Why I Love My Daughter-in-Law
“Can I come by?” she asked on a Saturday morning. “I have something for you.”
“Now? Sure! I’ve been working outside and I’m just cleaning up a little in the kitchen. It’s a great time.”
Moments later she was there, empty-handed. We hugged, but she laughed when she saw my puzzled face and said “it’s outside by your back gate.”
We walked back together, and there it was, just what I wanted:
She bought me a compost-maker!
I’ve got diamonds. I’ve got pearls. I’ve got everything I need to decorate myself and my house, too much even. But what I don’t have – or I didn’t until now – was a compost maker. This girl knows how to thrill my heart.
We spent a few minutes reading the instructions and putting it together. Wooo HOOOOO!
Don’t you hate to waste? I’ve been throwing out carrot peelings, and onion skins, and salad mix that’s gone a little gooey in my refrigerator, my coffee grounds, my newspapers – they are all fodder for making good compost, and good compost is desperately needed when your yard is greatly sand. Wooo HOOOO! Now, I can make my own compost!
I totally love it.
I decided to cut back this year, not to try to grow so many tomatoes and so many peppers. I don’t know what happened, but I had ordered some seeds, and I couldn’t let them go to waste, and I bought a couple tomatoes that are supposed to do well in this area, and we still have many nights with temperatures lower than 70 degrees (F) so I can still hope to have good tomatoes before the great heat sets in for the summer. Some people tell me that if I can keep the tomatoes going through the summer, just green, not setting tomatoes, some of them will start setting tomatoes again once the weather starts cooling once again. I also learned that the time to start your seedlings in Florida is like January or February, to get good tomato crops before the heat starts, so I got started about a month too late. On the other hand, they are doing great. We shall see.
This is what ‘cutting back’ looks like:
I found the Black Krims at the 14th Annual Emerald Coast Garden Show at the PSC Campus in MIlton last weekend. Mr. B’s Tomatoes was right where I bought them last year, and it was my first stop. I also bought one he said would also produce well for me, called Tommy Toe. It’s a weird name. Tomato people often give their tomatoes weird names.
My roses are growing like crazy, unfortunately, a week before Easter. I wonder if I will have any left to give to the church for the Easter services?
I planted tulips and Iris in the fall; the tulips are coming up but I have yet to see a real tulip bloom. The irises look good – I am thinking they may do well here, and that is a really good thing because I love iris. (I pulled the weed)
Three of my tomato plants have tomatoes on them!
Anniversary and Punch List
It’s been a year since we bought the house. We had to have it entirely rewired before we moved in, and now, we are so glad we took that time and spent that money; the insurance companies have gotten more and more finicky about insuring houses in Florida. One of the newest causes for non-renewal is aluminum wiring, which is what we had taken out and replaced with copper wiring, not cheap, we can tell you.
We are so glad our contractor made that recommendation. For one thing, we sleep well at night, knowing the wiring is new and well-installed. For another thing, it was good to get it done while we had nothing in the house, and the workers had easy access to everywhere they needed to tear out walls, rewire, put back walls, etc.
Do you make lists? I have a list I made in November, and today I finished off the list. It had unfinished tasks going back to the move-in. You prioritize, you know? Even when you have accomplished the most important things, sometimes it is just too overwhelming to tackle the next thing so you take a break . . . and that break can stretch.
The little plumbing things are all done. Every single one. Wooo HOOOO. The final light fixtures are all up. Woooo HOOOOO! The outside watering system is working, woooo HOOO, and we have a guy helping us restart our lawn – wooo HOOOO!
It’s kind of like having a baby. If you think about all the things that need to be done before you do it, you might have second thoughts. It’s all-consuming, and it can be exhausting, emotionally and physically and financially. Just like having a baby!
And, now that I have come to the end of my punch-list, I would celebrate, except that new things are cropping up – the gutters, the drainage, the driveway, the air conditioning . . . nothing that needs to be done, no emergencies, but all which need some attention, some fine tuning, so that we are not dealing with an unexpected disaster.
It’s not like Trust Towers in Kuwait, where we lived in Fintas, or Al Fardan Gardens in Qatar, where we could just call the management if anything went wrong, and someone would show up to fix it. Now, we have to think about what we want, how much we are willing to pay, and we have to make decisions.
We are waiting for the air conditioning man to come. The electricians have told us that the inside and outside units (the expensive pieces) are fine; it is the thermostat that needs replacing, so we have to have the A/C people replace that. Meanwhile, I think I will sit back and enjoy our new light fixture.
Here is what I love. AdventureMan and I are so often on the same track. We wanted traditional – a crystal chandelier – but we didn’t want elaborate, we wanted simple lines, not a lot of embellishment. When we found this, we both knew it at once – welcome home, new light fixture!
And here is one other thing we love. Through our contractor, we met the best people. The plumber is good, and thorough, and honest. The electricians are good, and hard working, and serious. They are all knowledgeable professionals, people we can trust.
