New Life Old Farmers

Saturday morning we were “up and at ’em” early.  ‘Early’ being a relative term for the country, but as the ‘we‘ included Number Two Son and The Teen, I believe any parent would declare it to have been ‘early’.  The nail gun was firing away before 9 am on Number Two Son’s day off.  Number Two usually goes in to work at 5 or 6 in the morning, so technically he did still get to sleep in.  Did you notice the word, ‘nail gun’.  Yes, this day’s work promised to be fun!

The Teen was up early, because she had been warned that ‘we’ were starting early in the attic and that ‘we’ were all helping.  The current access to the attic is through her bedroom, so between the traffic and the nail gun, ‘we’ were going to be pretty hard to ignore.  She also had a very specific job to do and for this she too needed to be ‘up and at ’em’.

Fully fueled, our goal was to secure the new rim joist, install the joist hangers and hang the floor joists.  (All joist words are fancy new terms for me and I am quite proud of my continuing education).  We are anxious to get the sub floor down in the space because the old chimney leak caused there to be a soot everywhere and just working in the space is dirty, very, very dirty.  Also, our gymnastic abilities of being able to work while balancing on beams has been well tested and the odds are no longer in our favor, so it is just a matter of time before one of us does go, WHOOPS, and puts a hole through the ceiling into the kitchen.  With a sub floor down, the whole space will be cleaner and we’ll have a floor to walk around on while we continue our attic remodeling project.

It was a very rewarding morning as we saw the floor structure come to life.  Number Two and I were a neophyte team installing the hangers across the room.  We work well together and were careful, diligent and consistent as each hanger, somehow had just a slight right tilt to it.  We offered to redo them, but luckily they were declared ‘good enough’ by My Loving Spouse Construction Engineer and we forged ahead, with hanging the joists, which was almost as much fun as running the nail gun.  Watching the flooring come together and the making of the room was almost magical, completing this stage, all before lunch!

The Teen and I spent the day together.  Annually, it seems, we spend one day together doing the unthinkable….cleaning out her room.  I know, I know, she’s old enough…yada, yada, yada… but the truth is…she needed help.  Just to set the record straight, The Teen is a caring, funny, smart, fashionable girl… here is a random picture to prove it.  

She is also a bit of a …squirrel, which is a nice way of saying that things tend to disappear up into her room.  She also hangs onto everything…e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g!!!  Stir into the mess a size-able portion of ADD and her room becomes a disaster.  So, then we plan some Mother and daughter time…to de-clutter, de-mess and unearth her room….with a bit of laughter, a bit of muttering, a bit of frustration and gnashing of teeth…and then…ta da…she has a somewhat organized clean room… I say somewhat because I have learned when to quit and that she is not me (lighting bolt-news flash) and needs to do ‘it’ differently.

In fairness to her, she did just (18 months ago) move and wasn’t quite sure what she should keep or throw away.  Well, now…we threw ‘it’ away… envelopes, water bottles, school spiral notebooks, other people’s school spiral notebooks, granola bar wrappers, granola bars, candy wrappers, homework (2 years old), partner-less shoes, hair bands, Easter candy, junk mail, and a school lunch.  The Teen hasn’t been in school for 6 months, so at best the lunch was 6 months old, but I have a sinking feeling that we might have moved it.

Items we put away in their proper places…Easter Basket, plastic eggs, 4 pairs of scissors, 3 spoons, 2 bowls, a screw driver, a mini-recorder, tooth paste, Dad’s shirt, first aid supplies (a box full), a camera, a flash light, 2 boxes of Christmas ornaments and partridge in a pear tree.  There were three constants that kept turning up…dust, bobby pins and socks…unearthed out of every nook and cranny.

The attic boxes are now out of her room.  Her extra bed is no longer a wardrobe heap and we’ve put two giant bags in the trash, have two bags for the consignment store, and two boxes for the charity shop.

The Teen is making progress.

If you grew up when I did, you watched ‘The Waltons’.  We thought it would have been nice to be a Walton.  Their family, their music, the way they narrated their story and of course the way they said good night. For those of you who do not realize it, My Loving Spouse is a ‘Walton’, a British Walton, but a ‘Walton’ still the same and I am Ellen Newman.

