progress

Mundane Things

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So a few things have moved along in just the past couple of days.

I got a response from the movers, after I emailed the estimate to repair their property damage in, then asked about the $400 they said they’d send for the damage to our belongings.  The first one I read said that the claims department had already sent the money by etransfer, then let me know that my estimate was being passed on to the insurance company.

I didn’t have an etransfer, so I went checking through my spam folder to see if it was there.  It was only after I sent a response saying I didn’t get it, that it came in.

So that part is taken care of as of yesterday evening.  They’ve paid up for the damage they did to our stuff during the move.  That lets us breath a bit easier for getting our van fixed.

Which leads me to the next bit of progress.

I got a call this morning, from my brother who lives next door.  I’d called a cousin everyone has been recommending to me to fix our van.  He’s retired and said he’d come out when he was in the area – he lives in the city, but has property out here, where his shop is.  He had stopped at my brother’s for coffee and they would be popping by together to look at our van.

So when I went out to do the cats stuff, I also went to open the garage, pop the hood, plug in and hang a light, left the keys on the seat, then opened the gate.  Then I went inside and had my tea in my crochet corner, so I could see them when they drove over.

Then there was a knock at the door, and they came in to tell me the status of the van. Since I had everything already set up, they pulled over at the garage and checked the van first, and I never saw them!

It’s confirmed that the noise is from the bearings in the water pump.  My cousin says he can fix it for me – and he can even get a new pump at wholesale cost for me!  We talked for a bit and I mentioned the first noise being made by a belt in temperatures colder than -20C, but that when the other noise started, I stopped driving the van.  I’d only started the engine a couple of times.  I think he appreciated that I didn’t drive the van with that noise.  It would have worked for a while, but could have caused some much more expensive damage, eventually.  On hearing about the belt, though, they decided to go back and check it, in case it needed to be replaced.  He’ll have to take the belt off when replacing the water pump, anyhow, so that would have been the time to replace it, if it was needed.  It turns out my belt is fine, so that’s good.  When he puts it back on, he’ll be sure to make sure it isn’t loose anywhere.

So he’s going to order the part for me and will come and pick up the van to fix it, probably around Friday.

Which is SUCH good news!

It’s also going to be much cheaper.  I’d gotten the cost of the water pump, if ordered directly from GM.  Depending on how much his price turns out to be, getting him to fix the van for me will cost about as much as it would have cost me to just buy the part from GM!  Not that I would have done it that way, if I had had to buy the part myself.  I would have gone elsewhere.

Meanwhile, my brother told me to keep using his van.  That is so sweet of him!

useage.details.before.Jan.resetAnother thing on the list of things to do today; reset the data usage for my computer.  Our internet account rolled over today, so I will monitor it over the next 30 days and see if all the stuff I turned off made the difference.

I noticed, however, that my total system usage over the past 30 days had gone down.

That means that, between 30 and 38 days ago, my computer’s system alone used up about 3 gigs of data.

I will be checking my data usage often, to see if there are any sudden jumps.

The next thing on my to-do list was to call the phone company.  I had been able to use their automated system to find out what our bill was, and it told me they’d mailed it out on Jan. 15.  I never received it, and needed to call back during business hours to find out why.  I asked to have it emailed to me, and for future bills to be emailed as well.  Then I got myself transferred to the sales department, so I could pick a long distance plan.

The pdf of the bill arrived in my email before I finished the call.

I found out why I didn’t get the bill.

Despite having given them my name and mailing address, they had my name, but my mother’s mailing address.

So that explains why my mother called me a while back, thinking she was going to be charged with my phone bill!  She must have opened it, not even noticing it had my name on it, instead of hers.

So that is now fixed; confirming my mailing address was one of the things done when I called.

As the hours passed, the winds and snow continued.  We had intended to go into the city to do our big, monthly shopping trip with our own vehicle, but since that won’t happen until the weekend, my daughter and I decided to go to the next town and get some groceries to tide us over; we’re still okay, but at that stage where we’re running out of enough things to be inconvenient.  Which would have been fine if we were going to the city tomorrow, when the pay comes in, but not so fine for several more days.

I also wanted to get it done while the roads were still clear enough to drive on.

