Song of the day: “The Flood” by Katie Melua. I only recently discovered this beauty by an artist I’ve already admired and loved for a few years, and don’t mind at all having this song going through my head most of the day.
The past couple of days have been mostly about tenant’s ceiling. That change of plan I mentioned the other day, required removing the plating again, putting up slats and then redoing the plating until it all looked nice and shiny, sorta. Sure, it’s going to need another lick of paint, and finishing slats, but in the end it’ll look grand. Tenant, at least, appears very happy with it, which is the most important thing. I think it is important that she feels she’s special enough to have people do something nice for her. She’s blooming a little of late, and has even helped today, sanding the slats.
While we were working in the ceiling yesterday, we did find a single beam in her roof that had been eaten away at by some sort of bug, meaning that we had to get the angle grinder and cut through all the roof nails, and then hammer the stupid beam out. It took some effort (I only helped for a short time seeing as caregiver phoned and needed a pick up from her other job) but we got the beam out.
Next we went in search of a new one, and worked anti-parasite liquid in the surrounding area wood. We did check everything, and it doesn’t look like the bug spread. Luckily we also had a proper beam (technically two, since it had to be long) and we covered that with the chemical stuff as well it was put in place this morning.
Weather wise things have been bloody insane. Seriously, for the past three days the mornings are starting downright cloudy, and there’ve been winds that were nothing if not absolutely chilling. Would you believe me if I told you I’ve already been donning long sleeved stuff…in August…in southern Spain? Insanity!
We had a rather wonderful conversation with grandpa during all the remodelling going on. It was about his parents, and what is wrong with folks these day. Grandpa is wonderfully conservative that way, and on most parts I’m just going to have to agree with him. When I hear him talking about his folks, and how they took two years of hard, hard work before they could get married. And how they decided to take the biggest risk of their lives and started a farm together with nothing to back them except their own backs and hands, and lots of determination. How they had a bunch of kids, made it through the war and evacuation, again with their own kids, along with an 8 month old baby cousin, walking for three days and everything. Only to come back to their decimated farm that had nothing left except walls and a roof and lots of abandoned boxes and bullets. How they started to rebuild, raised their kids to be happy and hard working adults, all of it together, until in the end they could not imagine a day going past without the other.
I will listen to grandpa’s stories of how his dad’s first question would always be where is you mom, and vice versa, about how they always asked the other what to do and go about it. How they worked their butts off together, being two parts of a whole, without ever speaking a nasty word to each other in front of the kids.
What is better than working all your life to become the better par of a whole? What is nobler than being good people with happy kids? What is wrong with striving for that, because that appears to be the problem in this day and age, doesn’t it? No one wants to put in that effort anymore, not really. We live in a world with quickie marriages and quickie divorces, a quickie mistake is easily made, isn’t it? Well, at least you can also get a quickie fix, so no harm done.
But is it really. Does all this quickie stuff not do more harm than good? Are not more people than ever, lonelier than they ever imagined? Sure, you’ve got 5000 friends on Facebook, and whatnot, but we’re sitting at our computers, ignoring life around us and forgetting that the only way to share your life with that special someone, is to actually spend it with that special someone. It is about going through the good the bad, the pretty and the ugly without ending up hating the other for some silly faux pas you would forgive a stranger and yet not your partner.
I mean, look at the world, some celeb proclaims divorce of a so-and-so-years partner because said partner didn’t make them happy. That is not a partner’s task (at least no in my book), it is your own. Your happiness is always in your hands and what you want to put into gaining it. The way I figure, the old adage still counts here, you get what you put in, so if you go into a marriage with just 50 percent because you can hardly be expected to just put your everything on the line, just for something as insignificant as marriage, you can’t expect to get anything except maybe fifty percent. It’s a tough fact, but there you have it; it applies to most anything worthwile in life, doesn’t it? I mean, you can’t be the best doctor on earth unless you go for it a 110 percent, now can you? If you think you can, well than I don’t suppose that you have ever put in your everything into anything. *sigh*
But enough ranting. I get carried away sometimes, I know, but I couldn’t help myself after that conversation with grandpa. It makes me hope that I will get to be in that place sometime too, where I won’t be able to imagine what it is like to be without a certain someone. *double sigh* Guess I’m just a romantic at heart, eh?
After yesterday’s efforts in putting the new ceiling plating in, I decided for a short nap lest I wouldn’t make it through the edit awake…good thing too, considering I conked out and blearily stumbled out of bed an hour later.
Both big brother and I headed down into the yard after that to check on the plants and to toss a big batch of home-made, all natural insecticide in the big planters of the greenhouse. We have a little mite problem in there, and hope that the natural insecticide will curb it.
The edit went well enough, but nothing remotely interesting happened during it to have me share at this moment. There really is only so much anyone can say about editing. It is frustrating, and we end up in tears of laughter, or frustration, but in the end it is just that: Editing.
The book I complained about the other day, has, much to my relief improved vastly. The writer is a good one after all and during the course of the plot, the in-gratuitous has become less gratuitous…if that makes any sense? He does have beautiful sentence structure, and a wonderful way with words that will make me blink in awe every now and then as I wonder if I could have gotten away with a particular sentence the way he did. I doubt it, but it is wonderful to wonder sometimes. Hah.
Started the day today by going into the yard. There was water to be given, harvests to get in (we’re rapidly nearing the end of that, by the way. Soon we’ll start having less fresh veggies for sure, darn it) and another friggin’ snake to get rid of. Once again it was slithering in the pepper planter, making a nuisance of its poisonous self (I checked online) until big brother captured it with a shovel and a bucket. We set it out far away where it won’t bother our dogs, thank you very much.
Afterwards we continued with tenant’s ceiling. The new beam went in, and grandpa and I sawed the slats that will covered the attachment points and make the whole look darn pretty. I didn’t have a lot time, but tenant enjoyed helping out by sanding the sides. I made a contraption on her table so the slats could stand up straight, allowing her to sand the edges. It took longer than for me to do it myself, but what the hey. It’s good practise for her motor skills, and I don’t see why we should do rehab exercises if we can catch two birds in one hand with just every day stuff that will make her feel better about herself because she is making herself usefull.
Afterwards I rushed down to make supper for us. We had an appointment in town to drop the Land Rover off at the garage, and then rushed back home because grandpa had to go to the village to pick up his moped (the stupid thing is playing up again). We were incredibly late because the Opel (of course) is screwing around again as well. The engine got overheated and we had to pull over lest we risked blowing up the engine. The cooling liquid was boiling, and we lost most of it while we stood halfway up the mountain. Luckily there was a store just a few hundred meters up, and big brother got us a tank of cooling liquid that we added to the tank just as soon as the boiling stopped. Grrrr.
Afterwards grandpa had to go to the village, also with the Opel, and he had to stop underway to prevent overheating. Then, by the time he finally got back, I had to head out to pick up Sally, all of it, with an engine that was about five degrees from overheating all the while. Yikes12
Which brings us to now, and me having to wrap this up so I can start working on the edit once more.
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