When we got married, I was a Realtor in Southern California and had spent years attempting to make ‘Ellen Newman’ known, and being ‘known’ when you live on 100% commission is a tad more than important!  It just wasn’t wise to change my name.  ‘Newman’ is also my children’s name, which made me feel awkward about leaving it as well. Four years later, My Loving Spouse and I live in a small town with two different last names and the truth is…I don’t like it.  People don’t understand we’re married, they don’t know how to address our mail and I want the name of My Loving Spouse, not the name of my Ex-Spouse.  I talked to my three…’would they mind if I changed my name?’….

Their answers were so typical of them…

“No, I thought you should have changed it a long time ago…”

“No, I think you should change it, I’m thinking I want to change mine too…”

“Whatever makes you happy, Mom…” ….and then I realized, I will still have the only name that matters to them…’Mom’.

Of course now, we have lived here just long enough to confuse people even more.  Those who were just getting use to Ellen Newman…might wonder where she went.

So, in 2014, I am getting two new names.  Two and I am pretty darn pleased as punch.  As soon as I pay the money and jump through the ‘hoops’, I will be Ellen Walton and I’ll have to think twice when someone asks my name.

My other new name?  Here’s a hint from the old TV show “The Waltons”…Yep…”Good night, Grandma!”

My Loving Spouse and I spent most of the day rewiring electrical that was done…hmmm, how shall I say…’poorly’.  I took one look at it, and said, “Whoops!”…even I knew it was ‘not good’.  I not only learned a lot about electrical wiring today, but I also learned a LOT of new words and I can repeat NONE of them, and here I thought the ‘Bad British’ word was fairly awful.  There is an electrician somewhere with his ears burning.  The thing about electrical is that ‘whoops’ is not a good word.

Many of the repairs meant we needed to work in the attic.  Working on electrical in the attic, is not too hard, as the electrical is all easy to see.  Well, it would be easy to see, if there were light, so holding the flash light was one of my jobs, along with being the Glorified ‘Go-fer’ or as My Loving Spouse calls it, ‘Step & Fetch It’.  Of course when we are working downstairs the tool we need is upstairs and then visa-versa, hence the need for the ‘Step & Fetch It’.   (This is not such a bad job on Sunday’s because it means that the ‘Stepper & Fetcher’ can stay abreast of the football scores each time they pass by the TV downstairs).  One of my other jobs is called ‘Keep My Loving Spouse From Falling Off Of The Wiggly Step Stool’.  As you can imagine, this is a very important job.  So far we only have one ‘whoa!’ and one other ‘phew!’ and no ‘whoops’.  He is a pretty big guy, so ‘whoops’ would really not be a good word.

Exposed electrical, such as we have in the attic, ought to be easy to work on, except, right now the attic has no real ‘floor’.  What one sees is the ceiling of the kitchen and this was not built to hold anyone..so in an effort to not fall through the ceiling into the kitchen, one must only walk balancing on the joists….all the time, this is a prime example of when saying ‘whoops’ would be really NOT good.

The attic and the kitchen below it were what we believe to be the second piece of ‘old house’ added to this old house, a practice that used to be common.  We have plans to make this space more ‘usable’, but needed to rip out the old floor first as the floor was nearly a foot higher than the other floors upstairs.  The attic is a fairly blank slate with only a bit of old wallpaper to show its age.

We remain ever optimistic.  Believing it would take us 2 hours to complete the electrical fixes today, we’d also planned to haul the 16 new floor joists 2x6x12 foot beams upstairs, as well as getting them installed.  Instead… we worked on electrical for 6 hours, put tools away for 1/2 hour, fed the animals for 1/2 hour, put football on, grabbed two beers and crashed.

The aftermath of the Christmas remodel chaos continues, albeit a tad more slowly now that Number One Son has had to go back to work.  Boxing day was spent cleaning the house as the soot that came downstairs had met (fairly frequently) the muddy footprints from four dogs going upstairs.  The Damn Cat managed to get into the soot as well, so although our bedroom is far from the eye of the storm, the soot was not!

With a clean house, and My Loving Spouse at work, it seemed the perfect time to start another project, so out came the sewing machine.  I took a deep breath and got out more extension cords for the lamps, so I could see what I was doing, as the light in that room is still ‘out’, I started into the ‘drapery’ project for the family room.  Drapery seems ‘simple’ but the truth is, it has been intimidating me.  It is a LOT of fabric and cannot be crooked, because everyone is going to see it….all the time.  I managed to almost finish one drape, so for our evening entertainment, we played ‘let’s put up the drapery rods’.  I think we might be ‘visual’ people.  We cannot tell exactly how something should look until we see how it does look and then we get to make it right or in other words, do-it-over.  Which is what we did with drapery rod number one…

As it is Saturday, My Loving Spouse is home to work on the electrical, which means I will be the electrician’s helper.  So  in just moments, I will leave the cozy comfort of my new flannel pajamas (blue with cows on them) and leap* into action.  Today’s plan… rewire downstairs bathroom, figure out why Number Two Son’s heater doesn’t work, lay a floor for the attic, trim a drape,  put up drapery rod number two, and finish laundering rugs and bedclothes with soot on them.

