Too soon old, too late smart

The saying I used for my title today is something I saw a lot growing up, usually on a plaque in a gift shop when I was looking for something to have as a souvenir to bring home.  I always got something else, often for someone else in the family, like when I brought home a plaque from Bar Harbor that said "Made in Maine by Maniacs" to have in our house because it described everyone who lived there but one.

Mom was "made in Canada"....

But that's not what I came to tell you about.  I came to talk about the draft....

No, wait.  That's the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement.

What I came to talk about was the fact that, when celebrating his 29th birthday with my son, I realized that I'm getting old.  Yeah, I know, if you were to ask him, I've always been old.  He'd probably tell you that, not only am I older than dirt, but my first pet was a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

He lies.

It was a saber tooth tiger, and I wouldn't recommend them to anyone.  Let me just put it this way for you to picture in your head.

LARGE cat.
small cave
Cat litter in places that I don't want to even discuss........

Ok.  Maybe I'm not THAT old.  I just feel that old some days.

So how old am I?

I'm old enough to be living in the future I was warned about through books like Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles".

I'm old enough to know better.

According to a friend, I'm old enough to be considered a cougar if I still like looking at young, well built models to represent the characters of my books.

Yeah.  So dirt DOES have a few years on me, but on those days when I wake and feel like I was not only run over by a truck, but like the driver backed over me to see what he'd hit, I think about some things that I've heard about aging.  This is one of them that seems to say how I feel on those days:.

"I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread." - Bilbo Baggins, "The Fellowship of the Ring" by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Other days, when I'm not feeling quite so bruised and battered just from trying to get a good night's sleep, I realize how young I am.

I'm still young enough to slide into my kayak for a sunrise paddle on the lake down the road from where I live.

I'm young enough to still hike up mountains, though I use a walking stick these days and take a bit longer for the upward march than I used to.

I'm young enough to believe in love at first site, soul mates, and that love can conquer all if the participants are willing to fight for their love.

True, I color my hair, but not so much to cover the gray hairs, of which there are more each year, but rather to lighten the dark, dull color that my hair has gone to with my age.  My pale skin just doesn't look right with me as a brunette, especially as I'm prone to big dark circles under my eyes that make people constantly ask me if I'm sick or perhaps just tired.  (Frankly, I get sick and tired of being asked if I'm sick and/or tired....*grin*)

I use products that are supposed to help the skin around my eyes, not so much because I'm worried about crows feet, but to get rid of some of those dark circles I mentioned above.

I have owned a cane since the tender age of 36, when I was working as a janitor and caused an accumulative disc injury in my lower back.  On certain days, when the weather and my activity level cause the disc in my back to swell up, I have to use the cane as something other than a threat of something to beat my kids with when they're getting too rude about my age.

I'm always surprising people when I reveal my true age, as obviously I don't behave like I'm really the age that I am.  I always tell them that I don't know HOW to act my age, as I've never been this age before....

And I always have little poems or quotations that can express how I feel:

"Age is strictly a case of mind over matter.  If you don't mind, it doesn't matter"
- Jack Benny

"I dread no more the first white in my hair,
Or even age itself, the easy shoe,
The cane, the wrinkled hands, the special chair.
Time, doing this to me, may alter too
My anguish, into something I can bear."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Do not regret growing older.  It is a privilege denied to many."
- unknown

Like the friend who likes to tease me about my "cougar tendencies", I'll keep coloring my hair only until the roots are lighter than the color I would be using on them.  Like the cougar she accuses me of being, I'll continue to look at photos of handsome young men to represent the love interest in my romance novels and will admire the many shapes and colors they come in.  (I also admire the way the young female models are put together as well, but for some reason, I don't get as much grief for seeing the artistic beauty of a portrait of a young woman as I do for a young man.  I've never quite understood why, when I've felt no urges to "hit" anything other than my husband's bod for years now, people always insist that, if I admire a male and a female equally, I must be wanting to "jump his bones" while I just want to BE her.......)

And don't let me hear any of you making jokes about my age.

I'll hit you with my cane.