The drive was certainly interesting!  The open road between our little hamlet and the next down over runs East/West.  The wind was coming from the south.  There are a few places where there is nothing to cut the wind at all.  It wasn’t too bad, but we definitely got buffeted a fair bit!

But it was done, and we’re good for a while, even if for some reason the van ends up taking longer to get fixed.

The wind can blow and the snow can fall.  We are safe and warm and well supplied.

I must admit, though, I can hardly wait to be able to drive our van again.  We avoided using my brother’s van as much as possible.  Once our own wheels are up and running again, we will be making quite a few more outings.  Especially to the city, so my husband can visit his father.  And with the money from the movers, I’ll be able to get the vehicle registration and our licenses transferred faster, too!

It’s going to be good.

The Re-Farmer

Estimate In

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I received the estimate, last night, for replacing our power pole and hooking electricity back up to the garage.

The total, including taxes, is $1500.25

Which is actually lower than my brother had expected. He thought the labour, alone, would cost about $1500.

It also includes delivery of the pole.  My SIL, who works for the electric company, had looked into getting it done through a contact she had.  It would have been a bit cheaper, except they would have had to pick the pole up and deliver it themselves (even if our van was repaired, we don’t have a trailer hitch, so we couldn’t do it ourselves).  And to do that, they would have had to go to a town about half an hour north of us.  So it would have been about two hours drive for them, just to get it.  Then they’d have had to load it up themselves, haul it here, unload it, then drive the 1 1/2 hours back home.

Paying to have it delivered is the much better choice!

Once I had the estimate, I responded to the movers.  With the cost being above their deductible, it means I will be dealing with their insurance company.  Which I hope will be more professional than the moving company.

I also sent an email to my lawyer, updating him.  If all goes well, that will be then end of that, with him.

My email to the movers also asked about the status of the $400 they said they’d pay me for our damaged belongings.

We shall see how that works out.

The Re-Farmer

The Continuing Stoooooorry…

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I finally have more progress on our saga with the movers.

A few days ago, I spent some time talking with a lawyer about our options.  One of the things he mentioned was that, usually one would start an insurance claim, then let the insurance companies duke it out.  The lawyer can send a letter to the moving company for me about it, if the moving company continues to give me grief about it.  How the company responds to that would determine our next move.

Hopefully, we will never have to find out.

Making a claim on my mother’s property insurance was not really preferable.  The deductible is a thousand dollars, so if the cost of replacing the pole is close to that, it’s almost not worth it.  However, my brother thought to contact our provincial vehicle insurance company, since the damage was done by a vehicle.  They said that yes, they do cover that sort of thing, so I called and started a claim. I spent some time talking to someone on the phone, then got an email address to send photos to.

As I prepared to send the email, I got an email from the moving company.  This after 10 days of nothing from them at all.

It was pretty short.  Basically, they wanted to know if I’d gotten an estimate on how much it would cost; if it was under $1000, they would cut me a check for it.  If it was over $1000 (the amount of their deductible), they would give me the information for their insurance company, and I would file a claim there.  (I’m paraphrasing a fair bit, since English is clearly not the first language of the person writing to me.)

Which really, the movers should be doing, not me.  Except I think I’d rather deal with the insurance company than with the movers.

No word on the money they said they would pay for our damaged goods a while back, which is a separate issue from property damage.

So I included their email with my email to the vehicle insurance company.  I was told it could take 2 or 3 days before I got a response, but I got one the next day.  Turns out that, because no vehicles registered in this province was involved, it’s out of their jurisdiction.  We would have to deal with the driver’s vehicle insurance company.  And I have no way of knowing who that is, since in the province we moved from, it’s private insurance companies, not one provincial insurance company.

So after I got that response, I got a phone number of a local electrician.  Someone I went to high school with, actually.  He’s a year or two younger than me, but we took the same bus to school for many years.  He has done work here on the farm for my brother before, and was highly recommended.  Since he works in the city, I was given his home phone number, and I left a message for him there.  Much to my surprise, not only did I get a call soon after (my timing was good, I guess; he came home from work shortly after my call), but he said he could come over right away!

