Hodgepodge

No not the skin disease, but the kind you put on the roof. What was even cooler was that the delivery was able t back the truck up to the low edge of the roof, and we drafted the ramp we use to get to the second floor door (stairs are on the to-do list) and jgaleckas and I could just carry them up the ramp. All 45 bundles are now on the roof! That is way easier than lifting from the ground.

It;s overcast and cold but dry so we will probably get some nailed down before the rain tomorrow - hopefully it will be light.

Since jgaleckas busted her butt yesterday finishing the roof panels in the waning moments of daylight, we took it a little easy today. We moved some boards from the ground outside into the newly roofed shop, moved 15 sheets of plywood and OSB from the Mousemobile into the shop and unloaded the trailer which has sat for a few weeks now while we focused on the roof.

While we did this, we started a fire in the fire pit that we made when we stayed in the shed (then we called it the "Cabin"). The fire was to burn the scraps we had left over form doing the roof. It was nice to have a warm spot to stand by when we took a break from the unloading and odd work.

Tomorrow the shingles delivered so we can have more fun!

Tuesday was rain again so no work on the roof. Unpacked the van and went into town to take Mom shopping. Hopefully today the rain will let up enough to get some more trusses up.

Got back to the farm last night after driving through some heavy rain in the St. Louis area. As soon as we got out of the van we could hear the creek rushing and the rill beside the house was burbling pretty good.

jgaleckas Checked the rain gauge and it had 2 inches of rain in it. I talked to Mom and she said it probably all came since Sunday night.

The kitties were happy to have us back - all four were in the bed within 10 minutes of lights out.

If you read this blog, you may have noticed that I haven't posted here in over two months. The reason for this is because since moving to the farm, we have had only slow dial-up internet access. Since jgaleckas and I share this connection, there is barely enough time to check email, get news and do essentials like check investments and pay bills, etc. Time for social networking has been limited to popping on Facebook a few times a week.

But that has changed now. How you may ask? Did we get cable modem ? Nope - we are 25 miles from the nearest cable installation. DSL? We are too far from the access point and since we are in the middle of the Mark Twain National Forest, the sparse population makes it a loser for a phone provider to upgrade our access point. Wireless Broadband? Naw, we are 15 miles from the nearest cell tower so we don't even get cell phone service let alone broadband. So how is it we have broadband? A dish, a satellite 22,000 miles away and a modem equals hi-speed internet -Yay!

You have probably heard that Satellite internet is a real pain but I believe it's an undeserved rap and after we have had it a while I will post on the experience.So far it is waaaay better than dial-up.

( Banal life details after cut )

Now that we have broadband I plan to be back on LJ regularly and enlighten you with details of life on the farm.

As I promised after living in the Chicago metro area almost all of the fifty plus years of my life - I will miss some things and not miss others.

Things I Will Miss

Family - While I have no family in Chicago (only child, no children of my own and Mom is already down here) jgaleckas has two kids who both live in the Chicago area. The son and his family we see not so much but Tamara is like the daughter I never had. She is fun to be around and I love her a lot. We usually got together at least once a week and always have a good time. I will miss that a lot.

Urban Convenience - No doubt about it, it is nice to live within 30 minutes or less of Best Buy, Sam's Club, Menard's, Lowe's, Petsmart, and movie theaters. Here at the farm, it is 2 hours to St. Louis for most of these except Lowes and Movies which are an hour away. So no last minute running out for something. Trips into the 'big city' will have to be planned and shopping lists made. In between trips we will just have to get by.

Public Transportation - As a child growing up my Mom and I went everywhere on the bus. I even remember the old electric buses that ran got their power from overheard wires. (Yes I am that old). Later when I lived in the suburbs the Metra commuter trains were a great to avoid the parking hassle when going downtown for something. The last dozen years or so that I have lived with Janice in Cicero, we were tow blocks from the L and always used that for trips downtown and to ballgames. At least the traffic here is not so bad and parking rarely costs anything.

Culture and the Lake front - If you have never been to the Lake front it is really beautiful. The city has done a wonderful job with the beaches and landscaping along the Lake and I have never seen any city do it better. That along with Grant Park and Millennium Park add to the joy of just walking around downtown, admiring the architecture and the plantings. The there are the great museums and such. It will be fun to discover what St. Louis has in addition to the riverfront and the Arch but I will miss those walks around downtown Chicago.

Baseball - I have been a White Sox fan since I was three years old, I remember my father taking me to the games (he was a HUGE fan) and how the ballpark was like a whole new world filled with people, sounds, smells and excitement. At that time I didn't care who won but I knew some of the player's names and shouted them along with the rest of the fans. By the time the Sox were in the 1959 World Series I knew a lot about baseball. I was a little bummed I has to watch the the Sox win the 2005 Series form our resort room at Disney but talk about the best of both worlds! I may catch a Sox game occasionally if it works out on return trips to Chicago and I will always be a fan even if I don't see them play much. I also enjoyed going to a few Cubs games and some Kane County Cougars minor league games as well. I don't see myself becoming a big Cardinals fan although I do follow them more since we have been coming down here.

