New Life Old Farmers

I have a complete double gloved golfer’s tan, even though I haven’t played golf in years. I wear work gloves almost all the time. The exception this week, would be when My Loving Spouse and I had to rub Bag Balm on Agnes’ udder, milk her and unblock her teats. It was greasy, hot and messy. Agnes was not happy about being in the head catch & squeeze. My Loving Spouse was not happy about being on his knees in the floor of the barn with a cow’s teat in his hand. She did try to kick us and peed and pooped and swished her tail making everything even more messy. We finally got her unblocked and milk flowing freely for little Ike.

It would not have been so bad, but Ike spent day two of his life eating from only one ‘faucet’….so, we had to do it again. Agnes was not the only frustrated, irritated animal in the barn! Day three, My Loving Spouse declared them ‘on their own…I’m not milking that beef cow again’! Luckily, for us all, Ike seems to have figured it out.

This has allowed us to view our happy herd from the side of the house, where we have been installing cedar siding. In theory, this is not too hard. If the boards were not a tad warped, it would have made the job much easier.

My Loving Spouse was in charge of whacking one piece of siding into the ridge of the lower piece of siding for a necessary snug fit. My job was to use the very heavy nailing gun to nail it all in place. No one got ‘nailed’ or fell off of a ladder, so it is all good, very good.

We run the nail gun off of the compressor we call “Puffin’ Billy”, because it has a steady quiet popping rumble to it. We snagged this great little compressor at a garage sale for $20.

My Loving Spouse was in charge of figuring out how much cedar we needed. He tried to explain board feet, which is different than linear feet….(not to mention tired feet), but honestly, I just was too exhausted to care. He makes a few careful notations.

The electricians did the same thing making notes in handy spots.

We are at a sweet spot in our remodel progress, where each step really feels like a large accomplishment.

The porch gets laid out….and voila!

Our days have often started with My Loving Spouse in the morning telling me how nice and easy today’s job is and how quickly it is going to go. The end of the evening he is usually telling me, “I’m too old for this.”

The Dry Wall team was dropping off the heavy sheet rock. (They are our favorite, because 1. They do dry wall. 2. They showed up 3. They keep saying “No big deal, don’t worry”) My Loving Spouse told the head guy, “I’m too old to be hauling dry wall around”.

‘You’re not old!‘

“I just turned 70!” My Loving Spouse explained.

‘Sh&$ You are old!’

We might be old, but we are a formidable team…and we indeed are blessed.

Ike arrived without any of our usual drama. We had been checking my cow, Agnes around the clock for signs of calving. At 5:45am My Loving Spouse got up to do the morning ‘calf check’. He returned to say, we had a new born black calf. I donned my fluffy pink robe, shoved my feet into my sneakers and took off for the pasture to check out for myself our new addition.

I declared the tiny calf, adorable.

Mama Agnes, Ike and brother Hal….I call this their ‘Christmas card photo’. You know those photos, where everyone has been fighting and arguing, not happy to be together, but smiling for the camera as soon as someone says, “Say, Cheese!” The second the photo was finished, Hal started acting like a teenage brat, head butting the little calf and knocking Ike down.

I called My Loving Spouse on the phone,

“You need to come out here! We need to get Hal out of the field before he hurts the calf”.

‘Okay, I’ll get dressed’.

“You don’t have time to get dressed! Put on your robe and come quickly !!”

‘Oh, my, bloody hell!’

Moments later, we two old folk/farmers adorned in our bathrobes, ran around the field chasing one large teenage steer out of the field, keeping Agnes and baby Ike in the field and letting the two horses go where ever they wanted. By the time we were finally having our morning coffee, we had everyone in the cows’ field, except the annoying teenage steer, Hal, who was serving detention in the horses field and pouting.

Baby Ike is a small calf, as his father Danny the bull was a Galloway, which is a smaller breed. Ike is just about as cute as they come and we are so glad he is here safe and sound.

I like Ike.

I am grateful indeed and very blessed.

I have had bucket lift envy for sometime now. I’ve found this is a fairly common phenomenon among those of us with big tall barns. We were eating dinner with a wise older farmer from our church and his eyes glazed over a tad, when he found out we had a bucket lift for the weekend.

A big blue giant with a 40 foot lift.

Everything looks different from up high, although I seldom actually looked ‘down’.