"Ask and Ye WILL Receive" (and who ever believed it was that easy?)

Yes, I know....

I just posted to this blog yesterday.  But have I ever mentioned how inspiration can be at times?  It's a "write it or lose it" world for a writer, and therefore......THIS:

I've discovered an odd phenomenon happening on my Facebook page, and it's not necessarily because of who I have on my friends list.  It's more of a situation where I'm starting to feel like I have an angel on my shoulder, and if I listen and obey what she's telling me, I can get what I asked for - within reason.

Take, for example, what happened last week.....

I've been merrily writing along on "A Wild Tiger's Heart", the third in The Tiger Series (as the publisher, Write Words Inc., termed it).  As I hit points when the characters are mulling over where I'm going next with it, I drop terms into search engines and see what pops up (i.e. "Italian Male Model" or "Native American Female Model") and see what comes in for results, sometimes seeing something I can use on the Facebook Fan Page for the book, but sometimes just getting lots of those pink bunny slippers I've mentioned in past posts.

And, of course, when I'm not even at home, I think of things that I can do for this book, such as the video book trailer like I did for the first two books last year.  The video trailers on You Tube may not be getting much play, but when one has no budget for marketing, one uses all the free tools available.  But, of course, to produce a video for the book, I need to find the models to use for the characters.

Brain fart time...

On the 5th of June, while at work, it suddenly struck me that I have a whole bunch of people on Facebook who helped me out with the last book.  Why not ask them?

So on Friday, June 6th, I posted a little message asking for assistance with finding models for my characters.  I described my characters:  Stefan, whom his countrymen (countrywomen?) think is the epitome of "tall, dark and handsome" and Kelly, pretty, but not model material, dark hair and eyes, looking enough like my model for Aloriah (which, for those of you who haven't figured out how to pronounce that, it's "Al-Oh-Ree-Ah" said fairly quickly) to allow us to really believe we are looking at Ree's mother.

I have never had the Universe slap me silly within 24 hours for asking for such a thing.

I monitor modeling pages on Facebook on the off chance that one of the dozen or so sites might post someone I can see as a character.  (For instance, if I hadn't already seen Teo Theodoridis before liking those pages, I would have found my Kyle there, as he has been featured a couple of times.  There have also been a few alternates for Teresanna, Ree and a couple of the other "background characters" on those sites.  Never have I had all the modeling sites post the same model at the same time.

Until June 7th.

ALL the sites that feature male models posted photographs of Daniel Sobieray on June 7th.  Several of my friends who also like those pages hit me in private messages with photographs of Daniel Sobieray from those same sites.  Several other friends who DON"T like those pages on Facebook sent me private messages with photographs of Daniel Sobieray.

I looked the man up.  On his own Facebook page within the first few posts, I found about a half a dozen photos that made the Stefan in my head poke me - hard - and say "Yes, that could have been me posing."

So what is a poor writer, looking at a news feed that has become a temple to a Los Angeles model to do?

Yes, you guessed it.  While I was right on Daniel's Facebook page, I liked his page and dropped him a message, basically introducing myself, telling the little story I've just shared with you, and the result.  As with my past models, I asked his permission to use his photographs to represent Stefan with my standard "creative borrowing set up" - that any photos used with have the source included, and he would be identified as the model, making it very easy for anyone who liked him as this character to locate more photos, possibly leading to more jobs......

Yup.  Standard approach.  Sometimes I get shot down when I approach the models like a stalker crawling out of a sewer, but sometimes, as with this time, I get a very lovely response thanking me for compliments I've included in my intro and I get permission to use the model as my character.

So the next step is always putting the name in Google to see what comes up for photos that strike me as the character.  As the kids these days put it:  O M G!

The first couple of pages I visited were like when I stumbled across Dylan Griner when looking for a model for Chase Benton.  In particular, there was this photo that made my chin hit the floor - almost literally.