Broadband - As I write this I am connected a whopping 28K over dial-up. Because we are on a very small trunk we are not cost effective for DSL. There is no cable here and we are too far from a cell tower for wireless. The only way we can get broadband is to go with a satellite dish and that has the disadvantages of hundreds for upfront costs, high monthly rates and a dish on the roof. We may have to go that route if we finally pull enough hair out of our heads over the crawl of dial-up but I miss my 1 Meg DSL.

Things I Will NOT Miss

The Neighbors - While most of the folks on the block are good, the one house next door has a family with several youth who are borderline delinquent. They sit o the front stoop every day drinking alcohol, smoking dope talking loud and profanely and throwing their garbage in out yard. The people they hang out with probably are the ones who stole our orange trees earlier this year and try repeatedly and unsuccessfully to break into the garage. Yeah I won't miss them at all.

The Noise - We live one block off Cicero Avenue near two railroad yards between two of the busiest expressways in the metro area. Trucks pound the pavement all day and night bouncing over bumps, using engine breaks and blowing their air horns. Add to that motorcycles screaming down the road, airplanes from Midway flying overhead and loud car stereo's rattling the windows and it's a wonder I got to sleep at all. The only noise I will miss is the train whistles - I love that sound and unfortunately all the tracks in the vicinity of the farm are abandoned. Of course here at the farm we have crickets, peep frogs, birds chirping and the occasional hoot owl but who's complaining?

The Foul Air - The same trains, semis, buses and airplanes spew huge amounts of soot into the air. When it lands it becomes a gray dust that gets on everything. In a week the fans on the computer are clogged with it and it coats everything. At the farm it takes weeks to build up dust and it is white. I breathe easier now.

The Traffic - Too many cars, not enough lanes. This applies to local streets as well as expressways. The Eisenhower is the worst culprit. That road can be backed up any time of day, any day of the week in either direction. Here at the farm if two cars go by an hour it is busy. The advantage to living on a road that turns into gravel less than a mile down the road. Yeah I like that.

Living on top of your neighbor - Lot size in Cicero 35' by 150'. Lot size at the farm 27 acres. Do I need to say more?

Too Many Rats In the Box - Cook County Population approx 6 million, Reynolds County Population approx 6 thousand. How's that for orders of magnitude?

I will miss Chicago for sure but I believe I will be happier here at the farm, surrounded by the person I love, four cats and the beauty of the forest. A new chapter begins.

Today we take our four cats down to the house in Missouri. The oldest cat has been there once just to see how she traveled (8 hours in the van). It went well so we are optimistic.

We only have two cat carriers so the the twins will have to ride in a large cardboard box. Once we get on the road we will let them roam the van for self preservation – 8 hours of mewling tends to fray one’s nerves. That means of course making sure when we stop at rest areas we have to prevent an escape. I am thinking of Steve McQueen on a motorcycle…

It will be interesting to see who catches the first mouse at the farmhouse since we have recently seen signs of an incursion – my money is on the boy cat Sammy.

Moving the cats means we are for all intents moved to the farm even though we still will be coming back to Chicago to attend to the house until something is finalized but the trips up here will be shorter and less frequent.

In the next day or so I will share what I will miss and not miss about life in the big city.

On this last trip to the farm, we didn’t do a lot of physical work like clearing the foundation, but we did get more of the moving stuff done - I got my Missouri driver’s license, we got the house fully insured, and moved the van and truck insurance down there.

We also got the washer and dryer hooked and did our first load of laundry – woo hoo!

We will get the van plated in Missouri in a week or so and once Janice gets a few items up here cleared up she will get her Missouri driver’s license.

The exciting thing is that later this week we plan to take the cats down and then for all practical purposes we will be moved. There are still some things to bring down and we are still wrestling with the rent or sell issue on the house in Cicero which will require some return trips but not the every week like we have been doing.

I am happy - yes

Over the holiday weekend jgaleckas and I took another load of stuff down to the farm. We are about two or three more trips from being their permanently. We will still have to come back here for a day or two do take care of selling the house and some issues that may pop up but we are very close.

The bulk of the move this time was the entertainment electronics - Xbox 360 plus widescreen TV at farm - life is good.

The garden is looking fab - cabbage starting to form heads, lots of flowers on the tomatoes and the potatoes are really growing. I see some good eating later this summer. The garden is a real source of joy for Janice. She was out every morning weeding and nurturing. This is the first time we have been down often enough to properly care for the garden and it is showing.