He spent a fair bit of time checking things out, including making sure there was no damage to the cable itself.  I will get an estimate from him emailed to me, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be over $1000, so it looks like I’ll be dealing with the insurance company.

One of the things he mentioned was that he likely wouldn’t be able to install a new pole until spring.  The electric company has access to the machinery that can drill into frozen ground, but he doesn’t.  It’s unlikely the electric company would be willing to come out for a customer owned pole to begin with – and we’d have to prune those trees for them to get into the yard!

Pruning is something that’s going to have to be a bit of a priority, it looks like!  I’d like to get that done while the trees are still dormant, so February would be good.  By March, it might be too late.  Hard to know.  We might have a late spring.  Or an early one.

Anyhow, that’s where we are at now.  I will wait on the estimate, then go from there – and will ask about the coverage for damage to our goods in the process.  I’ll update my lawyer about how things are going, too.

What a long and convoluted process this is!

All because no one bothered to look up.

The Re-Farmer

Trying to Decipher

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We’ve made a lot of progress with unpacking.  Yes, I still have stacks of boxes behind me as I type this, but just about everything else is unpacked, or at least partly unpacked.

I even managed to repair my dad’s bedside shelf, which I am now using.  This allowed me to move the large-ish end table I had on my side of the bed over to my husband’s side, so we could put his tiny fridge on it (for his medication), get his CPAP machine off the floor and have a place to tuck away his bottles of distilled water for the CPAP humidifier.

We still haven’t been able to find some of the girls’ things.  There was some stuff in their third floor bathroom that was in a bag we can’t find, and some movies that were on another floor, so they shouldn’t have ended up in the same box.  Also, we found other stuff from their  bathroom, so those items should have been there, too.

While my brother and I were at our van yesterday, checking on the engine, I remembered to go into the glove compartment and get the paperwork from the movers that was in there.  On moving day, I barely had time to skim over them as I signed them, and just shoved them into the glove compartment as we were leaving.

Today, I finally had a chance to sit down and look at them closely, to try and figure out what happened to the girls’ stuff.

I still have no clue.  The sheets tell me next to nothing useful.

This is so frustrating.

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As near as I can figure out, the above photo is mostly third floor stuff, but also second floor stuff.  Maybe.

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While this one is of second and third floor stuff.  The information I was looking for should have been on these two pages.  I can barely decipher it at all.

All over the place I see the word “mettals.”  I think it’s supposed to be “metal”.  But metal what?

“Matters”, I’ve figured out, means “mattress.”  “Pichers” are “pictures,” and likely refers to both pictures from the walls and my daughter’s paintings.  Then there are the shalfes, pellows, pillasstic taibls, hendels, wood and even anberallas.

I’m guessing shelves, pillows, plastic tables (I am guessing our collapsible tables, including the folding one they didn’t fold), handles (???), wood (my daughter’s easel?) and umbrella.

The other pages are no better.

There is 4 pages of this, each with two columns.  The first page was mostly
marked boxes and bins.  According to the sheets, including the piano, we had 234 items.  Some of those items were things like a bundle with our mop, broom, window cleaner and snow shovels, taped together.  The piano bench had its own number sticker, but I don’t see anything that even remotely looks like it could be “bench”.

When he brought the sheets for me to sign, he’d made a comment about how we had “a lot of stuff.”  You wouldn’t know it, from what’s on these sheets!  According to them, we just have a lot of mettal and shalfes.

In the end, though, there is no way of knowing what box they packed the girls’ stuff that’s missing into.  It looks like they not only marked the boxes and bins we packed ourselves as just “box” or “bin,” but also boxes they packed have no listing of their contents.

Which is something I was told they do, when I was arranging all this.

These sheets are useless.

As part of the contract, the client is supposed to use these sheets to make sure everything gets to its destination.  Given the circumstances of the delivery of our stuff, that was impossible.  Even if we’d managed to unpack everything with 10 days and could say for sure there was stuff missing, there would have been no way to say which item numbers weren’t accounted for.

What a mess.

Meanwhile, I still haven’t heard back about my claim, when I responded by saying I expected them to repair the damage their driver did, on top of the basic liability for items damaged.

