The Excitement Builds

 Today, Tim lightly sanded and used the tack cloth on the walls, and I gave them a second coat of polyurethane. It looks pretty nice. 

Pixie asked about the advisability of using wood on the walls. The only room with the wood walls is the livingroom. It kind of curls around to the entrance. I'll take a picture to explain at some point. The rest of the house is painted drywall. Timber walls are not an issue in our minds to prevent decorating the walls. If you notice, there are grooves between each of the planks. That's where we would install the nails for the picture hangers. (No walls will be hurt in the decorating process.) 

Tim worked on his food plot for a while, and one of the kittens approached him to be fed, which was interesting. 

We waited until it was good and hot to do our next project after the finishing the walls. We drove the truck down the hill and we pulled the cupboards that we bought probably 3 or 4 years ago. I knew that I loved them when I saw them, but then, when things are tucked away for many years, I forget just how much I loved them, and why I loved them. These are nice cabinets. I still love them, thankfully.

Just to refresh your minds, a tornado struck the small town of Starbrick several years back. We were in Washington DC at the time, and so we missed all the hubbub. But one of the houses badly damaged belonged to our friend, Terry. Two trees fell on his house. The kitchen was fine, but as long as he was having the rest of his house fixed up, he decided that he'd never really liked the layout of his kitchen. He decided to tear it out and redesign the whole thing. 

Knowing that we stockpile stuff for rentals, he asked if we wanted to buy the cupboards. At $500 for a nice kitchen, we immediately said yes. It was a bit of a rush job, but we got the stuff loaded up, hauled to the old house where we were storing the stuff for the new house, unloaded everything, and then headed back and did the whole process once more. 

A few months later, we had a bad storm and two trees blew down on the old house where we were storing the cupboards. "Hmmmmmm," I said. "Perhaps these cupboards have some bad juju..." Tim does not believe in juju, bad or otherwise. 

So. Anyways, we got everything into the new house, and I will spend tomorrow with Murphy's Oil Soap cleaning them all up. They are gorgeous. I forgot. I like them a lot. That was a good buy. 

Other than that, there is not much to report. 

My daughter-in-law mentioned that tomatoes are $22 a half bushel where she lives. She was well and truly shocked. They've had a much drier summer than we have and so it didn't surprise me, not really. Anyways, I stopped in and talked to Albert, our produce guy. Quite serendipitously, he is headed to an Amish produce auction tomorrow evening. They bid on the produce, but he felt that he could get me two bushels of tomatoes for between $16 and $20 a bushel. 

If he can get them, I'll be headed east to meet up with my son's family halfway. I'll get grandma time with the littles and I'll get to hear all about school. The oldest is, for the first time, in a different class from her very best friends. 

When I was there for her birthday, she told me about these sad circumstances. 

I said, "I learned something about you at your party. Want to know what it was?" 

She was very curious.

I said, "Well, I learned that you are a very friendly girl who has a very nice circle of friends that she loves, and who love her right back. So I think that what will happen when you walk in that classroom is that you will find new friends to add to that circle. You will enlarge your circle of friends. And that is not a bad thing."

She listened very intently to this. 

Her first day of school was yesterday, and I sent her a little message via her mother's chat. I made four predictions: 1) that her teacher was very nice. 2) that she made new friends. 3) that she had a great day at school and 4) that her little sister was very happy to see her getting off the bus a the end of the day. 

I was right on all four things. She typed back to me all by herself and it began, 'Dear Grandma. You were right! I did enlarge my circle of friends.' 

I'll treasure that little message forever. 

And if everything goes right, I'll have a chance to hear these fine stories in person on Friday or Saturday. I'm very excited about this.