Ready and waiting

Our family will get here tomorrow and I am about ready.  It has been a hard painful job to get ready for them with my back injury which is getting worse not better.

But it is a nice to have the house more or less in order.  I will never be able to keep it up to my old standards of years gone by and there are no house cleaners to be found out here so I just have to soldier on the best I can.  My husband is out of commission right now so his help is limited until he recovers from his recent surgery.

We will get them to do some of the jobs we can't do easily like fetch water softener salt from the store and put it in the softener and cut down some tree limbs we can't do anymore as it involves being on a ladder to reach them even with a pole saw.  We need to re-attach some cedar boards in the bathroom as we had to take them down to repair a leak. We could put them up but we can't carry the heavy air compressor up the stairs to use the nail gun to do it.  We were hoping son could help with the inside of the sunroom but the weather will probably be too hot to work in there.  We also need to put new springs on two of our rocking chairs so he can do that.  These things we would always do quickly with ease in good old days.  I hate to have them do things but they offered and we are very grateful. They always visit at the end of June when the children get out of school but it is always very hot then which limits how much time they can spend outside which is such a shame as it is beautiful at this time of year.

The girls and I have a few projects planned in the craft room, that will be nice.  They stay in a hotel in town about 35 miles away as we just do not have the beds to put them all up.  The two eldest are teenagers and the youngest is 8 going on 35 so it is like having an extra 5 adults here.  The hotel has a pool and breakfast included so that helps, they can swim every day at some point, either before they come or after they get back there. There is a cinema nearby too and a summer festival starts later in the week in town.  They are children who are used to having something to do all the time so sitting around with two old folks is not really their thing lol!

It is times like this that we realise how old we are getting and how limited we are in what we can do.  

Really looking forward to seeing them all though, last time was in 2021 when Covid was still causing problems.

My goodness, it has been a month since I posted!

 Life has a way of taking over doesn't it?  In the past month we have had to take both riding mowers in for repair, one of them twice!  That involves hooking up the trailer which is quite the task these days for us oldies.  It is a heavy trailer to lift onto the tow ball. We have one journey to take one in and one journey to pick it up and we can only get one mower on at a time, so several trips to town and back this past month.  We finally got them both back the Friday before we had to leave for the hospital on the Monday for my husband to have surgery on Tuesday.  We stayed overnight in a hotel as we have to drive three and a half hours to get to the hospital and he had to be there for 7.30am.  He had to stay in overnight and I stayed in the room with him.  The pull out bed was not very comfy but I was grateful to be able to stay with him. We have also had several other hospital appointments for him in the past month.

He had the surgery on Tuesday past so he is now under orders not to ride the mower or lift anything larger than a gallon of milk for 4-6 weeks.  We did do a fair bit of mowing the weekend before he went in but now it is all down to me.

We also did some work in the sunroom and bought some 8' x 4' boards so that involved the trailer again.  My husband has stained some of them ready but he is now grounded.

Added to all that we have family arriving a week on Monday for a week so major cleaning and tidying going on.

There has not been any time for making things!

We have several upcoming appointments too as they are starting him on infusions again for his auto immune disease.

Summer is always a busy time around here.

Had a birthday card I made returned as undeliverable.  I confirmed that the address was correct then I sent a photo of the envelope with the Post Office stickers on it to the recipient and she took it to her local  Post Office.  They said that the comma after the house number must have confused the robot! Artificial Intelligence at it's best!

Well that's about it for the past month, having a bit of a chill day today then back to the grindstone tomorrow!