Hitting on all 8 cylinders

 That's what my doc said about my current health status.

As a result, I now only have to get my blood drawn, and see him, every 3 months.  Still have to go every month for my shot, and every other visit includes a port flush, but those visits are USUALLY quick and easy.

The port flush this time was NOT quick and easy.  

There was a new nurse.  Why do new nurses ALWAYS have trouble with my stupid port??  

This time was so bad, the other nurse had to come and move the needle around to find the right spot on the port.  I had an anxiety attack. It was awful.

The thing is, I even have a little depression/scar in my skin over the access point where it's obvious that it's been poked over and over for 6 years.  

When I looked at it in the mirror when I got home, and her needle was at least a 1/4 inch off of that mark... HOW DID SHE NOT SEE IT??  She sprayed the numbing spray over the right spot, and then poked way off over there!

Anyway.... 

The condo was shown twice (that I know of), and the first offer was an insulting lowball.  Dave countered without asking me what to say, and fortunately, there was no response to the counter.

Then, someone came in at asking price, so I accepted.  Contract is pending.  Closing set for 4/29/21.

When Dave called my tenant to notify him that he has until the 28th of April (my birthday), he said he's planning to be out on the 15th.  He also didn't send me my April rent, which is odd, since none of us had any way of knowing if the property would sell.  

He DID pay his first and last month's rent when he moved in ten years ago, so I will pay him back his security deposit, and 2 weeks of his last month's rent.

We got a bit more outside work done yesterday.  Dave mowed the front yard, and I cleaned out the herb garden, and added a bag of fresh soil.  We got a tool that is like a tiller on a handle, and I mixed the new soil in, along with some of the leaves from last year that I hadn't removed.

I also added an oregano plant to replace the one that froze to death, and put in some sunflower seeds along the fence, some marigold seeds at the front edge, and a little cluster of cosmos seeds in a space in the middle.

Also got some basil plants to put in pots.

There are already tiny lettuce plants growing in my stackable pots!  Yay!

I'd really like to see Dave get out and do some of the cutting he needs to do in back. We have scrubby areas he has said he would clean up since last spring, and he has not lifted a finger.  Soon it will be too late. Again.

Dave's going to Costco this morning, and we are meeting a friend at an outdoor biergarten for lunch today.  Other than that, Dave will have no excuses, unless he engineers one, HAHA!

I'm happy to see the redbuds are blooming here.  I was worried that the harsh cold in February might have hurt them.

We also have a little bit of new growth on our photinia bush (all of its evergreen leaves turned leather-brown and fell off).

I am off to get my day started.  Have a good week!

Pots full of hope

 I know it's early, but I had to.

To celebrate vernal equinox, I planted seeds in pots. Nasturtium, passion flower (in big boxes with trellises to climb... where I put the cucumber vines last year), Heart's Ease... and the stackable pots have marigolds, lettuces, and cilantro.

It was fun to play in the dirt, and if it's really too early, the pots can be moved into the shed in case of frost.

I also scattered a bag of seed into my wildflower patch.  We'll see if any of it takes.  In nature those seeds would have spread themselves last fall and this spring, so there's a chance.

I'm waiting on the barrel containers, and the new cloth buckets I have.  I will put purchased plants in those, probably about a month from now.  Depends on the weather.

Today, we are attending to a going-away picnic (socially distanced) for our friends who usually take care of the house and the cats when we travel.

They also made us food when I was first in chemo, and while I was recovering from surgery.

They're young, and they hate it here (understandable), and they have the freedom to just up and move away.  She got a job transfer, and he works from home, so it worked out well for them.

Unfortunately, we have very few friends here, and losing them is sad for us.  

Not that we've been together for over a year now...but still...

The extended isolation is one of the reasons they are leaving now.  They feel it will be easier to go when they haven't been actively hanging out with anyone for all this COVID time.

I suppose they have a point, but we will miss them even more than we do already, knowing that they are gone.

Thankfully, we have another friend who is willing to help us out when we travel. She wasn't able to do so for a few years, but she's seen a change in her circumstances, and is willing again.

