I realized when looking my blogs over that I hadn't updated this one in a long time. After all, it's not really "a new home chronicle" anymore, is it? We've been here twelve years. Some of our oldest neighbors have moved away, and, even though nice neighbors have replaced them, it's not the same. Most of the homes sold on this street are being bought to be rentals, and renters just don't care about their neighborhoods and the home as much as someone who actually has a stake in the house. (Some friends of ours have sadly learned this as a family member's home they rented was completely trashed. They have spent weeks trying to get it in shape to sell.) No one seems to want to own a home, at least in this area, anymore. A couple of miles up the road, maybe, near downtown Smyrna, where they can walk to the new Publix and the library and the little pond, maybe, but not here.

Life has been good here, but as the years have gone on aging has taken its toll on us. Two months after my previous entry here, James had to get a power chair. After two falls on the stairs which resulted in two compressed disks in his spine, the two heels of his feet riddled with bone spurs, two bad knees in which he gets steroid injections quarterly, and two arthritic hips, our health provider felt that this was necessary for him to have transportation to actually keep working, never mind actually go and amuse ourselves occasionally. He can no longer walk any long distances. Up until last spring he was coming out with me at night to walk the dog, but he can no longer even manage that.

In July 2016 he had the first of two heart attacks; the second of which was in September of 2017. One doctor freely admitted that he should have been catherized in 2015 when he was having minor chest pain and was sent to Northside Hospital for a battery of tests, but after 24 hours of testing they said he was okay and sent him home instead. We have made major dietary changes, with low-sodium and low-carb as our motto, but problems with his kidneys have continued to plague us. He started having kidney irregularities in December of 2015, but not one of his blood tests flagged the high scores, nor was he contacted by a doctor to get them checked out, so we didn't know they were abnormal until he had the first heart attack. For six weeks between March and April of this year he was actually on kidney dialysis thrice a week, until someone finally figured out the big problem wasn't his kidneys, it was his prostate gland. It is now so enlarged it is blocking his ability to completely empty his bladder. The overflow is is backflowing into his kidneys, causing most of the problems. He is now undergoing tests in that area to see what the ultimate solution to the problem is.

In December 2017, while starting out on a trip to Chattanooga, we were struck by a car running a red light. The back quarter of the black pickup truck was completely ruined, especially the right rear wheel, which was bent on its axle. The expensive power chair lift at the back of the truck was also ruined. The power chair was thrown across the road, but miraculously still works, although it was very scratched up. We spent the month of January searching out a new pickup and bought a white 2014 Toyota Tacoma we found at a small used car lot. We got enough from the insurance claim to pay for a new trailer hitch and chair lift and put something for a down payment. The black truck was showing power train problems, so it was probably for the best, but now James has a multi-year truck payment he didn't have before.

Our young pets Tucker, the hyperactive tricolor terrier, and Snowy, the white and grey budgie, are now mature guys. Tucker is less hyperactive, still very alert and very terrier-torial, and celebrated his fourth adoption day just recently. He will be five in the fall, and Snowy will be five in November. After learning to perch on my finger after months of coaxing, "Mr. Snow" had a complete personality change in October of 2015 and became a nipper. In the last few months he has been letting me scratch him behind the ears, and he talks up a storm, especially when I put on his favorite program, Leo Laporte's podcast "The Tech Guy." But finger sitting? No dice.

My milestone came in January of this year when I retired after nearly 33 years of Federal service. Workwise I just flat out couldn't take the stress of end-of-fiscal-year anymore and the traffic horror that is the Atlanta commute any longer. When we moved into this house it would take me forty minutes to get to work and an hour to get home. When I retired it was 45 to fifty miles in the morning, and 80 to 120 minutes for a ride home. Teleworking for eleven of the twelve years we have been here was a godsend, but even two or three days a week fighting traffic became draining. I'd also become a dinosaur at my job. CDC is no longer hiring purchasing agents; the trainee contract specialists cut their teeth on purchase orders and now everyone does them along with their contracts. There were only two purchasing agents left, and the other one was also contemplating retirement. Plus it had gotten more and more difficult for me to drive in the dark. I've never been able to drive well in twilight and it has gotten worse over the years; and except for the ten weeks around the summer solstice, I was pretty much driving to work in the dark daily. That and the crazy traffic was making me fearful. Last year the Atlanta Braves stadium moved seven miles from our house (we didn't get to vote on it; they just stuck it there and now it has eaten up all the county's budget for parks so that they are threatening to close half the parks around us) and made the traffic situation even worse.

