The Day I Realized How Much I Missed Home

I haven’t blogged recently, because in all honesty there has not been much to blog about. I started a summer job that I sincerely enjoy on many different facets, but there is not much to say there, other than it is fun to work where you like to play, and it is a huge blessing to get along with my awesome boss and co-workers. Other than that, life has continued to trod along.

I continue to try to find my niche in this new place. I knew that starting over is hard work, but I have never really started over like this before. So many people expressed there concerns to me about the move over here, and one of the main points was that of suffocation. I understood them then, and I understand them now. There are many things over here that bring out the true vibrancy of life, and make me see how beautiful certain things are. I discover new things about my thoughts, beliefs, ideas, and myself almost every day. I am once again forced to look at life with a new pair of glasses on. There are days when I think that I can’t do this. That I won’t make it for one reason or another. Some days it is something plain silly like how horrible inland US drivers are. (I might write a whole post about this to get it out of my system at one point). Other days it is the feeling of isolation so intense that it literally makes me physically ill. On those days, the bad ones, Jesus and I have some tough conversations.

What fascinates me, is through those conversations, I never feel the need to run away, to concede defeat, or to become downtrodden. He truthfully blesses me in so many different ways. The thing is, today, I let myself stop and just think. I had a day off a work, and we are in a miserable heat wave, so I did close to nothing. Doing nothing is very dangerous. The heat is also very dangerous. Not one of us enjoys hot weather, and it tends to only increase our hot tempers.

After a rather stimulating conversation, solitude was needed, but no matter what, one thing or another ruined it. I just didn’t understand why I was so upset. I honestly could normally care less about things like kids screaming around the water or such. What was eating away at me. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I missed my kiddos. The ones that wormed their way into my heart like they were my own for so many years now. I missed seeing people I know at the grocery store. I missed knowing my best friends were just a small drive away. I missed the sense of belonging. I missed my home.

I have been homesick before. It is a natural occurrence whenever you up and leave the place that holds so much of your heart. Jesus and I have talked about this too, and the cool thing is that I know he gets it. He gets the grief. He knows how much I want to hug the kids and play with them. He knows how much it sucks to be separated from your happy place. The feeling of being alone isn’t that bad when I remember that. I watch this new world that I am now a part of, and watch to see what he would have me do here; his plans to continue to bring joy in place of sorrow.

I know I will always miss home, where you grow up is a special place that nowhere else can touch your heart in that way. But I also know that life is always an adventure, and I don’t do well doing nothing. I miss home, but I am excited to see how this unfolds.

The Day I did…Well Not Much

The weather has been absolutely beautiful, no stunning since arriving here; however, yesterday it took a turn for the worse. Buckets would be an adequate description of how much rain was falling down from the sky. So what does one do when you have a bunch of outside work to be done, and the inside is at a bit of a standstill until certain things arrive? Well you do you a couple of things, the first being you go and clean the concrete in the basement with an acid wash treatment. It came as a surprise to me that the bottle specified to wear acid resistant shoes. Acid resistant shoes? Ummm doesn’t acid melt approximately everything, and most of my shoes are still packed away in a box…somewhere. So I put on my old rainbow flip flops, pulled some grocery bags over them, tied them around my ankles, and proceeded to commence with the concrete treatment.

The acid in the treatment melted the bags, big surprise, but luckily my feet and flip flops came out mostly unharmed. Acid burns on your skin aren’t that big of deal anyway. After the initial treatment and wash, one must wait for the floor to dry before you can do anything else to it. So now that the one big household task has been accomplished, what is there left to do? I will tell you what was left to do, go through my embarrassingly big movie case, pull out some old school seasons of Buffy, which I may or may not own, and have a 90’s vampire slay fest.

I am a child of the 90’s. I love the 90’s. Okay, I even own more shameful 90’s television seasons than Buffy, whose names shall never be disclosed in writing. While zoning out to the cheesey vampires and demons trying to take over Sunnydale, I had fun counting how many red welts were raising on my skin from the acid. I never came to a final conclusion, but it was a day, where I played with chemicals, watched some good ole Buffy, and did well, not much.