In other news, we got our tax refunds (federal and state) this past week, and Dave went out and got our generator.

You may recall that we had hoped to do a whole house, hard wired one that's attached to the natural gas supply to the house, but that kind of project runs between $10K and $12K on average.

Given the fact that Dave wants to replace the heat/ac for the house with this year's tax refund, AND $10K is WAAAAY out of range to begin with, we had to scratch that item off as permanently unobtainable.

The gasoline powered, portable generator that he got is plenty.  We will have our service guy add putting a specialized outlet on the back of the house to what he has to do to change out the heat/ac.

It will keep us with enough power to run the fridge, and to be able to work from home.

Anyway, Dave thinks this old heat/ac unit is on its last legs (it had a really expensive repair this past fall), and he wants to go with a more efficient, and up to date, heat pump.  The crew will also fix the shoddy duct work that has always been a problem in this house since we bought it.

If I sell my condo, this will be the last big tax refund we will ever see, so we have to make the most of it.

Off to get my day going. I have lab work and see my doc next week. 

Enjoy your first week of "official" spring! 

Panic

 The condo sale is not yet underway.  

Apparently, there are rules from the association that are causing problems, and Dave did not want to face them, or tell me, so everything is just... on hold... until he talks to the realtor.

He finally replied to her yesterday, at my insistence, but, of course, it was Saturday, so she was very busy. 

Hopefully, they will talk today.

One rule that is causing me extreme confusion: selling or not, is that renters are no longer allowed, and that I can't renew the lease ever again.

I feel this is highly unlikely, and that this rule is being misinterpreted.

I can't see that it would be a NEW rule since October, when I renewed my lease the last time, AND that I would not have been notified of a change like this. 

I seem to remember, from a few years ago, that this rule was added, but current tenants were allowed to stay, and renew, until they chose to move out. At that point, new tenants are not allowed.

The other issue: there's something about the tenant has to move out if the condo is placed on the market??

 WHAT?????  I can't afford this. Period.  AND, I prefer not to break my lease, and put my elderly tenant out of his home.

I also think this is being misinterpreted, because why would the association demand something like that?

Dave needs to step up and do what he said he was going to do, or the whole thing is off the table.

In other news, we finally got some rain last night. It was the first moisture since the snow in February, and much needed.

My daffodils are blooming nicely, even with their brown leaves, but my peonies are not coming up.  The cold might have killed them.  We'll see.

The little shrubs that were next to our shed, however, are clearly dead, and need to be removed. Dammit.

Aside from the anxiety attacks of the past couple of days (from finding out about the condo sale issues), I'm doing pretty well.  I am having SO MUCH LESS pain, over all, that I sometimes forget how bad it was just a few weeks ago.

There are no plans on the agenda for today, so maybe we can get outside and walk somewhere.  

I could use the grounding of being out in nature. 

OH!! And Frank GOT IN MY LAP last night!  The only other time he has done this was after our car accident in October.  He must be able to sense my emotional upsets. 

Wishing you a good week, and please send your good wishes for this condo sale.  I really need it all to work out in my favor.  That would be a nice change.

Albatross!

 It's been another boring week (except for the big news below), but sometimes, boring is a good thing.

We were actually able to get out and take two walks a day most of last week, and it felt so good to get our heart rates up, and to get some decent exercise.

My bone density test results arrived on Friday.  I still have osteopenia, and have not progressed to osteoporosis.  This is good news.

We did some yard work yesterday, after running a bunch of errands.  Dave finally got the weed whacker out to cut back all of the brown, dead stuff in the flower bed, so the "curb appeal" of the house is vastly improved.  

Some of that damage was from the ice storm in October.

The iris are coming up, but the daffodils and tulips in the flower bed are in bad shape.  Fortunately, the peonies hadn't started to sprout yet when we had the latest weather catastrophe.

In the back, I cut the damaged (dead) branches off of the English ivy, and cut the freeze-burned rose canes back. There are tiny buds on the rose bush, though, so it isn't fully dead.

