Moving Day

          Hello my loves.

          It has been one heck of a busy week this past week. Monday was moving day and so has been every day since then too. In fact, next week will be more of the same. It's amazing the amount of stuff you can pack into a small space when you do it slowly, over the course of years. But I have a fully functioning kitchen now!

          Even better than that, I have a view of the sunrise from my kitchen window. I didn't even know that that was something I wanted or needed, but now that I have it, I can't tell you how unbelievably happy it makes me.

          "What's that white bar across the top of the window?" you ask.

          I know right! I saw it too. Oh, I thought, I must have done something to it when I reduced the [picture] size in Paint. It wouldn't be the first time I accidently picked up a tool in that program and made changes I didn't mean to make. But now that I'd saved the changes I wouldn't be able to undo it so I went back to the original photo. That's when I discovered it was on there too. Funny I didn't see that when I was sorting photos, I thought. I looked closer and realized it's a reflection of the kitchen light. It's a good thing I stepped outside the door so you could fully appreciate the beautiful sky our Lord painted this day.

          My new kitchen is awesome and eclectic (different and varied). I have a spice cabinet that Rosie and Lamar Kipp gave to me. Next to it are shelves that used to belong to Mike's mother.

          "Is the spacing off on the shelves?" you wonder.

          It's not. Mike measured. I think it looks out of balance too but we're not changing it so I'll live with it.

          Since we are still in the process, there are a lot of tools sitting around and lots of things that haven't found homes yet, but all in good time.

          On the other side of the sink, between the window and door, is a commercial stainless double shelf that I had in Peggy's Kitchen, a dessert business I had for about eight months one year. The holes didn't line up for the studs so we had to put two-by-fours up first and even though I thought I would hate it, I rather like the look of it.

          "Looks like a head banger to me!" you say.

          I know, right! Going in and out of the door I've gotten my head on it twice already and Mike nailed it at least once. But the great thing about pain is that it's a good teacher; I'm much more careful and thoughtful when I'm letting the girls in and out. Which reminds me! We fenced in a big section of the kitchen alcove and Itsy and Ginger can go out on their own now! That's something else I didn't know that I needed or wanted, but now that I have it, I love it!

          The microwave 'stand' was the cash register cabinet from one of our stores so it has a locking drawer.

          I have two sections of white cabinets that were also salvaged from one business or another and we have those on either end of a twelve-foot counter with a dresser and nightstand in the middle (last week's picture). I have no idea where these two pieces came from, but I have plenty of bedroom furniture without them. They're just the right height for under my counter, have lots of drawers to put things in, saves Mike having to build me shelves under there, and best of all, doesn't cost me anything to use them! Except a little elbow grease to clean them up. The wood glides on the drawers are a little sticky but I'll get some wax the next time we go to the store and hopefully that will take care of that!

          My center 'island' is another salvage from an outgoing business. A lot of times when our tenants left, they didn't want this stuff and asked if they could leave it. Mike always let them thinking it would be an asset to whomever our next tenant would be but if they didn't want it, it would find its way into the garage and ultimately it ended up out here, in the way-back of the mill, in storage.

          This is half of a much larger piece and I don't know what happened to the other half....

          "Mike!" I yelled from my place in front of my computer (I told you my desk wouldn't stay neat for very long)...

 to where Mike is sitting, 35 feet away, in his recliner watching TV.

          "We need Walkie-Talkies," he's said before, but right now, he muted the TV and yelled back. "What?"

          "What happened to the other half of that counter that's my center island?"

          "Oh, I don't know." He thought about it for a moment then says, "I think it got busted up."

          So my center island has a THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING sign on it that I may just leave there for shits and grins, and we have a future plan to put a bar on this side for the cool chairs that are already living there. These stools are heavy iron, shorter than a bar stool, but taller than a regular chair.

          You may notice my stove at the end of the counter. We originally weren't going to bring the stove over from the apartment. I have two NU WAVE cook tops and two NU WAVE ovens and I was going to use those until I got my Forever Kitchen. They would work just fine for me 95% of the time. The few times that I'd need a full size oven, I could go over to the apartment and bake. 

          Friday, Mike says to me, "Peg, we could bring the stove over here. It wouldn't be that hard to do and I hate to have you go over there in the middle of winter to cook something." The apartment will be winterized and unheated this winter.

          I didn't say anything and he was quiet for a moment. Then he went on, "We could put it at the end of the counter where we were going to put the butcher block and put the butcher block on the other end."

          He'd obviously given this a lot of thought.

          "Yeah but then you'd see the back of the stove. That would be ugly," I pointed out.

          "I could put a half wall up behind it," he volunteered.

          So Friday we moved the stove over and ran the power down through a center PVC pole, the same way we ran power to the island on the other end. Now I have one on each end and it looks balanced. "I think I'll paint them purple!" I said thinking Mike would object.

          "I don't care," was all he said.

          I don't know if I'll paint them purple or not paint them at all, but one thing is for sure; I'm going to ask Rosie first. She's my color coordinator when I need that kind of advice.

          On my side of the counter, the kitchen side, Mike put shelves in three of the four bays for me, two half-shelves and a full shelf between them. It'll give me a handy place to keep pots and pans that I use all the time and as you can plainly see, the first bay is already designated as the pet food bay. The last bay is more narrow and would be perfect for taller things like cookie sheets.

          "Peg, that's all fine and dandy, but where's your ceiling?" you ask.

          It'll have to wait, along with the carpet and hardwood floors for the kitchen and dining areas. You may notice there are pieces of carpet all throughout our 'new' home but once again, they were salvaged from our old business.

          My pantry has shelves Mike bought from a store going-out-of-business sale a couple of five years ago. And he made me a can shelf because cans can get heavy.

