I didn’t mean to take a mini break from the blogging world. But a sinus infection, the antibiotic for the sinus infection, and a cold took the wind out of my sails for a couple of weeks. Just for funsies, my birthday and Thanksgiving were during that two week period. I think I need a do-over on my birthday celebration. Oh, well. On to the post!
We were unaware of Roxie’s kleptomaniac tendencies until we returned from our 2023 road trip only to discover most of my refrigerator magnets missing. At the time of our trip, Roxie was somewhere between six and seven months old. I still don’t know how a kitten was able to remove so many magnets; I’m guessing sheer determination played a large role. Most of my magnets are souvenirs from our travels, so I didn’t want to just not get any more, but a different solution for protecting them was needed. Fortunately, an idea presented itself.
Our kitchen cabinets have that “wasted space” between the top of the cabinet doors and the ceiling. I asked Kenn to “age” some galvanized metal like he has done for some of his other projects and fit a piece above the smallest cabinet. He did and it works perfectly! However, by the time I added this years magnets, that area was mostly full.
The wasted space.
We both like the looks of the metal so Kenn decided to continue it across the remaining cabinets. We joked that we need to put up a sign saying “Nyx’s Kitchen” since the kitchen is very much Nyx’s (our black cat) “territory.” I found some rustic-style letter magnets and voila!
It turns out, Kenn is not a fan of these magnets.🤦♀️The Roxie-free magnet zone.
Now I feel like the cabinet doors need… something. I just need to figure out what. Whatever it is can wait until after the holidays!
Fall is my favorite season. Fall is when the weather finally starts to change reminding us that the miserable heat and humidity of summer will actually come to an end. I also love the color provided by the changing of the leaves. Sadly, we live far enough south that we don’t get much color; we have a lot of evergreens and the leaves on the non-evergreens tend to just turn brown and fall off. Northern Georgia gets beautiful color, but joining the crowds of “leaf peepers” means making reservations at least a year in advance. Mostly, I just live vicariously through the photos of my fellow bloggers from the more northern climes.
However, as I look around our yard, I see that we are slowly changing things in our neck of the woods. Our crape myrtles are young, but they are doing their part to bring some color to our yard as do the forsythia.
One of our crape myrtles showing out.
Forsythia
I have had a life-long fascination with ginkgo trees due to my love of dinosaurs; fossil records indicate that ginkgos have been around since dinosaurs roamed the earth. (I recently learned that ginkgos were around before dinosaurs.) Four years ago, Kenn gifted me a ginkgo of my own which is just starting to turn the beautiful yellow they are known for.
A touch of yellow on my ginkgo.
Last fall, we planted two young Japanese maples of different varieties. When I say small, I mean small. Both trees were twigs barely a foot tall when we planted them and we weren’t sure if they would make it. However, both are doing well and while still small, they are starting to look like actual trees. I think the tree that has the red leaves of the traditional Japanese maple is going to require another year or two to come into its own. The second tree, a Japanese Sunrise, is already showing us some pretty color even though the leaves are brown-edged due to the lack of rain over the past few months.
Young Japanese Sunrise.
This year, I gifted Kenn a Flame Thrower Redbud for his birthday. However, since we didn’t want to plant it until after our road trip, I had it delivered last week and Kenn planted it the same day. While it is currently tall and skinny with big leaves, we can’t wait to see how it does over the next year. We’re hoping for spectacular color!
I thought I’d do a quick summary of our trip before getting into detailed posts. After all, all I had to do was copy and paste most of the info from a FB post. What was I thinking? This is WordPress – it doesn’t do easy. Instead, it converted every individual line of the copied text into a separate paragraph. Ugh. It probably would have been simpler to re-type everything rather than fix the resulting mess, but I’m hard-headed so I did things the hard way. Anyhoo, here is the promised summary:
Trip Length: Twenty-five days and 4,505 miles
States Visited:
North Carolina
Tennessee
Virginia
West Virginia
Ohio
Indiana
Michigan
Wisconsin
Minnesota
Illinois
Kentucky
All of the states we have visited with our camper.
Places visited:
New River Gorge National Park
Babcock State Park (West Virginia)
Cuyahoga Valley National Park
The House from A Christmas Story
Indiana Dunes National Park
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore
Castle Rock (St. Ignace, Michigan)
Mackinac Island
Tahquamenon Falls State Park (Upper Peninsula of Michigan)
Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore
Apostle Islands National Lakeshore
Atomic Antiques (Madison, Wisconsin)
The Bronze Fonz (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
The Kaskaskia Dragon (Vandalia, Illinois)
Great Lakes:
Erie
Michigan
Huron
Superior
We’re only missing Lake Ontario!
