Whirl Wind

We blew right through this weekend...I am just now sitting to take deep breaths and process it all!

I have had one sick girl home for 3 days/week for the past 2 weeks.  That's 6 days out of the last 10 school days!  Luckily it was an upper respiratory virus that they both got, causing fever, headache and sore throat, so they basically laid around and napped, read or watched movies all day (easy!)  Because of that, most of my forays out of the house lately, have been to work, to pick up homework at one or the other school, or to take the dog to the Vet (just a check up!)  Boring.

Thursday afternoon, J was feeling somewhat better, and we decided to take the 20 minute drive through the country to the Apple Orchard.  We came home with the back of the car full of apples, our eyes full of the colors of Autumn, and our lungs filled with plenty of fresh air, but unfortunately it did the poor girl in.  She was back on the couch, napping, within a half hour of our arrival home.

The following day, the workers were scheduled to arrive at 7:30 AM to pour concrete for the new chicken and rabbit house that is currently in the works.  Here is the truck that poured the concrete:

The Green Weenie...?

 

And here is the freshly poured pad.

There is another one just inside the barn for a future metal shop...all in good time!

While they were still working on the concrete, I got a call from the Coal people.  We had been trying to get them out here with 5 tons of coal since December last year.  We had a dusting of snow the morning they showed up back in December, and apparently they couldn't make it up our hill.  They got up this time, and now we have back-up fuel for the winter.  Hoorah!  No more cutting and stacking wood every weekend while the snow flies!!



Also good for Stocking Stuffers...

 

As the Coal Man was disappearing down the driveway, I received a phone call from the Auto Clinic Dude, who has had possession of JP's old truck since it left the Muffler Man's care.  After spending $$ there, I no longer needed to wear ear plugs when driving the truck, but it still barely ran.  Auto Clinician was able to get it "purring like a kitten" (his words).

So it was that I stopped in the middle of making applesauce at about 2 PM, and hitched a ride into town with my Mom to pick up the truck (and more homework!)  On our way down the driveway, we encountered someone coming up (not a common occurrence on the hill!)  This happened to be the brother of a gentleman who supplied our load of long wood that we cut and stacked all winter.  He had promised us another load back in the Spring, but unfortunately, he passed away unexpectedly in the summer.  His brother told us that he had been driving around, trying to find the place where the wood was expected - he is planning on following through with his brother's unfinished business!

I finished the 24 pints of Secret Ingredient Applesauce later that afternoon, folded 3 loads of laundry, and packed a small bag for a get-away with my girlfriends.

My friend and I left town at 7 AM Saturday morning, and arrived at State College about 3 hours later, where we met another friend who now lives about 3 hours in the other direction.  We found a lovely spot for brunch, where we had crepes and delicious mocha, then walked around the town, shopping for several hours.  We had dinner at a lovely establishment, and then retired to our hotel room for more chatting, resting and recovering.  We lingered over an early breakfast the next morning, and then took off for home, where Soccer Sunday was happening whether we liked it or not!

I arrived home just as JP and J were leaving for her game over an hour North.  I just had time to make a thermos of cocoa to warm L up after her game before she and I had to leave for her game 30 minutes East.

Since soccer, I have been doing laundry, and in general catching up on what I normally do over the weekend!  Both girls will be back to school on Monday morning (hoorah), and JP will be home to get started on the chicken/rabbit...chick-bit?...house.  I will be here and there, continuing the catch up process, working in the garden (have I mentioned the enormous crop of potatoes?), and helping when & where I can.  It is back to soccer practice and music lessons, but I feel rejuvenated.  Plus...it's a short week, SO doable after some that we've already been through!



This is maybe 1/2 of the potatoes I dug this year...
2 milk crates full are now stored in the garage for winter!

Let's go, Team Poplar Ridge!!

Falling for Autumn

We had our first frost of the season on Sunday night. I was a teeny bit glad that our lawn had not yet been planted. The ground was sparkling white when I woke.



Unfortunately, we could almost see our breath in the house as well. It seems that our furnace and/or thermostat are not working in tandem. We have to manually "jump start" the furnace 2 or 3 times in the morning before it continues correctly for the remainder of the day. Grrrr.

The last couple of days have been beautiful! The trees are lovely, and the sun shining through them turns the leaves into fluttering jewels.



JP drove out to the next ridge yesterday evening and took a picture at our homestead. We feel like we are on top of the hill, but in reality, you can see that we aren't quite there. (Click on the picture for a larger view.)



