Monthly Archives: March 2009

the latest on the boat

We are finally ready to move the boat. It’s scheduled for Saturday and I’ll try to see if I can get some pictures. I moved my Silver Streak down to the river on Friday. I’m about done with the old place. I’m going out tomorrow to give it one last look and see what I missed moving. Then I’ll be done with it. I wish I could be sad about this. I’m sad about losing Jeffrey, not losing the place. After dealing with the snow on my own, I’ve had enough of it. We are finally seeing the last of it melt up at the house.

Life has been okay. I spent a week in town, while the boyfriend was sick. It’s a long commute to work, but most of it is on the freeway. It wasn’t bad. I’m back at the house and I think the dogs want to catch up on their sleep. They spend the day outside in town and they just don’t sleep as well. The old dog is really failing and I don’t think she has many months left. I don’t think she could handle boat life, in any case. I’ll just have to see how it goes.

More than anything else, I want to have a place where I feel like I’m at home. The boyfriend’s house will never be that place. The house in the mountains isn’t mine and the cats seem to have taken it over in my absence. I can’t live in the trailer any more. I don’t know what I will do, if life on the boat doesn’t work out. It seems to be my future and I can’t see anything else. I am going to try and go through the things I moved and see what I can get rid of. I have some ideas on how to decorate the inside of the boat. I just need the money and time to do the work.

Goats!

They don’t live with me any more, but they are still having kids! Here’s Lily with her two brand new kids.
Lily's buckling

Lily's doeling

Lily with the doeling

Lily was bred to a mini-nubian buck so these kids should be small goats. This is her second kidding and I’m happy to see that it went well. One last goat picture. These are Scamper’s latest:

Scamper's latest

how things are going

I had really great news last week. The state is going to cover Jeffrey’s medical expenses! This is a huge relief for me. I was looking at around $170,000 in medical bills. I will still have some odds and ends to clear up and that will be hard enough. The second bit of good news is that I’ve moved most of my things over at the place. I took the stuff I wanted out of the sheds. I still need to move the trailer and a few more things. I’m hoping to do that on Saturday. Once that’s complete, I will be done with the place Jeffrey and I were buying. It’s been difficult, because the old “friend” screwed me out of everything I put into it. He won’t sell the place and is letting his son have it. So the $9,300 that I put into it as a down payment is lost. I have been through such hell since Jeffrey died that the loss of the money is almost trivial. I could use it and the “friend” knows it. I hope he gets the reward he deserves.

The boyfriend has been sick, so no progress on the boat. We are talking about paying to have it moved. It’s taking too much time to get the engines in working condition. It will have to be done, but not today. It’s costing us to keep it moored and it needs to be moved. So we are trying to scrape up the money to do that, hopefully this week as well. Once it’s moved, we can work on the interior and get it ready to be lived in. I would like to be out of the church’s house by the end of April, if possible. I feel pretty scattered with things the way that they are. I’ve been spending four days in town at the boyfriend’s and three days at the house with the cats. There’s just no way to move the cats into his house. If we can get the worst of the heavy work done on the boat, I could move the cats into it and then start moving me up to town. So I will see how it goes. I am going to start going through all the stuff that was in the shed and see what I have that I need to get rid of. I will feel better when I purge things. I am thinking about bringing over all that fleece I bought for the yurt project. I wasn’t going to bother, but I think I will, if I have time. I’d like to do some felting and it would be good to have something made from that stuff.

I still don’t know what direction my life without Jeffrey will take. The new relationship seems pretty solid. I’m happier than I have been. I still miss Jeffrey and likely always will. It seem strange, after all those years together, to be with a new man. We have all these stories yet to tell each other. We’ve shared so much. And really, I have to learn how to be my own self, to stand on my own. I don’t have to live alone to do that. I do have to learn what it means to live without that very solid marriage I had. I’ve taken off the wedding rings I used to wear and am wearing a small turquoise ring, to remind myself that I am single. The boyfriend and I have a tendancy to fall into that “old married couple” thing. It’s comfortable and one day, we may be exactly that. For now, I need to remind myself that the relationship is new and fresh.