As we sat last night with drapery rod bits strewn about us, I looked at My Loving Spouse and said,

“Do you ever think we were fools to have taken this house on?”

“Oh, yes, often…but we are happy fools..”

True…very true…

*What actually constitutes ‘leaping’ shall be defined at the sole desecration of the ‘leaper’.

It is here.  Christmas Eve, one of my favorite days of the year!  We are blessed to have a passel of Offspring here to go to church with us, which is truly my favorite part of Christmas…the Christmas eve service with family.  I know I am blessed…

I just set our dinning room table and yes, I used the sterling, because…well, that is what it is for.  I am also not cooking yet, because this is what my kitchen looks like.Nothing about the electrical ‘issues’ have been easy to fix, with broken drill bits, hot wires, drill bits meant to go up the inside of the wall, managing to go out into the room next door (which prior to this did not need to be painted…oh, well, what’s a little touch up), there were a few Bad British words said.  All the electrical is currently off in the kitchen, but I am pretty sure, that if push came to shove, I could cook the meal on our BBQ… sort of hoping I don’t need to do that.  My Loving Spouse and Number One Son are doing their best to get the electrical back on in the kitchen, and to have light, as all the light fittings were taken out earlier in the day, when we thought things would go well.  Ah… it is good to be optimistic…  and as The Teen just said, “Well, we’ll look back on this and remember this as the Christmas the house was all ripped up!” True…

As I look out on the hay field above our house, I can see the flock of sheep that are currently there, and know that the Shepard is near by.  What a wonderful reminder to me, of why we celebrate this day…

 Merry Christmas to you, our dear Friends…from all of us at Glory Farm.

The ‘elves’ have been very, very busy around here, and I do not mean the Christmas elves.  I mean the ‘let’s rip that stuff out and see what is there elves’.  This is one reason why a family should all go to church together… otherwise one can come home from church to this…

and comments like…”it sure was a good thing your Mom was at church when we started, she would have had a ‘come apart’ (English word for tantrum), if she’d seen you dangling off of that roof”.

Then there was the “Hi, Mom…come on in and see what we’ve done…”, from Number One Son, as he waved to me out of what used to be the attic window.  Number One Son has been wanting to get in and start ripping out the attic floor ever since it was ‘mildly mentioned’, that we might…

As our old home is actually parts of other old homes, some of the parts have been ‘interestingly’ tied together.  Such was the case with the floor to the attic as it was a complete step up off of the bedroom it was attached to.  There are actually multiple floors here with electrical in between.  Not only that, but the chimney is also here and at some time there was a chimney ‘leak’ which meant at one point the ‘elves’ hit a few years worth of soot.

Always good to be wearing appropriate safety items.

My handsome son who now looks like a zombie…

These elves were tired, so with showers taken, all work ceased while the Sea Hawks were playing, with plenty of loud yelling at the TV.

One of the great mysteries of this old home is the electrical… and I must say it is not a pretty picture.  The good news is that it has ‘worked’ for a very long time, but it is our goal to get the electrical to work for an even longer time…  My Loving Spouse often says things like…”it is concerning” or “down right scary”, so we are working on ‘it’.  So, with a yummy dinner into the bellies of 6 adults at the table, we decided it was time.  Each adult took off to ‘man’ a different area of the house, while My Loving Spouse turned on and off breakers in the electrical box, in an effort to understand what was tied into what.  With shouts of “the bathroom is out, it is on, the bedroom is out, it is on”, we were a ‘low tech’ systematic discovery team.  Then the ‘Head Elvies’ (My Loving Spouse and Number One Son) were back into the attic…to find ‘new’ wire tied into ‘old’ (really old) wiring, ending up with them turning off the lights to the kitchen, pantry and attic and leaving My Loving Spouse with a very bad night’s sleep.  There was a certain mention of an electrician friend down in La Crescenta and our saying…’where is he now and perhaps he’d like to come for New Year’s..’

