Life in Weyers Cave

This morning I spent four hours with a Board Meeting for a nonprofit I serve on. Tam, how do you do this for a living. Whoa! I brought my flying bee hat and was class clown because, hey, it's Halloween. It was much appreciated. But I was a good girl and kept it under my desk most of the time. With all the extra stress I am under I can definitely feel that I am significantly more ADD with 200 thoughts a minute streaming through my mind. But I am working diligently on the database project and got five thousand names worked through today and shipped off, the first of twenty modules. I found a couple of ways to make it go faster and faster as well as more efficient. I enjoy working on it because I can have beautiful music or "conference" on in the background and it helps to calm me down. I also got a few big boxes out this week and can see a little more of the garage. Yup, there IS a garage out there. I promise. I went to a small Halloween party tonight here in Weyers Cave...

I'm not talking much because I keep the blog positive, but am going through some tough personal storms right now. My husband is with his father-in-law in Jacksonville as he fights passing away from leukemia and pulmonary stenosis. My mother in Raleigh and I are disagreeing about the best way to help my unemployed brother who has moved in with her. I know I need to put Faraday to sleep and don't have the heart to do it. The strength of my faith, my church, my wonderful family, and my tremendous friends are really helping in these tortuous times. Thank you all. And for those who are sitting quietly on the sidelines praying, thank you as well. You think I don't know you exist, but I do. Because you see, I'm praying, too.

Allen and his new friend in the Seychelles. and this little guy doesn't look like he will turn out too well -- a picture I took with my cell phone from the back porch but you can see he isn't all that far away and looking straight at me. A little fox that lives in the back yard. Quite cute, actually. I love that we have so much wildlife around here.

These pictures of David's Dad. He was born in 1923. The last one of course has his granddad and David and his two sisters when they were young. Always fun to see old photos!

I just got back from a new client. An couple my old with kids grown and gone. I walk in the back door in nice neighborhood. There is a tennis court and a swimming pool and lovely little garden area. The owner comes up in a golf cart from his daughter's house next door. There is a big kitchen with a tiled floor and big island and computer area, lots of bedrooms and formal areas as well as informal areas, decks, porches, gardens, a big master bedroom, it all kind of runs together. There is a children's bedroom with toys all over. While we are there, the daughter comes over with 2 year old granddaughter on her golf cart from next door. They play with the toys while we work on computers in the office. In retrospect there is a television. But I loved the idea of the three generational family flow of the house. The love, the dad coming in and out, loving bantering, it was such a great place. I want to live next door to my kids and drive my golf cart back and forth. (By the way, they...

I'll save the more embarrassing ones for blackmail.

I love talking to people from all over the world at the museum. Yesterday the weather was ideal. The chickens always love me and come running to me, often when I don't even call. I love sitting against the brick heated wall because it feels great on my arthritic back. I love the sense of history and thinking of the great sacrifices our ancestors made to give us the freedoms that we have. It is ironic that the greatest thing they ran away from is the excessive taxation on every aspect of their lives as a way of controlling them. I love working with Gottfried, who was born in Austria and whose father fought in Hitler's Army and died in a "camp". I am pretty good at NOT talking politics and steering the conversation away from politics at the museum, but naturally it will come up. The other thing that comes up a lot is training children and child discipline. It is so fun to get away from technology although the manual labor sometimes isn't so great. No bathrooms, non-...

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Kelly R gave me some Friendship Bread starter. Grrr. It is a little ziplock bag with a yeast mixture growing in it accompanied by a page of instructions. You feed it and squish it and ten days later you add to it, divide it in four parts, make a loaf of bread with your part and find three more victims. I lose. My bread was bad enough to give to the birds. Do they do this anywhere else in the world? Or is it just a Shenandoah Valley thing? David is gone for the weekend to teach in DC so I am a widow yet again. But there is something to be said for the peaceful classical music and hot peppermint tea and getting things put away. I made another trip to Allen's closet yesterday. Little by little I am weeding away my garage. Sigh.

Where does the time go? On Tuesday I had a great day at the Museum. Several people came by that I knew and I had lots of Germans come. Rosa came by - she is the inspiration for the German house. She grew up a block or two away and worked there for years and I wear her costume. Bryan used to volunteer with her. When she heard I was Bryan's mom she was delighted and her face lit up! I decided to name one of the chickens Joan Rivers because she will not shut up. Ever. She talks incessantly. And Jezebel once again ran away and made me chase her EVERYWHERE rather than go to bed at night. David went down to his parents last week to clean out the shed out back. He said most of it was old books and papers from many years of his dad teaching. He had forty bags of garbage for his sister Becky to take to the dump. I was surprised at how little he came home with. He took the van down but it was only about a third full. And in fact most of that was the empty boxes he had gone down with. NOT tha...