I’ll break the future posts out by state, assuming I survive grooming (aka shaving) Kota, our long-haired cat. Wish me luck!
I don’t what happens, but every year, usually in the July time, frame I get behind on reading the posts by people I follow and my own posts become rather haphazard. I made it until August this year before this happened. (Go, me!😂) I’m actually just getting back into the swing of things so some of y’all are going to start seeing likes and comments on older posts.
August seemed to turn into a circular discussion on the following:
Are we going on a road trip this year?
If so, are we going to stick to the route we’ve already discussed or change it up?
If we stick to the route we’ve been discussing, do we want to add any additional stops to what we already have planned?
When it comes to these types of discussions, we can absolutely beat the topic to death. Discussions seem to come to an end when I reach the point where I just really don’t care any more, LOL. So, what did we decide?
We did go on a trip.
We stuck to the route we had already discussed.
We only added one or two stops at kitschy roadside attractions and those were added on the fly.
Selfie on the shore of Lake Superior
We’ve now been home for a week and are starting to get back into the swing of things. We’ve caught up on sleep and laundry and consoling the cats, now I’m getting back into the routine tasks like vacuuming, dusting, etc. We got home just in time for the government shutdown so Kenn hasn’t been able to go back to his part-time job yet.
I’ll be posting more about our travels over the coming weeks. Now, it’s time to go scoop litterboxes. Whoo hoo! (I miss our cats dreadfully while we’re gone. I do not miss scooping poop.)
If you’ve ever had kids, or been around children for any length of time, you know that when they are young and their immune systems are developing they basically become the world’s cutest little plague carriers. For several years, pretty much every bug going through the day care/school comes home to infect the whole family. Fortunately, as the kids grow and their immune systems strengthen, not every illness comes home. Then, after several years, the grandchildren come along and the process begins anew.
As of this writing, Kenn and I have three grandchildren: a twelve-year-old grandson, and his three-year-old brother and sister (fraternal twins). Up until our oldest son and his family (which includes all of the grandkids) moved to South Carolina, we kept our oldest grandson every other weekend; one of the times I have been the sickest was courtesy of him. At the time he was nine months old and fond of giving open-mouthed kisses as babies do when they’re first learning to kiss. It was adorable until he basically took out the whole family. I was sick as a dog for two weeks; everyone else shook it off after about a week. As for the grandson, he was fine; he was just a carrier. We still refer to it as the Babe-onic Plague.
Earlier this month, the twins were down visiting their other grandparents for a few days. Since we were headed to South Carolina for a weekend visit, we took the twins back with us. Lulu got a dose of Dramamine before we got on the road since she tends to get carsick. Everything was fine until just before we reached the Georgia/South Carolina border when Lulu started getting fussy. We took a break at the South Carolina Visitor’s Center so everyone could get out an move around. Lulu was not interested in anything. As I was carrying the pitiful little girl across the parking lot, I realized that she felt a little warm, but didn’t say anything. Kenn and I swapped off keeping an eye on the twins while the other went to the restroom. When I rejoined the group, Kenn said “Lulu feels a little warm to me.” I agreed, but we were almost to their house, so we loaded up and continued the journey. When we got to our son’s house, I told him that Lulu was fussy and felt a little warm, but he didn’t think she had a fever – until he took her temperature. Poor little girl had a temperature off 100.4o. Our daughter-in-law joined us at that point and our son greeted her with “Why does she get sick every time she visits your parents?” Of course, that’s one of those questions that has no answer. Poor little Lulu was sick all weekend; she was just miserable with a low-grade fever and a cough/congestion. (Linus, meanwhile, was fine.)
Kenn makes a pretty good napping buddy for a sick little girl.
When Kenn and I headed home on Monday, I was sleepy – which tends to be one of the first signs that I’m getting sick. The kids contacted us to let us know that Lulu’s COVID test was negative and that she was starting to feel a little better. Once we got home, Kenn and I spent the next few days suffering from a mild fatigue and I had a day of “brain fog” where words just weren’t working. After we started feeling better, I told him that I felt like I’d had a really mild case of COVID. It turns out that we probably did. Apparently there are a couple of new COVID variants that a lot of tests don’t detect. I’m just thankful that Lulu was feeling better in just a few days and that Kenn and I were only slightly under the weather.
