planting corn

I planted corn last week.

At least that is what I said. When I go to work on the CoachHouse project Miriam asks me where I am going. She does not remember that we have the Coachmen here or that I am doing something with/for it.

So she asks me if I am going to "work in the garden." Both are the same general direction.

I say yes, because I am lazy and that is the lazy way out. "What did you do." "I planted corn."

She has no idea of what season we are in. Months make little sense to her, so me planting corn is not out of line, and she will not remember later to ask about the corn.

This is not how I would like to run my life, but it is where I am right now.

Kind of pathetic, kind of horrible, and still almost humorous, and in my world, any humor is good humor.

I have a lot of windows and glass in Idaho, until they get here I can not frame in the side walls, but she is protected from the rain now. That is very good!

There will be a 12 by 20 room this side of the CH. That will make the 400 square foot house quite luxurious!

The high gable covers the air conditioning unit and gives me the pitch I need on the addition. I'll use that attic space to store off season clothing.

small m miracle

In the musical "Fiddler on the Roof" there was a song about miracles.

While I am ready to admit that I am taking that song way way out of context, and that my miracle is a micro-miracle at best, I had that moment this morning.

On a whim I grabbed a large peanut butter jar and headed for the CoachHouse. That is the name I call my new building project. There are a lot of coach houses in this old Washington town. Always a town of some wealth, there were a lot of coach houses built in the old days. Some survive and some have been converted to very nice small living quarters.

The only thing mine has in common with a real coach house is that I have a Coachmen camper trailer encapsulated in the structure.

So this morning I grabbed a peanut butter jar, which has been the basis of all food storage around my life, to check a couple of drawers.

When I rebuilt Coachmen some years ago, there was a space behind the dinette that was a wonderful place for storage. On top is a bin for such things as folding chairs and below two very long drawers.

When I say long I mean 32" or so, They were as long as I could make them before they bumped into another cabinet. Then I put the drawers on full extension hardware that has a load capacity of 100 pounds each. The idea is that it was a good place to store canned food, and it still is.

But the miracle of the morning is that each drawer is tall enough for a peanut butter jar. That gives me a place for 30 or 40 or more jars! Ahh the luxury of it all.

Before we move in I'll paint the tops of the jars with blackboard black paint. Then, with chalk I can write on top the contents of the jar (that idea was from daughter 1).

So, once more my plan seems to be working.

The miracle is that I made those drawers that size!

Nor does life.

New doctor

Miriam went to her new Doctor recently.

This is Miriam’s new Washington Doctor. Daughter knows and likes Dr. Taylor and that is good. They went together.

There is a slight heart murmur, Doc reported, but “nothing we are going to split her open to fix.” Of course Daughter and I knew that (not the murmur, but the NOT split thing). Long ago we decided that we would not go that route, or other major intervention routes.

Doc suggested we check into an AD med that is supposed to help in late mid stage. It might keep her from being incontinent and it might keep her out of a nursing home, but no one knows for sure. If insurance will pay for it (AD meds tend to be spendy) we will give it a try.

None of this is new, none of it is amazing and none of it breaks any ground, but that does not make it easy to listen to and to think about. We have been married for 55 1/2 years. Miriam was sharp and cordial for our 50th party, but she likely will be largely unaware of our 56th.

She is the only girl friend I ever had. We have been going together since I was a sophomore in High School. Life has no guarantees, but I can rest in the knowledge that we had a good life together, that (most of the time!) we dearly loved each other.

Now she is still here yet she is not really here either.

This is another one of daughter 4's paper dresses. What is different with this one is the model! She is my granddaughter Emily.

The dress was a commission project (in other words, daughter gets paid for it!!).

http://www.papier-couture.com/

the gift

Winter is not my favorite time of year.

No secret here. When I was working the trades, winter was that time when things are frozen or muddy, when the jobs were further and colder and harder and slower. I just did not like winter.

Retirement has helped a little. If it is snowy or muddy I can stay inside, mostly.

This is not a particularly cold winter. We have not gotten even close to zero. It's 28 outside now at 6 in the morning. Our aluminum home, with it's single pane windows and less than perfect insulation (an RV with "perfect" insulation would not be very big inside!), is a bit chilly on cold mornings.

I miss the wood stove we would snuggle up to. I never did mind the rhythm of bringing wood in and taking ashes out. It was the fabric of my winter life. It was good that our house was smallish and well insulated, so it did not take a huge amount of firewood.

Last week we had a day of sun when the temps were in the low 50's and I was transformed. My mind shed (temporarily) these dark thoughts of cold and blossomed with thoughts of spring and sunshine, maybe even a bit of good old fashioned perspiration!

That warm weather (it was late December, after all) was a gift to remind me of the joy of spring and summer.

Thank you Gift Giver.

I am not a great fan of 4 door sedans. They may be useful, but rarely very good looking. This one is not an exception, but it is about as good as any 4 door I've seen lately.

Someone said one time, talking about classic cars, that the more doors the car had, the less value it had. Probably not true, but it did stick in my head!

PS: Happy New Year.