The Stefan in my head keeps telling me that he started doing cocaine when his agent started harping on him about starting to "look fat".  As I looked at this photo, personally admiring the view, Stefan's agent/manager, Christof, started yelling in the back of my head "Look at those love handles you're showing!  You're getting fat and lazy!  How can I sell your photographs when you're fat, wrinkled, and starting to show grey hair?  You need to keep your weight under control for the good of your career!"

The hanging head and general feel of this photo just really got to me - especially when another photo right after it was either photoshopped or just shows enough of a different angle to make Daniel look much leaner, but no less defined.....

Of course, one of the pages I visited listed some stats, and that was when the theme from The Twilight Zone REALLY started to play.

You see, I've described Kyle Benton as 6'2", muscular, green eyes, dark hair.  The stats on Teo Theodoridis match that description exactly.

I've described Chase Benton as almost the exact duplicate of his father, but he also takes after his mother a little.  The stats on Dylan Griner put him at 5"11" or 6', depending on which site you look at, and he otherwise matches the description.

I hadn't really thought about how tall Stefan might be, but the description I gave above - and the fact that Kelly is about 5'6" and, in a couple of scenes I've been shown, Stefan is a bit taller than Kelly.  She actually makes a comment to that effect, as her husband was about her same height, so she was never able to wear heels when they were going somewhere special.  (Being 5'8" myself, this happened a lot before I went to college, as most of the guys I went to school with prior to that were mostly my height or shorter.)

Daniel is either 6'2" or 6'3", depending on which site you look at.

So, basically,, if I were to get my three chosen male models together with the two ladies I have for my characters (I'm still looking for Kelly), the men would tower over the ladies in the same way that the characters do.

Sometimes, the Universe is a little disturbing when giving me what I ask for......

I Am Woman, Hear Me Brew......

There was a big news story over the weekend here where I live in Maine about women in "non-traditional" positions, in this particular case, covering some ladies who work in a local brewery.  The news made this sound like it's such a strange thing for women to be doing, but it got me thinking after they'd finished the broadcast and I was moving on to other things....

Are we still that far in the dark ages, when females cooking up batches of beer is considered so far out in left field they need to do a long exposition on the news to point that out?

Sorry....maybe it's just the way I was brought up.

My mother was raised on a farm, and the traditional thing about farm families was that, between diseases, accidents and other such things that would prevent children from surviving to adulthood, there were always as many children as the parents could produce.  Just as an example was my grandmother's family, with 16 children, in which all the boys went out every morning to work out in the fields and all the girls were charged with cleaning the house, cooking the food, making the clothes that the family would need, etc.  One of my mom's aunts, thinking she didn't have much time left on this earth when she was approaching her 96th birthday, wrote her memoirs, which included talking about evenings on the farm, when all the girls would gather in front of the fire (as this was prior to electricity being a common thing, so it was the way for them to see what they were doing) to knit underwear and socks while the boys tried to put together the things they would need to play whatever game they may have created while out cutting hay or hoeing the garden.

These were the traditional roles that my grandparents were raised with, and the roles that they brought up their children with, for the most part....

Except there was a minor kibosh for my mom and her siblings:  There were no men to go work in the fields with the exception of Pepere, as there were four girls.  When faced with having to do all the "manly chores" by himself or use the daughters he'd been given, Pepere broke with tradition and brought his girls out into the fields.  When grandchildren started to arrive, some male and some female, the grandchildren were told about the "traditional" roles, with the girls being shown knitting, crochet, embroidery, etc. and the boys being sent out to the field, but there was also a lot of non-traditional time.  My sisters and female cousins were just as apt to be out in the barn, shoveling manure, feeding the cows, milking.  The boys all learned how to do simple clothing repairs.

By the time I was having children, the world had shifted.  Women no longer stayed at home to take care of the children because men could no longer make enough of a paycheck to cover all the bills without assistance.  My mother's words from my high school years, which she was never allowed to experience because, back when she was graduating from 6th grade, the higher grades had a tuition that your parents paid, just like going to a university now, and my grandmother saw no reason for a woman to have a high school education in order to cook, clean and change diapers.  I went out and took whatever job anyone was willing to pay me to do (within reason, as I was taught that a woman who has any other means of providing for herself should NEVER stoop to selling her body).  I've held several "traditional male" positions in my life, so the news story about women in the brewery threw me for a loop.