Faraday, the mystery cat, has her "places". She likes to be inside a box best. Her latest "place" is now right in the middle of the kitchen table. She has never even been allowed on the table, but I have heard her jumping off of it as I walk in the kitchen and find cat fur there ... But now when I walk in the kitchen, she glares at me defiantly and says "go ahead, make my day!" when I threaten to make her get off. She is 15 and thinks she can get away with anything. Go figure. She has for years insisted that we give her only running water to drink, and is verbal about making us turn the water on the instant we walk in the door. There are times when she is pretty adamant about what sink it comes from. She has just recently changed that. Now she is wanting water with fresh ice cubes in it. She is diabetic so she drinks a lot. I guess I just don't know about cats.

Since Cathryn talked about her kitty I thought I could post about mine. This is Gerda. Her latest trick is to sit on the rail right by the front door of the German house because she knows I will give her a handful of wheat when I walk by and she won't have to share it. She and her sister Greta are the friendliest kitties and like to be picked up the most. They are always the first to come running to me when I call out "Here kitty, kitty, kitty!" Greta likes to come in the house so I can throw her out the window.

Cathryn remarked that I have become more politically active lately. Hmm. I have always considered myself politically active, but since it annoyed David I have tried to keep a low profile. Because he earns most of the money here, I don't contribute money to campaigns. I don't have bumper stickers or yard signs because of him. But I have always studied the issues, talked with others, voted, written lots of letters, and met with politicians when I can. It still annoys David and I still try to keep a low profile. But it is even more important to me since it is evident that my children will not enjoy the freedoms we have had. Let me be clear. Politics/arguing annoys David. Not so much WHO is saying WHAT, just the fact that there is disagreement going on in any form. David does vote and in general we agree on who to vote for. I, on the other hand, was raised in a political family. My earliest memory is my father explaining the Nixon/Kennedy election to me in 1960. I was a "Buckl...

I have worked very hard updating a computer lab for the last two days, expanding from six to ten computers. It is in an old house that was wired professionally about a year ago. there are eight in one room and two down the hall in another room. I bought four nice used computers with 1 mb RAM each for $150 apiece from Computer Recyclers. This is a great deal, since they are usually $175 for the 512 RAM but they know me and their mission is to support schools. One didn't work so they quickly changed it out. They have XP Professional, which is good, because the others have XP Home. One acts as a server and you can't access XP Home with more than five other computers so we will need to be moving the server to one of the new computers. I had some trouble with damaged LAN cables. A lot of scootching around on the floor (boy, was I sore yesterday!). Intermittent problems. I am worried about the electricity draw on this old house. I replaced some surge strips that had their lights out....

I bought a $20 hard drive for a broken laptop and put it in yesterday and reloaded the OS. Once again, with XP Home, since it is a Sony and I didn't have a Sony disk, it is now demanding a hundred dollars to continue running. The drive was a 20 gig, the largest I could find. The computer isn't worth the $100. I have learned Microsoft doesn't care about a workaround on this. I need to ponder the solution. This computer was donated for me to fix up and has the name of a local family to give to when it is decides to behave! Linux? Hmmm All they want is to go on line, watch DVDs and write stuff. I haven't done Linux before but this might be the time. Jezebel -- fried hard drive with valuable grandkid pictures and NO BACKUP! These things make me cry! It was on a nice UPS, but plugged into the phone line. ZAP! It took out the hard drive and some of the four 256 sticks of RAM. I have it running on one stick of RAM and have a new used drive and have loaded the OS, but sadly wi...

I keep seeing so many cases of the Golden Rule being a piece of bunk, I thought I'd write about it. Because it is, after all, my blog, and you can click to another page. But hear me out. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Obviously, you would add the caveat "in the same situation" -- you would give a baby a bottle but wouldn't want one yourself. But more than that, people are so different in their needs and their wants that it renders this rule pretty useless. David was at a command station with his ham radio yesterday. An older couple prattled on endlessly not realizing that what David wanted most was to be left alone with his radio. They thought they were being friendly, but he found it annoying. Today at the dog show some of the Ruritans wanted to serve large portions, others small. Some wanted to cut the sandwiches, others said that was too much work. Some wanted to close right at 1:30 to get home, others wanted to stay open a few minutes longer. S...

No, I did NOT say Rabbit, Rabbit today, even if it is the first day of the month. But I did go to my 8:30 BNI meeting, then a phone call to a client that lasted an hour, and a 12:00 board meeting, then bought four computers for Skyline Literacy and delivered them (setup tomorrow), and came back home to attempt a fix on an uncooperative computer and do some paperwork. Another board meeting at 7, and putting together lunch for Saturday and Sunday for the Ruritans sponsoring 100 people at the annual dog show. I have two clients to visit tomorrow and lots of egg salad and macaroni and cheese to make. So I'm busy without being overwhelmed and life is good. "Friends are the chocolate chips in the cookie of life ."