This morning, they finished picking up rocks from the yard. Hopefully they will return later today with some top soil and grass seed!

The concrete folks got the basement poured at my parents' house this morning as well.


Thank goodness that the sun came out again so the workers would too!

Oh, by the way...

My parents' house is well on its way to being a real house. The basement went in last week in just 3 or 4 hours.


The Superior Walls are made of concrete, and poured off site. They were brought in by a semi, which had to be pushed up the last quarter of our driveway by the excavator. Each segment was lifted off by a crane,



and set into place.



Then each one was glued with a special adhesive, and bolted top and bottom to the next piece.



It didn't take long for the entire hexagon to be formed. I think it came in 12 segments.




This is the back side of the house, where the garage will be.




On Friday, in the freezing mist, my parents helped to unload 2 semis filled with parts of their house. It was so muddy, that our old friend, the Lull, was having trouble getting up the drive to deliver to the building site. There are several stacks of wrapped packages at the bottom of the drive. They have all been inventoried my my parents with the assistance of their Kuhn's Brothers representative.



Today, JP spent several hours in the girls' room working on their hidey hole. I mentioned earlier that I would post pictures, so here they are! The closet looks like any other ordinary closet...



...until closer inspection! We asked the builder to leave the space under the stairs open. Part of it is one of the girls' closets, and part of it is our game closet in the Family Room. The girls are so happy with their little space, and have been very eager to share it with their friends. JP finally had the chance to put electricity in there for lights, and covered the exposed insulation with crisp, white panelling. It is very cute!



It is supposed to freeze tonight, and snow tomorrow...lovely day for...soccer?

Hoop Dreams

JP played on the basketball team in High School, and intramural basketball in college. He has been disappointed now for many years that we have not had the space for a basketball hoop. He made sure that basketball space was worked into this house, and the hoop is something he ordered well before we moved in. It has been taking up room in the garage in a giant box since I hauled it out here in April or May. The concrete pad in front of the garage was fully complete this morning, so after my success in building a storage shed over the weekend, I decided to tackle putting the thing together.

If you don't count the time I dropped a socket wrench on my toe, or the episode where the girls were playing "family" with the 4 rubber washers and one of them mysteriously disappeared, everything went smoothly right up to the end. The finishing touch with this hoop was to fill the base with 400 lbs. of sand. The manual shows a man pouring it in using a funnel. No problem. The only sand at our friendly neighborhood hardware/lumber store, however, was play sand (filtered, washed, packed together and more expensive), and I only bought 300 lbs, because I was afraid I'd break the van. Luckily JP was home at this point to help me, because we literally shovelled the sand in with one of the girls' sand shovels, scoop by scoop. It took over an hour, but that didn't prevent JP from trying it out in the dark! Basketball is now J's new favorite sport (passed up mini golf, which was a hit last week), and she can hardly wait to get out there again with a ball...it does her Daddy's heart good to hear that!

Of course, while we were playing with sand, the girls occupied themselves doing what they felt the concrete is best for...riding bikes...

and sidewalk chalk pictures.

I particularly like this one that J did. She says it is the sun yawning and stretching before it goes to bed at night.

Visitors

I've been apprehensive about my parents living with us for the several months until their house is finished. I tend to be the "glass half empty" kind of person, who imagines the worst (when I used to go jogging as a young person, I would fill my time by imagining what would happen if I was struck by a passing car). While I realize that this experience has the potential of being very good, I have been worrying about all the things that can go wrong. I want my parents to feel comfortable here, but at the same time, the whole concept is pushing the limits of my own comfort zone. Don't get me wrong, I am THRILLED (as is the rest of the family) that my folks are going to be our next door neighbors. I grew up only seeing my grandparents every couple of years, so this is an incredible opportunity for the girls. I am also looking forward to gardening and preserving with my Mom, shared meals with my parents, and many other things.

Mom & Dad came out again this weekend with another load of stuff. Dad is having rotator cuff surgery tomorrow, and wanted to move some heavy things (this load was his wood working equipment and wood stoves) before he was unable to lift. He decided this time to erect a shed to store things in, so that we won't have to move it from the garage when we are finally able to clear it out, finish the floor, and at long last...park our vehicles in there! Mom, Dad and I worked on it together, with the girls running in, out and around, and erecting their own structures with found sticks and pieces of scrap wood. First Dad flattened out a spot with the tractor.