Are there any Babe-onic Plague type stories in your family?
I tend to be an organized person, although I’ve relaxed a lot in retirement. However, I still find it annoying when I can’t find something – especially when I just had it and I haven’t moved from where I was working. Pro Tip: always check under the cat. (Of course, now that Roxie is a member of the family, things go missing more often; the girl is a total kleptomaniac.)
Roxie, aka Klepto Kitty
We are currently trying to find the biggest item we have ever misplaced. Actually, we didn’t misplace it, we’ve never known where it is.🤷♀️ The Cabin is our third home, but the first to have a septic tank. The general rule of thumb seems to be that a septic tank should be pumped out every three to five years; as of August 5th, we have been living here eight years. Kenn and I have had a few discussions about having the septic tank checked/pumped, but then it slips our minds. However, we have finally taken action. (Go, us!) We had someone come out last week, but the ground was too boggy to do much. He’s supposed to come out again this Friday, but what with regular rainstorms, I’m not sure that the ground will be much better.
Kenn contacted the previous owners of The Cabin and asked about the location of the septic tank. They gave him a rough idea of its location, but he wasn’t able to find it. Before the technician was scheduled to arrive, Kenn said he remembered us getting a hand-drawn diagram of the location of the septic tank when we closed on the house. Of course, neither of us could find the closing paperwork. So much for my organizational skill! (I found the paperwork for our first two houses with no problems.🙄)
Kenn has become friends with the owners of the local pawn shop. (How’s that for a non sequitur?) He stopped in at the pawn shop for a visit and asked if they knew where their septic tank is; they did. They also gave Kenn a tip. It turns out that we can get a copy of the latest septic tank inspection from our local… health department. I thought we might be able to locate the information on the Tax Commissioner’s website, but I was wrong. Getting the information from the health department would have never even crossed my mind. Kenn gave the health department a call yesterday, and they have already sent him some information; he also got out and did some digging and is pretty sure he found the septic tank. According to the paperwork from the health department, the original 1979 septic system was replaced and relocated in 2001; the location of the “new” system matches up to what Kenn found. He has also flagged the location so we don’t “lose” it again.
What’s the biggest (or most important thing) you have misplaced?
I don’t know what happened, but when my part-time job ended, I decided that it is time for us to start working on the projects that we’ve discussed seemingly forever. Among those projects are:
Replacing the ceiling fan and light fixture in our living/dining area.
Install vinyl plank flooring in the basement bathroom and replace the sink and toilet.
Replace the counter and sink in the main floor bathroom.
The basement bathroom project revolves around us agreeing on which vinyl plank flooring pattern to use which may take a while. Kenn likes lighter flooring, I don’t – especially for the basement bathroom. The basement bath is between the half of the basement that serves as Kenn workshop and the half where my video game consoles are set up. As such, that bathroom sees a lot of muddy boots (Kenn’s) which, in my opinion, are not conducive to a light colored floor. I think he now sees the logic behind going with something a little darker, but we haven’t found exactly what we’re looking for yet.
Our next door neighbor has his own counter/cabinetry business, so replacing the counter/sink in the main floor bath is only a matter of getting on his schedule. We purchased the sink/counter combo for our master bath from him, so we already know what pattern we want – no decisions to make here!
We usually replace ceiling fans and light fixtures on our own, but the ones in the “great room” are going to require a professional with a scaffold or something due to the twenty-foot ceilings. I will dust the ceiling occasionally, but that’s where it stops for me.
We recently undertook a smaller project. Well, it was a smaller project for me; I don’t think it was even on Kenn’s list. We replaced our mailbox. The Cabin came with a rustic mailbox. (Shocking, I know.) The cedar mailbox was great for our rural location and rustic house, but it required too much upkeep for me. The mailbox looked like a house and the previous owners had stained the sides and roof of the mailbox to match those of The Cabin. They had even painted the “doors and windows” on the mailbox green like those on The Cabin. I played around with the idea of repainting the mailbox “door” yellow after we repainted our front door, but… no. The mailbox roof had faded and needed to be restained; it also had moss and lichen growing on it. I mentioned it to Kenn, and he was enthusiastic. “We can clean it and restain it!” However, I strongly suspected that that “we” meant “me” and “me” had no interest in taking on that task. I’m not a high-maintenance person, and I don’t want a high-maintenance mailbox. So, I bought a basic bronze mailbox and we installed it a few days ago.
The original mailbox.
