A Little Ray of Sunshine

Thursday, October 26, 2006

A lovely morning

It snowed yesterday, and is still snowy today. Half-an-inch, perhaps, it looks like someone drizzled sugar glaze all over. The mountain peaks to the east appeared to be floating on top of the mist off the lakes which are hidden by a ridge from our house. The sunrise was gorgeous.
The view out the windows is different every minute. I love it. I told my husband I want a better quality camera when we can afford one. He's in favor of the idea--any tech toy meets with his approval.
Beau and Hemi really want to go outside to play. They have lots of energy and I am just trying to keep them from screaming and running indoors this morning. I can't blame them, but it is too cold out for Hummer right now. Perhaps closer to midday we can go out.
My great-grandmother's china hutch arrived, unfortunately, the shippers shattered a pane of glass in it. This was supposed to go to my uncle, but is mahogany, and his dining room furniture is teak, so he offered it to me! When repaired and reassembled, (they took the legs off for shipping) it will be about ten feet tall. It is a lovely peice, and I still can't quite believe it came to me. I am fond of the darker woods, so it will go well with the other items I've collected. I like antiques, too, and I suppose one could call the furniture style in our home 'mixed' with accuracy. Suffice to say that I will stick with the cheap hand-me-downs or garage sale specials until I can afford or am given the real, solid wood peices that I like. (Every now and then a real treasure turns up: I am typing this sitting at a solid cherry desk, which my dad found at a garage sale for $10 when I was in high school and my mom and I stripped a quarter-inch of white paint off of. Not something I could have afforded new!)
We're getting settled in here, little by little. Some things aren't going to be unpacked, where we will be moving again in nine months at the outside there's no sense in unpacking the knick-knacks. No sense in making curtains, either. So it'll never really look like a home, but that's okay. We're already going to have to replace the blinds in the boys' room, they ripped it down (I think it was an accident). We're busy enough, and we're already looking into our options for June.

Monday, October 23, 2006

I'm Back!

To some extent. The local phone company claims they provide DSL here, well, they gave us the modem but don't actually provide service (no cables)! And they don't have a local access number, either. So I've got 28K dial-up at home for now and the forseeable future. My husband is looking into satilite internet.
I've also got an adorable new baby boy, 9 lbs 6 oz, big brown eyes and a head of black hair, just like his big brothers.
My husband's first day of work was the twelvth, 2 hours into the work day I was calling every number I could find for his employers trying to reach him. Someone found him and sent him home for me. The baby was born a couple hours later. I got to ride to the hospital in an ambulence, a big deal for the two big boys--especially since they have an invitation from the EMTs to come tour the ambulence sometime. (The hospital being about an hour-and-a-half away by normal within-speed-limits transportation, this turned out to be a good thing.)
For now I'll call the little guy "Hummer", since he spent the first night (and nearly constantly since) humming. Beau and Hemi think their little brother is great, and we've been working on teaching Beau how to pick him up properly. He's a pretty easy-going baby, and we're wondering how much of that is his nature and how much is that we're experienced baby-handlers. He's a very still sleeper, so some is certainly nature, which surprises me because he was so active before he was born.
As near as we can tell, everyone in town now knows who we are and everything about Hummer's birth. The local communication network is much faster than the internet out here, that's for sure!
We've had a couple invitations to attend local churches, but for the forseeable future (next week and the weekend after) we've got to spend our weekends clearing out the old place. At least the boys are getting to church with Nana this way.
We didn't have our minivan last week, it was back to the transmission shop for warrenty work. Now we've got it back, and we're just crossing our fingers that it'll keep running. We can't fit a booster, two car seats, and two adults into the buick century and have everyone in seatbelts. It just won't happen. (Well, if my hips were half the size they are, it might . . .) It ought to be good for a while, if they got all the bugs out.
We have a house--a double-wide mobile--from my husband's employer, through the end of June. We have to find another place to live by then.
The phone cuts out when it pleases. So does the electricity. I think it's time for some serious research on solar panals. There are lakes and rivers all over the place, my husband is just dying to go fishing. Beau and Hemi like the antelope--we must have seen a thousand, and pretty up-close, too. And there are some game trails through our back yard, and plenty of elk and deer/antelope poop to go with them. (Any hints on how to tell the difference, if there is one?)
It's snowed a couple times, but not stuck yet, much to Beau's dismay. He wants to throw snowballs at Hemi.
I didn't get a lot of our produce from the garden preserved, but my husband took a bunch into work, and it seemed to be pretty popular, so at least it didn't go to waste. I'm told to expect between sixty-five and twenty-eight consecutive frost-free days here, hence not much chance for outdoor tomatos. The potted tomatos are just chilling out in the window, but the cayenne peppers are blooming and setting fruit. So we'll see just how good I can get at container gardening, I guess! It's cold and constantly windy, but it sure is pretty here. I've got great views out all the windows, which makes up for the wind. Someone erected a snow fence beside our driveway. I'm sure we'll appreciate that greatly in the next month or so.
So that's what we're up to--half moved, a new job, and a new baby. I've got the pantry contents--maybe 6 months worth of food--that we brought up this last weekend to put away now. Maybe next week we can get the dishes!