Our Land

It might not be the best use of my time to journal right now.

But I am being good to myself.

This morning, painters came to paint the trim on our house. Our shutters are no longer faded burgundy vinyl. Now they are brown. I think they look nice. However, having a crew of painters on site is stressful to me. They open all the windows (well, they have to, to paint the sills). But then they smoke. I baked apple crisp to try to drown out the cigarette smell.

I was also working on laundry. At our house, there is always laundry. The head painter came and asked to use my laundry tub to do something with his brushes. I said, "Sure," and took him down to the basement... where I found that a dustcloth and two socks had fallen into the washtub and plugged it... so when the washer drained after the wash cycle and again after the rinse cycle, it had overflowed the laundry tub and flooded the basement floor.

Our basement is very cluttered. It is also very dusty. When you add about thirty gallons of water to the mix, you get a big mess.

I was very sad. I worked hard and moved everything to dry areas, using approximately thirteen towels to sop up all the wet. Maybe more. The painter tried to help by mopping. I'm sure he got up a bunch of water, but I felt like he was in my way. I needed to move things. I emailed an SOS to Shawn and he kindly came home and helped me move furniture and appliances so I could get into the last corners to dry things up.

Although the windows are all cracked open so the paint on the windowsills can dry, making it fairly cold in the house, I got warm working on that mess. I got a little hot under the collar, too. I wish people would be careful not to throw small cloth items into the laundry tub. This has happened before. I do not like it when this happens.

Anyway, the damage is mostly under control and I should be preparing for the Job study tomorrow. But I am taking a moment to "chill" and do some things that will make me feel happier... like eating a piece of apple crisp and writing about our land.


This is Jonathan getting ready to four-wheel out to see the land. Actually, he, Shawn and I all went together on the four-wheeler.




This is what our land looks like. There are about ten acres of arable land, which is currently covered with six-foot tall weeds. You can four-wheel through the weeds, but it would be very hard to walk through them, plus it would be easy to get lost since they are so high. As soon as we close on the property, we are going to have the weeds mowed down. Behind the weeds, we have about ten acres of forest... you can see the trees in the background. So if the economy fails, we can try to grow food and raise a few chickens, a couple pigs and maybe a cow on our front ten acres, and we can hunt deer in the back ten acres.




Here are Shawn and Jonathan exploring our woods. Did I just say "our woods"? I never even thought I'd own a swimming pool, and here we are looking at... woods. They are pretty wild; I'm sure we'll have to watch out for poison oak and poison ivy, and there are some very thorny wild rose type vines. But it is beautiful nonetheless, and Shawn and Jonno found a deer track. Jonno is already begging for a bow.

I can't believe this is happening to me.