It never even crossed my mind that, in this day and age, there was still such a major deal about "tradition".

So, this sheds new light on recent stories about people dying under a hail of stones in the Middle East.  It sheds new light on the attitudes I've run into with the current batch of political leaders who are trying to get elected into various offices this year.  It especially makes me rethink a couple of things that I was mulling over pertaining to the current "work in progress" as well as the historical romance and the sci-fi that are waiting in the wings.

Tradition isn't always as dead as I might think it is.  There may be chivalry still out there in the world, people raised in tradition the same way I was raised non-traditional, and some of these values may come into play when a non-traditional woman finds herself alone in a very traditional country where she's considered a second class citizen.....

We Didn't Start The Fire.......

I've turned off the news again today.

It's the same stories repeated over and over, each time with a little bit more added on to try to keep you interested in this newest development, and most of the "new developments" are from a single person's point of view, meant to cause hate and discontent.  Having spent a lot of time over the past couple of decades looking into our nation's history, I have a hard time with current news thinking this is all brand new and we should be getting all hyped up over such as this:

Obama bypassed Congress recently to gain the release of a prisoner of war.  Oh gee!  In today's theory that we should impeach the man for this, what would today's press have done with Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

(Check out this news story from January:  Presidents who've bypassed congress)

Looks to me like someone who was calling for impeachment a couple of days ago needs to read their US History.

I'm also seeing a bunch of stories about kidnapping victims, like the trio from Ohio, who are being found after decades of imprisonment and abuse.  Now, I live in a very small town with over an acre of property, and if I'm out working on my garden with a radio running a couple of feet away, I have a neighbor who will send the police over to ask me to "turn down the music" that I can't even hear if a car is going by.  I've walked officers through my entire home, including down into my basement, to prove that the barking dog they've been sent to investigate DOESN'T belong to me.  Yet, in Ohio, reports of women screaming didn't even get a police drive by or, if the police DID respond, didn't evoke a complete walk-through in order to prove that there were no women, ANYWHERE in the house, who might be getting raped and tortured?

Looks to me that the person who did the kidnapping isn't the only one who kept these kidnapping victims imprisoned when, even in the Jaycee Dugard story, they didn't take a walk through the back yard "compound" of a man who was a known sexual offender just on the off chance that one of those sheds he had in his back yard - which neighbors had reported CONSTANTLY as hearing suspicious noises from - to see if maybe this sick little monkey and his equally sick wife might possibly have someone back there they were torturing.

And of course, all the posts about prices going up and who we should be blaming for it.

Um, people??  Who was it that changed the laws so that the police can't go into homes without six tons of paperwork being done first or the owner's permission?  Who is it that takes money from oil company lobbyists and looks the other way when the oil companies put the cost of oil and gas up?  Who is too busy arguing "across the aisles" instead of using a little common sense that says that, if we ignore intelligence saying that we're about to be attacked, we should DO SOMETHING to prevent that attack?

That would be the liars and thieves that have been put into political office because you weren't paying proper attention and started to allow lobbyists to fund political parties.

In the past in America's history, who had the most money to put into the hands of the politicians to have laws changed to protect "personal property" (including public domain) so that we now need to protect the privacy rights of people like Ariel Castro and Philip Garrido?  Um, yeah.  That would have been those like Al Capone and other Mafia bosses when the police were able to gain warrants too easily, cutting into the profits of the cartel big-wigs.  Instead of now being allowed to use some common sense, such as hearing a baby cry when there isn't supposed to be a baby on the property and investigating to make sure all is well, the police have to go through ten tons of red tape, and by the time they get done with all the tape, decades have passed and a young girl who disappeared on her way to school has two children older than she was when she was abducted; or there's a dead mother and children who were gunned down by the man they had a restraining order against because his privacy was more important than the rights of his wife and children to be assured by his parole officer that he didn't get his hands on a gun; or there's some idiot who should have never been allowed to carry a gun in the first place gunning down young men in hoodies under the pretense of being a "neighborhood watch captain" who is protected by one of those laws that some politician put into place because someone paid the right amount of cash into a political campaign.