I pulled my dead herbs out of the herb garden (the oregano was black, and now it appears that the sage and rosemary are also dead), and removed my potted plants that froze to death inside the shed.

This included my 6 year old geranium.  It was sad, but needed to be done.

We will do more today.  The mint patch, and my wildflower patch, both need to have the dead stuff cut back, and Dave needs to figure out how to get all of the bent and broken bamboo out of the huge bamboo patch.

There is still a lot to do, and we may resort to paying our guy to come and deal with some of it.

In other news, BIG news, one of my oldest and dearest friends, Margaret, has started talking about how I really should sell my condo in Lombard.  Like, NOW.

It's a buyers' market right now, and my mortgage value has flipped right side up -- after being upside down for 12 years.

She and Dave are pressuring me.... saying, basically, that I don't need to wait for a sellers' market, I need to off load this albatross while it's more likely to be bought.

Anyway, Dave and Margaret are working with a realtor to get everything done. Margaret, by referring us to her realtor, and offering encouragement and advice (she just sold her home in Illinois, and moved to her home in Michigan, after becoming a widow), and Dave by basically managing the entire process for me because my anxiety about it is THROUGH THE ROOF.

If it doesn't sell, and my tenant moves out at the end of his lease, I am screwed.  Bankruptcy, here I come. 

There's also the fact that the condo was my back up plan.... There are some big reasons that I didn't entirely want to let it go, but it's come to the point that I should probably just do so.

I hated living there, after all.... do I really want to go back if something happens to leave me homeless here?

No.

SO, as of yesterday, Dave called my tenant and let him know, and I composed a formal letter to send to him.  

I've also emailed the condo management company.

The realtor has the tenant's phone number, and my brother in law will pass his set of keys to the realtor some time in the next couple of days.

Dave will send the condo association rules to the realtor, so she is aware of the myriad restrictions for listing and showing a property in the building, and off we go.

Some friends of ours here put their completely NOT updated 2 bedroom home on the market last week, and it sold in a day.

My condo isn't updated, and has a few little damaged areas....but I am hoping that this goes as smoothly as their sale did.

The thought is that any actual profit I get from the sale will go toward the mortgage on this house, to reduce the principle, and cut our payments.  
Dave wants to actually pay this house off with the money inherited from his dad, but it's sitting in a cd for a few more months.

We'll see.  We may need to contact a financial adviser about the best path to take.

So, on that note, now that typing this all out has created an anxiety attack for me, I will bid you good week! 

Quiet week

Our long weekend last week was nice.  We did get out to what I am starting to refer to as "the deer park," up on the north side of town.  I led us off the pathway into the woods, along a deer path, and we were not disappointed.  Saw three.

My doc visit went fine, and my labs look good, and I got my bone density test out of the way.  It was nice to have so many hours off work this past week, between the long weekend, and my appointments.

Dave finally found out why we never got our microwave delivered.  

There was, as there often is with him (he does not listen), a communication breakdown, and the microwave was sitting at the store, waiting for him to pick it up.

They said the words "in store delivery," and all he heard was "DELIVERY."  

So, he went to pick it up, and our neighbor (everyone properly masked) helped take out the dead one on Friday, and install the new one on Saturday.

Best Buy accepts and recycles old electronics, so Dave will take the old one to them.

We donated the little one we bought to get by to an organization that houses homeless veterans.

It looks like my rose bush and shrubs may be severely damaged, if not dead. Time will tell.  The miniature daffodils were buried in the snow, so they are still green, but the taller ones, exposed to deadly weather by the drifting snow, are brown and curled.

Maybe they will come back next year, but without green tops to feed and energize the bulbs, I have little hope of that.

This will be a colorless spring in OKC, I fear.

We are off to Costco this morning, so that's all I have for the moment. Have a good week.

Present and accounted for...

 We survived the two blizzards, and record-setting cold, with little discomfort, other than the constant anxiety that we would lose power, or our pipes would freeze.

All of the feral cats disappeared when it got really bad.  