Still having troubles with the telephone. A few weeks ago there was a couple of sever thunderstorms that rocked the farm while we were up here in Chi town. The last time down it took two service calls to get a new network interface box which helped the buzz in the line and we were finally able to get on the internet but at a slower connection than we normally get which is crappy.

This time down there is still a lot of static in the line and a hum from time to time. We have checked the internal wiring and are good there so the problem is somewhere in the line to the house. With the last weekend being the holiday we chose not to call CenturyTel but next time down we will have to start bugging them. The cable that serve our area is probably 20 or thirty years old and everyone on our circuit has slow dial-up and other issues. Maybe with enough complaints they will have to replace it and we can finally get some decent dial-up. DSL is not in the cards due to so few people served by the access point, but if we could get 40k+ dial-up we could manage.

Looking forward to the next load this weekend.

Finally after a sub-freezing January it was nice to get warmer weather. Temps at the farm this weekend were in the sixties which melted all the snow and ice from last week there – especially the driveway which was ice covered when we arrived Thursday night.

When we got back to Cicero last night the snow here was also melted, except for some piles near the garages from shoveling. It is interesting how the side of the alley that gets the sun had no piles while the side that doesn’t still had some POS (piles of size).

I plan to take advantage if the warm to take a walk today or/and tomorrow.

Hopes you are also thawing.

For those of you out there wondering why you haven't seen any posts or comments from me, jgaleckas and I have been at the farm for the last ten days. Our mission was to put a real roof on the shop building we built a couple years ago. The makeshift roof was leaking too much and so we decided to bite the bullet and take the time to put a real rook up.

The trusses arrived but the remains of Ike dropped three inches of rain on us last Sunday so we couldn't start until Monday. We went at it pretty hard that day getting the old roof off and getting the first 6 trusses up. In hindsight we should have paced ourselves because we never quite recovered from that first day. But by Friday we had gotten all 15 trusses up, got the sheathing on, the gable boards and trim up and the tar paper that underlays the shingles. Unfortunately we had totally spent ourselves by then and had no energy to get the shingles up on the roof and installed. In case you are wondering, a bundle of shingles is VERY heavy and not easy to get up on the roof manually and we have about 24 bundles to get up there.

We had gorgeous weather for the project (after Sunday) but it was as if the Lord knew we got the tar paper done because we had rain both Saturday and Sunday. A check found that we only had a few drips, probably around nail holes that haven't sealed yet. If all goes well, we will stay down after Archon in early October and install the shingles.

Since we worked all day, and since we still have slow dial-up at the farm I only went online twice and mostly to check weather.

We did take Saturday off and went to an auction and got all kinds of neat old stuff, but I suspect Janice will post on that.

Yesterday we moved everything back into the shop so we had room to put the ATV's away in the shed and other stuff and finally got home around 10PM.

This morning we are both still sore, my right knee is not happy from going up and down ladders and the aroma of Icy Hot fills the room as Janice tries to soothe her hammer arm.

If you need a new roof we are NOT available!

We are at the farm for an extended visit so we can put the roof on the shop building.

We out the second floor on over a year ago and put a tarp on it until we moved and put the rook on (of course we thought at that time we would be here a few months later but things change).

The tarp has leaked and rather than allow any damage to the contents of the shop we decided to bite the bullet and get the roof on.

We order trusses from a local supplier and they delivered them Friday. We moved half into the upstairs yesterday and then went into town to take Momma shopping and such.

While at Mom's we got to see the weather forecast and the remains of Ike are going to dump on us tonight and Sunday but after that the weather looks clear. So today we got the rest of the trusses moved upstairs, battened down the tarp and went into town with the MouseMobile and picked up the shingles (in green which was Janice's preference) and the rest of the lumber. The mouse was sagging a bit under the load of 8 squares of shingles ( about 1000 lbs or more) but it got us home.

We will take it easy today and tomorrow we will stay in and watch the rain until time to go to Momma's for Sunday dinner. Hopefully we will not have to row.

If all goes well by Friday we will have a roof and no more leaks.

Reporting from down at the farm:

It is raining cats and dogs, really BIG cats and dogs. I am sitting on the couch typing this and watching the water pour off the roof as I look out the front door. This is on top of the inch of rain we got overnight. That was a great light show as the cloud to cloud lightning kept the sky lit almost continually.

Looking at the radar, we could get this rain for a few hours and probably another inch. Now we just need to the cistern installed.

jgaleckas and I had a nice weekend at the farm - after taking Mom shopping we brought her back to the farm for a cookout with the neighbor. The food was great - especially the pattipan squash the neighbor brought. If you have never grilled squash you don't know what you're missing.