The Re-Farmer

People Visit

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We get lots of critter visitors.  Yesterday, we got a people visit!

My oldest brother came by briefly.  Being the sweetheart that he is, he brought along his mechanics stethoscope, and we checked out our van.  The first thing we did was check the coolant.  This was not an easy job, as the radiator cap on our vehicle is off to the side and under a hose.

We also discovered that I am very low on coolant.

I had the vehicle serviced before we drove out here.  I should not have been low on coolant.  Which means I likely have a leak somewhere.  I have never seen signs of a leak under the vehicle, but it’s possible that any leak was happening only while I was driving, after the engine was warm enough for the coolant to expand into the overflow chamber.

He got as much as he could into the tester, and as best as we can make out, our coolant has enough anti-freeze to handle temperatures down to about -22C to -25C.  Without being able to fill the tester fully, however, we can’t say that definitively.

We’ve been hitting temperatures of lower than -30C.  Wind chills brought us to the -40C, but we didn’t drive in that, and the van was in the garage, so it was protected from the elements, at least.

Then we fired it up and waited until the noise started, which took about a minute.  Using his stethoscope, we were able to pinpoint the source as the water pump.  Likely a bearing.  And yes, the cold could have caused this damage, with our coolant as low as it was.

On the plus side, if the water pump needs to be replaced, the part itself is not that expensive.  Labour, on the other hand, could easily be much more.  It all depends on how hard it is to get into there.  It could cost anywhere from $300-$400 to fix.

Also on the plus side, when funds come in, we should actually have room in the budget for that.  It’s do-able.  As long as it doesn’t end up costing  more. :-(  Meanwhile, we will continue to NOT use our van, because driving it would likely cause more damage.

It’s a good thing we don’t need to go anywhere.  And my other brother has told us to just leave his van at our place for now.

That done, my older brother’s next task was to salvage the parts he’d put into the old hot water tank.  He’d spent quite a bit of money on that thing, and the parts are still good, so anything that can be salvaged will be useful.

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The first thing he did was take out the bottom thermostat and remove the new heating band he’d installed at the bottom.

This photo shows that heating band.  It had been in pristine condition when he put it in, but in the short time it was there, it got this corroded!

You can see an the bottom of the photo, what he’d used to McGyver the band in place, when it turned out to be too short.

That was one heck of a job.  And it did work, for a short time.  It was the last thing to try.  Once that failed, there was nothing left to do.

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In the next picture, you can see the top thermometer he’s about to remove.

The tank itself got dented up (you can see that a bit at the top left of the second photo) when the plumber dropped it down to drain into the sump pump reservoir.  There were more dents all in a line.  The bottom of the tank had started to rust quite a bit in one patch.  It was weakened enough that the entire bottom had started to come loose!

That thing was way overdue for replacement.

Getting it out of the basement is going to be one heck of a job!

The visit also gave us the opportunity to talk about the house in general, and some of the work he’d done over the years, from what he had to do to get the pump to the septic tank working a few years back (you can see part of it in the background of the top photo), to fixing doors and the like.  He even brought printouts of the historical data for the electric bills for this place!  This will help me with budgeting a bit.  Our usage is, of course, going to be higher, since the house was empty during the time period in the printouts.  However, this was before the new windows were installed, so it would have been bleeding heat in the winter like crazy.  I’d hate to think how much our current bill would have been if the old windows were still in!  Hopefully, over the next while, we’ll be able to continue improvements to make the house more energy efficient.

Little by little, we’ll figure it out.

The Re-Farmer

Looking Back

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It has been just past 2 months since all of us have been living here, in my childhood home.  Three months for my husband and younger daughter.

It’s been rather tumultuous, all things considered.  Hopefully, this will all have been worth it in the long run.  We shall see.

There are, as always, a number of things that we couldn’t know until we actually lived here a while.  Some of those things were budget related.

Living on my husband’s long term disability has changed a lot.  Thankfully, 60% of his previous income left us doing much better than others I know in a similar position.  Still, living in the city kept getting more and more expensive, while the income can’t change.  Our daughters had gotten themselves part time jobs, and my older daughter has been working on turning her art into an income, but they both gave that up to come with us, so that they could help their father and I as much as possible.  They gave up quite a lot of other things to come out here, too.  And with our van making noises it shouldn’t be making, and no money to get it looked at, all our options are severely limited.

