2/14/2010/ catching up

Trina taking a nap on our bed. We are still sleeping on the floor! Notice her dog bed next to our bed being empty!

David laying floors in the Living Room.

Stripping that dark ugly wall paper of the dining room wall took David two days. That stuff was a nightmare to remove.

Frozen water spill on our dam.

Today's sunset.
It is cold but we have sun for a few hours just about every day. It might snow and fifteen minutes later it is sunny. But yes, very, very cold. Like 17 degree just right now!

Friends, I have a lot of catching up to do. Since we are here we have hired a girl who totally painted the whole house! Her name is Kris and she has become an instant friend. She is a single mom who raised her boy by herself. Very, very hardworking girl. We do a lot of teasing and she has a great sense of humor. It took her a month to paint this house but she also works in the night as a care giver to an older couple. Tough girl I say. It became a habit that she would come in the morning after her care giver job and eat breakfast with us and I also would make her eat lunch with us. Have to take care of that woman since she hardly takes time to eat. As soon as she found out that I am big into healthy food she brought me this fungus which we then put into a half a gallon of strong black tea and let it sit for 7 days. It is supposed to changes the tea into this health drink which should be good for your digesting system. Every week we would set up what I called our witches brew and the first batch turned out pretty good. The second batch tasted funny and the third one was gross. We don't know what went wrong but we decided that our experiment failed.

We also had that ugly, ugly wall with those niches rebuild and now it is ready to accommodate a wall unit I ordered from Costco which will be delivered next Friday.

Then my dear people, David laid the hardwood floors for the whole house, about 2000 sqft of floor and he did a supper duper job. He still has the master bedroom to go but has to wait till the guys in the master bath are done laying the tiles. That should happen tomorrow.
Meanwhile I am battling the utility companies, TV set up, Internet and such things.
Now listen to this. Ordered the daily newspaper. Nice, the service was to start the next day. So went out at about 8am, no paper; went out again at 9am, no paper; 10am still no paper. Well lo and behold at 3pm the paper was delivered... so we get the daily news at 3pm...old news by then. The newspaper people probably come to work at 8:30 or 9am then sit together with a cup of coffee and read some of the other counties paper and maybe one bigger paper for national news. Then they decide which article they want to copy and which national news the want to use for that one national column. Meanwhile the Sheriff and Court report will have arrived for the most exiting news of the day! Then they will warm up the machines and are ready by noon to print. And oh miracle by 2pm the paper is ready to go and you get it by 3pm. And we used to complain in San Diego if the paper was not on our door step at 7am though we used to hear the paper guy throw the paper at our house at 5am. Welcome to the slower pace of the Midwest. Then of course there is no paper on Saturday because they already have to start printing the Sunday paper on Saturday and oh my gosh, you get the Sunday paper at 9am, how exiting!
Oh and then the news you read in the paper. Every day there is the Sheriff report with who did what complete with name of the person and address where they live. Also who hit a deer that night and the damage to the car!!! Then the daily court report with who went into foreclosure, who got divorced, who was in court for rape, spousal abuse and or bounced a check always with name and address. No privacy in this town that's for sure. Keeps you straight though because you sure don't want your name in the paper for all to read what the heck you did. Oh then there is also who sold a house and the name of the buyer! Yep, we all are informed what is going on here!

Then there is the Internet! One gigabyte my friends and that is what they call "high speed". If David, who is notorious for watching YouTube videos send by his buddies, opens one of the video links my computers Internet comes practically to a screeching halt. So thanks to the phone company we have "high speed" Internet which works most of the time but then the phone is an other subject because it is very sporadic in its job. It was down for 2 weeks the up for 2 days and now down again. Though thanks God I have hooked up Vonage for years which runs over the Internet so we are still reachable (if the Internet works that is). That also allows us to keep our San Diego number and also have a virtual Ohio number so nobody has to pay long distance to talk to us. And then of course we still have our cell phones with the SD numbers.

TV is another story. The phone company decided no TV for us so we had to go for Satellite TV. So far so good though they warned us that a good snow blizzard might take down the signal. No blizzard yet and I can actually watch the morning news which makes the newspaper obsolete except of course I want to keep the paper just to be informed who ran over a deer last night and how much damage it did to his car. And of course you never know if your neighbors name will show up in the paper because he bounced a check!!!
Talking about neighbors. We are really blessed with having awesome neighbors. Bruce on the right has himself attached to David and checks almost daily on our progress. He also has a barn full of cool equipments like tractors and stuff which David is truly jealous of. Every time we have a few snow flakes he is cleaning his and also our drive way and garage and barn entry. So he went last week to the Bahamas on vacation with his family and of course just then we have this big snow storm. Our drive way was buried a foot under snow and Kris couldn't leave to go to the store to get more paint because her wheels are spinning and she buries herself about another foot into a snow drift. Here comes the other Bruce from the left on HIS tractor (left neighbor and right neighbor both are Bruces) and tells us that Bruce from the right called him from the Bahamas and asked him to clean our drive way because he can't do it and we don't have a tractor. Now this my friends are our new neighbors. Unbelievable. And Bruce from the left apologizes to David that he doesn't handle his tractor to well because he is a city slicker. He lived all his live in Defiance our little town of about 16000 citizens (the whole county has 33000 people) and he calls himself a city slicker. David almost choked so he would not laugh but assured Bruce that he is doing a mighty fine job cleaning our driveway!!!
People, living here is quite an adventure. We love it here but there is ever so often a bit frustration lifting its ugly head. We still need to learn to slow down and not take our self so important. But yeah, it is funny sometimes how we see our self and others.
Now that I caught up a bit I will get in the next postings a bit more into the details of country living. Hope that you stay with me on our journey to become farmers in Ohio! I might not write every day put a couple of times a week or more for sure.
Thanks for the kind remarks and keep on reading!