When we want to fuss and fight over our current state of affairs, how about look back at the way things were when white man first started to appear on this continent in the big boats from away?  Our forefathers had been subjected to unequal laws that protected the rich and constantly put the poor man at the fuzzy end of the lolly pop.  The initial group of rules they established, including the separation of church and state, were designed to change that, beginning with these words:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."  (taken from http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html)


There was also a Declaration of Independence - which we used to learn in school, but I'm not sure that they still fully teach - which begins:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness  (taken from: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html)

So, if you ask me, what we have here in the United States is a government that has gone to the kind of government our forefathers hopped onto big ships to escape.  What the politicians who refuse to raise the nationwide minimum wage while giving themselves yet another "cost of living" wage because they can't afford the yacht to go with their mansion any more won't remind you of is the people who came here with little but the clothes on their backs, subjecting their families to hostile natives who didn't like white men invading their country, bringing diseases they'd never heard of and had no immunity against, who were just as apt to kill you as look at you.

Our politicians and law makers USED to be common folk like us, who didn't make any more from their time in office as I might make working up the street in the local general store, and they sure as heck didn't get a "forever wage" for serving for a very short time.  We all remembered that these people were regular joes, who were hired to run the country for a short time, then they went back to their regular jobs and were rarely heard from again.  They used to consider what the lobbyists, Wall Street types, etc are doing as bribes, and laws weren't made on the merits of a bribe.

Before there were bribes running this country, common sense ruled more.

You didn't see the President going through Congress and being blamed for their dragging their feet (Bengazi) who decided to ignore Congress to try something on his own to gain the release of an American who had already caused several deaths and avoid further deaths.

You didn't see the rights of a sexual offender protected over the rights of the little girl he kidnapped and tortured for almost two decades.

There were mistakes, sure enough, but they weren't taken by the media and beaten well beyond the point that the "horse" had died and should have been buried.  We had the common sense to tell our media to SHUT THE F*&% UP and DROP IT!  We had the common sense to stop, investigate on our own, and realize that things aren't always like what we're seeing on television, and that we shouldn't let one media mogul's private agenda skew our view of the world and what we need to do to make it a better place.

Thank you for reading through my rant and for adding any thoughts, whether you agree with me, disagree, or have an entirely new take on something I  mentioned or neglected to mention that I may not have thought of yet.

Thank you, especially, for putting this blog at over 1100 views in less than a year.

Turning back the years........

One of my relatives recently joked that I'm ALWAYS on Facebook.  They're right, in a way, as I look at Facebook as my daily contact with people who I wouldn't get to see otherwise - whether they be friends from former workplaces, past neighbors, relatives (which over half of my "friends list" actually are).

On Facebook, the newest trend is to post old photographs for "Turn Back Thursday" (abbreviated as TBT by  most who participate).

Man, do I ever have a LOT of old photographs!  I have things from the 1800's right up to last week.  It's always an interesting task to make that decision on what photo to post for the week.

Not so with this post in this blog, as three are more photos than I'm going to have room for in the memorial post I wanted to do in a couple of weeks.  What better way to do the "Turn Back" than to simply post the link to this post where I can have a little bit more of a permanent link for the person who was my very bestest best friend growing up, my partner in crime, the other side of the coin that was me, than to post the photos I've been coming across and tell about the part of my heart that was taken from me when I was 20?

June 14, 1961 was the birth date for this person, just three weeks after my own birth.  His name was Timothy James Bartlett, and he was my cousin.

This first photo is from our first Christmas together.  My walker was made of wood and I had become very used to the way it handled.  Tim's was made of metal and he was also very used to the way it handled.  Even though we hadn't started talking yet, we already shared an almost psychic bond, looking at each other before making a beeline for the Christmas tree, making our parents work very hard to try to keep us from tearing down the tree.

Then someone had the brilliant idea of switching walkers.