So it’s 4 of us living on one fixed income, still playing catch up on the costs of the move and the bills we had to let slide a bit.

But we’ve been here long enough to get an idea of what some of those unknowns are going to be.

One of them was the electricity costs.  We knew, from living in the area before and heating with electricity, we would be looking at Hydro bills in the winter of about $400 or more.  Previously, our winter bills were in the $80-$90 range, while in the summer, it was closer to $150-$180.  We had to use an air conditioner all summer, for my husband’s health.  We won’t need an air conditioner here, but winters are another story.

Our very first electric bill came out to over $400.  I had actually expected it to be a bit higher, because of all the troubles we were having with the hot water tank, and needing to use the stove to heat so much water every day.  I knew the next bill would be even higher, partly because it covered the time period were we were heating the most water, but also because of the polar vortex that sent temperatures plunging and the furnace running.

We send in our meter readings in the middle of the month, and now have the new bill.  It’s just under $600.  And there was absolutely nothing we could have done to make it lower.

Ouch.

At least we can be sure that this is going to be the highest electric bill of the winter.  After this, it should start doing down.

Still.  Ouch.

The next unknown was the internet.  Our satellite package is only about $100 a month; less than the cable/internet package we had before the move.  Unfortunately, the maximum data available for non-commercial packages is 100 gigs.  Before coming out here, we averaged about 350 gigs a month usage.  Still, we can control that to a certain extent.  No more watching lots of Youtube videos, and no more World of Warcraft.  We take advantage of free WiFi elsewhere, as much as we can.

Reaching the limit on our package didn’t mean we would lose our internet for the rest of the month.  It would just be reduced in speed.  It would be enough to check our email or whatever.  Or, we could have the bottleneck removed and pay $2 a gig on top of our regular package.  There would be no slowdown that way.

That resulted in a bill of almost $300, even with reducing our online usage.

At the start of the month, there was a lot of downloading of updates and patches, which resulted in us reaching our limit before even half way through the month.  So options were looked at on how to get around that.

In the end, we got a second account, with a second satellite dish.  It was installed yesterday. By doing it that way, we’ll be paying around $200 + a month for internet, instead of $300 +.

We still haven’t received our first phone bill in our name, so that one is still an unknown.

Then there’s the fact that we’re feeding so many extra animals, including the deer.  We will probably be spending another $150 a month, just on that.  That wasn’t in our projected calculations at all.

The fact that we are no longer paying a housing charge of just over $1400 a month does give us the room to handle these extra expenses.  Or at least it would, if we didn’t still have to catch up on old bills, plus deal with additional expenses related to the move, plus we had to buy that new hot water tank, plus we have to get the van looked at, plus we’re going to have to put money into this house to make up for years of neglect…

It’ll probably be another 2-4 months before we get to a point were we can actually know if living here will be a financial improvement.

The next question becomes one of quality of life.  Did moving here improve that situation?

Well, for my husband, we’re not there yet.  First, there were the problems with not being able to get certain prescriptions, and the screw up with his insurance coverage.  So he’s been in massive amounts of pain.  Big drop in quality of life, there.  Then there is finding a new medical team to replace the specialists he left behind.  That will take time.  Still, there is the advantage of stress reduction in other areas, and stress = pain.  There’s also the fact that this house, for all its issues, is more accessible that the townhouse we left.  He’s no longer essentially trapped on the second floor.  Something as simple as getting up and going into the kitchen is something he can do now, without too much difficulty. The biggest plus is that we are close to his family again, but without reliable transportation, we may as well still be two provinces away.

For myself, there is a definite huge reduction in stress.  I’m still in contact with friends living in the co-op we’d been in, and I am so glad we’re not there anymore.  I honestly cannot recommend co-op housing anymore.  The concept is good, but human nature being what it is, it just doesn’t work unless the members are aware enough to get a good property management company in.  Otherwise, it’s just not worth the stress.

