New routine.

Song of the day: “Que Sera Sera” by Doris Day. Got that one a few times already, but it is so wonderfully easy. Hah.

We started early yesterday, considering we had to go grocery shopping…yes, it is that time of the month, darn it. We went a little early, too, figuring that if we got it all done in time we would be able to do a short edit afterwards.
First there was yard work, however. There are two wheelbarrows filled with plants that need to be put in the ground, but we only managed about half before time was up and we head to the car to leave for the planned grocery trip.

Everything gets done in four and a half hours…I had another question of a shop-owner about my weight-loss. She asked whether I had been dieting, or if I’d been ill. So strange. Last time I was asked about a diet and surgery. What is it with the incredulous looks, I wonder, when I say that I’ve never eaten as much as I have in the past year. I have…’cause let’s face it, every four hours or so, my stomach is acting as if my throat’s been cut. There are times when I fear that I don’t get enough food, since I really do not want to lose weight faster than two lbs a month…it’s been going steadily that way for several month; it allows my skin to keep up, I think.

But is it really true that the only conceivable way to lose weight is to diet, become terminally ill or have surgery? Makes you wonder why it is always something torturous, doesn’t it?

Be that as it may, it was a nice compliment. Hah. A nice tidbit of yesterday’s shopping is that we finally managed to get two pairs of shoes in big brother’s size. It is a hard thing to do since he’s got size sixteen, (47.5 European size) or something, which is downright impossible to get here in Spain, unless you visit a really expensive store (not something we are inclined to do).

As planned, we did a four-page edit when we got home, which was a relief after the debacle of the day before yesterday. I swear, we were so tired after pouring the concrete that we could hardly think. But the pages got done, some details were adjusted and that brings us almost to half of what needs to be edited before I can resume writing. I’m looking forward to it.

After the edit we watched Tom Hanks’ “Angels and Demons”, which I found to be a tad disappointing. It was a little weak, compared to the first one, and that’s pity.

Which brings us to today:
Thorgal (golden retriever) had a slight seizure of sorts this morning. It was rather peculiar; he just went through his back legs and started spasming.
Five minutes later, he was fine, but we’re going to have to keep an eye on him.

Before we got started on the day’s project, I went up to our tenant’s place, where I helped with her rehab exercises. This is the second one we’ve done, but it is nice to see her excitement when something new happens. Like the first time (Monday, I think) she could walk past the bar we made for her convenience without actual assistance. And then, while doing balance exercises, her lame arm, actually started to mimic the movements of her good arm. Since mobility and independence is what we’re aiming for, we focused on her arm most today. After a while, her arm once again started to mimic her good one, which thrilled her.

Then it’s time for me to start outside work. We’re only halfway through it now, so who knows what else is going to happen, but since I won’t have time to write tonight, I thought I might as well get through this right now and post.
Today we’re putting in the wooden partition on the southeast side of the carport, and it is looking grand. Sturdy too, and it replaces the bad fence that has been an eyesore for the past year…which reminds me, I need to get out there; the sibs are a mite impatient. Hah.

We’ll pick up here the day after tomorrow…maybe I’ll have time to post some pictures by then.

Pouring Concrete. Yay.

So yeah, it’s been a busy couple of days, and I’m really roughhousing my way through this thing, but what has to be done, has to be done.

Let’s start off with the bit of news of the fire that raged across the valley where we live. Big brother and I were working on the manuscript in my cabin, when suddenly we noticed a bright orange glow in the distance. It was a rather huge fire that swept across the mountains that face ours. It was all rather impressive. There were lights of helicopters swarming over it. Emergency services lights flashed, and for the duration we kept a close eye on the matter. Considering that the winds were sweeping down full force, (bad for the fire and those poor firefighters, good for us, ‘cause it went in the direction of the sea rather than our place) we really didn’t want to get caught unprepared, but come morning the fire had been extinguished and the yellow alert (ours that is) turned off, so to speak. Hah.

Yesterday pretty much involved preparing for today. There were only a couple of hours of editing for big brother and me…my focus was really shot after a dream where I was late for everything, including a flight to the U.S…for some reason I couldn’t manage to get my bags packed. And there you have it the ultimate nightmare for me. Give me zombies, werewolves, vampires and monsters: No prob. But dreaming that I’m late for something will have me in a genuine tizzy when I wake up. And to think that in real life I can just go with the flow and don’t mind such a “disaster”. In regard to that I’ve really got the Spanish mentality of, “Mañana”.
Go figure, it just makes no sense whatsoever.

