The aftermath

Song of the day: “Bruises” by Train and Ashley Monroe. Cute little song, but I’ve been listening to it a bit too much because I even woke up with it this morning.

So what’s been going on? Not a whole bloody lot, really. Most of all, yesterday was rather tedious for everyone involved. Part of it was because I wasn’t worth a damn after that thirteen hour workday. I was tired, sore and out of sorts, in particular since, in order to sleep I had to take a painkiller because my every muscle was screaming, and refused to relax. Very annoying. But anyway, I did in the end fall asleep, which was what I really needed. Wasn’t at my best after waking up, but did slowly go through the morning rituals such as laundry and feeding the dogs, and getting into the day.

There was the car to unload (had an appointment later on to pick up a donation), which was a friggin’ mess after three days of hard labor. There were tools to gather from the mess, metal debris, paper cement bags, and all those little things that filled up the whole of the back. While I did the remainder of the Land Rover, big brother took care of the trailer so little brother could come up and reload for their market on Sunday, and protect everything against the predicted rain.

My doggies were very “sticky”, which is something that often happens when I need to be out a lot. They’ll follow me around everywhere, sticking their heads under my hands, and basically trying to trip me so I’ll be on the ground where they can hold me down. *snort*

Okay, my memory is failing me, so I’m just going to mention whatever pops up in my mind, and you’ll just have to figure it all out yourself. Hah. Right…okay, yesterday we did some wood chopping and bringing it up. Regretfully I only managed one three foot trunk, seriously, my feet refused to climb the mountain all the way, and I had to drop the darn thing at the top of the garden steps.
Luckily today went a lot better. Managed to chop about half a load of the pieces of trunks that big brother sawed off. Was a nice exercise, oiled the muscles, allowed me to get rid of the lingering stiffness, which was good, because stiff I was.

What else? Well, there was the donation thing. Got about a thousand pounds of canned beets. Big cans, mind you, that were about a year overdue, which isn’t a big problem considering they were on a sour base. It took some time to load them, especially considering we were both sore as heck. Hah.

Put the last touches (blue slats) on Sally’s roof. We’d been postponing it and since the weather is rapidly turning bad again. There is a prediction of rain for the weekend thank you very much, meaning that it is unlikely that we’re going to be heading for the Sunday market. Not that I mind all that much. A quiet weekend, which we can use to prepare for Tuesday with the balcony, at home.

Knight II’s foot is looking good. Regretfully he still has a small wound on the top of his heel that needs to heal before his sock can come off. The bastard has been making a nuisance of himself, if you must know. He’s gone through four socks already, chewing through the fabric, darn it.

Gada…well, she’s not doing well. I took her to the vet the other day to discuss her options, and promptly ended up crying. So stupid. Must have been the tiredness, because I know better than most that sometimes the end is just there. Still, it startled the vet, I think, who immediately said that there were other options to try. One of them being a change in her pain medication to see how she would respond to that. She asked if I thought Gada was unhappy, or in a lot of pain, and I answered yes to the latter, while to the first I had to be honest and say that I had no idea. She’s a Labrador, after all, and to a lab life is grand as long as the boss is there to play with. Regretfully Gada is the type of dog who would gladly walk on a broken leg if that meant that she could do her cheery job as a Labrador. Poor darling. I have noticed she’s in pain, though. More often than not she’s sagging through her hind legs, and at night I will sometimes find her awake, breathing heavy despite the fact that the nights are cool. Ah well, right now I’m in the possession of new pain medication that will last her for about ten days. We’ll see how it goes, but so far I’m not particularly pleased with her progress.
Now let’s hope that the next time I need to take her to the vet I can keep from blubbering all over the place. Because that won’t help anyone, and even worry Gada, which is not something she deserves.
I should look at it the way the vet does. Sometimes the body is just at its end, and Gada’s hips are there.

There was more unloading of the car, of course. All those cans that had to be stored
Supper had to be cooked. Thought big brother took care of one of those by making spinach which potatoes, I made a veggie mix on spaghetti which went down well…or would have, if I had been remotely hungry.

Some concerns are going on at the moment what with the strikes in the big cities. Though the small villages aren’t really bothered, the unrest is affecting everyone, scaring folks quite a bit. Me too, admittedly. I mean, seriously, what use do the strikes have when there IS NO MONEY? I mean, you can stamp your foot all you like, but that won’t make the wallet full (and no, getting that money from the rich won’t help at all. Either everyone gets a buck this month, or one more pay, and then what? Idiots!). Heck, even the Twinkie company went down because of silliness like this. What do folks think: someone waves a magic wand? Mommy and daddy will take care of it? What? Scary how so many folks can be so shortsighted. I do hope that stuff won’t get as bad as a few years ago where we were without dog food due to such strikes. I mean, seriously, I can do without a meal or two, but the doggies can’t.

