When I went back to my old job, I returned to the 150 mile round trip commute. Daily. It’s all freeway, but I had some very near misses this winter, and winter in the Gorge is unpredictable. With gas prices climbing and a decidedly inefficient car, I was faced with possibly having to find a different job, closer to home. Thanks to my boss and the company owner, my current job is now the job closer to home. Today was my first day of telecommuting. It’s a two month trial, but I’m doing all I can to make things permanent.

I wish I could say that it was a smooth transition. I’d worked on getting the phone set up Saturday and thought I had it. Then, this morning, it wasn’t working right. We got it working, then I started losing the internet. Finally, after having Comcast give me a second ip address, both the internet and phone were working at the same time. I can access most of my tools from my computer, but there are a few applications that I needed a remote desktop to access. I’ve got that part working now too. I’m able to log into the phone queue and take calls from my desk in Quinn’s old room. It’s a nice view.

Advantages to the company are– I can now work a split shift, giving a bit more support in the morning. I’ll be taking a 3 hour break in the afternoon, then working another three hours. It’s also like getting a raise that didn’t cost them any money. And, if someone calls in sick on the weekends or they get hammered with an outage, I can jump in for whatever is needed. My office is just down the hall.

Advantages to me are simple. An extra 9 hours a week that I don’t spend driving. Less money spent on gas, and this runs $25-30 a day. And I get to stay with a company that I do care about. It’s a real win-win situation.

Well, it’s not anywhere near done. I’m in the process of redoing the Spindlitis site. I’m moving it off Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress and back to basic html. I’ve put back in some nice stuff about spindles. I’ve yet to do my spinning, knitting and blog pages for the site. I’m pretty happy with it so far. Here it is!

In other news, travel in the Gorge continues to be treacherous. I left early on Friday, at the owner’s suggestion. Monday, I had no problems. Today, I got to Cascade Locks and it was a mess. Several inches of snow were on the ground and I-84 also had snow on the road. I turned around at the first car off the road and went home. The highway is fine to milepost 30, but the 14 miles to Cascade Locks is where you start to see snow. We even had a bit of snow at home last night, but it’s turned back to rain. I realize that we have not had the sort of winter they had back East or even the kind of winter I dealt with up in Carson. Still, I’m ready for spring.

I took a snow day today. I struggle over this, as I’m usually confident of my ability to drive in snow. I had a bad time with icy roads in January, where I came close to being in a wreck, and I no longer want to drive in ice. I could have dealt with the snow today, but temps tonight will be in the 20s and that means ice. I stayed home. I did have some snow and poor visibility last night, but managed to do okay.

I know at some point, my driving skills will start to deteriorate and my reflexes worsen. It’s part of the aging process. I suppose that doing a 150 mile commute was not a good idea, but I do like the company and people that I work for now. I just hope that this is the last of the bad weather for the year and we can return to the usual rain. I’m ready for spring.

I’ve been a fan of this book for awhile. I bought a copy several years back and I love all the notes along the sides that talk about nutrition in different cultures. I have to confess that the recipes sometimes intimidate me, especially the ones for making lacto-fermented vegetables.

The good news is there are a bunch of websites, teaching you how to do this stuff. My bookmarks can be found here.

I especially like Nourishing Days. Shannon has a very nice e-cookbook, designed for seasonal cooking. The recipes I’ve tried are great. They are simple, filling and tasty. I highly recommend it. I’m not as good about this as I’d like. I want to start using sourdough again. I need to soak my beans and grains overnight and I need to tackle those lacto-fermented veggies. It’s an important way to build health.

I thought I’d separate this out. I’m going to be cutting back on work, to allow myself more time to live. I can’t work my current job long term. The commute is too much. I came very close to getting injured on the 11th of this month, driving in freezing rain. It doesn’t make sense to me to do that. I’m eligible for widow’s benefits from Social Security this year. It’s not a lot, but it gives me the option to work a bit less. I am still sorting out what to do with that time. I want to garden. And I want to write, something I’ve always wanted to do. I’m also considering a class in silversmithing, which is another thing I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Because, you know, at some point you start to run out of time. If you don’t do those things that matter, you may not be able to do them. Is it worth putting in all those hours at work and miss out on the opportunity to live your life fully?

I’ve been thinking about how to shake up my blogging and I think I will be making some changes. I want to rewrite the code for my Spindlitis site and start putting my home life back onto that site. I’ve got to change the old page into something using CSS, so it will require a little work.