I ever got Momma on the ATV for a tour of the place - she has been there for a while and I wanted to show her all the stuff we've planted recently.

After the cookout we headed back to Salem to drop Mom off after the fireworks show. It was good one with the highlight being a fireball that may have been intentional or not but was very cool.

The rough thing was replacing the tarp n the shop roof. We haven't got a regular roof up yet so the old tarp has rotted and we have had a few leaks. Janice got a little overheated but we survived and got it done.

Just got done reading all me RSS feeds and LJ friends posts since Thursday (No broadband at the farm).

Will probably comment more later.

Got back home last night from the farm, mostly an uneventful trip, spent time with Mom, mowed the grass did some planting, etc.

jgaleckas did assemble the grill/smoker so we are ready for the Fourth of July - we may end up at InConjunction though - so it is not a sure thing yet on the cookout.

The potatoes are looking good and a lot of the corn we planted last time is up - yay!

Planted some squash just for the heck of it. The orchard trees a re looking good so all in all things are starting to shape up. The wet spring has definitely made a difference.

Now I have to get three book reviews done, one I finished before we left, on the trip I finished an ebook I had been reading and I zipped through a paperback. It will be a while before the next one - starting the third book in the George Martin Ice and Fire series - 1100 page paperback.

Got back last night from a short weekend at the farm. Celebrated both my Mom's birthday and mine as well as Mother's Day. Everything was fine but still very wet with creeks. ponds and rivers all at high levels. The good thing about this is that is it so green! The pastures, yards and trees are all a gorgeous emerald green that takes your breath away.

On the garden front, the potatoes we planted last time are coming up and the flowers and grasses continue to grow. The blackberries and raspberries are looking good and the orchard is in good shape. I don't expect much fruit since the freeze last year really drained the trees and this year they need to conserve energy and just leaf up nice. Next year could be good.

While I mowed, jgaleckas put in some new asparagus crowns - some had died - and put in about 50 strawberry plants.

The bird feeders were active, mostly the usual suspects, except the grosbeaks from last time were nowhere to be seen - possibly they were just passing through. But we did see a beautiful baltimore oriole Sunday morning. That's another first for us - in fact I have never seen one ever - way cool.

On the way home we stopped at Janice's son's house to see the new granddaughter - Hailey Kay. She was born Thursday. Momma and baby are doing fine.

Life is good.

Got home last night from the farm - a very wet place this spring. Another couple days of rain caused the pond to overflow the dam and formed a large puddle in the front yard. The rill next to the house was a raging stream. So far this spring we have received twice the amount of rain to this date as any of the previous five years. In fact, half the annual rainfall has already soaked our little corner of the Ozarks. The Meramec River was WAY over it's banks on the drive home yesterday.

Mom decided she wanted a sofa for the living room of her apartment and she found a nice one and we brought it over in the van. We planted 25 pine trees, a dozen paw paw trees and 4 fruit tress we bought at Big Lots on the way down. One benefit of the wet ground was easier digging, when it's dry it's like digging a clay pot.

Sunday was cold and we had snow/sleet all day - no accumulation but with the wind and the 38 degree temp it was cold. The birds didn't seem to mind though. The Boss Bird Buffet was going strong. We had well over a dozen finches - mostly goldfinches - as well as the resident cardinals, blue jays and nuthatches. Some newcomers were a brown headed cowbird, a towhee and a indigo bunting. The bunting was spectacular with iridescent blue feathers. I can't wait to see what else shows up over the summer.

The feeder was very busy today, dozens of birds around. Most were the usual suspects; cardinals, nuthatches, blue jays but the finches are back as well. They feed on the thistle seed that is in a sock that hangs near the feeder. One in particular was very striking in bright yellow feathers. Also many of the young cardinals have shed their dull colored feathers for bright red coats. These wonderful crested birds are one of my favorites.

I spent a lot of time sitting on the front porch watching them at the feeder and in the pecan tree. I even saw a few woodpeckers banging away on the tree. The variety of songs the different birds sing is truly beautiful.

On a side note the bulb flowers are popping up and a couple of crocuses bloomed this morning!

We have a farm in SE Mo. that we are soon moving to permanently. Janice and I were concerned when we heard about the flooding since we recognized many of the towns near us in the news. We checked in with our neighbor and she said the creek was high but no flooding on the property. Looks like we dodged a bullet. I feel blessed.

This weekend the feeder was jumping! It was so busy I have come to call it the "Boss Bird Buffet". The ravenous creatures emptied out both feeders each day. I suspect the snow on the ground recently had something to do with it.

All day their were several birds feeding at the trough. We had nuthatches, junco ( also known as snowbirds), cardinals, blue jays and even a crow or two. The juncos were the most common, probably a couple dozen.

I am looking forward to spring when the finches, robins and bluebirds return.