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Now Sadie has packed herself up. We are getting so tired of piling up boxes and waiting for the new house to get finished. The new owners dropped by the other day to put some things in the shop to store. I am wondering if I need to get some place to put all my things if the house gets even further behind. But will cross that bridge when it comes. I took a walk on the dam and then stopped by the house Friday morning. All the taping of drywall was finished and I suppose next comes the painting. I will check tomorrow morning to see if anything new happened since.

There was a walk through the meadow and some drawing in the book.

Lots of rabbit sightings in the clover along the path from gym to house site.

And at the house interesting things to draw in the book about its construction.

This morning I hauled five more bags to the trash.  Yesterday packed a few more boxes of teapots, cups, candles and candle holders. So much pottery from the dining room cupboards. I will miss all these built in cupboards but have found out once something gets stuffed back in….it is simply not used. So many things I saw, liked, bought, and put away to use someday. Silly. There are days I think of taking one plate, one place setting of cutlery, one cup, one bowl and letting them sit on the kitchen counter waiting for the next meal to be ready to eat. But maybe someone will visit and I will need more, so more gets packed and I am hoping there is enough cupboard space for them to come out of those boxes.

In the meantime I enjoy the little pleasures of what stays behind.

Tomorrow I will call and see if a rug cleaning place can come and roll up three or four area rugs to take away, clean and return all rolled up for the movers. Two of them have been in every house we’ve had since ’93 when we moved here and never had a professional cleaning. If I can’t find a local cleaner then I roll them myself and they go as they are.

There are still paintings and other things on the walls. And two framed documents are making me wonder if I should take them in their frames. One is my undergraduate degree and the larger one is my Masters of Fine Art degree. I had them framed when I received them because no one in my family ever went to college, some did not graduate high school. I hung them over my computer desk in the office downstairs and thought of how my parents died before either of these degrees were earned.

When I was trying to pay my way to a two year Associates degree after high school, my father took me aside and slipped me a $100 bill. I had never seen one before, and knew he had not seen many. He told me it was for my tuition and a couple of books the following semester. Tuition was $70 and used books about $10 each. That was almost sixty years ago and I still remember his wanting to help me out.

The degrees only mean something to me personally. I was the only one who needed to see them and remember the struggles of achievement.  Maybe I can hang them side by side in my new walk in closet over my massage bed, or behind the ironing board in the laundry room, somewhere, I think. I will let you know where they end up.

Last night I fixed myself a Turbo Tonic. It was a good idea but unlike a gin and tonic, there was not a desire to have a second.

Til later….

It has only been three days but here goes…

I go to bed early and rarely go anywhere in the evening but the night of the third I awoke to a neighbor’s fireworks. It was quite the sight from my porch. But so was the sunset just before heading off to bed.

Wasn’t that fun!

The new house now has drywall all up in every room.

That last image is the dining area looking out to what will be a small screened porch. So more drawing in the house book….

and yesterday while checking out the drywall, I found this hanging tool still in the garage.

With this tool the tall (6ft 8in) installer can and did work alone. I just love the look of the thing…so drew it in the book.

Because I am bored stiff with packing boxes, I dug out my watercolors again to work on the Meadow Book.

These are some of the plants I either bring home or photograph so I can draw them at home. I don’t think I am quite ready to drag a chair out there and sit while balancing my paints, pencils, water and brushes.

This morning I went to the dam before checking in with the builder.

He seems to be waffling on my plan to move in mid August. And, of course he can. It was only my idea, not his. The problem now is not supplies for my house, all those are here. It is shortage of labor. The good thing is he has no problems putting extra topsoil in the back of the house for my landscaper to fit in a Japanese-type garden. There will be a small pond with trickling water, Japanese shrubbery/trees and all my round stones collected here in the yard with my outdoor stone sculptures. Thank heaven he (the landscaper) is moving all of that so I don’t have to ask the movers.

Speaking of movers, I need to stop stalling by painting in books and get the rest of what goes north packed up. Family will be here in less than a week to load it all up. I defrosted the chest freezer in the garage for them to take. Now I need to eat some of what I found in there before movers take my refrigerator along with everything else. The cleaning lady will not be back until near the end of the month and will help me scour cupboards.

I am running short of boxes so will stop by the grocery store again tomorrow for those nice strong egg loading ones. They used to be half the size and great for filling with books and still be able to lift. Now they are twice the size and perfect for anything but books. I need to ask the movers if they move dressers with clothes in them or prefer them empty.

