Discoveries

 Well, I don't know if this past week can be officially counted as a "Move".  I mean who knows what the rules are anymore?  If you're in the midst of moving things from one place of residence to another and that was called a "Move" in the past, can that criteria still be applied in this day and age?  

I think even The Lord was confused about the rules and decided to play it safe in case it was ruled a move.  Yes, My Move/Precipitation ration is still 100 percent

Given that it had been in the mid 40's the day before, it didn't stay on the ground long.

So...Anyhow, this past week, Mrs J and I spent prepping our old house for the floor refurbish. (For those who haven't been following this saga, we're refurbishing our old house so that my Sister can move into it, we will then refurbish her cabin and turn it into a second guest house. That's the plan anyhow.)

The "bubbas" will be arriving this morning to begin tearing out the old carpeting and tile in preparation for replacement by vinyl planking.  One of the preconditions for their beginning work was that all but the heavy furniture be off the floor and that the water be turned off to the refrigerator.

Easy, peasy, on the latter, right?  There's just a little valve to turn.  Nothing is easy anymore.  Turns out there were 4 different valves.  Not sure what two of them were, but there was the one to the Reverse Osmosis system and then one to the fridge itself.  That last one was hidden in a closet half way around the kitchen.  Being the patient man that I am (Stop laughing, Beans, that isn't funny!) I finally gave up and called Culligan.  They sent a guy out about an hour later, took him two minutes to get the water off.

That crisis averted, we spent the rest of the week going through the remains of 20 years of habitation hiding in storage places I only dimly remembered existing.  It involved many round trips from one dwelling to the other and many more round trips from the dwelling to the truck to the dwelling.

Hat tip:  Costco makes a dolly that can be converted to a wagon.  Sound's great, doesn't it? DON"T BUY IT.  It does nothing well.  The wheels are too small, the handle is badly designed and forces you the bend lower to get the cargo off the ground and the shelf that holds the cargo is not 90^o to the handle.  Your back will thank you.

But there was a small reward in this operation.  When my Mother passed away, Dad was pretty rattled even though she had been ill for quite a while.  Dad very quickly sold the house, packed up and moved here.  Not many of the boxes were labeled and many were left unpacked in the new attic. He bachelored it for 6 years before rejoining Mom.  It fell to me to handle the estate.  

Got the house sold, moved most of the stuff to a storage unit.  Tried my best to get stuff divvied up fairly between the four of us kids.  That latter part didn't go too well and when all was said and done, the stuff I had left went into closets in our house for sorting out at a later date. I wasn't ready for the job at that time.

This past week was that date, 18 years after my Mom passed.  I'd always wondered what had happened to her cooking recipes.  Mom was an excellent cook and passed the love of cooking to me.  I had wanted her cookbooks and had prevailed in that request.  But, she had had a shoe box full of 3 x 5 cards that were her recipes, borrowed from other sources, tried and adjusted as necessary, then recorded for reuse as her own.

I had vaguely remembered putting the shoe box in a closet, but when we did the initial move to the new house, couldn't find it.  I was pretty bummed about the potential loss.  In any case,  we're cleaning out the old house and my wife comes walking in to the room where I'm working and hands me this.

She had forgotten that back in the day when we were unpacking Dad's things, she'd come across the shoe box (which was in pretty poor shape), knew that I would want the recipes, and had put them in a more survivable storage.

I, not realizing that had happened, just put the new plastic box away in a moving box intending to go through it later.  This week, Mrs J went through that box and realized that it contained the box with the recipes.  

So we're at home, relaxing with a soothing Naproxen and I'm just getting ready to start looking through them (all handwritten BTW) when my phone dings.  It's a text from my brother with a picture I had never seen before.

That would be me in the middle.  I believe this was taken around Christmas '59.  I was 4.  We were in Finley ND and my Grandmother had come to visit.  She had taken the picture, had it developed as a slide which my Grandfather had given to my brother quite a few years ago.  He had also forgotten about them until he moved to the LA area.  He finally got around to having a print made of it and texted me the picture.  

I think Mom was involved in this little discovery period of mine.

Oh, here's another.  See if you can guess which one is me!

Update: Sarge's younger brother, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, once said "No plan survives first contact with the enemy".  So it is written, so it shall be.

Dining room on the same wall as the kitchen sink.

Spare bedroom shared wall with guest bathroom.

We had scheduled a guy to come take a look at the rafters shingles that had blown off the roof in a storm a few weeks ago, and happened to mention that the flooring job just got difficult.  He asked if he could take a look, did, and said it wasn't too bad, the joists looked fine.  He also said that he has a crew that does renovation that would be available next week.  Quote coming tonight.  We'll see.