In the months since January, when I haven't been keeping James company in a hospital room or going back and forth to doctors' appointments with him, I have been trying to get the house in order. I suppose everyone finds this out (except perhaps minimalists) as they get older, but you tend to accumulate the damnedest pile of junk as you live. You buy new stuff and toss some of the old stuff, but not all, and it just fades into corners, taking up more and more space each year. I've been wanting to tackle this junk for years, and now I have the chance.

I wish it looked a lot better, but it looks a little better and even that is a help. This is a brief summary of the progress (I'm sure it's a boring list to read, but these are major victories for me):

• I tidied up about 3/4 of the garage, tossing old boxes, general junk, and decanting my bicycle and putting it in a position that I can ride it rather than it being trapped near the nose of the pickup truck. This has also made room so that if James parks the truck properly he can walk around the front of it and not have to go out of the garage in extreme weather. However, I did not get a chance to tidy the tool shelves before the weather got too hot. Perhaps in November, when the air is breathable again.
• All the stored food has been cleaned out in the kitchen, downstairs in the pantry closet, and on the downstairs hall shelves. I had to completely empty the kitchen pantry after it was invaded by carpet beetles. We had stuff in there from when we moved! All old stuff or bug-infested stuff was thrown out, a big 33-gallon bag of it, a terrible shame. I had the exterminator come and treat, and then it was restocked so only sealed containers are on the floor. Good food that had too much sodium in it was donated to a friend's church's food pantry.
• The broken desk in the library is finally gone and all the backlogged books are shelved. I need more shelves.
• The closet in the spare room, which holds party supplies, things like vaporizers, all the wrapping paper, and two boxes of magazines was completely cleaned out. I added another box to hold advanced-purchased gifts, folded all the tissue paper neatly, and tossed out a box full of cloth material that I was never going to use. Convention programs were all boxed neatly and I tossed out some bad memories I didn't want to keep.
• The master bedroom closet was stripped of junk and storage drawers and boxes labeled.
• Various other things were organized and labeled (like stored Command hooks).
• Several boxes of usable stuff went to Goodwill, including computer speakers, working computer parts that we won't be using, extra keyboards and wired mice, housewares, gifts we weren't using, a few clothes (usually when clothes leave here they are not wearable).
• Broken electric and electronic things were dumped in the electronics recycling boxes for disposal in November, like broken fans, clocks, and my poor MopVac, which I haven't used since Swiffers came out and you can't get the rubber mop part anymore anyway.
• At least a half dozen full 33-gallon bags of junk have gone in the trash (maybe more).
• Four Xerox-paper boxes of books and DVDs went to McKay's and were actually traded for cash instead of credit.
• The hall closet was cleaned out until all cleaning and party supplies and light bulbs and paper towels and towels can be taken out safely.
• I discovered my 1974 graduation present tape recorder still plays, which is a good thing because I still have cassette tapes!
• I have made inroads in tidying my craft room so I can actually work in it. I have been doing a couple of very amateurish watercolor paintings and playing with watercolor pencils.

There is still much more to go but James' problems are depressing me and wearing me thin (so you can imagine what it's doing to him), so I've slowed down a bit. Summer always makes me depressed anyway; it's so hard to exercise when there's barely any air out there. I'm trying to do 30 minutes of activity a day, but it's a hard slog when it gets up into the 80s and all I want to do is sleep under an air conditioning vent.

But, as Walter Cronkite always said, "That's the way it is."

Labels: birds, books, bookshelves, crafts, decorating, DIY, dogs, food, furniture, house, kitchen, library, organizing, storage

--------------------------------------
. . . . . Linda at 10:06:00 PM

(0) comments

After we got home from grocery shopping this morning, James decided to install the programmable thermostat we bought yesterday (a Hunter, just in case you were curious). According to the directions, it was simple: take the old one off, label the wires, take the mount for the old one off and install the new one, match the wall wires to the wires on the new unit and fasten them, then put the new one on the wall.

And the screw holes on each mount actually matched, so no messy drilling had to be done.

Except for one thing: our present thermostat is powered by the house current, with battery as backup. But nowhere on the box of the programmable unit we purchased did it mention that the entire unit is powered by the battery. Neither of us want to play that way. We like the concept of double and triple redundancy. So it was back out to Lowes. Turned out that Hunter did not have—or perhaps Lowes doesn't carry—a type of thermostat that was electrically powered with a battery backup. We ended up with a Honeywell.