Then it went from this:

...to this:

With lots of this in between.

It ended up being a fun project. I really like to see things go from pieces into a finished product, that's partly why I enjoy sewing. It was hard work, and all of us got cuts and bruises (Wow! I know I was sore on Saturday night, can you imagine how my retirement-age parents felt??), but it was enjoyable to work together on this project. This weekend finally gave me the sense that everything was going to work out alright. We might have our occasional minor injuries, but the final product will be strong and good.

In other news, the builders finished the entrance last week. They are pouring the final bit of concrete as I write. I need to ask the builder how much concrete they used in this project.

My parent's septic went in. This is the guys unloading the tank to put into a huge hole behind the truck.

I finally got one of my hummingbird feeders up. Within a couple of hours, we had our first visitors!

As for the other visitors...the rodent ones...the exterminators were out last week and left nasty stuff around for them. The night scrabbling sounds have diminished, but not completely disappeared, and if the smell in the girls' rooms is what I think it is, at least one has perished. Hmmm.

Girls' Rooms

We finally got mattresses for the daybed in the girls' playroom yesterday evening at the Friends & Family 20% off sale at Big Lots, so we could finally finish the girls' rooms. They are very "girly"...decorated with flowers, butterflies and fairies.




I showed a picture earlier of the double pocket doors between their rooms. For now, these are open most of the time, but when they are older and want their own rooms, they can keep them closed. One of the rooms is basically a sleeping room, with bunk beds and dressers for the girls.

The other room is the playroom/overflow guest room. L calls the area under the canopy the "rain place", but J thinks it is a "sleep-over/fairy bed". JP also managed to unearth the hopscotch rug that has been in storage for over a year.

I will post more pictures later of the girls hidey-hole under the stairs when it is finished.

This morning I woke up to this out front:

...and this in the back:

Now it looks like this:

They will pour another section of concrete later this week to make it into a giant rectangle. Then JP will at last be able to set up his Basketball hoop. They had to pour it in 2 steps in order to have a way to brace the roof over the door.

This weekend we did some more clearing in the garage. JP pulled out all the deck chairs and I scrubbed them. I also cleaned some more mouse dirtied things: sleeping bags, and the extra parts for the pack'n'play. JP was looking for bug spray, and found the bin it was in had something leak during the winter, so we had to clean all that up too. SIGH...I am really looking forward to the time when "moving" means hanging pictures, and NOT cleaning up mouse poo and pecan shells!

We put the deck chairs and the picnic table (that we used for a dining room table in the apartment) out on the porch. The girls had lunch there today.

My Heart Stopped Today

We are nearing the end of swimming lessons, thank goodness! It has been a long week at the pool. I'm sure the girls enjoyed it much more than I did. I'm pretty disappointed with the lessons this year...neither of the girls has learned much at all.

L fell in the water over her head this morning. It happened while I was scanning across the pool to be sure J was doing alright, so I wasn't aware that she was under until my friend started yelling "L is in the water! Get her out!" I took off running into the pool fully dressed, but one of the lifeguards managed to pull her out before I got in past my ankles. She was across the pool from me, coughing and gagging and shivering...so close, and yet so far away. All I wanted to do was hold her in my arms. When I finally did, I realized how much I was shaking too.

This evening, L told JP how she "got in the deep end and got water in my eyes and ears and nose"...no big deal to a 3 year old, but absolutely terrifying to a Mommy!

We spent the entire day at the pool, and came home tired and feeling a bit like raisins in the afternoon. The crew was just about to leave for the day. They put forms up for half of the concrete pad, and moved things out of the way for the excavators tomorrow. They also cleaned the porch and patio and sealed them with something called "Shark Skin", to make the concrete less slippery when wet. They look a bit darker and sorta shiny now. The porch hasn't been this empty since it was poured!

The cupola arrived and is in a giant box in the garage. J and I managed to put the "whimsical pig" weather vane together last week, so it is ready to go!

The pig garden is in full bloom! We released J's preying mantis out there this evening, after keeping it in the bug cage for most of the week. I was worried it would die, since we were having a hard time supplying food that it liked. We enjoyed watching it for several days...good luck in the wild Timmy!