I will probably change this over to an html site as well, and ditch WordPress. It’s a good system. I just don’t like having my posts exist in a database. When I’ve transitioned it, I think this will become more of a philosophical blog, with more tech rants and thoughts on prepping and the Nourishing Traditions style of cooking. In sort, more about interests and things that interest me at the time. The Quinn’s Cove site will not see a lot of action for now. We’re holding onto that one, in case we decide to run a small business. I’ll have to do some design work and think about how I want this all to come together.

I was looking at the Wayback machine today, at how my spindlitis site used to look. I really loved the look of it and had a lot of fun changing the color schemes and putting in little ornaments. I changed it, because table based formats were outdated and I never managed to get a CSS version set up. So now, it’s basically a dead page. I used Tumblr, which has a great look, but doesn’t interest me the way the old system did. Even using Word Press for this blog is a bit boring, although you’d think the simplicity of it would make me blog more often. It doesn’t work out that way. I’m just not as engaged with it. What seems to be worse is that there is no way to make an online archive with these tools, the way that the old html pages were archived. It’s as though the site is gone.

I don’t have a good fix for this. I’m doing a long commute and don’t have the time on the weekends to mess with it the way that I used to do. Maybe I should make the time somehow. It’s a small record of my passage through life, even if no one cares very much about it.

Loretta doesn’t care where we go, as long as she gets to come along. We needed to do a bit of work on the dock today, so we drove down to the river. It was a beautiful day. By the time we got there, Quinn had already fixed the problem with the help of a couple of his friends. So we just got to enjoy the view.

The goats were out. One of them is not doing too well. I suspect it may be CL, but she is also the one that was hit by a car. They are sisters and starting to get up a bit in years. I am considering getting Nigerian Dwarf goats, when we move in. I think they would be good goats to start raising. And I’d like to have milk goats again some time.

The Aqua Home looks nice. In this new year, I plan to start working on the interior. I’d also like to get the engines working, maybe start to rewire the interior and replace the lights with LEDs. I really love sitting on the front deck, watching the river. I’d still love to live in the Aqua Home. I am hoping to have this as an option for us to live in while we rebuild the mobile on the place.

This is another boat I’d like to have going this year. It’s a wonderful boat and we now have a motor for it too. I want to repaint it and learn how to sail a bit. This was Kate’s boat and will one day be Quinn’s boat. He’s not using it and I find it sad to see it sit there year after year. Maybe this year it will be different.

The dock could use work. The houseboats are a mess, but they will have to wait until the lawsuit is over. I got my trunk out of the two story and brought it up to the house. We are starting to pack some of the things in the house to move to the river for storage. I have a nice trunk, rebuilt, that Jeffrey bought for me the last year of his life. It’s nice to have it in the house with me.

And so that was a bit of our day. I’ll miss living in this house, but I do enjoy being down at the river. There are so many ideas that I have for cleaning it up and making it a happy place for us to live. Maybe this will be the year we finally do it.

Well we’ve made it through Christmas. Like many folks, money is tight and we really weren’t able to buy much. The grandson was off with his mom and it will be this week before he comes by to get his gift. Quinn did come by for breakfast Christmas morning, bringing a friend. We did not put up a tree or decorate.

But on Christmas Eve, Lon decided that we needed a tree. Earlier in the month, he’d gotten a small evergreen tree on Craigslist. It was planted in a bucket in the front yard. He had me pick up some birthday candles and aluminum foil from the Dollar Store. And he talked me into making aluminum foil chains that night. He made some aluminum foil candle holders. It was raining a bit, but we went out and put the candleholders on the tree and draped the chain on it, then lit all the candles. It really was fun and Lon proclaimed it the best Christmas ever. It was something he’d wanted to do for a long time.

Of course, the next day I got cranky over something and we had a minor quarrel. We made up again, because we do love each other. And what I have learned, more than anything after Jeffrey’s loss, is that people are what matter most. And that is what the holidays are all about, taking time to honor and strengthen the relationships in our life.