That stress was having quite a negative effect on my health, but since being here, for all the hassles we’ve had, there has been a huge improvement.  The pressure headaches are gone.  My sleep has improved.  I hardly ever need to take pain killers anymore.  My body’s aches and pains have reduced substantially, though I know they will never go away completely.  And I do still have my mystery pain in my side, and that chronic cough that no amount of testing could find the source of.   Unfortunately, while I’ve been able to set up the office part of things, I haven’t been able to set up my crafting side of things quite yet; not enough that I can get back to working on things or writing patterns, and I have not been able to get my photography area set up yet.  That should come in time, though I will have to evict the cats from what will be my work and photography area on my work table, which they have claimed for naps. :-D

And for our daughters?  They once again have an upper floor as their own space.  Sometimes, as I work in my office, I can hear them upstairs, singing together, and they sound so wonderful.  I know it’s been hard on them, but I do hope that, long term, this will be good for them, too.

We knew coming out here would be a mixed bag of positives and negatives.  We’re still figuring out what those are.  Plus, once we’re past those first few months of settling in, there will be new options ahead of us that we could not have done without coming here.

In the end, I do feel that we made the right choice.

The Re-Farmer

Eight

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Okay, I’ve made up for lost time, that’s for sure.

I finished clearing, cleaning and disinfecting the linen closet.  The shelves are made of plywood that’s painted.  It’s quite rough in texture.  My mother had lined the shelves with sheets of plastic, tacked into place, to protect her linens.  I haven’t decided what I want to do with them to fix the roughness on a permanent basis, but I still needed to do something to cover them, so they won’t damage my stuff.

Cardboard to the rescue.

I cut a couple of boxes we’d unpacked previously, to fit the shelves.  It worked out quite well.

It’s amazing what getting that one thing done led to.

I was able to unpack 8 boxes.  I was also able to move two long bins designed to fit under beds, under the bottom shelf.  These hold things like our collection of canes, umbrellas and shinai in one, badminton and tennis rackets in the other, so we do want to keep them handy.  They stick out of the closet, which means the door can’t be closed, but the door is broken, anyhow, so it doesn’t really matter.  At some point, they will actually get unpacked to more permanent places.

With the linen closet now clear, I could not only unpack my linens, but move some of the ones already unpacked and shoved into the wall of shelves.  I was then able to pack a bit more of my mother’s things away, which in turned helped clear more shelves.  I was then able to clear and clean 2 columns of shelves in the wall of shelves, then unpack boxes of papers, binders, folders, board games, etc.  Some of it will need to be gone through and put into more permanent places, or at least better organized, but the main thing is they are no longer in boxes.

All that finally allowed me to unpack my last box of linens.  These I was saving for last, as it included things like an antique, cut work embroidered linen table cloth, and table cloths and napkins embroidered for me by the same amazingly talented family member who gifted me with the ceramic sugar and creamer set that the movers broke the creamer from.  She’s actually the one who inspired me to get into crafting myself.  I’ve also got items embroidered and crocheted (some pieces have both) by my great-aunt, who was amazingly skilled.

One box, oddly, was half blankets, half kitchen stuff.  The movers packed that one.  I unpacked the blankets half, then took the box out to the dinging room.  After I stopped for supper (which my daughters were awesome enough to make for us), it was there anyhow, I unpacked the rest of that box, too.

The best part is, I no longer have a wall of boxes along my side of the bed that I need to squeeze past.  Yay!  There’s now just a few things than need to be finished up and re-organized in the bedroom before it’s done.  Well.  As done as it can be, for now.

The next major area of boxes that needs unpacking is my office.  Some of them are my crafting materials and tools, but not all.  As usual, the challenge is, where do I unpack them to?  I still need to work out a space to unpack all my cookbooks in particular, since I do want them actually near the kitchen.

All in good time.  Right now, I’m exhausted, but in a good way.  I think my goal for tomorrow is not to unpack anything else, but to rearrange our bedroom and maybe even *gasp* vacuum it.  I do wish we could rip out the carpet.  The lumps and bumps are quite the tripping hazard.  That, I am thinking, will wait until we can install the second bathroom.  If we’re going to be doing construction in there, anyway, that would be a good time to get rid of it.  I have no idea how we would take out that wall of shelves, though.  It’s more than 10 feet long.