The Day I Painted a Concrete Floor

I painted a concrete floor today. I have never been good at painting. It is one of those things that I am happy to help, but in the end, most of my work needs to be redone. So imagine my trepidation when I had to paint a whole floor! The thing is, painting a floor is actually a lot easier than painting walls, at least in my opinion. The only thing about this particular floor, well the house really, is there is a bit of an ant problem. Apparently, they have bad years for ants over here, and ta-da this is one. The pest control guy is coming on Friday to spray, can I get a hallelujah! Anyways, the basement definitely has a lot of creepy crawly ants around. I have started making up theme songs about being a super hero ant killer. I have lost track of how many ants I have stomped, thwacked, smushed, and all around obliterated. I added quite a few to my number today, because they would go crawling in the way of my paint roller, and splat, smush, spread, they went. The floor is a now a nice bronzed ivy (no I am not being a smart-a, that is the actual name of the paint chip from home depot), but it has a lovely texture and make-up of insect bi-product and exoskeleton proteins.

At the end of the day, it made painting a concrete floor all the more entertaining, and washing out the roller all the more absolutely disgusting. Can you say ant massacre anyone?

The Day I Said ‘You Too’ With a Southern Twang

Enough said.

The Days I...

The Day I Drove 12 Hours, But it was Only Supposed to Take 6 ½ Packing up the house back in Washington was not too horrible, now, loading all of our cra…stuff into cars and u-haul was an entirely different story. However, after my cruiser was loaded, and I had attached a bike rack to my hitch with four bikes on it, I was off. I pulled out of the Harbor, and watched my rearview mirrors as 16 turned to 5, 5 into 18, and then 18 into 90. I had my trusty navigator with me, my ever faithful, Scout. Now we all know Scout, we all love Scout, but let me tell you, when it comes to car company, Scout is an epic failure. In her little Newfoundland puppy mind the car is to be used for napping, napping, and oh some more napping. So although my pup was by my side, it was mainly myself being left to my thoughts. My thoughts for the trip I would like to claim were deep and profound, you know the real life changers, but I confess they were nothing of the sort. I think the most frustrated part of my thinking process was the fact that I could not remember the country radio station in Ellensburg. Ellensburg brought the promise of seeing a best friend for a quick bit, but then it was back on the windy road. I made okay time, but by the time I had pulled into Spokane, well, between the pit stops and everything else, I was down for the day, but alas it was not to be. I still had two and half-hours to go at the rate of speed I was going. The wind had started blowing the moment I had crossed the pass, and it was still blowing hard all the way into Cour de Alane. So as a way to pass the time I started counting tumbleweeds. I know, thrilling. Now you are probably wondering why is she writing about counting tumbleweeds, and I confess that it is because I wish for you all to share just how desperate for entertainment I was at this point. I had of course timed my drive perfectly for the sun to be setting over the lake and mountains as I drove over the HWY 95 water bridge getting into Sandpoint, which was gorgeous, and gave me the extra push to finish the hour drive left. But sometimes fate is not kind. I quickly met up with part two of our three part fake convoy, and after spending some time getting food and such learned that part three, the U-Haul truck had gotten a flat tire in the middle of no where. OH NO! What to do!? It actually just required some common sense, an 800 number, and a lot of waiting on our part, but it was fixed that night. We made it up the house in the pitch black of night, to just unload some food, my dog, ourselves, and plopped ourselves down on some sofas that had been moved in previously TTL. It was a day full of epic proportions, but it really was just a day that took 12 instead of 6 ½ . The Day I Learned to Operate a Back-ho on the Back of a Tractor Anybody out there know what a Yugle Beat is without googling it? If you do, then you win five points and are beating me in the knowledge game, because when I heard that I had to go dig out some Yugle Beats, I am pretty sure my face said, ‘And just what might those weird sounding things be?’ For those who don’t know they are a garden bed technique where you dig pits, put in logs, and then cover them up with a mound of dirt. Now I am not sure when this idea came into existence, but I hope for all involved it was after the invention of farm machinery. I love tractors, no, I adore tractors, I have an affinity for the things. There is a tractor museum somewhere I think in N. California off of I-5, that I desperately want to go to every time I pass it, but no one in the car ever thinks it is a good idea. Anyways, I love tractors, but it is more a nostalgic and physical love than it is a knowledgeable love. I know close to nothing about the things. I know that they you use a clutch, they have different gears, John Deere is Green, Honda is Red, and Kabota is Orange. I thought that was enough, but nope. We have a nice big orange tractor that has a bucket on one end, and a back-ho on the other. I learned to operate the back-ho. I stuck that serrated bucket in the ground, and tore it up. I never thought I would be good at something like a back-ho, but maybe it is because I come from the joystick of gaming generation that I had some serious skill. I quickly became back-ho dexterous. The Day I Literally Became a Redneck This day is the day that I had some more Yugle Beats to dig, and I started super early in the morning, and by two in the afternoon the 90 degree sunshine had done its sincere damage to my neck and upper back. We are talking the scorched, when someone puts their hand hovering over the burn they can feel the heat radiating off of it burn. My neck was as red as it could ever be. It hurt, it burned, it was confusing. Now I am not saying that I was super tan, and that sunscreen would not have been a bad idea, but I had some base, and I usually don’t crispify that intensely that quickly. So what had been the culprit? Maybe Mother Nature was just trying to help me identify with my new surroundings? Or maybe it was the DEET that I had sprayed to keep the swarms of mosquitoes from draining me of all of my life giving hemoglobin. As much as number one is funny, the conclusion was numero dos. So word to the wise folks, if you don’t want to become a redneck, well wear sunscreen, and don’t spray DEET directly on your skin to go bake in the sunshine. The Day I Found Some Mountain People My burn was so bad that I took two full days of mainly just doing work inside to give my skin a break from that ever so wonderful thing that gives us the burning UV rays. There are many eccentric and fun nooks and crannies to be discovered in the mountainous countryside. One such place is a root cellar that is off of some obscure little road. Now it is not just any root cellar, nope, it is a root cellar that is open to the public 24/7, that has all organic seed starters, produce etc. It is completely honors system to leave the amount of cash or check for what you took. CRAZY! I met some of the girls that run it, and garden for it. They reminded me of Fremont, but just with a little bit more country in them. I walked away knowing that I had met some of the mountain hippie contingency, and that made me smile. More than just a few miles up that same small obscure road that leads to a beautiful tucked away public lake that I plan to sit in the middle of and do some moose watching is a place that has a lot of…cows!!!! It is a grade-A dairy facility that specializes in Raw Milk and is expanding to branch out into yogurt, cheese, ice-cream etc. Yummy! At first I thought the place was deserted, but after being out the car and near the barn for a good little bit, a mister came roaring up in his camo hat and full on Honest Abe beard on his ATV. He was a super nice guy who is also a transplant to the area, just not quite as new. He gave a tour of the facility and showed where they kept the milk and how you can just drop your money or check into the cooler and take what you want, when you want as well! We talked cow, horse, chicken, wolves, and felines. He is of the mountain people, but the more raw of the mountain people, and that made me smile too. The Day I Discovered My New Life Theme Song There are no radio stations that come in out here except for an opera station. They all get to be pure static about two miles before the house. There also is still no Internet connection at the house, so no online streaming for me. Needless to say, I have had my i-pod plugged in a lot. (Shameless plug going in here: If anyone wants to take pity on my poor soul, and send me some music or comedy or whatever to listen to, I would love them forever, and Jesus would surely put another jewel in their crown in heaven.) Anyways, as most of you would know I enjoy folk music, some call it sad, some say it tells stories, and some just say well that is eclectic and hard to define. I also enjoy acoustic and uncut music. So for me, every year when the Mountain releases their Live From the Mountain Music Lounge, I get giddy. I have a full playlist with all the albums on there. It holds some stuff that I can skip over, but it also holds some gems of gems. A song popped up, and it is not new to me. I have known it for quite some time, but listening and singing along to it made me realize I have a new life theme song. My life theme songs come and go at odd variances, and sometimes I have doubles and triples, betraying the movie soundtrack rule, but life is not a movie so nana nana boo boo to the rules. So you say, if I am bothering reading this very actual dull post, I better at least get the name of the song. It is called The Outsiders by Needtobreathe. I highly recommend a listen, not so that you can identify with my life feelings, because that is just slightly too needy and creepy. I really don’t want people trying to get into my head and analyze me from a song. Nah, I just recommend a listen because it is a good listen, and I am all for people expanding their musical horizons, call it another passion of mine, right up there with cows and tractors.