I believe we’ll be out of some power in some spots for  some time, which is okay as we really do NOT want to burn the place down and Number One Son can pull out the old wire.  It is Christmas, we just need power to the stove to cook the roast and we’ve lamps to run off of the ‘good’ electricity, wood for the fire to heat the room and we’ll be just fine.

So, what are your ‘elves’ up to?

In the year 1964 (or so) my mother (the queen of organization) procured a large spool of red yarn-like ribbon and then proceeded to wrap all gifts with it for the next 42 years.  The spool was large, but it wasn’t that large!  The moment a gift was open, she’d snag the ribbon back and start rolling it up to be returned to her stash.  This red yarn sort of ribbon wasn’t even particularly nice, it was made mostly of polyester or some other such wonderful product, but boy has that stuff lasted.  We have one string of it left in my stash and one present gets wrapped with ‘the ribbon’ every year, just for tradition’s sake.

My children have a habit of opening their gifts and then passing me the gift’s ribbon and saying, “Here Grammy”.  Okay, so I might be just a tad like my mother, but in my defense I wrap presents with much nicer ribbon, so ‘it’ is worth saving!  I might even snag the gift tags too, but only because they are really cute and hand-made and definitely able to be reused.  Unlike my mother, I do not save wrapping paper….well, maybe a few pieces but only if the pieces are large and nice.  (I am quite sure we did not save any of the ‘Justin Beiber gift wrap’ Number One Son found last year).

I have found I enjoy wrapping gifts, when I have fun supplies and set aside the time to wrap my gifts.  I’m not so crazy about the times I need to fly out the door with that small ‘something’ for ‘someone’ and am hurried, behind and late.

I am quite sure I/we will never make the leader board at Pinterest for our ‘perfect’ perfectly wrapped family gifts.  We are much too ‘real’ life here, especially once we throw in the pile My Loving Spouse bought and wrapped himself all in blue.  Gotta love a guy that can buy and wrap his own presents!  (My Dad was a great guy and never wrapped a gift in his life.  He’d walk in the house hand the ‘gift’ to an offspring and say, “Here wrap this, please”.)  My Loving Spouse’s paper reminds me of the year one of my brothers wrapped all his Christmas gifts in the Hanukkah paper my mother was saving.  I am sure, said brother did it, just to ruffle her feathers so to speak and I am sure it worked.

Isn’t that the irony in life?  We remember the quirky bits, mixed in with the beautiful or practical bits and that is what we hold on to and find dear… which leads me to suspect that The Offspring will have plenty of memories to hold on to as we’ve plenty of ‘quirky’ around here.

I do try to be ‘real’ in my posts about our life here.  I believe some of my photos of cows calving was a bit more real than some of you would have preferred.  I am grateful for my home (my mess), my animals (their mess), my family (more mess) and our life, very, very grateful…but… often life is hard.  There were days my life was very, very hard and I am grateful to those who helped me through…

My favorite Christmas ‘saying’ are the words put together… “HO HO HOPE”.  Christmas is the season of ‘Hope’, but not everyone knows it or feels it or…   Some people get desperate… for them this season is just too much…

Today is the anniversary of my oldest brother’s death, to be real, his suicide…one week before Christmas… a very, very long time ago, when I was just a teen.  No, I don’t know ‘why’…  do we ever really… when others are hurting… we may not know it… or we may not realize how desperate they are to end their pain or…or…or…  All I am sure of is that, I do not know…anything really…

I had heard the phone ring late the night before…then in the morning my father woke me up to tell me, that Mike was dead…to this day a phone call in the night sends my heart to pounding.  My siblings were scattered about, my parents left to go to his home 400 miles away and I was left alone….it was beyond awful…  No one knows what to say, so they say nothing…and then you are really, really alone…so here is my big piece of wisdom, you don’t need to know what to say to make it better, you cannot make it better…you can only make it worse by saying nothing…so say something…stumble on your words, cry with your friend, hug them, or just sit and hold their hand…but don’t pretend it didn’t happen…because their heart will forever be altered.

 (Gotta love the 70’s)

A few Christmas’s before we lost Mike…upper right with the twinkle in his eye…

I wish I really knew how to give others hope… but I don’t think I do… but I was told and I have learned that it is true, that ‘we are only as sick as our secrets’… my hurts never got better alone… so I am being as ‘real’ as I can be and if you are hurting this season, I am sorry for your pain, so very sorry for your hurt, I have been there…

and….for Mike…. I don’t like this day…this ‘wrong’ anniversary….

but to you…whoever you are…there is hope.