One by one, most of them have re-appeared.  There's only one we haven't seen yet. Even the elders have shown up.

This does our hearts a world of good, to know that they didn't freeze to death. That was, sadly, a distinct possibility.

There are a couple of houses around us that have open crawl space entries... we're thinking they  sheltered under those houses.

We got a total of 14 inches of snow, and the record breaking cold temperature of -17F, with wind chills of -30F.  We had high temperatures that were either just barely above 0F, or below 0F.  

Many friends had water pipes burst, despite their best efforts.  

This region of the country does not have the infrastructure to deal with weather like this. People died. 

Unlike Texas, our power grid didn't fail, but it came damned close, so rolling black outs were instituted.  For some reason, our area was never blacked out. 

If it had been, our pipes may have frozen as well.

As it was, we left water running 24/7 (not just dripping), and we were okay.  

The worst issue we had was that the water pressure in the entire area dropped to near nothing. This was due to 31 main breaks in the city alone, mostly on this side of town, and tripled water demand caused by everyone running their water, OR their pipes bursting!

The pressure dropped, but, thankfully, we could still leave a stream running to keep the pipes from freezing.

However, there was not nearly enough water pressure to operate our tankless water heater, and we were asked to conserve electricity, so we spent a lot of time in the candle light, with everything turned off that we could, and we had to skip showering for a couple of days.

We did dishes by heating water on the stove, and doing them in the sink, with a tiny trickle of ice cold water for the rinse.

Sponge baths like in the fall, only this time, we didn't have to do them by flashlight.

Water pressure has gradually come back up, and we were able to shower yesterday.  I also did laundry, and Dave ran the dishwasher, so we are almost back to normal.  The pressure is still low, but at least now, we can use the water heater.  It just takes longer to rinse the conditioner out of my hair, HAHA.

I have to say, once again, that Dave is a master of preparation....  Two years ago, he insisted that we insulate the attic with our tax refund money.  

In addition, he purchased crawl space covers that he installs in the late autumn every year.  These keep the raging winter wind out of the open expanse under the house, where our above-ground water pipes are.

This makes our hardwood and tile floors a bit less cold in the winter, and protects our pipes.

He removes them in the spring, so that the rain water and other sources of moisture can evaporate in the hot weather.

Without these things, we surely would have had water pipe issues at the very least.  

Our heating system worked hard, but it DID cycle off and on, instead of running constantly.  We were comfortable in layers, and shoes instead of house slippers.  

Unfortunately, replacing the windows in this 1927 house is an EXTREMELY expensive prospect.  One quote we got was $23,000.00  But, Dave wants to get started on them anyway... one or two at a time, using a Lowe's credit card.

It will take years to complete, but it's probably necessary.

Anyway, I wore Dave's parka to shovel snow, and my hiking boots with cashmere socks, but my feet and hands got REALLY cold.  Painfully cold.

Dave did a little shoveling, but I did most of it.  He's got a heart stent, after all.

Thankfully, Amazon has sale prices on winter gear, and I went ahead and ordered myself a decent down parka and insulated boots.  I may only need them once in a while, but now, I will be prepared with cold weather gear that fits me.

I had hoped they would come before the storm, but Amazon Prime no longer guarantees 2 day delivery like they used to.  If they did, I would have gotten these things the day before the first storm.  Oh well.

My packages arrived yesterday, when it was in the 40s out, and everything was starting to melt.

A friend also sent a care package with more long sleeved cotton t shirts for layering, and a polyester fill jacket and vest.  I think she raided a thrift store, HAHA!  I am so grateful that she went to the trouble.

So, we had scheduled this as a 4 day weekend, in hopes that we could get away from the house for an overnight or something...but instead, we have been home, getting errands done, and continuing to clear the melting snow.

The absolute isolation caused by the weather was really hard on me.  Even the zoom dance classes were canceled, because people didn't have power or internet. 

So, on Friday, the first day of our mini vacation, we got in the car, and took our chances of being able to get out of our neighborhood to a street that was clear.  

Many of our resources are along one of the streets that they DO plow, so we headed out to do a few errands.