The electrician didn’t want to charge us. He said these were leftover tasks from last year. We insisted – a year later, this is on us, not on them. We fiddled around a whole year looking for what we wanted; it’s not fair to not pay after a whole year.
Sometimes we just feel so blessed, having come to this broad and spacious place, Pensacola.
AdventureMan’s New Talents
This has been a great month for AdventureMan.
He knew what he wanted. He thought about it, planned it, sought out resources. He now has three photo shelves in his office, where he can display a changing round of photographs. He bought the lumber, tacked on the trim and mounted them on the wall, all by himself.
All these years he has worked so hard – he has never had the time for a fun project like this, and he just sits there and grins that something he was able to do himself can give him so much satisfaction and happiness. Retired, maybe, but still learning new skills, scaling new mountains.
Last night, he baked his first pork tenderloin, and then roasted up some asparagus with an olive vinaigrette sauce. Oh, yummmmm. Still growing, still developing new skills, it is so much fun.
Today, he is going out to explore what kind of kayak he wants to buy. 🙂
“You Seem Happy Here – Are You?”
The landscape designer and I met last year as she toured our garden and helped us identify the plants we have in our garden. She had great ideas, and gave us a lot of help caring for a mature garden. She suggested we live with our yard for a year, and then decide how we want to move forward.
It was the best advice. What looked like a wreck of a garden after last year’s very cold winter came back back with a vengeance. We had fabulous plants, plants the birds and bees and butterflies and hummingbirds all loved to visit. We had a chance to visit other gardens and to see what we like. This year, we have more of a plan, and this lovely lady who has been gardening in Pensacola all her life, helps us fine tune our plans.
We’ve been going around the yard, figuring out where to put a pomegranate tree, a lime tree, a couple hydrangea bushes.
“You seem happy here,” she starts, “Are you?”
“You sound surprised!” I laughed, thinking how many moves I’ve made, and how I really like living near our son, his wife and son. We’ve been here a year now. I make friends slowly, but I actually have a few now.
“I wasn’t sure you would be able to handle the heat,” she confided.
I laughed. “I can’t. There is this wonderful thing called air conditioning. When it gets too hot, I don’t spent much time outside. I’m doing fine.”
It’s been almost a year since we bought the house here. It seems like so much longer, so much has happened. Last night, AdventureMan made a fabulous Bermuda Fish Chowder. Our son’s wife and little Baby Q came by for dinner while our son waited in line at Best Buy for a new iPad2, wooo hooo. He came by as soon as finished the purchase. Life is sweet, and yes, I think I am happy.
Things Get Done
As many of you who know me may know, I am mildly obsessive-compulsive. I like things to be in their designated space. I like a clean house, down to the baseboards and the hidden places. I suppose it gives me some mystical illusion of control in a world where there is little (I believe) that can be controlled.
I believe my faith is pragmatic; I have learned – at least in my life – that God is in control, and that his plans are far better than my plans, although when I am in the midst of chaos, I have problems clinging to that belief, LOL.
But he sends me messages. As I have ended the old year and started the new year in a frenzy of cleaning out and organizing, I have come across lists from nightmare times in my life, mostly getting ready to move or settling in to a new location. Lists and lists of things to be done, things to be checked on . . . and I am comforted to know that what – at the time – was overwhelming, the details sorted themselves out. Things got done. Little by little, we ate the elephant.
As I came across notes and lists this morning, for buying this house and getting settled in Pensacola, I was able to take a deep breath. We survived. We got it all done. Lists and lists of details, and we got it all done. All of a sudden, things assume their proper perspective, and I thank God for this view of what my life looked like a year ago compared to what it looks like today.
We are settled.
I have friends.
We can pay our bills.
We have a house to live in and cars to drive.
We are in good health, and we have a good doctor.
We have a place where the Qattari Cat can stay when we go out of town.
We are registered voters, and have driver’s licenses and pay our taxes on time (insh’allah.)
We have a strong and rewarding family life, and activities we enjoy.
Life is sweet.
Organization and Settling In
We’ve only been back a week, but we’ve spent this time unpacking, cleaning things up, sorting out things we don’t need, finding places for things and putting things up. AdventureMan is having a lot of fun, he bought this beautiful tent hanging which just exactly fits around three of the walls in his office and the entry:
He spent a day putting tiny nails into the wall while I sewed a cord for hanging onto the back of the band. He has it up now, and he loves it. He also put up some pictures on the wall and instituted a recycle basket and a shred basket. He is so organized:
He put together another set of cubicles for me so I can keep order in my closet:
We are people who need order in our lives; we live chaotic lives in an ordered environment. 🙂
AdventureMan’s Bathroom
“Hey Dad, what happened, you draw the short straw?” our son asked AdventureMan when he saw the bathroom in the Pensacola house.
We really love having our own bathrooms. They may be small, but we don’t have to bump one another out of the way, we don’t have to try to groom while someone is showering and steaming, and while I can have the A/C blasting, AdventureMan can have the vents totally closed. It works for us.
