A Bunch of Random Things

Today’s post will not be a theme, but just random things going on and what is going on in my noggin.

Lately too much time has been spent on financial things or those related to aging and fully retiring. My brain rejects all things like this. It has no natural inclination to delve into such matters. My brain screams, “Run!” These things don’t bring me anything but stress. I turn 65 this September and decided I should start thinking about signing up for Medicare and social security. I am sure some of you are thinking, she is just now doing this… Yep! I didn’t get as far as I would have liked with it last week, but maybe next week since I am in Auburn this week and I am relaxing my brain! 

Jeff and I have decided to do a few home improvement things and that has been the focus of things lately. One of which is a fence to enclose a portion of the back yard in Auburn. This way when it is 30 degrees outside in the middle of the night and Gus needs to potty, I can just let him out and wait in the warm house.  Also when we are all here as a family that means 4 dogs who are hanging out with us on the side yard won’t be constantly trying to escape the front.

We priced this a long time ago and I think the guy quoted us a wrought iron fence which does line part of the front and side yard. It was an astronomical price so we let it go. Then while we were up here at New Year’s our neighbor had switched her picket fence to this….

this…

So we added one to match. It is much cheaper, but will do the trick.

It it not my best photography but now a large portion of the side yard is fenced in.

Then we decided to have the windows washed at our main home which led to more as it always does. The windows look amazing even for 40 year old windows. The upside besides having washed windows was we are now able to see what was really grime or broken seals. I think we need to replace 3 window panes,  but they are not in real visible locations so we can take our time on that.

 

Here is the living room before the screens were put back on, but even with the screens they look amazing. An interesting thing is all of the windows in the home used to have these pop in things that looked like window panes. I popped them out right after we moved in to clean one day and we decided we liked the look without them.

The other thing we did was have the house washed and the gutters cleaned out since the pines would no longer be clogging them up with straw. There were 2 places I was constantly digging pine straw out and the gutters had gotten so dirty.

This corner was always clogged with straw. It is going to be super nice not to be digging that out.

We also got the decks and stone cleaned. The downstairs was bad and I think Jeff just felt overwhelmed by it all. This was surprisingly not nearly as expensive as I thought it would be, so I will be handing his off again when it becomes more than I can manage. They did a great job and had it all done in 2 days. 

Jeff has been working hard on decluttering the garage and it is looking great. That is a more manageable task that he can handle in small spurts.

On to other random topics… I love orange and this room is so pretty.

Jeff says it looks like the Tennessee Volunteers, but I don’t agree:)

If you are wondering where it is -it is at our church. We teach an 8 week class for those that are new to faith or returning. It is a place to ask questions …we do have an amazing curriculum and Jeff is a fantastic leader. I am the hostess figure. We once did it twice a year, but we finally got another couple to do it one of the times it is offered and now we lead once and they lead once.  Anyway, you can see mine and Jeff’s spots for leading this group. 

The group has been just about everything you can imagine or maybe you can’t imagine. Years ago, I felt it was people who just had bad church experiences in their younger days, but not nearly as much the case these days. Many have ended up here with someone that liked or admired or were at the end of their rope and know nothing about faith in Jesus. Nothing. It always makes me humble and Jeff loves doing it. I have learned so much from it and in my prayer journal I have a list that I still pray for. One guy never showed up, but I had corresponded with him about it. A whole year later I get a text from him. I remembered because of the odder name. He was living in Pensacola. We had about an hour long texting conversation. You just never know. I gave him some advice at the end to seek out. All I can do is pray he chose to seek out the answers he needed. So yea. That is a biggie 8 weeks out of the year. 

I am fully ready for spring, but it is back to cool this week. My pansies are showing off, but I am impatient  for more. The spring like beginning of February made it too hard to accept cold, but I must.

So my last piece of randomness is my biscuits that I learned to make with Einkorn flour. It took a while but I mastered them. I basically used the same ingredients as always with biscuits but the Einkorn flour is much softer and can make for a stickier dough. I used more baking powder than I  do with regular flour. The reason for learning is that I had heard this flour was good for gluten intolerant people. I have loved them and done well eating them. Here is a link for the flour I am talking about. https://jovialfoods.com/einkorn/flour/

You will have to forgive all the typing mistakes as I did this entire post pecking out on my iPad. I didn’t bring my computer for our few days away.

Stay warm and let’s pool out energy for spring shall we?