It took 2 hours, but it was 2 hours of NOT being locked in the house, and we only got caught up in the deep ruts of snow on our street once.

The stores were mostly deserted, so we didn't come into contact with others, except at the cash registers, where the checkers were on the other sides of plexiglass barriers, and everyone was masked.

Getting out did my mental health a WORLD of good.

Yesterday, Dave went out to get groceries, because our delivery service app isn't working yet again.  He then took himself to a pub.

I was really mad about this because I am the one who goes stir crazy being cooped up in the house, and HE is FINE WITH IT.

Oh well.

All of the snow and ice is melting.  Some streets are flooding, but it's clearing away pretty quickly for the most part.

Yesterday, our car port was full of 2 inch thick ice from the meltwater, but today it is just wet.  The huge icicles are gone, and the street we live on is now mostly clear.

Today, it's going to be in the 40s again, but horribly windy.  We might try to get the taxes done later, and then, tomorrow, it's supposed to be in the 50s.  I am hoping to finally get out and take a walk.

I also need to go get my labs drawn at some point tomorrow, the last day of our little mini vacation, as I see my doctor on Wednesday.

Also have a bone density scan on Friday. I rescheduled it from last week, because I knew I wouldn't be able to get there on Thursday, after two blizzards!  

We are EXCEEDINGLY grateful that we made it through this weather crisis so much more easily than the last one, but there is no doubt that I, at least, have a degree of PTSD from the events of the fall.

I can feel the anxiety melting away, like the snow and ice, the further we get away from the events of this week.  

Wishing my readers warmth, comfort, and peace of mind. 

Blizzard!

 Well, Oklahoma is having another record breaking (actually record setting...unprecedented) catastrophic weather event.

Right now, it's colder than it has ever been, and there will be approximately 20 inches of snow on the ground by Wednesday evening.

Tonight, and into tomorrow morning, there will be sub zero air temperatures, and the wind chill factors will reach thirty degrees below zero, fahrenheit.

This is Alaska, North Dakota, Wyoming winter weather.  This is not southern plains weather.

People are already dying.  Animals are dying.

We are fortunate that we have shelter and warmth. Those who do not are in imminent, life threatening danger.

SO there's that.

We started seeing this in the forecast on Wednesday, so we ordered our groceries Wednesday night.  

The service was already overwhelmed, and they couldn't give us a delivery time until Thursday morning.  Our shopper said the shelves were already getting sparse.

Luckily, we got everything we ordered, in one form or another.  I mean... I wanted bone in pork chops, and I GOT thin cut, boneless, flavored pork chops...but whatever.

By yesterday, people who hadn't had the forethought that we had were faced with bare shelves.

Folks who have places to live will be stuck in those places for at least a full week.  

Oklahoma city, county, and state services are not equipped or staffed adequately to clear the roads beyond the highways, and what they call "tier 1" snow routes.... that would be the grid of surface streets that mark out the one mile section lines.

Our street will never be plowed.  People will be driving down it, making ruts, and sliding into yards.

Yay.

I left all of my seriously cold weather gear back in Illinois when I moved.  I gave my sister my down parka, and I donated my boots, gloves, and hat.

I've ordered new ones, but they can't get to me with the blizzard.

When I go out to shovel the driveway later, I will be wearing Dave's parka, which he bought in 2011 when we had a really bad cold snap.   The coat I bought at that time turned out to be inadequate.  It has a great, warm hood, but the body of the coat is worthless.  You can't really tell that when you're indoors trying things on, LOL!

I've been using my hiking boots for snow, but they aren't well insulated enough to deal with this intense cold, so I will have to come inside often from shoveling.

Fortunately, it's so very cold (high of seven degrees during the snowfall), that the snow will be light and easy to move.

If our power stays on, we will be okay.  If it goes out, it will be very bad for us.  

I am baking brownies, and going out to do a little shoveling here in a few minutes.  Just trying to maintain sanity.

I walked away from my computer hours ago, and forgot to click "publish."  Oops!

Stay warm and safe, gentle readers!