We got very distracted by the walkers that didn't behave like the ones we were used to, and Timmy seemed very determined to get his back, even though he couldn't figure out the mechanics of how to do so.  It made for a couple of very cute photos and also saved Memere's Christmas tree.

Tim's dad was in the Navy, so we didn't see each other again for a while, when the family returned from being stationed in Hawaii when we were in first grade.  When Disney released "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day" that winter, 1968, we were all gathered again at Memere's house to watch "The Wonderful World of Disney".  Unaware that no one else could do such a thing, I sang "The Tigger Song" after the show was over, having memorized it on that first hearing.  Timmy decided that, since I already knew the song, I HAD to be Tigger.  Some of my relatives STILL call me "Tigger", because "They're bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!
But the most wonderful thing about Tiggers is I'm the only one".  Um, yeah.  I can be a little "over the top happy" at a lot of these gatherings......

At the end of that school year, the Bartletts were reassigned, eventually returning to Maine permanently when Tim and I were in sixth grade.  While his parents chose a place to buy a house, we were once again classmates, and then Tim was just a few towns over, so we became even closer friends.  At the family gatherings, we tended to hang out together, and the year we turned 14, we got into trouble by sharing one of Aunt Dot's chairs and discussing Tolkien.  Seems we had our heads too close together, and one of my sisters went out to the parents insisting that Tim and I were kissing.

Yeah.  Ok.  From this photo that Pepere put into a collage that I eventually ended up with, I guess you could say he was a good looking young man.  But seriously?  We were practically forehead to forehead, discussing favorite characters and favorite scenes.  He had started using the nickname "Gandalf" and walking around saying "Gandalf the Grey was sorta gay, but Gandalf the White is outta sight!"  We discussed which character would most represent me, but Tim teasingly told me that, no matter which Tolkien nickname I chose for myself, I would ALWAYS be Tigger.....

Where did anyone get the idea I would be necking with my cousin?

We tried to be a little more careful about where we had our "tete-a-tete" chats, but they still happened - regularly.  When my parents weren't able to go to his graduation from high school, my sis and I got dressed up and went to represent.  These are the last photos I have of my beloved cousin:

I had just moved in with my college boyfriend at the beginning of my final semester at BCC/UMO and I was trying to decide what I was going to chose as my major for the next semester.  I had already lost my "rudder", as my dad, who had always helped me to steer my life, had passed away from cancer in July 1980.  Tim was planning on going into the service himself even while acting as the wind in my sails, encouraging me to continue with my education and make something of myself.

Then the phone call came through from my mom.  Tim had been at a send off party with a bunch of his friends.  His brothers had all climbed into one car to go straight home, but Tim had called "shot gun" for a friend's vehicle, taking another friend home on the way.  According to the driver, they hit a small patch of black ice, and he wasn't real familiar with what to do when put into a spin.  Timmy was laughing, then there was the thud and all got really quiet.  They had hit a tree on the side of the road, breaking the leg of the kid in the back seat and snapping Tim's neck instantly.  The wind in my sail was gone at the tender age of 20.  For me, still struggling with the grief of watching my father die a slow, painful death, it was the death knell for my college career.  Not only could I NOT chose between the acting career I had entered college to pursue and the writing career that I was being encouraged to go for, but NOTHING made sense any more.  The two men who had been my entire world, the two male voices who had always listened to my concerns and helped me with their opinions about which direction I should chose were gone....

I still have days, even almost 33 years after I lost him, that I find myself wanting to pick up the phone and call Tim to run some annoying thing past him and get his view on it.  I need his silly commentary, his "old soul in a young body" wisdom, and to share a laugh as I get encouraged, once again, to keep going and to keep being that unique person that Tim knew I always was.

Some days, I need to have someone tell me again that, no matter what other name I might chose to go by, I'm still, and always will be, Tigger in Timmy's eyes.

June 14, 2014.
He would have been 53, just like me.
He probably would have HATED "Turn Back Thursday" and this "weepy memorial" to him.

