Mid Week Ramblings

It's only Wednesday, but it should be at least Thursday by now! It's been quite a week already.

I can't believe it's nearly Thanksgiving! Where did the summer go? Oh yeah, it went to the rent house and a lot of company. And a rock garden, even though that was actually a fall project. The next Fall project is actually two: move more irises! And Otter's tulip bed. We have to get the bulbs pretty soon, then we can start getting the bed itself ready. Getting it ready entails weeding, and it's got plenty. Then, we have to "stir" the dirt up a little and treat it with mineral oil, liquid soap and water so that gophers and moles will leave it alone - moles disturb the dirt in their search for grubs to eat and gophers eat bulbs! We usually treat it once or twice, about a week apart, then about a week after the second treatment is when we plant the bulbs. Since I have seen evidence of mole activity in that part of the yard, we might even treat it 3 times.

The rent house was an interesting experience. The selling of it, I mean. We got it listed and got an offer within 4 days. That was good, and faster than we expected. The stress came from the fact that it took 2 months to close because the buyer's mortgage company kept dropping the ball. They lost part of his paperwork, then they had to re-do some other paperwork and there was a waiting period after he signed it, stuff like that. The process of getting it ready to sell was somewhat stressful, but it was more that it was harder work than just getting it ready to rent. Since we wanted to sell it, there were things that we did that we might not have done otherwise. Such as replacing the front screen door, there was some work Bill did to the bathroom floor and that sort of thing. But the hard work paid off, so I'm not complaining.

Now we get to concentrate on stuff around the house. The chimney repair is the first week of December, it should take a couple of days. I'm not sure if repair is the right word, it's not that the chimney is broken - it's more that it wasn't constructed quite right and we're going to get that fixed. The roof is next after the chimney, but we might not be able to get it done this year. The chimney has to be done first because we really don't want people climbing around to fix it, on new roof slats! Or tiles, whatever they're called. We're just running out of daylight, as far as the roof repair is concerned.

Now, I think I'll go surf the 'net for a while and then go watch tv. We've been watching a very well done mini-series on The History Channel. WWII in HD. It's very good, color footage of WWII that has not been shown before and it's in chronological order. Otter is really enjoying it, she said that it's making a lot of things fall into place for her because she wasn't sure of some of the timeline. There wasn't too much on D-Day in this series. I always look for Dad in anything that deals with D-Day. I've seen him once, it was while he was still with us and he was surprised that he was shown but I think he was glad about it. I can't remember the exact name, but it was a major mini-series and I'll eventually think of it.