Replacing the Irreplaceable

Judy Garland and Katharine Hepburn appear at Farmlandia!

 

 

 

Flurries come at me like crazy.

Not the soft white kind. The oh-my-god-everything-needs-to-be-done-right-now-and-for-cheap kind. The and-this-is-why-I-drink kind...

Ahhhh!


Last weekend threw all our plans into disarray. We've been preparing for a huge gathering at the house for the Fourth of July - and not just on the actual holiday. The Thursday night until the Sunday night. Plus, the 4th is Ella's birthday and the 5th is her big sister's birthday.

We've planned games and experiments and food and fireworks and short trips and everything you can think of. Oh yeah...and 95% of our guests are staying with us.


...the entire time.


...seriously.

We've been doing tons of work...




Sans wallpaper



Dining Room

 

Dining Room after wallpaper was removed.
Bob surveys our accomplishment.

For the last two months, we've been slowly getting things done.

I take that back...


From last year's event until now, we've been getting a LOT of things done, but they are things you can't see, like getting the HVAC units replaced because both of them went out the day before last year's event.

First layer of Kilz

Nice...


First layer of
chalkboard paint

Night falls as the project
continues on Day 5

There are things they can see, but don't think about, like fixing lighting, and fencing, and having tree limbs removed that were destroyed in the last winter storm.

And there's construction on the apartment above our garage as we add a new full bathroom and turn it into a Man Cave.

There are also the things they can see, like redoing our dining room so the walls no longer have wallpaper but a super fun black chalkboard top.



The darkened dining room



Seasoning the chalkboard walls

Our first semi-permanent sign

My First Practical Use of the Chalkboard Paint

However, over the last two weeks, Rachel, Big Daddy, and I have been going over the budget with a fine toothed comb, looking at when money is coming in, where it is going out, what's reasonable, and what's really something we would only allow a 12-year-old to do after we've down major Xanax and considered a meth addiction a benefit.

Mostly those discussions revolved around the fireworks budget...(kidding, Big Daddy...[but they did] )

But, I digress...



When Audrey died, we were much less prepared than I originally thought we were, not just emotionally, but financially. We hadn't really thought about what it would do to the makeup of our tiny herd and what we'd have to do to compensate for that underpreparedness.

Kate is convinced Sam needs
her help fixing the fence

While in the middle of grief and nightly visits to the liquor cabinet, we finally came up with a last minute plan to split our responsibilities across the upcoming, packed weekend and attempt to get everything done.

Rachel, Ella, and I would rent a car and head East back to Fields of Grace to pick out a new companion for Kate, while Big Daddy took Scout and Kate to the vet, then meet his folks in Chattanooga to hand back one of our young nieces (oh yeah, we also had Little Miss Awesome visiting with us and she needed to get back in time so she could make the events planned for her at home.)

After we all reconvened at home on Saturday, we would turn around, head to my cousin's house to celebrate her son's college graduation and finding a spectacular job, albeit in another state.



...and that was just Saturday.

...in our copious free time.

We were lucky enough that our original breeder had three extra doelings she could sell us. Ella went about picking out here favorite - a doeling that looks a bit like a tiny antelope.

While it took the four of us - the breeder, Ella, Rachel, and me - to corner Miss Judy and get her situated into the car (granted, she was like some cartoon goat, her legs splayed out, trying to avoid being pushed into the car. It was like a weird episode of "Cops for Goats.")

Miss Judy Garland!

Judy thinks we're high and can't understand why we want to touch her. She'd much rather be alone or play with Kate. Sadly, Kate is glomming onto Judy's way of thinking and is starting to shy away from us - unless we arrive with raisins. Then it's a whoooooole other ballgame.


We've become little slaves to these girls, begging for attention they have no intention of giving us, and then having them look at us with a Gordon Ramsey sneer when we show up with food, as though we had misplaced a hay stick and really, hadn't we ought to know better by now?


But, then just as quickly, they will hip hop around the farm, Kate kicking her back heels together, channeling Gene Kelly in her swift dance moves and utter joy.

...maybe she'll rub off on Judy after all.

 

Judy and Kate pretending
they're in the Andes mountains

 

 

With only two full weeks left before everyone descends upon us and the drunken Cards Against Humanity games start, we've too much to do.

Sam's finished ripping up the carpet in his room that Princess Buttercup the Boxer started when the thunderstorms began. The bare floor requires a fast covering, but one we can replace piecemeal if Miss Scaredy Boots starts digging for China from the second floor again. So, off to the salvage flooring store we go.

We've got ladders in dining rooms and drop cloths on bare floors and paint buckets in kitchens and shower kits in hallways and a bunch of animals that insist that our path is exactly where the best spot in the entire house is to lie down.

...exactly.

(The chances of this statement being true are tripled if we are carrying something and quadrupled if we are carrying something that blocks our view. If we're walking down stairs, just consider it a foregone conclusion. We have a camera at the base of the stairs that records everything, the theory being that something will be good enough to capture then post on YouTube. It's sort of a backup financial plan.)


Anyway, more to do...more to do...



 
As an aside, when I search for my blog to add more posts, I sometimes stumble on one that a young woman named Alice (Green Hectares,) started when she took a trip to Portugal for a few weeks, fell in love with the land and her own prince, and they started a small farm.

Things we had to deal with - loss, guilt, lack of knowledge, more guilt - it seems we all feel this at times when we start these new lifestyles. It's no difference in Portugal.

Take a read of her blog. She is a very interesting writer and certainly very compelling.

Maybe we'll even get to meet her next year when we journey to Europe.

copyright - All rights to the work posted on this site are retained by Cass Van Gelder. If you'd like to use some of my work, please ask. To do so, the permissions must be spelled out in writing...from me...I mean it. I have horribly mean cats; don't make me use them.