The new mailbox.
While we were installing the new mailbox, we were also waiting for an air conditioning technician to arrive. Our A/C had stopped working the previous day, and it was time for us to find out if the existing unit could be repaired or if it would need to be replaced. Based on the date written on the unit, it’s twenty-two years old; I couldn’t help but feel that the odds were not in our favor. However, we dodged a bullet. A new switch and capacitor got the unit back up and running. We know it’s at the end of its lifespan, but hopefully, this fix will keep it running a little longer.🤞
Are you a DIY-er or do you prefer to hire a professional for your home improvement projects?
When our state began implementing traffic circles (or roundabouts if you prefer) I didn’t see the point. Part of the problem was that the first traffic circles we encountered with any regularity were in the middle of absolutely nowhere. I’m talking intersections where if two vehicles reach the intersection at the same time at any point in the day, it’s a traffic jam. Once we moved to The Cabin and we began navigating the traffic circle that’s a little over a mile from our house – we got it. The traffic circle is so much better than the four-way stop it replaced. Around six months ago, a second traffic circle opened about a half mile from the first one.
There are basically two roads to take when leaving our house. One has the two traffic circles discussed above. Now, a new traffic circle is being installed (implemented? constructed?) on the other road, about a mile from our house. I’m excited about this one. I navigated this intersection frequently; especially on days I worked. Through traffic on the road doesn’t stop so certain times of day, the traffic entering from the side roads backs up, especially when someone needs to turn left. The pavement in one area was really in need of repair as well. With other traffic circles in the area, the roads were kept open during construction. This time, the roadway is closed and the contractor has thirty-five days to complete the project; so, it should be completed around the Forth of July.
Image from depositphotos.com
Now, when I say the roads leading to the traffic-circle-in-process are closed, there is no doubt that the roads are. closed. There are big signs barricading the roads and plenty of bright orange detour signs. However, this apparently isn’t enough to stop some people – including my husband.🙄 Kenn came home one day about a week after the closure and casually mentioned that he had driven down to check on the progress of the project. Upon questioning, yes, he had driven around the barricades. No, he didn’t think it was a big deal. I begged to differ, but, whatever dude. Then, a little over a week ago, Kenn came home from his Saturday morning errands and confessed that he, along with the drivers of two or three other vehicles, had driven around the barricades. However, this time, the police were waiting on them. So, my dear hubby came home with a ticket and a court date. I told him he may as well not try to talk his way out of it because he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Kenn agreed and also promised that he will not be violating the barricades again. I also explained to him the definition of FAFO – the non-PC version of “play stupid games and win stupid prizes.”
So, what do you call these: traffic circles or roundabouts? Or, maybe something completely different? (One of my former coworkers calls them “roundy-rounds.”)
In my last post, I wrote about how I planned to replace the bird house the bluebirds were nesting in as soon as the babies left home. I didn’t have a chance. I went outside Tuesday and glanced at the bird house like I always do and… it was gone. The only thing attached to the hook it hung from was the roof. The rest of the house was on the seat of the swing. I checked inside; the nest was intact, and I didn’t see any baby bluebird corpses. However, when I checked the ground, there was a shattered egg.😢 I was heartbroken. Nature can be harsh, so I’m well aware that things happen to nests in the wild, but this one should have been safe.
The bird house was wooden and I was keeping an eye on it because the bottom was warped, causing a gap between the base and the rest of the house. There was no indication that there was a problem with the roof, so I was shocked at the complete failure of the structure. I immediately ordered the two houses I mentioned in my last post. The replacements arrived Thursday and Kenn put them up on Friday. (According to nestwatch.org, bluebird houses should be 300 feet apart.) Since the broken birdhouse was in a popular location, we placed one of the new ones there. However, the new one is firmly attached to a post, not hanging.
Saturday, the day after the new houses were put up, I got a couple of texts from Kenn.
A couple of hours later, I looked out the window and saw this.
House Hunters, bluebird style!
Based on the activity we’ve seen, this couple is busily creating a new nest. I look forward to watching the development of the new family. Their new home is well built and made of recycled plastic, so it should hold up for several years. It’s also easy to clean out, unlike the one that failed.
Kenn also built a house for the Carolina wrens and mounted it on the carport post near the location of one of the earlier nests. Once again, according to nestwatch.org, we are in the height of Carolina wren nesting season, so it will be interesting to see if it will get used.
Here’s hoping for happier bird watching in the days and weeks ahead!
Linda Lou's Life 