It’s okay to not be okay.

 Happy Saturday friends!

As with most weeks lately, it’s both happy and sad: we said goodbye to our buck Poppy, and yearling goat Rosemary on Friday. If you remember Rosemary has had an autoimmune disease causing her skin to thicken, crack, and bleed. Poppy had hyperextended knees that were causing him a lot of pain.

Rosemary was part of last spring’s triplet set out of Dancer. It was Parsley, Sage, and Rosemary. Sage was born “off” and only lived a week and now Rosemary is joining her in heaven. It was Dancer’s first time having babies and she had such a tough time. Too small a goat to have triplets. Being with her had me rethinking my choices to breed. Helping Parsely be born breech was scary as hell, then Sage came out floppy and her mom rejected her, and now Rosemary. I haven’t wanted to breed again since. Life on a farm is hard sometimes. Having more animals than the average person with a dog or two, means that there is much more death. And after my Aunt Katy crossing on May 4th…well, I’m just deathed out. 

I was trying to figure out why I was such a wreck this week when it occurred to me that from the moment the fire happened it’s been go, go, go: Get the fire contained as much as possible, get out of the house. Find a temporary place to stay. Find out it would take 4-6 months to fix and start that process. Find a 4-6 month rental nearby. And on and on. Moving toward “fixing” it, moving toward the goal of getting back into the house. 

Now, we are almost there and the enormity of the situation is hitting me.

(Is it though? IS IT???)

I hadn’t let it in until now. It reminds me of when Mom died and the week after being a whirlwind of prepping for the funeral and all that went with it. The day after the funeral, I suddenly felt like I had hit a brick wall. Like all the adrenaline had left my body and I was suddenly weak, nauseated, and weepy. That’s how I’ve been feeling this week. 

THE RANCH:

I’ve been coping with grief by working in the garden. With the Long Covid/Epstein Barr thing, I’ve not been able to do this for two long years. I’m very happy to be moving my body. I started off with trimming back some bushes and transplanting a few things and I felt okay. The next day I reestablished the edging on the walkway to the front door:

I still felt okay. Miraculous.

I washed the table, chairs, and umbrella with the Polar Bear looking on:

Then I worked on this area underneath the Japanese Maple, it really needed some love:

I had some variegated loriope (monkey grass), broke it apart and planted it around the edge of this bed. I added about an inch of aged compost to the top of the bed to give the tree some happy nutrients and give me a little to plant into. I found a weed that I was curious about, found out it was actually an herb called Heal-all/Selfheal/Prunella vulgaris. Being that we live in the jungle, there are lots of freebies that pop up all over. I found big patches of it in shady areas around the house. It was very shady under the Japanese Maple! I dug it all up and moved it under the tree. I also found Creeping Jenny in a flower box off the back deck and transplanted some clippings with rootlets. 

Here is what it looks like now! The Loriope will create a little short hedge eventually, keeping the soil in place. The Heal All blooms purple from spring until fall and spreads and the Creeping Jenny will add a nice bright chartreuse to the mix, eventually filling in all the bare spots: 

More to do here but I’m about 3/4 done. Happy girl to have dirt smudges on my face, dirt under my nails, and dirt on my clothes :-) I remember once while helping my mom garden as a kid in California, rolling around in the freshly turned dirt LOL, this is as close as I can get to that nowadays.

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I had one of those weird days on Wednesday where I knew I had a couple of appointments, but got the times wrong, twice. God. At 55, all I can think of is Alzheimer’s! So, while I waited for my 1pm client to arrive (not at noon like I thought) I gave myself a neurofeedback session, obviously my brain needed it. Stress does funny things to our body doesn’t it? We are a week and a half out from the Pod People unloading all of our belongings back into our home. We have an amazing general contractor who is on top of everything and stops by twice a day to make sure everything is moving along on our house. And yet, my brain also wants to be on top of everything that is happening at our house. I guess as we come down to the homestretch, I’m going to have to do some extra neurofeedback and retrain my brain back into calm. 

They started working on rebuilding the part of the wood floor that was ruined by the water from the firefighters, putting wood in my office, and sanding the rest of the floors on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. By Wednesday evening they were cleaning everything up. Thursday was staining day, and Friday was the 3 coats of finish. What a process. The guys have been there almost 12 hours every day. Green Step Flooring is in Cary, I’m impressed!

We started seeing a difference on day on Monday evening when they were sanding the old finish off. So much lighter and brighter:

As I’m writing this Friday evening, I realize I forgot to take a pic of the stained floor darn it! It’s very similar to the above pic though. It’s a satin finish and is gorgeous!

ManChild’s windows were delivered this week:

 And one promptly got broken:

But it’s already been measured and they will get the glass replaced.

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The neighborhood magnolias are in full swing! They are 40+ years old and the flowers are nearly as big as dinner plates when fully opened:

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The grass really is greener on the other side:

B-Rad was in a pool tournament last weekend and his daughter Nichole (also in the tournament along with her brother Josh) took this picture, soooo handsome!

 THE MEMES:

A friend sent me this and now I can’t stop thinking about painting the back porch…

Schrodinger’s Dishes:

We haven’t been able to get into the farm house all week so no potty. I thought  I would look on Amazon for those pee-standing-up disposable funnels. This is NOT what I ended up buying!

Seriously? Apparently there are still people out there who STILL think we women are jealous LOL. Lord.

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