The Ducky Bathroom

It has been quiet around here this week. Well, quiet during the day anyway. At 9 PM, like clockwork, the rodents begin gnawing on things up in the ceiling. I can't tell you how dismayed I am that my new house is already infested with mice. I was so looking forward to a mouse-free zone for a number of years, after repeatedly trapping 2/day every winter at the old house. These seem to be a different species of truly annoying rodents, unlike the last species that merely showed up smooshed in the traps periodically. I finally went to Wal Mart yesterday for battle gear: D-Con and glue traps. I can tell you, that at 9:37 PM, there is still one alive in the Library ceiling gnawing on something...probably a pecan.

The construction crew has been out this week on another job. They have promised to return on Friday to pour concrete in front of the driveway and for the stoop at our entrance door (so that we no longer have to use a packing pallet to step on). I assume that means that they will actually return tomorrow in order to get the forms set up. I hope that next week they can finish in the storage/utility area so that I can put the stuff that has stacked up in the Family Room away...it looks like a smaller, cleaner, rodent-free (I think) version of the garage in there!

We did finish the girls' bathroom. They requested that it be decorated with rubber duckies. I decided to use adhesive wall stickers so that when they tire of the duckies in a couple of years, it won't be too hard to change. There is a crack in the bathtub, which apparently happens frequently in construction. Someone is coming to fix it next week.

The counter is loooooooooooooooooooong! It will be perfect when the girls are teenagers and have piles of make-up and creams and doo-dads to put there!

In the meantime, it is swimming lessons week, so we are spending 2 1/2 hours a day at the pool. J worked on the back stroke today, and L played "Simon Says" in the shallow water.

Oh, and another thing...

I have been trying to update this blog for the past 24 hours. First the computer crashed, twice, while I was trying to edit photos. Then the computer chair was usurped by my husband. Then life happened, and we actually made yet another trip up the hill tonight for a pre-vacation meeting with the builder.

So, we have finally reached that point in our building experience where I get a call every day or so from the builder with questions. It's nice to know that we've reached the point where we need to pick out faucets and what-not for the bathrooms. But now we've really reached the point where our "Over-Budget" bill is rising. We have decided to have a wood ceiling put in the great room and kitchen, and possibly a Solatube in the kitchen.

The builder is making lots of lists too. This one is downstairs.

The tinted concrete looks great now that it is completely dry. This shot shows it up against the block of the garage.

Here are the girls' hand prints...a bit hard to make out.

Speaking of the girls...they have decided that the big equipment is the best place to play lately. This time they brought along their baby dolls.

Most of the wiring in the house is done. I couldn't get a shot of the circuit board in the girls' closet because I would have gotten another butt shot of one of the crew. These are a few of the recessed lighting cans in the kitchen/dining room. They are all over the place! (No more bare light bulbs in closets!)

The egress window well arrived for the girls' window downstairs. The very nice folks at Wayne Lumber brought it out for me, and stayed for a quick look at the house. This came in 4 sections, and includes steps for exiting/entering. It is designed to be large enough to fit a firefighter with equipment.

We have had thunder storms and quite a bit of rain in the past 24 hours. The driveway has held up very well so far. I haven't shown pictures of our field and stream (Wisecarver Run) because they aren't where the action is at lately. However, things are completely soggy and flooded over there. It would probably help if we dig all the old tires and crap out of it, but we are focused elsewhere at the moment.

I should be focusing on packing at this moment. By the end of next week, we are promised showers, tubs and toilets!

It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Spring has truly sprung in the southwest corner of PA. After a frost last night, the sky is blue, the temps have soared to over 60* and daffodils are blooming all over the place! We spent the entire morning out on Poplar Ridge, and invited friends to come and see the big trucks! The kiddos had a great time running, exploring and getting muddy.

They poured concrete for our patio on the first floor and our porch on the second floor today. We decided to tint the concrete a "sandstone" color, so that all of that expanse does not end up looking so much like a huge sea of, well, of grey concrete! Here is a shot of them pouring.

This is the nearly finished porch. You can see how well the concrete color goes with the block on the garage.

Here is the patio from the front. The girls put their little hand prints in the concrete to the left.

One of my friends was impressed that our builders are a pretty good looking crew of guys. Unfortunately, I usually get pictures of their backs (and no, it's not intentional). Here is a picture from the front for once. This is R, fixing the patio where J accidentally ran out into it and left big holes. You can see the little foot prints on the floor where she came back in.

They have also gotten a bunch of wiring done inside. Here is the wiring for the chandelier and 2 ceiling fans in the Great Room.

We leave for our Disney vacation this weekend. The house will probably be done when we return. (Or is that just wishful thinking?)