Did some more leather branding this morning. Not much, just trying out some shapes, seeing what works.
Dog food had to be done, of course. Which meant cutting the lot while big brother took care of our supper tonight. Yay.
Decided to take this writing session of the blog as an excuse to re-watch Resident Evil (the first one) which is still a splendid movie. *sigh*

Well, that’s about it for me. Did manage to sweep the floor in my cabin this morning, but the place is still a mess, darn it. I really have to eke out some time for that. Same goes for the writing. Though I have added some pages, it is going extremely slow at the moment, darn it.

Nuh-uh...no title

Song of the day: “Puppet on a string” by…I forgot. Ah well. Funny song anyway.

Had a tedious couple of days, at least in regards to telling about them. Since we’re working on storage anyway, yesterday morning, right after finishing the house chores, such as laundry and all those other pesky daily jobs, we headed for the bus. Like me, grandpa is going bonkers due to the lack of storage, so it really was time for this.

It took us most of yesterday to take it all out, and sort through the mess…although we did manage to fit in another potato planting session. Looking cute too, what with the reed fencing I made around it. I’ve feeling that, come summer it’ll all look rather tropic.

Anyway, once we finished taking the contents from under the bus (and separated the garbage from it) there was loads of cleaning (this place wasn’t exempt from our most recent rat problem) and then putting in partitions. While I did this particular chore, big brother worked on a dam like section for the gutters that lead to the basin. We’ve got this big slab of marble that can now be set in place if the water supply has to be closed off. It looks rather nifty, if I do say so myself.
Grandpa was hauling stuff up with Dani all the while, considering that a lot has to go to the local landfill in the next few weeks.

Since the Land Rover was occupied for today’s market venture (the sibs and mom, remember?) we had an excellent excuse not to go out for stones. I was rather glad for it, because these days I’ve a feeling that I’m burning the candles on both sides a bit again. Not that it matters, considering I keep being sensible about it, get enough sleep and food, and take care that balance activities. Nevertheless, a bit of caution is warranted.

There were some edits but on the most part, we worked on the synopsis for A.I.L. I didn’t think it was going to work this time, what with shifting everything around and getting it up to three pages, but in the end it all came down again to exactly two, as is requested by the publisher.

We also worked on my new letterhead, which turned out properly cute for the occasion. We printed the whole lot out and I’ve gotta admit that it all looks pretty darn good. With a little luck we’ll start sending it all out next week. After another hour of edit-reading, I was so tired I basically past out the moment my head hit the pillow.

This morning, after the usual household chores, along with a visit to tenant who agreed to spend the last sunny day on my porch, where she could at least catch a bit of sun still, it was back to the bus. During the course of the day the clouds kept gathering, however. Even now the rain is gently coming down, which isn’t bad, per say, in particularly not for the plants, but still. I’m not thrilled with the change. Hah.

After finishing closing off the last of the holes and locking the side sections of the old bus over old suitcases and such, we continued on on the other side and took to staring at the old diesel tank there. Seriously, it took me two minutes of staring before I turned to big brother and said, “Hey, this thing runs on diesel, right?”
Big brother: “Uh-huh.”
Me: “I don’t suppose you know if it’s empty?”
Big brother: “Nuh-uh.”
Me: “Should we…”
Big brother: “Uh-huh.” And off he was to get a tube from storage, along with a couple of buckets.

So we ended up with about 20 liters of diesel, yay. We filtered it, of course, and then poured it down into the tank of the Land Rover. This is going to save us quite a bill this month, in particular since it is aaaar…ehm grocery shopping day tomorrow. We won’t need to gas up at least. Yay.

Had a nice little walk with tenant who slept splendidly but would like to have her bed lowered by several centimeters (1 or 2 inches) because when it is lower she can get on easier. I’ll try to do that in the morning, but otherwise the day after, we’ll have to see how it turns out.

Today we sowed spinach, by the way. Grandpa turned some more earth (don’t ask me why, but he really likes doing that). And just about when we were done, the first drops of rain started to fall. Not hard, but we started hurrying up in cleaning the last bits around the bus, hauling up what we could to storage and get all the tools safely settled for the night.

In the last bit of daylight, we got another batch of rocks. There was some mild rain, but nothing to serious. On the most part, I don’t dislike hauling rocks at the end of the day. It is a good exercise to wind down from whatever activities we did during the day. Besides, whether I like it or not doesn’t matter anyway. It has to be done.

Dog-wise Gada’s ear is all better. No more stuff oozes out, yay, so I won’t be needed to clean that ear anymore. Let’s hope that this remedy will work longer than the antibiotics. Touri’s ear is not better yet (though there is some improvement) instead he hates me for cleaning his ear every other day. *sigh* You should see the look in his eyes afterwards, in particular because I literally need to take him in a choke-hold so big brother can spray the stuff into his ear. Ah well, we’ll see how things go in the near future.

Well, that’s it for today. All else that happened is just…well, a blank.