But I got distracted. Where was I? Oh yes, preparations. So yeah, after I made some adjustments to my new drawers…made a slight error during construction that had to be fixed…and then it was up the mountain. Considering that we want to pour the concrete gutter before the winter rains start, it is a job we have to get done in proper time, so we start weighing the options.

There are really only two ways to get to the area in question: The roof, which would mean hauling buckets onto the roof, then walking across the expanse of it (probably damaging a lot of the tiles in the process) to pour the stuff down behind the house until the gutter is filled.
Second option is hauling it down the mountain on rope and then fill it up. Not a fun way either, so we put our heads together and designed and apparatus of sorts made of sewer tubes and a large piece of metal shaped into a rather large funnel that fit into the connecting corner that we put on the end of the twenty yard tube we stuck down the mountain.
Using a handful of metal bars, which we drove into the ground, we tied the entire thing up and gave it a test run with a bucket of water. The test went well, so with that done we went off on different ventures.

Little sister and I set out cut metal bars to put in the section where the concrete will be poured, and then put it all in place for today. By nightfall, what could be prepared in advance was done, and we headed inside for dinner and another edit. It went well, considering that we actually managed to get to our daily quota of doing four pages a day.

But, since nightfall is coming fast now, big brother and I decide to make the leap, and change our usual routine completely. Chores and projects first and then in the dark hours of the evening editing. It is going to take some getting used to, but once we do it should work out fine.

With that in mind we made it an early night and got up early so we could start today fresh and new. It work rather well to declare as much in the evening, it really works when you say: I give up today, and start fresh and new in the morning.
I like it.

So today (song of the day: practically any song I know that has a yodel in it. Downright weird, I tell ya) it was going through the usual chores, such as laundry and cleaning, and then doing some repairs. There’s a section of the ceiling that got damaged during the floor project that needs to be fixed and two lamp fittings have to be replaced in the kitchen and then we get to work on the kitchen furnace.

As it turns out, a rat got into it, decided to nest inside…yep, we saw it sitting in there while we were taking the dratted device apart, and the dogs were going bonkers…and messed up the wiring completely. It took a couple of hours, but we got it all cleaned out (the dogs didn’t manage to get the rat in question, though they tried with a passion) and put it all back together again. Phew. Works like a charm again.

That done we had a quick lunch, after which we were running slightly behind. No matter, though, the sibs were ready and together we all headed up the mountain, out the gate (leaving the dogs inside…making them go bonkers for a bit, of course. The dog’s really don’t appreciate being left out.) and then towards where the tubing had been set up.

We hauled the concrete mixer up, buckets, water hose, shovels and of course wheelbarrows full of sand and cement bags. Oh my God, it’s a good thing we has so much practice with the rock walls, ‘cause it was a doozy of a day. We succeeded, however. We managed to get the entire gutter in, which meant mixing over fifteen batches of concrete and lifting over a hundred buckets to pour it down the tubing.

The first hour or so was downright splendid, what with the sun shining warmly and the wind having died down for the first time in days. Really, it was like sunbathing. Lovely. Just lovely. It makes working outside absolutely wonderful.

Good cooperation today. The sisters and I were doing the cement mixing and pouring it down, while little brother hauled sand towards us, and big brother kept an eye on the progress (and spreading of the stuff, of course) behind the house. In the end we got it all done in four hours, which is excellent. The evening was about to fall when we started cleanup. The entire mess was hosed down, the tubing removed, empty bags gathered (wind had started up again, so debris wanted to scatter) buckets and mixer cleaned out, and before you know it, the sun disappeared behind the mountain.

The dogs were ecstatic when we finally returned within the property fences, and after capturing Knight II by his collar (he attempted to bowl me over more than once) I took a few minutes to calm them down and pet them all, crooning approval to them, for having been so brave as to stay behind the fences. Hah.