I will ask Patrick and Marla if they can get on a ladder to pull nails I can’t reach and touch up the walls. I want to leave this house ready to move into. I want the new owners to get on with enjoying this house right away and not sigh at having to do much before they can.

Okay, that is all from here in a sea of boxes…filled with the things I somehow justified worthy of coming along.

Til later…..

 

I went to the dump this morning…just like I do every Sunday. This time loaded with soggy bags from defrosting the chest freezer in the garage. It is such a great feeling when I drive away from there. No changing my mind now!! And before I leave the house, I take the half full bag from under the sink and walk around to bathroom drawers, open them up and if I don’t see a need for the assorted things in there, in the garbage it goes.

The lady at the bank who keeps me in twenty dollar bills told me that the free shredder won’t be coming til October. Too late for my needs. Now I am in the downstairs office trying to get a grip on three cartons of papers needing a shred. After about ten times, stacking three sheets together, it wants a break. A few minutes later it will start up again. This could take forever! I can haul the papers upstairs, load them into the car and drive about a half hour to the nearest professional shredder. There I can pay sixty-nine cents a pound and get it over with. It seems a tempting alternative when I think of how many bags of shredded paper need to be taken to the dump each week til I leave here.

I was going to watch a movie on prime while shredding but there is no audio…lousy picture that continually pauses and no audio. This particular computer is on its last legs and is waiting for the daughter with tech know-how to take it all apart, clearing information from the drives.

So like Dilly here, I am packing things up.

The new house should be completely drywalled by the time I go there on Tuesday morning. Thursday morning it was about half done.

My bedroom and walk in closet.

The following morning I walked the dam.

Then because I miss drawing and get bored with filling boxes, I started the sketchbook about the meadow near my new house….

I put a baby killdeer in because there are so many flitting about. Now because my shredder bucket is packed and it is taking a break, and I don’t have more garbage bags down here to fill with these endless strips of paper, I might just finish this and go back upstairs and draw some more,

It is the fourth of July holiday here. A celebration of our country’s beginnings. With the giant leaps backward made by the Christian-biased Supreme Court, there is not a lot to celebrate. We have begun the journey to abject failure as a free and open democracy. This is not a country I am proud of anymore. We are exactly what the rest of the world sees, a country that has lost its way, through ignorance and an insatiable greed that has found a way to feed the ignorance to maintain power for such a small minority.  Hopefully by this time next year we may be on a corrective course. There is always hope.

For now I am going to ask myself again, “Do I really need this?” And keep on packing.

Til later….

 

I walked through the meadow a couple days ago to check on the house and deliberately get close to this pile of red soil near the gym. I pause there to appreciate how much it reminds me of being in Australia.

And you can see where it was dug from the rise behind under the trees. So there is more where that came from. I love it. And when I got to the new house, the drywall had been delivered to every room.

Naturally the following day I walked back over expecting it to be hung, at least in one room….not so. But one of the men I stop to have coffee with told me that if the drywall hanger is still the tall worker (6’8″) then it will be hung quickly. So tomorrow morning I will go back over to see if it is underway.

Last week I also had a chance to walk along the river. I took the down stream side and endured hundreds of mosquitos just to see how the high river was affecting the shoreline.

Geese swimming close to the path,

With so much soaked soil, a tree toppled taking some of the trail with it.

The mimosa trees are in full bloom. Pink powder puff blooms that don’t last long before covering the ground beneath.

Today I packed a couple more boxes and told the cleaning lady to not come back for four weeks instead of her usual two. By then the big moving truck that my son is going to pack full will be gone with much of the furniture and artwork.

I had some time to draw in my building book.

These two by fours are getting tedious. The book is close to the halfway mark and things should get more interesting once the drywall is in. Next will be shelves, shower tiles and doors, texturing walls and painting before flooring and cupboards arrive. The appliances are waiting in storage.

Packing so many of my books to take with me. I have had the grocery store bagger bring out sixteen boxes that held four gallons of milk each. Any larger than that and it is hard for even movers to pick up when loaded with books. Those sixteen should hold just the ones in the living room. Those big coffee table books that were in the den took three boxes. They are so heavy! I even found an old hardcover Australian cookbook. I might make myself a Pavlova with my new oven once I get settled. Too bad we don’t have passion fruit here….

Til later…..