Well we’ve made it through Christmas. Like many folks, money is tight and we really weren’t able to buy much. The grandson was off with his mom and it will be this week before he comes by to get his gift. Quinn did come by for breakfast Christmas morning, bringing a friend. We did not put up a tree or decorate. But on Christmas Eve, Lon

It’s the end of an era. I sold the Silver Streak today. It went to a couple that want to redo and restore it, to be towed behind a restored ’59 Chevy pickup. So I guess you could say that it went to a good home. I’d gotten to the point where it didn’t bother me to go into it. I wasn’t reminded of Jeffrey sitting at the kitchen table, eating peanuts and stacking the shells. And, since I’ve moved it down from Stabler,I wasn’t reminded of Jeffrey waiting to meet me at the door. I wasn’t as bothered by selling the trailer, as I’d been by selling my old Mazda, full of memories. In a way, I’m glad to have it gone.

I didn’t get anywhere near what I’d paid for it, of course. But, it did give me enough to really stock up the pantry and get caught up a bit financially. That feels good for a chance. We’ve really eaten down the stuff we had and I like to have a bit more on hand for winter weather. We even went through a few areas with a bit of snow today. Just a reminder of what’s coming up.I’m just not ready for winter yet. Wednesday would have been Jeffrey’s 61st birthday. These anniversaries don’t hurt as much as they did that first year. I chalk that up to the happy times I have now, with Lon in my life. He has a knack of reminding me when I get too cranky and can usually get me laughing again. We are really comfortable together.

Okay, so it seems that I don’t have much to say these days. We made it through the two year anniversary of Kate and Jeffrey. Things like anniversaries and holidays tend to be easier, as you are sort of mentally prepared for it. There are still times when the loss sort of sneaks up on you. We were watching Grey’s Anatomy, where a husband has to decide to take his wife off life support. It took him three days on the show to make the decision. Lon pointed out that we knew what it was like to have to do that. One of the good things about our relationship is that we can talk about things like that and that there’s no jealousy about our previous relationships. It helps a lot.

I’ve been fighting some staph infections. They crop up about every two months. I go on antibiotics, they clear then reoccur. I feel like the doctors don’t have a clue about what else to do. I am going to see a specialist in infectious diseases, but I think I will see a naturopath too. There’s got to be a better way to deal with this.

My stepson Quinn turned 21. He’s been going through some tough times lately. He’s being forced into fighting for custody rights for his son. He’s working part time and going to school. He’s been robbed twice at his apartments. He really is in transition at this point. He’s a good person and a great dad. I just hope we can help him a bit through the rough spots.

And work goes on, packing up, sorting through things. The garage is pretty well cleaned out. It’s about time to work on the house and the back yard. It’s nice to have less clutter and space for some new things. I am looking forward to moving, even though it’s going to be pretty rough at first. I’d just like to see the house sold and move on with life.

To top it all off, it’s Nanowrimo! See you there.

Let’s see. I’ve left Netflix and gone back to Gorge Networks. It’s an ugly commute but it feels great to be doing tech support again. We are making progress clearing out the garage at the house, so there is hope that we may finally get it listed one day. The chickens are laying eggs now. We have an outlaw rooster, hidden in the garage with one hen that we need to move down to the river place. He’s a nice rooster, a dark Brahma. So I’d like to keep him. We are still trying to sell, pack or give away stuff. We’ve also been trying to pull up the motor out of a sunken boat without any luck so far. It looks like we may just have to cut that one up to clear it out.

It’s hard to think that we are closing in on October. We have that joint anniversary, the 2nd year without Kate and Jeffrey. I’m planning to make Jeffrey’s Centinniel Pie in a couple of weeks to commemorate. I will always miss him, just as I know that Lon will always miss Kate. Still, we have a happy life together now. And I know that Jeffrey would want me to be happy.

I’ve always been big on appropriate technology. And I feel that we are losing a lot to our digital life. Think of all those digital pictures that are not priinted out, sometimes lost during a computer crash. I once talked to someone that lost pictures of her grandmother’s 102nd birthday that way.

So I love the idea of someone promoting letter writing. There’s even a website that has letterheads by famous people. So I was thrilled to find this blog: Art of the Letter . She’s making custom letterheads for a limited time. Stop by and get yours.

So, as always, it’s been really busy around here. I’ve been using Ubuntu mostly on my laptop (it’s dual boot). I like the fact that I don’t have to worry about viruses. And I like messing around with Linux. I’ve been using Ubuntu through several versions. It seems that about every other version has issues. I’ve had to spend a bit of time trying to sort out all these issues and get things up and working again. I loved the latest update but it broke things again. I read through the forum and discovered that some folks were starting to get fed up too. So I started looking around for a different distro. I tried a few and then found Open SUSE. I’ve always like Novell, so thought I’d try the live CD. I was amazed at how fast it was. It seemed like a regular operating system, not just a collection of various programs. I wiped the disk, after making a backup and installed it. I’m very impressed. I love using it.

