I have been quiet, but now am back

I did not have much good to say through the winter so I said nothing. It seemed that my days were filled with shoveling snow, cooking, shoveling snow, washing dishes, shoveling snow, washing clothes, shoveling snow, dealing with husband or mother in pain, shoveling ...... You get the idea. 2009 started out really shitty as far as I was concerned. It was cold and snowy, Jess moved to Virginia, Mike had heart scare which turned out to be medicine reaction, Mike got hit while driving tractor-trailer by a pickup truck so hard that Mike got greenstick fractures of 3 ribs ( The pickup hit Mike's passenger side of cab which had already made the RIGHT turn by running through snowbank so hard that burst the fuel tank. He said that he saw Mike's turn signal. Mike got ticketed for an illegal right turn, and a DEC ticket for the spilled fuel on the road. He is still fighting it, but every time he goes to court they postpone his case.), Grandma broke her back again, sold the last of the farm animals, and it was winter.

I did accomplish a few things these past few months. I got 4 people their Grandmother Remembers books, 4 more are almost done, and then the last 4 are alot closer to being done than they were before. I am getting royally sick of that project, but Grandma really wants all of her grandchildren to have them so I am trying to finish them for her. They are all written now, and all of the pictures that go into all books are in them, it is just the individual personalized pages that I am finishing up.

I tore down the wallpaper in the very back bedroom, and am now working on repairing the plaster. Well, it is at that point now, but to be honest, I have not mixed any plaster in quite a few weeks. When that room is finished it will be set up as the guest bedroom, then we will do the room next to it (the office) as Polly's sewing room, the hallway is going to be set up as a sitting-room/guest sleeping, and the nursery is going to be my craft room. We also cleaned Jess's room and it now seems like a shrine to the life of my baby. Polly and I have been sorting books and working on the never-ending job of trying to declutter this house.

Since the weather has improved, slightly, we have been working on cleaning the garage, hauling more of grandpa's never-ending scrap-metal piles to the scrap yard, cleaning the lawn up, and getting the flower beds back into shape. They suffered greatly with goats running around, and not getting as much attention these past couple of years. Jess did have them looking very good 3 years ago, but has not had the time to give to them since then.

Grandma gets slowly worse, and there seem to be more days when it is hard to get too much accomplished, except the basics. I am so happy that baseball season started, the Yankees are the only thing that seem to settle her down some days, other than giving her a couple of pain pills, which put her to sleep. There being too many days where I cannot leave her alone at all is why we realized that the last animals had to go. I still miss them terribly, but did not like not being able to care for them as I like to. I am dealing with it better than I was. I made myself go into the barn for the first time last week, and today was in and out several times getting wheelbarrows of manure for the flower beds and did not even cry once when I was in there. That cannot be said about the first trip last week.

I am going to try to be better at keeping this up, and learn how to put pictures in it of what we do, as I find that it helps me to get more accomplished in a day. That is my resolution of the day.