This is about all I saw of that Lamborghini as it slithered past me.

I guess it is good looking, but it sure is not very useful.

Hmm. I wonder what it would cost to insure one of those babies?

I looked it up and a guy says it cost him $20,000 a year.

If you have to ask you can't. . .

just passing

This was a crazy week.

We didn’t travel any really long distances. A couple hundred miles one direction, then the same the other.

What made the driving memorable were the cars that passed me! I don’t drive terribly fast and trucks and Chevy pickups occasionally pass me.

Last weekend were driving back from church in Portland. We were right where I84 merges with I5. I was paying attention to my driving and then I was passed by an orange Lamborghini. I know what it was because there was a big signature across the back panel.

It was one of those cars that can go 200 miles and hour and have little use on 55 mile per hour highways, but my envy is groveling.

As spendy cars go, it was not a real expensive version, you can buy a new one for a cool quarter of a million dollars. Wow. I read about a 1.3 million dollar car the other day. Probably I won’t see one of those any time soon.

Then later in the week I was driving on I84 across the lower right corner of Oregon and a really nice 4 door sedan passed me. I looked on the trunk lid and it said: Maserati. Wow. I didn’t know that companies that make really fast cars sometimes make really decent looking 4 door sedans, but there was one.

You can have one of those for a mere $130,000.

I suppose that includes a radio and heater?

Now I show my age. In my younger years, you could buy a new car without either radio OR heater. Sears sold heaters that could be installed, in case your southern car went north. Radios were all AM versions, with a load of tubes that ate power, and sounded bad at best. It was not a good idea to sit and “visit” with your girl friend with the radio on. The battery would go dead amazingly fast!

I know that one for a fact.

I did notice that in England, at least, you can “rent” both a Ferrari and a Lamborghini, and drive them each 6 miles on a track, for about $400! The joys of money!

Living in a tiny house is easier now than it used to be.

Music that used to take up shelf space for CD's or Cassettes, or help us LP records, now fits snugly in an iPod. Book cases full of books can be compressed onto an electronic reader.

If I could just put our clothes in a hard drive somewhere and pull them out, full sized, when i wanted to wear them.

Dream on!

I am back

It has been a while.

It is not that nothing has been happening, just not too much that would be worth writing about. We made a trip to visit daughter 4, her husband and her daughter for Christmas. They live in an 8th story apartment in beautiful Portland, Oregon.

I don’t think I took a single picture, though I enjoyed walking around the downtown Portland.

Someone said that “still water runs deep.” That should make someone happy, but most of life is not very deep and at times it is morbidly still.

Miriam is doing “fine.” She has a disease that does not respond well to much of anything and it continues to ravish her and her once active mind. Meanwhile, mine seems to be going into neutral.

I don’t wish to complain. Life is pretty good here. Miriam is getting better care with out daughters help than I could ever give her on my own, not a question in the world about that one. I struggle, but mostly I struggle with struggling.

When my kids were young I never would let them even say the “B” word (bored). It worked pretty well: “If you are bored find something to do,” father wisely (?) said. Now he has to live by his own words!

Santa was good to us. Miriam got a pair of UGG boots to help keep her always cold feet a bit warmer. The results have been encouraging. I got a Kindle Touch, the model I was thinking of buying myself. After using a tough screen phone I could not imagine negotiating a computer like device with a oddly placed keys. The Touch works pretty well.

The Kindle is a decent reading device, and for one who is living in a smaller space than before the idea of putting up to 2000 books in one small space is good. So far I have about 75 books downloaded, a lot of reading, but that much is just a corner of the capacity.

“Reading is fundamental,” the slogan used to say. Yea, it probably is. Thank you, my daughters.

We are going to Spokane today.

Google says it is a 2 hour and 55 minute drive.

Each year the boarding high school two of our grandkids attend, puts on a killer music program in a downtown location in Spokane. It is a sold out event (it is free!).

The big issue is not getting there, but standing in line for an hour before the doors open. It will be cold.

And, we will come back after the concert with the grandkids in tow!

leaving time

Years ago there was a country / western song about a farmer.

It was the end of summer, he had crops that were ready to harvest, he had kids that were ready for school and his wife, whose name poetically was Lucille, decided to leave him.

The songs main line was: “You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille.” Like a lot of country songs, you had to weep at the poor chap’s hardship.

Then someone did a parody (this was after Homer and Jethro, so it wasn’t them). In the parody version a guy was riding a bicycle at a good clip when the front wheel came off. The title for that version was: “You picked a fine time to leave me, loose wheel!”

Either version reminds me that there is eerily true.

As I get older, my “you picked a fine time to leave me” list is lengthening!

In our Idaho house there seemed to be just too much space between things. In the bus there sometimes seems to be too little space. Things are pretty compacted. Things I thought were important are not so much any longer.

The stuff that we no longer have is gone and I have made peace with most of that

Right now when Miriam and I could be having such a good life, we are not having the life we might have planned. It is not all bad, by any measure, but it is different. Other family members are slipping too. There are a lot of things that are leaving us.