But I DO believe he would have LOVED what Peter Jackson has done with "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings".  I think of him whenever I hear this tune:

The Song of the Lonely Mountain

So, Tim, there you have it:  I still miss you and wish I could spend just one more birthday with you.

With much love,
"Tigger" 

 

What happens when "Do It Yourself" types shouldn't have done it themselves

This year, as I'm trying to get outside to tend to my flower gardens and do the spring cleaning, my husband is trying to get a few projects done that should result in a lower cost for heating the house when he's finished.

You see, when we bought our house in 1998, we were madly in love with it, because it was unique and showed major potential for being a magnificent home when we did some remodeling to remove some of the "kinks" that the previous homeowner had caused to occur.  Then life happened.

Instead of spending the yearly income tax refund on remodeling, as we planned to do when pushing through the paperwork for the mortgage, we've had little "hiccups".  Here are just a few of those:

A beam that held up the front porch was rotting when the inspector did the walk through and gave us a list of things that had to be fixed before we could get financing.  He mentioned replacing the porch rail, but missed the beam.  To avoid a ton of paperwork, we propped up the roof and put a new deck under it in 2000.  The roof still needs to be replaced and is on the docket for next year's repairs.  

The former owner KNEW her septic system was on the way out and needed to be replaced.  She'd had various companies bid for the work, one of whom had even marked out where the new septic tank and leach field area would go with sticks that had been pounded into the ground.  (We learned about this when the neighbor across the street, who was friends with my husband's grandparents, came over and asked why we'd removed the sticks.)  We got the new septic put in during the summer of 2002.

My husband has had a broken wrist at work and a broken foot while riding a friend's jet ski.  He was able to go to work, but got no overtime while those injuries healed - and, in the case of the wrist, while he healed twice, as the screws and plate they used to put him back together caused problems and had to be removed again after a year.  Between him not being healthy enough to tackle the work and using the income tax to cover the bills that would have been taken care of by the overtime, those years were a wash when it came time to do remodeling.

In addition to taking out walls to give the whole first floor a very "open" feel, the former owners had added a "sun room/greenhouse" onto the back of the house.  According to the specs on the permit they got through the town, this was to be glass walled and put onto sonar tubes.  That isn't what they did.  The addition was solid sided with big plexiglass windows and a large sliding door leading to the back yard, but obviously no one ever explained "support beams" to these do it yourselfers.  The roof above the glass doors started to collapse, so one whole summer was dedicated to removing the glass door, properly supporting the back wall, and putting in smaller door.  It turned into a much larger project than expected because nothing was properly weatherproofed as they built, so instead of just taking apart and rebuilding one small section of the wall, the entire length had to be re-done.  Instead of having the money to fix up the part under the plexiglass windows where they put wood right onto the dirt with no cement footer to prevent rot and no protection against the insects and critters that come up from the dirt to eat the wood, the cash we had was all eaten up in the materials to fix their mess.  The "greenhouse" portion is one of the sections of the house that will just be getting taken off and not rebuilt, but the wall between the "greenhouse" and the main house has to be rebuilt first.

And of course, we have two children whom we've bailed out for a couple of years when they needed financial help, but couldn't get the loans they needed.

In short, the work we foresaw having to do when we first bought the house is finally getting started this year.  A couple of the walls that have been slowly starting to bow a little from having support beams removed are being opened up so that we can assess any extra work that we'll need to do, as the first "rewall" project showed that, when they took the walls out, they put good wood under rotting timbers, meaning that the support structure is in even worse condition than we thought, so we need to do more work than we thought was going to be needed.  (The photo below shows one of these rotted timbers, for those who want to see what I'm talking about.  The large beam that takes up most of this shot was put in under a water damaged beam, so the top of the larger beam was starting to rot as well.)

I've been doing something of a photo diary of the progress on this current project on Facebook, so suffice to say that the rotting stuff has been removed, new wood has been installed, and the wall closed up to make a desperately needed set of kitchen shelves.  The finished shelving unit is about 8 feet by 8 feet (a little over 2 meters square for my readers who use the metric system), and I'm looking forward to some of the rotted bits coming off in the next project.  At the time of this post, this is what I currently have where this big hole in the wall existed:

(Within the coming week, there will be framework added to the front and it will have doors added, but it's much more impressive than the hole....)