And after that, it was simple. By the time I got done folding the towels and my own clothes, James had it up. It took me longer to program it because it's a 7-day timer and you have to do one day at the time (well, okay, I found out later you can actually do multiple days at one time; that's what I get for reading the manual after I program the timer!). I'm so short I had to stand on a stool to look the thing "in the eye" to program it. I felt like Phronsie Pepper helping Polly with the dishes in the Little Brown House!

Labels: DIY, house

--------------------------------------
. . . . . Linda at 8:06:00 PM

(0) comments

After going crazy, especially with the installation of the pendant light, we wondered if we actually needed to swap out the large round fixture for the smaller one in the prep area of the kitchen. We had both thought that the larger fixture had another socket, which would have given us three of them rather than two, but that was not so.

However, since the larger fixture did have a larger reflective surface, James did put that one up in the prep area. In addition, instead of reusing the existing soft white 60 watt "Helco" or whatever the brand of bulbs were, since we could not put up anything of a larger wattage according to the UL listing on the socket, we replaced them with clear 60 watt bulbs.

Whoa. Before it was just bright enough to see the food, now I feel like I should be tap-dancing and singing along to the "Back on Broadway" song from Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (or reciting Luke for Charlie Brown).

Labels: DIY

--------------------------------------
. . . . . Linda at 11:42:00 AM

(0) comments

It's been another lovely afternoon...LOL.

We had nothing to do today. All the shopping was done, we had Betty's gift, no festivals or shows this weekend.

So after James made biscuits for breakfast and then loaded up the dishwasher, we first put up the little ceiling fan in the kitchen and the new faux-Tiffany light fixture in the dining room. This took us till three (four hours total), and we are exhausted.

We'd bought the 36 inch six-blade ceiling fan a few months ago because it gets a bit close in winter and on warm days when James is cooking even with the exhaust fan on. We made two sacrifices when we bought this house: one, there's no front window for the Christmas tree, and two, the kitchen is small. James loves to cook and we could never have a professional stove or a farmhouse sink because they just wouldn't fit. It's probably about 10x14, with half reserved for the appliances and sink and counters. The part under the window is supposed to be a breakfast nook, but we have the convection microwave there on a baker's rack, with the old microwave underneath (although we can't use both together; it blows the circuit) and also our breadmaker, stock pot, and crock pot.

We knew this going in. Okay, you can't tell the lights without a scorecard, so here goes. Originally there was a large round light fixture in the dining room, a small dropped light fixture in the breakfast nook, and a small round light fixture over the prep/appliance area. I told the builder to put the dropped light fixture in the dining room, and then to swap the two round light fixtures: put the large round one over the prep area, where you need it, and the small one over the "breakfast nook," where we just needed light for taking food out of the convection microwave.

Well, they put the dropped light fixture in the dining room, but the large light went in the "nook" and the small one stayed where it was.

Never mind.

The ceiling fan went pretty well except for James' tendency to drop the screws. He has large guy fingers and these things are made for small children. :-).

The Tiffany light was another matter. There were two wires, the one for the power, and the one for the ground. The latter was simple, thin copper wire twisted together, like in a television antenna attachment, and it broke just rubbing against the mount for the lamp. We spliced it together and James screwed it on yet a third time, since the first time he tried to get the wires back in the little space under the "cap" that goes over the fixture hole in the ceiling, the wires pulled out of the wire nuts. But then the ground wire and the power wire were not on the same side, and when James tried to screw the mount up, the thin ground wire would twist. So he had to take it down again, get the wires on both sides, and put it up again. Then the screw ring that fastened the cap up kept cross-threading because it was so narrow.

During all this time, since the fixture was not fastened to anything but the power cord yet, I was standing on a chair next to James holding the light up. It wasn't terribly heavy, but it wasn't light, either, and I have arthritis in my neck and also in my shoulder since the thyroid surgery. I was in quite a bit of pain and so was he, having worked overhead for over three hours, when that stupid ring finally went on properly and the light was up and hanging from its chain properly and not the power cord.

James then put the larger round fixture in place of the small fixture. We just have to get some better light bulbs than were originally in there, and some small bulbs for the ceiling fan and the Tiffany light.

Now that I look at the latter, though, it was worth it. It looks like it was made for that room, with an antiqued copper finish, almost black, and the delicate colored lamp covers, rather than the clumsy top-shaped fixture that was dangling there before. The red bits of glass match the chair cushions and the apple detailing and the soft ivory panels of most of the lamp cover and the yellow oval highlights give it all an autumn cast.

In order below: the "breakfast nook" fan, the dining room with new light, the light without using a flash, and then with a flash.

Labels: DIY

--------------------------------------
. . . . . Linda at 4:49:00 PM

(0) comments