          "Peg! Why didn't you paint it?" you ask.

          I guess I'm running out of steam. I just wanted to get it put up and the cans put back on them.

          On the opposite wall is a half bath that's ready for paint, my laundry alcove, and then the water room on the other side of that.

          I love the gray color that Mike picked for this area and it reminds me of my beautiful cousin Stacey; it's one of her favorite colors.

          I don't have a laundry sink yet and it might be a long time until I get one. We've had to separate our wants from our needs.

          Something else we've been digging out of storage are our painting and photographs for the walls. I'd forgotten all about this one but it has such an interesting story that I wanted to share it with you.

          When Mike was five or six years old, his mother took him to an eye doctor in Chicago in a high-rise building. After parking the car, Mike saw this painting leaning against a fence post.

          "Michael Norman! Leave that alone!" she yelled at him.

          "But Mom! I want it!" Michael said picking it up.

          "Put it back — NOW!"

          Michael didn't put it back, he leaned it against their car. Hours later, done at the doctors, they came back to the car and it was still there, so his mother let him keep it. That was in 1953. We don't know which way it was meant to hang and since it's not signed, we don't know who painted it. 

And it's one of those things that everyone can look at and see something different. It's quite a large painting, 4 feet by 2 1/2 feet. But one thing is for sure, our daughter Kat didn't like it. It scared her and Mike graciously hid it away so she never had to look at it.

          Our house isn't everyone's cup o' sunshine but I love being surrounded by things that remind me of people I love. I can be quite happy with what I have forever and ever — which is a good thing since it will take us that long to dig out of the hole we're in.

          I went out on the front patio and found this guy sunning himself. He's just a little guy, only about a foot long.

          "What is it?" you ask.

          This, my dears, is a rat snake. They have a habit of shaking their tails so you think he's a rattler. Rat snakes are constrictors; they hug the life right out of their prey and swallow them whole. But it's good to have rat snakes around. They eat mice, rats, voles, chipmunks, frogs, lizards, and bird eggs. It's interesting that juveniles are more likely to eat cold-blooded prey while adults stick exclusively to warm-blooded animals.

          I took a broom and dustpan, picked him up, took him out to the weeds, and dumped him out.

          The very next day I found him on the patio again! This time I took him further from the house, down near the pond, before I turned him loose.

          Coming back from an errand in town, we're crossing our little open-grate bridge and Mike says, "There's a heron."

          That got my attention! "Where?"

          "Sitting on the beaver dam," he said, stopping the car and backing up.

          "There's something else up there too," I said looking through the viewfinder of my camera. "Rosie's ducks!"

          The heron wasn't upset by our stopping on the bridge, but the ducks were and took flight.

          That got his attention so he stretched out his neck and looked around. We didn't want to cause him to fly away so we drove off.

         

          Powerful storms came through our area Monday night. Tuesday we had no cell phone service, at least none to speak of. We might get a signal long enough to send or receive a text but it was undependable. Sometimes it was on for a minute but more likely we'd only have service for a few seconds before it would go out again. So for all intents and purposes, we had no cell service.       Wednesday we had no cell phone service.

          Thursday we had no service. It came on long enough for a message to come through and Mike needed to return the call. "Let's go into town and make some phone calls," Mike suggested. Mike had cell service in town, but I didn't, which is weird because we have the same cell phone and the same service provider. "We'll go up to the overlook and see if yours works there."

          So once again I found myself taking pictures of the valley. The sumac leaves in the foreground are flaming red and you can see the Susquehanna River winding its way through the valley.

          I walked out to the huge rocks jutting over the edge and took pictures in both directions, just for you!

          Isn't it beautiful?

          Going back to the parking area I see one lone knapweed blooming in all his glory while all of the others had already come and gone. It was nice to see the touch of lavender among all the browns of the winter flowers.

          Our Bradford pear trees are a turning a pretty shade of red.

 

         A little red dragonfly landed on a leaf in front of me long enough for me to get two pictures of him.

The berries have split revealing the beautiful red center of the bittersweet.

          A day or so after putting in my kitchen sink, we realized we had a problem.  We built on an existing concrete slab and rather than chop out the concrete to get the proper flow in gravity feed system — which Mike tells me we'd never have gotten unless we went four feet down — we installed a grinder pump system in the bathroom. The pump pumps all the sewage up to the ceiling, across the kitchen to the outer wall where it comes down and ties in with the rest of the system, which is a gravity flow system. Even though we have air vents in all the proper places, and even though the bathroom comes in after the kitchen sink, when the pump pumps, it sucks the water from the trap under the kitchen sink and we get the foulest, most nastiest, sewer smell ever permeating our kitchen.

          "Everything's hooked up right, it shouldn't be doing that," Mike says. He called his crony Gary in Missouri and talked to him for a while and it was decided that we needed a 'cheater' vent under the kitchen sink.

          "Well go get it," I said to Mike when he told me and that's code for I don't want to go to the hardware store with you.

          "No. It'll wait until the next time we go out. In the meantime, if you keep a little water in the sink, the smell won't come up.

          We did this for a day or so and Mike was right, we didn't have an issue with smell.

          "Peg, you wanna go to breakfast Saturday morning?" Mike asks.

          I love breakfast out so I didn't have to think about that one very long. "Well, yeah!"

          "We can take the recycling out to Brown's and on the way home we can stop at ACE and get the vent," Mike says.

          Saturday morning we are coming down the mountain into town and the fog was coming up just across the Susquehanna, fall colors, and I took this photo.

          And a couple of more road pictures for you.

          Once home we put the cheater vent under the sink and even though the sink still gurgles when the pump pumps, we don't get the odor like before. I guess it's working!

          Let's call this one done!