoy Mrs. Grossman's large display room which was divided into sections for the new stickers she made each year. Her very first sticker was a heart. The girls also enjoyed browsing through the thousands of stickers in the gift shop. And of course, we had to bring some home with us!

Our next stop was the Jelly Belly Factory in Fairfield.


This was a spectacular tour. No cameras were allowed in either tours, but this was definitely a wonderful experience, and one I would highly recommend. Though the tour was completely behind glass, we were high above the ground floor and were able to look down into this amazing factory. Every facet of jellybean making, from coloring jellybeans, to tray stacking by robots, to final packaging by workers was exposed for viewing.


We didn't leave here empty-handed either!


Last Stop: Dinsert at A&W Root Beer.


Is this a happy kid, or what?

Beginning Again

Current events have definitely changed our course during the last eight months. My thoughts concerning our President and his Administration as well as the ideas that are now shaping our country and the rest of the world, and how these changes might affect our resources, have led me to consider the prospect of becoming more self-sufficient (but that's another post).

Something must first be said about the property we had our hearts set on. Less than two weeks before escrow was scheduled to close, we received a call from the lender informing us that they were no longer funding construction loans. The banking crises collapse felt around the world proved to be disastrous for us as well. Though our credit scores were above 800 with a perfect debt-ratio, our loan and our dream simply vanished into thin air. Our $5,000. deposit, along with $4,000. in preliminary drawing/plan fees, were hard losses to swallow. But we moved on. We layed it down as best we could: it had been God's money first, a gift given, and for reasons unknown, a gift taken away.

Eight months these days seems like an eternity of living, but I must go back to our trip up north and our visit to San Francisco for those memories did prove to be more memorable with the passage of time.


Part of the day we strolled along the streets of San Francisco allowing the architectural allure of old buildings to take us back to a time that seemed ancient to us.


We charted the crooked street on foot, hill after hill.


In the early afternoon, hungry tummies indulged themselves with bread bowls of steaming clam chowder and fresh baked bread from the Boudin Sourdough Bakery on the Fisherman's Wharf.




I was thoroughly intrigued by the arrangement of moving baskets that delivered warm bread from the kitchen to the cafe, and thought seriously if such a thing could be invented to travel from bedroom to bedroom for the purpose of collecting dirty clothes that could be sent directly to my laundry room.








Standing inside the Coit Tower at ground level, we were first mesmerized by the incredible murals depicting the Great Depression (which I was not allowed to photograph), and secondly, by the breathtaking views of the city after completing a short elevator ride.


Upon exiting the Coit Tower, I persuaded a passerby to demonstrate the first automatic, self-cleaning bathroom we'd ever seen. Unfortunately, no one in our family wanted to try this contraption for fear that certain unmentionable, naked body parts would be cleaned without permission.


The toilet, however, was not the focal point of our day. Earlier that morning we decided to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. I opted not to bring my camera because I was afraid I would drop it (I have a terrible fear of heights).












After we turned around to begin our walk back to the other side, we noticed the presence of several helicopters and rescue boats out on the bay and assumed they were performing some kind of rescue drill. We were amused for a time. But then a small crew of bridge men appeared and seemed to be searching quite intensely for...

you guessed it; a man overbridge (suicide). It was eerie. We watched the rescue attempt for what seemed like an hour. Though the older girls were enthusiastic over the idea of seeing a dead body dragged to shore, one was never found.


We encountered some pretty interesting stuff that day, including this very LONG light on the way back to our hotel.
















Now here's a SIGN that was crystal clear. It's a good thing too, otherwise, the designated driver (my significant other) would have ran it after 30 seconds.

To be continued...

Sneak Preview: A Birthday We Weren't Forced to Postpone.

BEEEEEEEEEP

How does one interrupt a program that hasn't been running for two full months?

Like this:









We interrupt this very dead and lonely blog to inform those persons who even remotely check this site anymore that we are still alive and kicking, and we happen to be smack in the middle of escrow on the lot we were only dreaming about buying back in May.