Now if I can just get enough of the books to sell to cover some of the materials needed that are going to go above and beyond the current money we have available.......

*smile*

\UPDATE 5/16:  The shelves are nearing completion, they have two layers of polyurethane painted on, and this morning, I stenciled on ivy leaves before doing two more layers of polyurethane.  My hubby still needs to add on three more boards, then the doors, but this is how this little project looks as of the moment:

(One of my mother-in-law's neighbors stenciled every room of her house, which I found tremendously beautiful, so I vowed to do the same one day.  Guess it's the day....)  Soon, we're on to project number 2, which will culminate with the removal of a room that, according to the town office, wasn't built to specs anyway, and therefore doesn't exist.......

When history comes alive......

As I've spoken of in other posts, I've been researching my family tree for years now, and am working on getting an interactive web site going that will allow other family members to follow the branches of the tree in whichever direction they wish.  I started with my dad's male line - which peters out pretty quickly at my great-grandfather - so I continued on with my paternal great-grandmother, following her male line back to the 1600's, when a man named Richard Baildon (who changed the spelling of his name to "Belding" when he was recorded as arriving in Connecticut in 1635) was the first of the line to set foot on American soil.

Sometimes, when first finding information on my forefathers, little things slide by until I start to search for proof of what others have posted as the God's Honest Truth.  One of those little details slid home unexpectedly yesterday.....

7 generations back from my great-grandmother, there is a man named Samuel Belding, the son of Richard, who, according to some of these people who have recorded information without researching it, was born in America in 1632.  (Quite the feat to be born here when his parents didn't arrive in Connecticut until 3 years after his birth, no?)  When recording the information - with a disclaimer that I'm still looking at the records for this particular person - I noted that his wife and youngest son have the same date for their death.

While it's not unusual for the people in early America to have been taken down by some sort of epidemic, there is usually a few days between the deaths, as different people will succumb to a fever or other illness at a different pace.  That these two family members would have died on the exact same date touched off a Sherlock Holmes-style reaction, so I followed the little wiggling leaf on Ancestry.com to see what historical hints anyone else may have posted.

A member story indicated that there was a disaster in the town where the Beldings were living, and when I Googled "September 19, 1677" and the town of Hatfield, Massachusetts, I got this:  Hatfield Massachusetts Indian Attack

I had been questioning why some of the children were born in Hatfield and some were born in other towns.  I had forgotten my American History when trying to deduce why they would have moved out of Hatfield and then moved right back again.  I forgot that the natives in the New World weren't the idealized "good people" who we hear about helping the settlers survive when we hear the story of the first Thanksgiving Feast.....

And the hostility of the native tribes resulted in a 47-year-old woman and her 5-year-old son being killed in an attack that resulted in 12 dead, 4 wounded, and 17 captured.  The hostages were marched up the Connecticut River valley, to Lake Champlain, and onward into Canada.  It took several months for a rescue party to get permission to go after them, and, miraculously, most were able to be rescued and returned to their families.

While I tuck this tale away for the time being, to be researched in further detail at a later time to confirm my ancestor's involvement in this incident, this brought history to life for me.  It's one thing to sit in a classroom in high school or college and listen to such tales about the early days here in America, not really feeling tied to it because of the number of years that have passed.  It's quite another thing to find that one's own relations were forced to move from one stockaded town to another or die at the hands of what may possibly be another group of relations, as there is a rumor of a native American ancestor somewhere in the mix of my genes.....

It may prove very interesting to find out which tribe attacked Hatfield - and which tribe the rumored "Indian in the Woodpile" came from....

In the meantime, I've given the family members who asked me to post this a little something to think about.  I'm hoping that, like me, they find the past reaching out to touch them more personally than it ever has before, urging other, younger family members to take up this gauntlet and continue this research after I join my ancestors on the other side of the ethereal veil.

Perhaps I'll be leaving an interesting legacy after all......