September 9 2013

September 9, 2013 Greetings My Friend, Another at home day and I realize I needed this time so much. We went to Norton yesterday to pick up my CPAP supplies only to find out I went the wrong month. I wound up getting a sick stomach so Junior brought me home and we did not shop. We had lunch on the porch. A gentle rain started coming down and we were not getting wet and well for me anyway I loved it. Alex is eating again and this girl is so happy. He is 18 so each struggle makes me wonder if the end is near. He has lost a lot of weight. Junior stuck him in a tub full of soap and the fleas that were all over him are gone. He even saw some blood and thinks that may be why he was not eating and losing weight. We spoil him now with ham for his meals our theory is if he will eat it great…..so the boy has always loved ham and now it is his daily diet if he eats I am thrilled. With the past couple of weeks and all the running I find I have needed to slow down and stay slow. When I have tried to run again too soon I find myself with a sick stomach ache so I slow down yet again and to be honest I am grateful that I am able to stop as I need to these days. I love the dream of this house. I love it nearing completion and yet there is a whole lot that still needs to be done. I start picturing days of the work all done and just a bit of fixing to be done on the house. I picture my routines and they comfort me. I do them often these days and the set-backs still happen but not as often or as long. These days I also start picturing myself adding a couple of craft projects to my day and that excites me as well. Junior has now found a place to get his prosthesis worked on or a new one and that is the very last thing we need to find and not go to MI for. We will go check the place out next week and again it is a 3 hr. drive from our house but in the same state now. I should say it is a day’s drive there and back since a lot of the places we go to are in Tennessee which for us is a few hours. The big hospitals and the specialists are there and most of the people around here tend to go to Tn. to see the specialists. It works. I continue to dream of the house being more or less finished. I realize we will always have a project to work on but it should not be the big project it has been. So far Junior has not made it inside to work on the kitchen yet. I keep thinking any time now and then another week a month goes by and nope he has not started in the kitchen. He wants to extend the deck all across the back of the house but right now he is working at shoring up the foundation and his plan is next summer add to the deck, we will see. For me if I did not get a bigger deck my feelings would not be hurt. When it is completed though I know I will love it even if the kitchen is another year down the road. As I sit and look out of the lace sheer curtains and the rain falling gently I fall in love with my house yet again. I marvel that we’ve owned the house for three years now and have lived in it for 2 ½ years and I am as in love or more in love with this house as the day we discovered it. I love taking care of this place more and more. Some weeks I go great guns and some weeks I move so slow but overall I am taking care of my home and that too excites me to no end. Retirement has been a struggle so far but now I am moving into the routines and frankly I love it. I truly see Junior and I growing older very old in fact in this place. We are also setting the house up where if it becomes too big we will be able to close off a portion of the house and have an apartment sized place to keep up with. I like that a ton. Many older people tend to move to assisted living and have a very small place to call home. Our thinking is if we set the house up to live in that amount of space if need be then we won’t need to move into assisted living. I also love having a gas fireplace and a wood burning stove. That way if the power is out we have a back- up system in place. Down the road we will get a whole house generator which means it truly would be a seamless moment where we hardly realize the power is out but for now we have heat and we have a well on the property so if the city water is off, we still can get water. The goal for this home is to be able to stay in it as long as we can and grow old in it. I do believe we are working towards that goal and frankly that feels good. At some point we will go back and widen the doorways a bit more but for now they have not been widened. We realize that projects on a home are a never ending process so we are good with that. We won’t have to paint much since we have wood paneling well actual planks of wood on the walls and ceilings. We also have everything on one floor and we are starting to put a wheelchair ramp for the outside. The gravel is around the property so if need be we don’t even have to mow the lawn although we still keep the grass short at present. Junior has a riding lawnmower and that helps him a ton. I like that we are attempting to stay put and not have to move. If we do then we will but the goal is to stay here until the end. May God bless you and keep you, make His face to shine upon you. Love Janet