It's happening, it's real, and I've been buried (can one be buried like...ten times?) between the Gospel of John, the Middle Ages, Chemistry and General Science, Algebra II and Algebra I, King Arthur and Robin Hood, and other novels not to be missed like Charlotte Mason's, Ourselves (a book every teenager should read), and of course, Pilgrim's Progress and Laura Ingalls' By the Shores of Silver Lake. Not to mention (but I will) we've been humming to Palestrina's, Missa Papae Marcelli in the mornings when we aren't singing Blessed Assurance, The Star Spangled Banner and Barbara Allen in between emails and phone calls to and from both the architect and lender who have advised us it will be nothing short of a miracle if we close this deal in less than 60 days (October 27, to be exact), as required by the seller because the property was in foreclosure. Whew! The only thing truly missing in all this chaos is a pregnancy! STRIKE THAT!

God is continuing to open incredible doors for our family in ways I couldn't have imagined just five months ago, and I'm very anxious to share all of it as soon as things return to normal (I'm lying, they will never be normal again), AND...I get to post the rest of our vacation pictures and all the other photos that are hogging up space on my SanDisks from three months ago.

And I did say I was interrupting, so I'm giving myself permission to post these two pictures from the lot that we hope will soon belong to us.

Oh, and did I mention that my daughters are all old enough now to dig ditches and move rocks in all that dusty dirt, and lay hundreds of feet of pipe that will require getting that blue gooey glue all over their fingers after they break off all their pretty painted fingernails from sanding wood until their fingers are numb and they think they can't bear to pick up one more nail or screw among tons of construction trash.

I know I left something out. Oh yeah. On a clear day (unlike this one), you can see all the way to the island of Catalina.

It might just very well be one wild and exciting year...

BEEEEEEEEEP.............

Vision

There's a happy side to having a bad dream, and that is, that the dreamer eventually wakes from it, having had nothing more than a cold sweat. Though it was difficult to commence a family vacation in the midst of wavering doom, I managed to keep the camera rolling if only to persuade myself that when my nightmare was finally over, I'd have some proof that it wasn't such a terrible dream after all.


We spent an afternoon among towering redwoods,


took a morning drive through endless fields of grapes,


and embarked upon a short hike through a small forest of Manzanita trees clothed in clusters of fine lace; the result of the symbiotic relationship between fungus and algae. City life does not lend itself to such mysteries. Lichens rarely survive in the air pollution back home. So these discoveries were, for me, the first of several "pleasant" signs of reassurance.
















And I reminded myself that the girls were getting a chance to SEE the things we'd learned about in Botany this year, not quite as excited about it all as I was, but nature has a way of getting directly in one's face without even being conscious of her.


Tangled trails of tree roots were no exception,


nor was the moss covered rocks or saplings that grew straight up from the base of this tree. For years I'd been telling the girls that someday I would take them to see these things.
















Another sign?

To be continued...

Sneak Preview: Our Someday in San Francisco

Making Whine With Sour Grapes

With my 12 year old's birthday in the dumpster, and my soon to be 7 year old's crammed back into my suitcase, we searched for one hotel and then another, and I wondered if we might have been better off strapping down our mattresses on top of the car like the lunatics we saw on Highway 101 the previous day.

Teetering on the edge of mental illness myself, I entertained several more happy thoughts aloud in the car. The first being that we were about to slap down another couple grand for TWO rather small rooms, since putting us up three in a bed might have raised a red flag or two at Guest Services...or would it? But the peanut gallery was protesting again. Secondly, the reality of having hotel accommodations meant we'd be eating three meals out every day instead of dining in (I didn't have the heart to tell them that our credit card was going to deny our third meal). And thirdly, I was unable to shake off the comment our waitress made the previous night when she spoke under her breath about the river.

"Some people do (eyes narrowing), but I've lived here over three years now and I'd NEVER swim in it."


And the signs. Was it even safe to drink the water?
















Definitely a message here. Let's see. How about this one: "Wake Up Sonoma. The floodgates of hell are about to burst open."

To be continued...

Sneak Preview: Perspective