Ugh.  I can’t start thinking about that now!  Especially since it’ll probably be years before we can come up with the money to do it.  I’m more interested in getting more boxes unpacked and hopefully finding the stuff of the girls’ that’s missing.  I don’t hold out much hope for that, though.

The Re-Farmer

Trapped trap

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While vacuuming the linen closet, I went into the carpeted area under the bottom shelf.  In one corner I used the crevice tool to pull out what looked like a very old nylon knee high (they do NOT make nylons in that sort of fabric anymore, and haven’t for a very long time), tied into a loop.

I didn’t look took closely.

Then I saw a piece of wood tucked into the opposite corner.  Not an unusual find in this place, really.  I tried to use the vacuum to bring it closer, but that didn’t work.  So I bashed it around a bit, only to realize it had something on the other side that was caught on the carpet.

The carpet does not seem to be adhered to the floor at all, so it kept lifting up.

Eventually, I got it loose, and found this…

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It was the hooked end that was caught on the carpet.

I imagine that someone tucked it into the corner years ago, it got triggered without catching anything, and was simply forgotten.

I’m glad I didn’t find a little corpse to go with it.

Since I needed to use a little step ladder to reach the top of the closet, I took the opportunity to finally get into the very top, where there are sliding doors that hid the contents.

I found my dad’s old water bed mattress, what looks like rolled up blinds, some poster paper, also rolled up, a tied up bundle of fabric, what a plastic grocery bag with what looks like a folded up sheet of vinyl.

I had to show the folded up mattress to my daughters.  This was from when water beds first came out, so it is literally just a big vinyl bladder.  I still remember how fun it was to go on the bed and make waves, and the struggle to get out of it.  The mattress was held by a sturdy frame.  The mattress, of course, would sink as you sat on the edge, which would leave your legs hung up on the frame.  It could be quite painful, with that wood digging into the backs of your legs.

I’m procrastinating, now.  It’s all vacuumed out.  Now I need to clean and sterilize it.

Time to dig out the gloves…

The Re-Farmer

 

Getting things done, and more deer

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This morning, we got a phone call from my husband’s doctor, following up on the fax sent from the pharmacy about that prescription refill.  We then headed into town to pick up the prescription (he ended up giving a bunch), since getting the pharmacy to do it might take a couple of days.  At the same time, the prescription dosage error on the other versions of this medication was fixed.  So my husband is all stocked up on painkillers again, which is making life much more bearable for him!

We also got a pair of deer visiting again today.  This time, they seemed less nervous about us in the window.  The deer came together, but kept their distance from each other, trading off eating.  They left, but came back soon after.  Interestingly, one actually started to drive the other off of the feed, with some aggressive posturing and jumping.  Then they went into the spruce trees and hung out there for an hour or more before one came back.  The other stayed in the spruces for a while, then drove the first one away from the food and started eating, while the first on stuck around and seemed to keep watch.

It was interesting behavior to watch.

I was able to get some good photos of them, too.

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In between taking photos, I finally started on clearing that linen closet, wrapping up a stack of mirrors to box up, then removing the plastic shelf liners.  The seeds that we think are mouse poison were only on the top shelf.  I swept most away, but didn’t get to vacuuming the ones stuck in crevices, because I didn’t want the noise to scare the deer.  Meanwhile, my older daughter was a sweetheart and started cleaning the set of decorative plates I inherited from my mother-in-law.  They had hung on her wall for many years, and my in-laws were both heavy smokers at the time, so they had to be washed twice.  Not all the nicotine quite came off, though, so a third washing will be needed to get the last of it off, but they look fabulous now.

Cleaning the hangers is going to be a challenge.  That and the one plate that is a relief of a Rockwell painting.  That one will need a toothbrush to clean it.

That will all wait until later, as my younger daughter decided to make up a double batch of sourdough dinner rolls.  I am looking forward to those!

All in all, a pretty good day.

Some updates

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So, in between unpacking and rearranging, cooking with sourdough, feeding the critters outside and taking pictures of our deer visitor, other things have been going on.

First update: I did get an email back about our claim to the moving company.

Actually, I got two.

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