Those who know me well know that I enter a new year with many trepidations. As much as I would like all loose ends tied up by the end of one year, I know from past experience that bullshit from December will carry over. The past couple of months have been so full of bullshit in fact that my motto for the new year has been about matching energies and not caring as much about a situation than the person who is supposed to care about it does.
While December saw the youngest of our boys home from college for nearly a month over Christmas break, he worked a total of two days while home on that break. The flu knocked him on his ass for two weeks, and our workplace was slow. So the last week he was home found him having to get in all of his appointments that he had to cancel prior, and got him also receiving his first (and hopefully last) speeding ticket. Hopefully that knocks the chip off of his shoulder a little while it puts a dent in his bank account.
Woodchucks brother was hospitalized with various medical issues, but the main one was cirrhosis of the liver. He was soon released to a nursing facility where his care was subpar and his health continued to decline. My big, burly husband went to visit his little brother and washed his hair, shaved him, trimmed his nails, took him treats. Woodchuck was working hard every day to find a better and closer place for him to be transferred to so he could see him more often and make sure he was being taken care of, but his brother caught Covid while in the nursing facility and was unable to have visitors or go anywhere for 10 days. Many places also did not have any beds open and he was quickly declining. His brother called him one evening saying that he couldn't breathe and his nurse wouldn't answer his calls (a constant issue). One thing led to another and an ambulance was called and he was transported back to the hospital, where he started receiving much better care and was diagnosed with pneumonia.
His decline didn't stop though, and he was put into ICU soon after admission. Woodchuck went to see him, though nobody was allowed in the room and they had to watch him through a window. My heart goes out to anyone who has to watch someone die, and watch them die from the other side of a wall. Within a few days after that, he was gone. Woodchucks father died on New Years Day, his mother died around 6 years ago right before Christmas, and now his brother passed between the two holidays. I just couldn't imagine! Though I did jokingly tell him that I know now the time of year to expect his passing as well. 😬
While he had the week off from work to deal with the passing, he made an appointment at the bank to inquire about a construction loan to start building the house. This is nothing either one of us has dealt with before, though some friends were giving me some info about how theirs went. As it turns out, the bank quoted $350,000 and a 9 month time period to get the house built. Not only is that figure a pipe dream for us, that time frame doesn't work with the initial plan of building in phases over the next three years, moving into the house the third year and having Woodchuck commute the fourth year, which would be his last year before retiring. That is just too far of a commute to do for four years and really?! Have banks worked with contractors before?! Getting things done in 9 months seems a little unreasonable. But what the hell do I know.
So, we will not be starting to build this year and we are ok with that. There's no reason and no time for boo-hoo'ing about it. We are still blessed and it is not like building is off the table completely, it's just getting pushed back and it's not like we don't have plenty of work to do in the meantime! Woodchuck will be contacting another house design firm since we had some less than stellar moments with the one we used. That was to be expected since she came recommended by the contractor he used to clear the trees and make the ingress/egress road and you all remember the issues we had with him?
Well that has flared back up as well.
We received a letter last week from the stone company we used. The first loads were ordered by the contractor we used (who was a friend of Woodchucks. Notice I said WAS). Woodchuck paid him cash to pay the stone company, and he was also supposed to spread the stone out for our driveway. He did order the stone, he did spread the stone, but we found out that he never finished paying the stone company and they've been trying to collect from him for nearly a year now! They are also threatening a lien on our land.
I wasn't surprised. The guy was a dick to us for months trying to get that work done and Woodchuck wouldn't listen to me to square up and cut ties with him. So Woodchuck got a hold of him and the guy said he would have his secretary send a check out right away and that he was out of the state until this past weekend and would get a hold of us when he got back. Guess who's ghosting us now? So now we have to figure that situation out.