With a successful day behind us, we headed down to the house for dinner and an attempt at editing (we really were too tired; no surprise to it, really, since we managed to finish a task we’d thought to spread out over two days) after about an hour of basically staring at three paragraphs we decided to give up and went on to different ventures which were a little less energy consuming.

Which concludes the update of the past couple of days. On to the next.

Winter's near. Brrr

Song of the day: There were several yesterday, and most of them were infomercials, so I’m not going to list them all up. It was downright ridiculous.

Let me think as to what all has happened in the past couple of days. Thankfully the edit is slowly progressing, and we now have about one chapter done in the rewrite. Phew. It is so very tough to get used to the new characters after a year of Nina and Rory, but Callie and Alex are slowly starting to grow on me. The dialogue is starting to smoothen, and the actions of the two protagonists are beginning to get more natural. I think we’re getting into the swing of it.

The shelving project is all done, standing beautifully in my bedroom beside the new wardrobe. It looks great, and now that all the old closets (they were falling apart) are out and torn down into rubbish pieces and stuff that can still be used, there’s a lot of room, which I love.

There was another fight between Groovy and Mati…this sometimes happens when there’s bad blood between two dogs; it’ll take a while for them to get over it. We’re going to have to keep them apart for a bit now, but soon they’ll have forgotten all about it, they always do.

Lots of wind again. Yesterday there were heavy winds from the west…which hardly ever happens…and these tore the roof plates of the old horse stable, which meant that big portions of yesterday and today were spent reattaching the plates (we had to gather them from all over the place) and taking two big ones from the courtyard roof to replace those that were damaged beyond repair. The darn things should hold now…I hope.

Though the nights are starting to get pretty darn cold, big brother and I did two more runs. The moon is no longer out at this time, but luckily the stars are bright enough to make a relatively visible road for us. The progress is slow, but I am starting to notice improvement with the runs. Big brother can already do the whole piece without needing to catch his breath, and I’m slowly doing bigger stretches at an even pace. Whenever I can’t keep it up, I just switch to a brisk pace instead, which does the trick well enough. It’s not as if I want to push myself. I want the process to be fun and natural.

There were three more “prison breaks” of the chinchilla into the rabbit cage, poor thing. It looks all harassed when he’s in with the two bunnies, and yet it continued to attempt escape. Now the rabbit cage has been fully closed off, so the chinchilla should remain in place in the future. It’s so strange that it kept trying to get out, when every time I put it back, it crawled up against its sister and immediately started to snooze.

The traumatized puppy we’re trying to get over the shock is slowly showing improvement. It’s (Niobe) less scared now, and will actually join the other dogs again without making a racket. His little brother, Morpheus, on the other hand, is starting to be a rascal though. Hah.

More carpentry projects, such as repairing (or repairing) drawers, are in full swing, and finally drawing to an end. Painting is still prominent, too, and to keep things interesting big brother and I have gone on a “scavenge hunt” at the nearby landfill. We found a lot of raw materials again, which has replenished the slowly depleting supplies. We’re going to have to go out more often in the future, since we’re going through the stuff at a fast rate. There really isn’t much that’s more fun than do actual recycling of stuff people just threw away. Something that looks downright horrid and then making it look beautiful again is certainly very satisfying.

The recently remodeled office is working out well, by the way. When the dogs join us in the space during the evening it warms up nicely, making it an excellent spot when winter gets to be in full swing. The only thing that still needs to be done is put in proper power outlets ‘cause the old ones aren’t sufficient at all.

A bit of disturbing news is that middle sister’s dog Rhumba appears to be feeling poorly. Last night the poor ten-year-old Samoyed had a high fever, but luckily, after we pumped antibiotics into him, he started to improve slowly. I do hope that he manages to overcome this particular problem; he really is too old to be messing around with diseases and such. For a while there, we were afraid that we were going to have to take him to the vet…in the middle of the night, mind you, and on a Sunday to boot.

Another bit of sad news is that we heard today that our maternal grandfather died sometime last week. It is not as if we had seen the man in a long time, or that he was an actual part of our lives, but still, it leaves an impression. From what we heard, he didn’t suffer and died peacefully in his sleep, so that is something at least.
Regretfully death is very much a part of life, no matter that there are times when we want to stop time from advancing.

Well, with that, another Blog comes to an end. I’m just about ready to call it a day now.