We organized our time with THE Lift by the hardest jobs to do with a ladder. The first item on THE List was installing two new windows in The Buckaroo room. The new windows were hefty and the opening is the highest spot on the house. There are also electrical lines to be careful/cautious/mindful of. My Loving Spouse squeezes The Lift right into place, without smashing the downstairs windows in the process. (Harder than one might think, as The Lift does not move smoothly, but more in fits and jerks).

The old storm windows come down and with it a long and disgusting amount of dead flies. The flies had been stuck between the storm window and the old painted in place windows.

Ah, the country life….

The windows go in without a hitch….on our end. We had special ordered the windows from THE Home Depot. They had managed to place the safety catches on the windows in places that will do no earthly good in keeping kids safe from falling out of these very high widows. I launch into a long angry rant about Home Depot. This is not the first frustration brought on by that place. I pray for Lowes success, while saying the blessing at dinner later that night.

We spent the afternoon spraying 10 gallons of ‘Crabby Apple Red’ paint from Sherwin Williams on the highest, hardest to reach barns on our farm.

How to paint the cupola has been an often discussed topic. We’ve been told that the previous owner tied a rope around his youngest son, threw the (very long) rope over the barn and then drove away from the barn on a tractor, thereby hauling the boy up to the cupola. We’ve never found anyone small enough and brave enough to try this stunt. So enters The Lift…

My Loving Spouse makes a harness to keep him safe and attached to the lift, as even at the end of it’s reach is not quite long enough. (Note to self, if we ever do this again, get the 60 foot lift).

He gets all of the cupola he can safely manage painted. It is clearly time for lunch. We then set back into The Lift together to paint all the white parts of the barns, that we’d inadvertently sprayed with red. Armed with wasp spray we keep a diligent eye out for the flying stinging pests.

By the end of the day, we are exhausted..and the barns are looking grand.

The only thing left is to keep an eye on that cow of mine. Agnes was/is due to calf anytime.

We’re grateful to have this done and dreaming of our vacation next month!

We work so well together.

Indeed, we are blessed.

We got a plumbing bid for the new kitchen. The price was…not bad, except they couldn’t start for 6 weeks. The total $$ did not include fixing the ‘backing up’ problem we have every 3 months or so. (Drain lines…aren’t they grand!)

Plumbing…how hard can it be?

My Loving Spouse knows plumbing. He got the ‘up to date’ requirements for our plumbing code….and got to work. The water lines were easy, even boring (says the one of us who was not under the house).

We didn’t want to loose the kitchen sink until we had to, so we just cut out a cupboard, one we didn’t plan to re-use.

Figuring out the exact location of the drain line culprit was going to be tricky, possibly even messy and My Loving Spouse had reason to be concerned. We figured out where we believed the usual ‘blockage’ to be. Cut up the kitchen floor and started to dig.

The drain line was down there somewhere!

We dug, filling many 5 gallon buckets of dirt, that were carried outside to Blue.

It took us most of the day and we filled two tractor loads of dirt to uncover the mess of the drain line….under the old kitchen floor.

New pipes, old pipes and even a few abandoned pipes. Old, old brittle cast iron pipes…we find filled with debris and sediment.

Let me remind you dear reader, that the only way to know one’s drain pipe is filled with debris is to have the drain line open, which means…that you do not have a working drain line, so we kept digging.

It is a wonder we didn’t have blockages more often with the poor shape these drains were in. We used a cast iron cutting tool, along with a saws-all, a hammer and occasionally some ‘encouraging words’ to break the old pipe properly.

The only breaks we took, were to check on Agnes who was due to calve yesterday and a quick lunch, and trips back to the hardware store!!! (Stay tuned…as I write this Agnes is still ‘great with calve’).

Yes, it seems we have a stream in our kitchen. Luckily for us, we have a new floor planned, as the fir did not stand up to the wear and tear of farm life. Today was a first, I’ve never dug in the dirt in my kitchen before.

Other than many loads of dirt I dug out, I also dug out a collection of bones. Some chicken…some not.

The exceptional news is that the new drain line works wonderfully! Don’t be jealous, I know, it is a thing of beauty.

We are very, very tired. However, when one’s drain line is ‘open’, stopping halfway through the job is not an option, but we are done. We can flush and that my friends, is a beautiful thing.

Yes, indeed, we are blessed.

Black onyx is our roofing tile color and I’d like to say, that is mostly what we got…eventually, after our many trips to The Home Depot.

What is the hardest part of roofing a ‘small’ addition?

No, it wasn’t getting the gun away from the Damn Cat.