My boyfriend has been having issues with the desktop. It’s been running slow, even though I can’t find anything wrong with it. I think that it’s just the anti-virus program slowing things down. I popped the live CD into the desktop and booted it up. It worked fine, faster running from the CD than Windows runs from the hard drive. And he liked using it, didn’t really notice the difference. This weekend, I’m going to turn the desktop into a dual boot machine. He can use Linux for most of the things he does, but will still have Windows for those few things he can’t do in Linux.

I have some recent pictures of the river that I’ll be uploading in a day or so. The river is very low and we are trying to get ready to lift up a sunken boat.

So we had our Messabout, our wooden boat festival. It was a bit of a bust, due to the cloudy weather. The river was way up, so the guys couldn’t camp on the beach. We did have a nice potluck, but I didn’t get any pictures this time. We are talking about doing it again in August, but can’t agree on a date just yet.

We went to Aberdeen this weekend. Still trying to figure out a way to get the boat back home. It’s another Chris-Craft, this one about 26 feet long. We have boat trailers, but nothing quite the right size. It will need work, of course. We have just a couple more weeks to pull this off, as the owner needs the garage space. We have plans to go to the ocean on Fourth of July weekend. I think the weather is going to be cloudy again, so maybe it won’t be too cloudy. We went out there last Fourth as the kids had other plans. We’ll be meeting Lon’s sister there this year. Quinn is off to Seattle, to visit a friend. So many changes this year and there’s a lot still to come.

at the river. We have been driving around Portland a lot lately, getting some inspiration for the place that we want to live in at the river. We will be remodeling the double-wide trailer on the lot. One can still dream of having a fine old Victorian. The water is still pretty high and there are nests on the power poles. Lots of birds out this time of year. It will be nice to move down to the river and settle in. Mostly, it will be nice to have time off and be able to relax more. We have been working on the engines of the Aqua Home and now have a motor for the sailboat. I think we just might take that out this year. It would be fun to finally go out in a boat, instead of just looking at them.

Not a lot of new things to report. We are still trying to get the house ready to sell. We will be moving down to the river when that happens. So there is a lot of work still to be done. I’ll try and post more fully in a few days.

This is how things looked down on the river the other day. For some reason, I remembered to take a picture during the cloudy day, but not during the sunny days. Anyway, you can see that we cleared out a lot of boats and junk. The Aqua Home is still there in the distance. The floating house in the front was full of garbage, which our friends helped up load and haul to the dump.

This is part of the pile driver. The guys that raised the sunken boat asked if they could move it to make it easier to raise the boat. They promised to move it back into place, but here it still sits. This is the second time they’ve pulled this. Yet the local paper makes them sound like heroes, even though DNR is trying to evict them as well (with a lot more reason than they went after us.)

And this boat belongs to the son of the guy that owned the sunken boat. They just drug it up on county land and left it. They also left us a bunch of barrels with diesel mixed with water, which we got to pay to have properly disposed of. Yet the local paper made us out to be the bad guys, even though we had nothing to do with the boat sinking. People lose their boats by the dock and just walk away from it. We get stuck with the bill to have them raised and disposed of, yet the paper called us “the apocolyto marina.” I guess there is a reason why people don’t read newspapers these days. When they consider it reporting to write up a lot of malicious, unfounded gossip and call it a news story, they deserve to go out of business.

This weekend was a successful cleanup of our place on the river. A lot of good people showed up to help. Took out two pickup loads of garbage, left behind by some fishermen who’d been using one of the houseboats without permission. Took three boats out of the water. Best of all is that the tug is out of the water. It needs work and so we can finally start to make it functional again.

We had some bad publicity lately, caused when a friend’s boat sank while moored. He gave to boat away to someone who is currently trying to get it back up. So it seemed like a good time to clean things up. We have the lawsuit from DNR hanging over our heads. We feel that we have a good case against them, but it will likely be several more months before we go to court.

Lon is still making progress after his surgery. He’s starting to move beyond using the walker. We’ve both gone on a diet of sorts, to try and get back into shape for warm weather. Feels good to be eating right again.