But his bathroom had swinging doors, saloon style. And an old toilet that didn’t always flush completely. And an old bathtub with old tiles.
While he was away, we did a new bath – new walk-in shower with a rainfall showerhead, new toilet, and best of all, a pocketing door. He is going to be SO surprised. 🙂
It has been so hard keeping this secret. I can hardly wait to see his face.
Rainbow to the Rescue in Pensacola
This post is about an amazing blessing. You won’t think it is a blessing at first, you will think it borders on disaster, but stop. Think about it.
Late this afternoon, our contractor friend was in putting bars in the guest suite that people can use to help navigate around, help lift themselves off the toilet, etc. We were busy looking for a stud for the shower bars when it started raining.
“That’s raining pretty hard.” he said.
“It rains like that all the time,” I said blithely.
But it really was coming down, and it wasn’t just for a few minutes, it poured, and it kept pouring. The lightning was really close and we heard a loud CRACK! and then BANG and the power transformer on the post near my house was hit, but my power must come from somewhere else because, by the Grace of God, we didn’t lose power.
“Oh no! This has never happened before!” I exclaimed as I saw water seeping in the guest suite where we were working. (This has been cleaned up a little bit for this family blog.)
I thought it was coming in under the French doors, but when I grabbed the old towels for soaking up purposes, I saw that there was more . . . coming from under the walls! Horrors! I was almost stopped still in my tracks – there aren’t enough towels in Pensacola to handle the amount of water seeping in!
“This is a task for Rainbow!” my contractor said, and ran for his truck, to exchange it for his Rainbow truck (he is both a contractor and a Rainbow franchise operator).
While Dave was gone, his assistant, Bobby, used their wet vac to get as much water up as he could, dumping the full tank several times out the window as we struggled. Finally, the rain slowed, and we could mop up the remaining wetness. He started a fan.
Dave came back with the big Rainbow truck and an intimidating amount of equipment. Now I will go into a parenthetical gripe about men and their toys. The biggest part of me is incredibly grateful to have this resourceful man who helps us with our construction and renovation needs, and then is there, like Superman, to the rescue, when disaster strikes. Another part of me wishes he didn’t have that excited gleam in his eye. My problem is his challenge – he loves the adrenalin.
Honestly, it’s only a small part, and mostly it’s because I wish I didn’t have any problem at all. Dave has a meter that shows where water is still sitting in the grout between the tiles, and how it has soaked the baseboards and begun to creep up the sheet rock. He explains how in Florida, where the humidity is so high, the sheet rock can’t always dry out fast enough to avoid mold formation, and that even though it eventually may dry on its own, the mold can survive until the next moisture hits. Oh aarrgh!
Hours later, we have huge fans running, and we have dry air in oscilations being wafted into our walls to insure they dry thoroughly, but not too much. We have machines taking readings. Our insurance company says we are doing all the right things and the adjuster will come by on Monday or Tuesday.
This was supposed to be a quiet Saturday night. If it had been a normal quiet Saturday night, we might have been upstairs, watching some TV, listening to the lightening and not worrying too much about it. We would have gotten up in the morning and gone to church. We might not have even known our guest suite was flooded for days!
So honestly, I feel blessed. I am blessed that if this disaster had to happen, I had people with me who knew exactly what to do, and did it.
As they left, the Gulf Power people were out fixing the exploding power transformer, and I thought how many heroes there are on this earth, people who do their job under the worst circumstances, people who leave their families to serve because there are jobs that must be done.
God bless you, all of you, health workers, police, firemen, electricians, plumbers, emergency services, soldiers and sailors and airmen – all who sacrifice and serve. May you sleep well at night, and may God bless you and your families who support you.
I had a disaster, but I was surrounded by every resource I needed to deal with it. Thanks be to God.
If you have a disaster, and you live in the greater Pensacola area, I can recommend:
Rainbow International Restoration Services
David Murphy
O: 850-994-4411
Cell: 850-281-0232
Home Improvement: Spackle and Paint
When you paint those walls (or have them painted) save a small container of your paint in an airtight container. When you are putting things on the walls – yeh, you can measure all you want, but sometimes that wire on the back of the mirror or heavy painting is just a little longer than it should be. It happens to everyone, even the pros.
When I was an Army wife, our houses had to pass inspection before we moved on. I was GOOD. I learned how to mix a little spackle and paint, and use a toothpick to seal the holes.
Once the hold is sealed, use a paper towel or kleenex or toothbrush (in a pinch your clean finger) to make the surface a little rougher, otherwise the spackled area stands out because it is smoother than the surrounding area. Using a toothpick works best for filling in small holes, if you have a larger area, use a popsicle stick or small spatula. Having a little paint of the original wall color mixed in to the spackle makes the fill invisible. 🙂
(Whenever I use spackle, I think of my sister Sparkle, who calls oatmeal ‘spackle’, LOL!)
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