No, it wasn’t getting the under-layment down in the wind.

It wasn’t hiring a roofer? WHAT! Truly, that was never really even an option, because

1. This is a small project…to roofers.
2. I wanted to do it.

The hardest part of doing our roof was getting the 16 bags of roofing tiles each weighing 100+ pounds up on the roof. My Loving Spouse was gone for the weekend, so I was trying to figure out a way to get the bags up where we needed them. I hatched a plan that included a lot of heavy chain.

I lay them up over the roof line, one end wrapped around the axle of our quad bike. Old planks of lumber laid down to protect the under-layment as I pictured the bags working their way up the roof.

Two sets of ‘come-a-longs’ and canvas grocery bags to carry each set of tiles. The wind came up, but I was careful. I called my neighbor and left a message.

“If I don’t call you back in 20 minutes, come and see if I fell off the roof”. The wind got worse and the ‘come-a-longs’ were not ‘coming-a-long’. I decided to call it off for safety reasons. I called my friend and left a new message, “I’m off the roof and fine.” She called two hours later, “Oh, I see you called. What’s up?” Note to self: do not use great neighbor as a safety back up plan when on the roof.

All of my work was not in vain, as it got My Loving Spouse thinking. As he arrived home, he had a new plan. The plan included Blue, a large long metal pole and heavy chain.

It looked a bit like a battering ram, or a lance for a steed, but whatever it looked like, it worked brilliantly.

Before we knew it, we had all the heavy bundles on the roof.

We attached the drip edge, the flashing and the first couple of courses of shingle tiles.

Roofing is ‘not’ rocket science, however I wouldn’t want to do this for a living. We worked well together. My Loving Spouse putting the tiles out and me nailing them down.

Whack, whack, whack. I did get my chance to run our roofing nailer. Actually, I got quite good at it. Every once in a while I missed, but all I could say was…”Oh, well! or possibly a ‘Bad British Word”

We used twice as many nails on the windy side and worked like the formidable team, that we are. Some of the tiles are a tad crooked, but only the fly boys can see them…I imagine they’ll say something like,

“Wow, that roof looks like it was put on by a 60 year old woman!”

Indeed!!

I managed the bucket lift and moved My Loving Spouse up and down as he trimmed the edge of the roof.

We’ve checked off ‘roofing’ on our long list of ‘to-do’ items…

and we know that we are blessed!

My site/blog has been ‘in maintenance mode’ (down) for the last few days, while I huffed and puffed about technology. It was all about security and thinks that sound like a ‘raspberry’ called ‘php’. Techno junkies are nodding their heads. The rest of you are like….come on, what did you break now, besides my phone, which I might have run over with the tractor (again) and now randomly butt dials people whose name begins with the letter ‘R’.

I had to learn soooooo much, just to keep it up. I couldn’t start over, and I couldn’t loose all of you.

For three days I worked with DIVI who were very fancy and helpful, as they helped me not be able to do what I needed. In the end, I returned the site to the theme Thesis (if you understand this, if you don’t understand, just ignore me).

Long story short…we’re back….we’re up…I will stop throwing my hands in the air.

The site is still a bit wonky, but I’m working on that. Wonky may be our norm.

We continue to wait for Agnes to calve from a white bull, My Loving Spouse is still in love with his duck Charlie, who follows us around like a Labrador.

I am in for the win! The blog is back up! I am grateful for you and….I won at croquet…and I am blessed!

My Loving Spouse said, “I don’t need any big deals for my birthday.” Even though he was going to turn a significant number. He ‘might‘ not have actually said, ‘deals’, it could have been ‘surprises’ or ‘parties’ or whatever, but I know for sure, that he said ‘need’, which is totally different than ‘want’.

Actually, I did know exactly what he wanted…more than anything…it was to see Number Three Son. Number Three has been gone for the last few years working with his church, so it had been sometime since My Loving Spouse had seen him.

Number Three and I (with a bit of help from Number Two) hatched a plan. Tickets were booked, and My Loving Spouse and I set of to the airport to pick up a ‘friend’ of Number Two Son. It is hard to get My Loving Spouse ‘flabber-gassed’, but we did it!

Tuesdays are reserved for Croquet. So far, the wind always blows hardest on Tuesday. We told Number Three to grab a hat that fit tight, so he could earn the ‘straw hat’ point.