I also recently got my eyes checked, after waiting an extra year to do so because we have crappy vision insurance and even worse options of places that accept it. Keep in mind that Woodchuck was diagnosed with Macular Degeneration last year and goes once a month to get injections in his eye to try and stop the progression and save the eyesight that he has left. After my exam the eye doctor asked if I had ever been told that my pressures were high and I said yes, once before and he said that now I'm being told twice and need to see a specialist. So off I go to the place that Woodchuck goes to, which was the place I went to for years until we got the shitty insurance that they don't accept. I am what he called a "glaucoma suspect" and I will go in every few months initially for some baseline tests and then around twice a year after that. I told him that I can't have both us lose our sight! And ironically, it's the right eye for both of us.
Early last week I got a knock on my door early one morning before leaving for work and it was an employee of the county garage here in town. Really nice guy, said that they got complaints that our tree line at the front is blocking the eyesight for people stopping at the stop sign on the corner and looking East. He said his boss was going to have them come out and just trim them without talking to us and I told him that they would have had a very, very, very angry little woman on their hands if they had done that. I mean, why even? Why interact with the homeowners that way when you can do what he did and say no, we aren't going to just show up and cut them! I'll stop and talk with the homeowners first. We talked for a bit and I told him that those trees now cost $1000 each to replace and that's for a 12 inch sapling. Our trees are 22 years old, we planted them when we bought the house. I told him we'd talk with Arborists again (we did last year too when that drunk driver drove into them). He said he'd be back the next morning to talk with both Woodchuck and myself and see what we came up with.
Unfortunately, those trees aren't meant to be trimmed. If you trim them, it has to be minimal. All of their greenery is on the outer parts of the branches, so if you cut that away, you just have bare branches and what looks like a dead tree. And after talking again with the guy, he said that we needed to plant no closer than 20 feet from the center of the road. Which we did. But the growth of the trees came out about 3 foot, so there's only 17 feet of easement now. It didn't help that last Summer they widened the road when they repaved it and now the road is even closer to our trees, which makes it hard to mow. So now he was going to go back to his boss and see if they can get an arborist over to look at the trees and come up with a game plan.
I have to say here that his boss said the complaints are all over Facebook and in the community group that was started for this town. I know the moderator for that group and she said there was literally TWO comments made about our trees, one of them from the crazy neighbors next door that we don't get along with. We've been here 22 years and it's been never ending with entitled hillbillies who constantly want to do what they want to do and infringe on us but wouldn't tolerate being infringed on themselves.
We are so looking forward to becoming hermits on our land.
I have been working a lot to try and stay on top of tuition payments. There's just over one more year to go for that. Once the boy graduates I'll be having to think about shoulder surgery to fix the other shoulder! It's been so painful the past few months.
My workplace recently made me keyholder again, with illnesses (Covid) having the majority of the staff out and the store closing here and there due to lack of staff and nobody to run it. I worked 45 hours last week to help cover and to get through a project I took on to revamp our used book section. That was one of the most satisfying things I've done there yet! And the customers are already loving it as well! Our volunteer that works on them has been out for a couple of months, calling only last week to let us know that she was injured during the last snowstorm. I'm glad I made the decision that I did to do them then, I always worry about taking work away from the volunteers but also finding enough to keep myself busy as well.
So Woodchuck and I went to the land recently for our first work day of the new year. With many options to choose from on where to begin, we decided to work on the West edge of the pond, clearing the invasive plants there and working slowly to get over to the phragmite that is land rooted. Again, and as usual, I don't feel like we made much progress. My shoulder was killing me, which left Woodchuck doing most of the grunt work, and since it's Winter and we haven't worked the land as much, we are "soft", lol. It didn't take much to wear us out!
We took down a lot of honeysuckle, some autumn olive, Woodchuck cut a dogwood of some sort before I could stop him, as well as some of my staghorn sumac (I swear he doesn't like that tree, he cuts them down all of the time!). We also cut many poison ivy and grapevines wrapping the oaks on that part of the pond.
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