The dogs have been doing okay. I suspect that I will have to put Tessie down in the next month or so. She has cancer, with a big tumor hanging down from the underarm area. She’s starting to get thin. She doesn’t see, hear, or walk well any more and is incontinent. I am hoping to get her to some warm weather, but I feel like the end may be near. It will be sad, but I would like to bury her on the Denne place. I will likely leave a bit of Jeffrey’s ashes with her. I think he’d like that.

Spring, where are you??

I am SO ready for spring. We had a pretty good melt going. Then it decided to snow a few inches. It’s melting again, but still…I am ready for warmer weather. I’m planning to try and move the last of my things off the place next week and try to sell the trailer. Then I want to figure out what it will take to move into Vancouver. I’d like to be down there by April, which is not that far off. Mainly, I need a place for the cats. They are inside cats and we haven’t quite figured out a way to move them in. If the boat were ready, I could move there, but we are still working on it. I will find out how things are progressing tonight. I want to finish up some of the loose ends from the old life and get started on the new one.

There are bulbs in bloom in the lowlands. I’ve had roses in the bedroom, but those finally died. So I bought a few bulbs for the room today; a primrose, narcissis, and small iris. I have four cheap rose bushes to plant too. I just have that need to work with growing things for awhile.

Oh, and to show that I’m still a geek, I picked up a Palm Tungsten C last week from Free Geeks. Great price! These have a built in wifi and a larger than normal battery with 64MB of RAM. It’s a screamer. I just couldn’t resist it, although I’d sworn off on geek toys. The only thing it lacks is a camera. I guess if I ever upgrade my cell phone, I’ll just get one that has a decent camera. I might still pick up a Palm Centro for my phone. I still like Palms.

Dogs are doing fine, as are the cats. My goats have been kidding in their new home, out East. I’m adjusting to the loss of that dream. I think the reason that people have problems adjusting to the loss of a spouse is that the old dreams have died but there are no new ones to take their place. I am trying to dream those new dreams now. As I start to see them come to life, I will feel more confident about the future.

Blog changes

I’ve decided to get rid of the opening page and have my blog directly at notsothoreau.com. So here you are.

We went out to the boat again on Sunday. We’ve got new batteries for the engines. The starters are going to be rebuilt this week. One of the carburetors is shot, so we will need to replace that. If we can get one engine working, that will be enough to move it. We’ve been trying to sort out what work needs to be done immediately. I am hoping to move in by April. I am spending half the week in town and the other half out at the house in the woods. I need to get settled in somewhere. This just is too hard emotionally. The dogs seem to enjoy the time in town, and then spend the time in the woods catching up on their sleep. There is a fenced yard in town, so they get to spend a lot of time outside there.

As for how my life is going, well some days I just don’t know. I seem pretty happy in town, when I’m with the boyfriend. When I’m back out in the woods, it gets lonely. The amount of stuff to deal with is overwhelming. I am in a mess with the “friend” who was supposedly selling us the place in the woods. He is reluctant to put it up for sale, which means I have no chance to recover any of the money I put down on the place. He is trying to prevent me from removing the rest of my personal property, like the trailer. He can’t prevent me from doing that legally, but it does make things messy. I have tried to be conciliatory, but simply can’t afford to give him any more money on the place. And I’m angry about the whole mess. Jeffrey got sick taking him to the VA Hospital. I really don’t feel like I owe the man anything else.

The other issue of course are medical bills. I have a ton of them. I put in for the WA state medical insurance back when Jeffrey got sick. It took until January before they denied it at the first level. It’s now up at the disability office. I had to go in and give them a copy of the death certificate this morning. The woman that took it remembered working with Jeffrey back at the Nursery. Little things like that are always hard. I don’t know how that will turn out.

And then there are the usual issues in a new relationship. I have to remind myself how little time I’ve been in this relationship and how long I was married in the old one. It’s tough. We seem to connect well and get along well enough. But I am dealing with a different person and I have become someone different. Both of us have been dealing with grief and the loss of our spouse. It’s complex. I think that it will all get easier with time. We need to see what our relationship looks like. It’s still developing.