Cleaning the refrigerator is on my top five list of things I hate to do.  This is them in order…

1. Cook  I hate to cook.  I hate all aspects of cooking from the picking of ingredients, to choosing a recipe, to cooking the food and then, there  is the cleanup.  My mother was the best cook in the world, but I know she didn’t love doing it.  I learned a lot from her  mostly from watching her as she bustled around the kitchen.  I was in charge of cleaning up most often. Especially after my older sister married. The cleanup was left to me. I’d rather wash and dry dishes than cook.   I took Foods in 4-H and my remembrance of it was me in the kitchen crying and my mother yelling at me from the other room that I could do it.   I baked so many yellow cakes one Summer, my brothers would moan when another one appeared at the table for dessert. Now baking I don’t mind so much.  I will gladly bake a cake at the drop of a hat, but fix a meal, ugh, no. Don’t confuse cooking with baking. They are very different and charm the senses in very different ways.

2. Clean the refrigerator.  This is a chore best done when no one is around so no one will hear any curse words, but it is nice to have  a husband to know how to put it all back together again after you have disassembled it.  I wasn’t planning to clean the refrigerator today, but I watched  Hoarders on tv this morning and after I washed some eggs and was arranging them in the refrigerator, I realized something sticky and red had been spilt on just about every shelf and on the walls.  Some of the refrigerators on Hoarders are pretty nasty. I’m not here to judge, but rotten food and expired food is not what I want in my refrigerator. Anyway, I washed one shelf, realized the next shelf needed cleaning and before I was all through, I had every shelf out of my refrigerator and had washed just about everything. There was a bit way in the back I couldn’t reach, but thankfully, David did that when he got home.  Now it’s all clean for another year or two.  Just kidding.  I had scrubbed my kitchen floor this morning and had to reclean it and that’s another reason.

3.  Attend Funerals  I have attended quite a lot of funerals in my life. I’ve buried grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, a brother, a nephew, and friends.  My son-in-law’s mother passed away this week after a long illness.  She was such a wonderful lady, loved by everyone who knew her.  She’s just a year older than me and makes me think how near I am to death’s door. I’m at the stage of my life now that I know more dead people than living ones.   I always want to go to funerals out of respect, but I am a very horrible comforter.  People usually end up comforting me.  This will not be an easy funeral to attend. What ones are?

4. Dust.  My house has to get pretty dusty for me to dust. My rule is, dust before company and rest the rest of the time. Enough said about that.

5.  Go to parties.  I am not a party animal although once I get to one I enjoy myself usually.  I always feel like people are trying too hard to have a good time and I’d rather be home reading a book.  But that’s just me.  Some people are just gregarious.  I’m not.  I’m the one sitting on the sidelines watching everyone else and that is all I’d rather do.

I know there are other things I don’t like to do, but these are my top five.   I’m pretty easily entertained and don’t expect much from people.  I love gardening, taking care of my chickens, playing with my dogs, traveling, reading, quilting, knitting and painting(not pictures, walls.)   I love to visit with family and friends which we don’t get to do often.  I don’t consider going to funerals as visiting even though I will see several people I don’t see often.

Do you have a list of things you just hate to do, but have to be done? We all have to do things we don’t like and I’m glad there are only five on my list. I think I’m pretty fortunate in that way.  Bye.

Before I tell you about all the fun I had last weekend I want to tell you about a surprise I got in the mail. Remember the flowers Coldwater Creek sent me for over billing me on my credit card?  Well, one day last week I got the mail and there was an envelope for me and when I opened it, there was another apology from Coldwater Creek and an American Express Card for $100!  Now that is a company who treats their customers right.   I guess I’ll be ordering from them soon.

Now about my weekend. Early Friday morning David and I got up and got dressed and went to the hospital where I was going to have a pacemaker installed. The nurses who prepped me were very nice, but I had trouble understanding one of them. Seems I did understand her, but I couldn’t understand why she was asking me if I or anyone I know abused drugs?  Huh?  The other nurse said I’d be surprised at how many people say, “yes.”  I just didn’t know why they were even asking me the question.  There were a lot of questions asked that day that I didn’t think was anyone’s business but mine.  But that’s just me.

In the operating room it was like a beehive with nurses fastening all kinds of wires to me all over my body and the anesthesiologist put a nose plug in my nose so I thought I’d soon be asleep. After a few minutes I was still wide awake and I said, ” I can still hear you guys”  The doctor said he hadn’t started the anesthesia yet.  Then the next thing I remembered was sitting up in bed, trying to get out of it and two people wrestling me back down and I was out again until I woke to an almost empty room and wondered where everyone had gone.

Finally they took me back to the recovery room where I could see David. I was feeling no pain.

Then it was just enduring all the blood pressure taking and checking up on me all through the night. It’s true you cannot rest in a hospital. I was sound asleep a couple of times when nurses woke my up to take my blood pressure.   Why do they do that?  Seems one’s blood pressure would be down when someone is fast asleep.