I did break the news to My Loving Spouse that the Croquet ‘Pot-luck’ was actually a “Pat-luck”. Everyone was bringing dishes that he especially liked….Korean BBQ, Molasses cookies, pickled asparagus, guacamole, Irish Death and a new cocktail created by Number Two called The English 70! We are celebrating you!

Everyone, especially My Loving Spouse enjoyed all the food and drink at the Pat-luck. The wind howled and Number Two won….again! Someone needs to do something about that, as he is already the only one with 2 Green Bandannas.

Forth of July found us eating and drinking, (who knew that it was ‘Thirsty Thursday’ and beer was $2, luckily, we had a designated driver) in Yakima for the Pippins game. Hot dogs, beer, ice cream, kettle corn, tums….

A tiny little pancake for the boy, before he had to head to the airport and our week came to an end.

Time with his dad was precious to them both. Finding that he has grown to a delightful guy, was a gift to us all….as we share a love of history, and old architecture. I planned the surprise for them….but believe me, I am blessed.

Oh, my heck. We did make it to the end of school and have commenced enjoying the delight of summer…. a very, very windy summer, but summer break none-the-less.

The wind, often at 30 mph has taken a toll on the speed of our remodel, but as I sit here, we are moving forward and this is a very, very good thing. My Loving Spouse and I removed the cabinets along the wall that is to come down.

I do love demo! “Can I just whack something?”, is an often spoken sentence by me!

Yes, this did feel very good.

The wind, the wind, the wind has kept our crew a tad off kilter, but progress is being made which is exciting to us.

It is amazing to watch the ‘pros’ at work. I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is how planned out and careful they are. They lack the the chainsaw welding mayhem, we (My Loving Spouse and I ) tend to dive in with.

As they often need to balance…

…both wind speed and the ability to stand upon little bits of wood. This father and son team work so well together, they are a treat to watch.

In the meantime, we talk to electricians and call every plumber in the book and then some. As fun as it is to watch professionals work, finding good workers is exhausting. (Note to young people, go into plumbing, you’ll never want for work!)

Thank God, literally for My Handy Cousin, who was calling. “Do you need help? What needs to be done? What are you doing at the end of June?” My Handy Cousin and His Handy Wife would be on their anniversary weekend and would be happy to come and help.

We had no well laid out plan, as everything depended upon the ‘wind’, but we always have jobs or projects to do, this year more than most.

We had hoped to use his knowledge and his roofing nailer to put the roof on, but ‘wind’…

Honestly, it is always a bit hard for us to accept help. We are grateful for it, but it is more in our nature to give rather than take. However, the accomplishments of a day and a half…were more than we could ever, ever do! My Loving Spouse said, “Your cousin is a bit like a Jack Russel terrier, you just mention something and he is on it!”

A porch light was installed, the laundry room sink was installed (for when we loose our kitchen sink), the lawn was mowed, seeded, a truck bed full of mulch added and fertilized.

Then the real fun began!

We knocked the wall down! My Handy Cousin is careful, methodical and has every tool in the book and then some. (Me, I just wanted to whack it down.) His way was safer and less messy, but I did get to push the big piece of wall down once he’d sawn and cut and muttered to himself. Yes, it was very rewarding and I was grinning from ear to ear.

We sat and had a cold beer and then a load of hay was delivered. We were all back on our feet unloading and stacking 75 bales of hay.

All of this weekend was a wonderful gift and fun to work together, and I can’t help but think what our mothers (sisters) would think of us now. The very best part? Sitting together in church on Sunday morning…and we are blessed.

Some of us at school are counting the days until summer vacation is here. The rest of them…have somehow not learned to count yet.

Our remodel keeps limping along…

Each step is exciting to us…we’ve got footings and stem walls and one of us has just learned these terms.

Our view is delightrul with Mother’s day chairs…built out of wood so they don’t actually blow away in the Ellensburg wind. I love looking out the window and seeing them beckon to us…

To say nothing of the my other favorite view…

With only 4 hens and 2 of those broody, we knew we needed a few more hens. We picked up 6 Cuckoo Maran chicks and in the dark of night, slipped them under the Mother-to-be hen, whose name is awkwardly ‘Stewart‘.

She woke up to six babies and began clucking to them, strutting around the hen house.

Welcome to the Miss Moneypennys….all six of them…named by this cutie who named them, as he was playing with some plastic money at the time.

We are ready for school to be out, I keep thinking it is spring. We’ve got buildings to be built, and weddings to plan for and trips to enjoy and Grand KIDS to see, and so we know for sure, that we are indeed very, very blessed.