Anyway, the next morning we waited and waited for the doctor to release me. I got a monitor that I will have to keep beside my bed to keep track of the pacemaker.  Other then that, I have no limitations after a few weeks of recuperation.  No putting my arms above my head or lifting anything heavy.  I don’t know how people get along who live alone as David has been doing all my work for me.

Today we decided that David would wash all the windows inside and out.  I decided to wash all the curtains.  So as we were removing a curtain from the rod, David dropped the end of the rod right on my surgery site and let me just say I was in a lot of pain.  I shed a few tears.  David felt so sorry, but I was just worried that he damaged the pacemaker.   But all is well.  I’m having some pain, but not enough to incapacitate me.

We are hoping to go to a quilt show this Saturday at a farm that sells flowers.  I’ve been to the store twice and no breathlessness or tiredness. It’s a miracle.

If you ever come to a day when the doctor tells you you need a pacemaker, don’t let it frighten you. It’s not like the old days when you had to be careful and stay away from microwaves.

Here’s to medical miracles and the doctors who perform them. Bye.

Having lived in this house almost forty-three years, we have, on occasion. hired people to do work for us.  When we first moved here, we were kind of poor with three little kids, so much of the remodeling on this old house was up to us.

When we bought the house it had blue paneling on all the walls upstairs and greenish blue carpet over most of the downstairs. Carpet that crunched when you walked on it. I said at the time that carpet would be the first to go. Well, it wasn’t. We had to get bedrooms ready for all of us, a nursery for our baby and a bedroom for our two boys.  We painted the paneling since we didn’t have the money to rip it out and fix the walls and then paint them. It actually looked pretty good. In fact, three rooms are still painted paneling and you would not know it.  We bought new carpeting for all the bedrooms, a little at a time. I sewed curtains and decorated as best I could on a limited budget.   That greenish blue carpet stayed on the floor for years until we could afford new carpeting.

As our family grew, we needed more space. The boys wanted separate bedrooms as they grew older so we looked for a contractor.  I’m not sure how we ended up with the one we hired, but he has pretty much remodeled this whole house through the years.  He was very young when we hired him, as were we,  He built a two-story addition to the back of our house that included a new bedroom for David and me, a family room and a combination bathroom and laundry room. We felt like we had so much more space.  After it was all built, we had a big rain and it was leaking in our new bedroom, so David called the contractor and in a storm with lightning and thunder, he got up on our roof and fixed the leak. I was so impressed with that even though we had not expected him to do that. We still talk about that with him. Since that time we have hired him for pretty much all our remodeling except for our kitchen and that’s a story  all by itself.  I regretted not hiring him for that job.

Since then our contractor has replaced all our windows, added two porches, one screened in and has done some other work on our house.

I have one criteria for hiring someone for a job. Are they optimistic and do they say they can get the job done.  I have hired people that I wondered why they were in that line of work. One time I hired a chimney sweep who said he was afraid of heights and I even had to hold the ladder for him when he climbed to the roof.  We do have a very high, steep roof, but I told him he was probably in the wrong line of work. Another chimney sweep I had hired came to our house and with one look told us he was too old for the job and I understood because he was about our age.  So we switched to a gas fireplace and no longer need a chimney sweep.

We have called people to our house who have brought their children who began to climb all over our wood pile and I feared for their safety. Needless to say, they weren’t hired. It’s not that I don’t like children, but they don’t belong on a job site.  We had a man to our house about painting our vaulted bedroom ceiling and I knew immediately that he would not be doing it by his attitude.  So, David and I painted it ourselves.

Now for the kitchen remodel.  We searched for a long time for someone to put in a new kitchen and we went to a kitchen “specialist” where we found cabinets we loved so we hired them.  Well, a job that should have taken a month took all Summer. I had to cook all our meals in my shop and we did not have the use of our whole downstairs all Summer as we were also getting hardwood flooring put in.  And the guy evidently didn’t pay his sub-contractors because I had them calling me asking me to convince him to pay them. I told them I paid him and it was up to him to pay them.  I have always wondered if they ever got paid.   It was one crazy Summer. He sub-contracted the drywall work and as soon as the middle aged woman and kid came to our door to hang the drywall, I knew we were in trouble.  They drywalled over a bump in the wall that looked like something was going to pop out of the wall.  I was not a happy camper when the contractor came the next day.  He found someone else who did the job right, but it was an unnecessary delay in our kitchen progress.  I really am not a demanding person, honest, I just expect people who say they can do a job, to do it.

We have been blessed to have a very good contractor for the last few years, but now I think all the work on our house is done. Except for some painting once in a while it is completed.

David stained our cabin this Summer. We have had it for sixteen years and it was needing some work. I will show you some pictures of it my next post.  I also will tell you about all the swings we have on our property. David and I are real swingers. Ha.

Have you ever had trouble with a contractor or anyone who has come to do work for you? I’d love to hear the stories. I’m sure there are many.  Here’s to good contractors who get the job done. Bye.

I never wrote one thing about a plumber, did I?  We don’t hire plumbers too often, but we have found a very good plumbing business who sends plumber to our house when they say they will and they get the job done with no excuses, so they are the ones we will always use.  And that’s all there is about plumbers.