I'm blogging this. . .

.: 08:14 :.

Sorry to go so long between posts. Time flies when you're living in a shed. We're working on trying to call this the Apartment, but Logan's not going for it yet. She likes saying we live in the laundry room.
We're doing what we can to get rid of the Playbus, which I despise more each time the handle falls off the kitchen faucet, or we find another leak in it, or whatever the next thing to break is. That means getting a toilet, and a shower (or something) some hot water, and some sort of kitchen set up. Someone from Lorane Little School has offered to loan us a trailer with kitchen -- we have to go check it out. Then there's putting a toilet in here. And maybe a tiny shower, or an outside shower and tub. And swiping the hot water heater from the house, since we'll be replacing it with an instant hot water heater.

21 April - our phone was out of order overnight. The computer had been on the phone and then it stopped working. This morning I called it in - and the phone company said there was a phone off the hook. Evidently the computer didn't hang up properly. Silly thing. Next I'll check to see if anyone actually tried to call us while the phone was off.

23 April - as of today we have both a toilet and a shower in the cabin. And hot water. Enough hot water for a long shower. Next is to fix the bath drain so one can soak in the tub too. Cabin has settled in my mind as what to call this place. It's going to be a few months of cramped living, but it's a whole hell of a lot better than that damn Playbus. Tomorrow is Saturday, and with luck, while Logan and I are in Eugene at her dance class (pre ballet - mostly fun play with a few terms and movements thrown in, so far she really likes it! It was her idea to start going for those of you wondering.) John will rearrange the washer and drier and get Steve and Joana's old stove/oven in here. Then we'll be set. We'll be washing dishes in the bath tub until we get a bigger sink, but we'll be all in one building that we can use as we like. There may have been a little debate with the insurance guy over whether this was an improvement to our property or an out of home living expense. It's both. But it's not an improvement we'd have made any time soon without having had the fire, been crammed in a hotel for two weeks, and then into a 10 by 27 foot living space for the past month. Rickety living space. The rickety was one of my biggest problems with it.

We got a list from the "soft cleaners" of what's considered uncleanable. Four pages of stuff. And they didn't take all our clothes or bedding by any means. We'll be replacing a lot. I'm going to start tracking down a replacement comforter online tonight, before the company that makes the ones I like (pacific coast down. . . ahem, wake up, find the link. . . Pacific Coast Feather Company ) goes out of business. The local store carrying their stuff claimed they are about to, but I don't know for sure. We had one of their comforters from the local store before, and, actually, Wilma has one now (Wilma, what's the name of the pattern of the cover on yours? They don't seem to have that in stock any more either, and I was hoping to find sheets like that, since we're replacing those too!), and we'll get another sometime soon, I hope.

On Monday we have a busy day. The sheep shearer comes. The building people come to seal the smoke out (I think, maybe it's seal it in), some flooring people come to find out what they're getting in to, and I think maybe there's someone else in there too. I'll go to the chiropractor, but I'm trying to keep that to a minimum since I've now used up my insurance (different insurance) allowance and have to pay for it all out of pocket. Yes, it's cruddy health insurance, but I have a chronically bad back too. There's a chance we'll see Aidan - I told Andrea he could come and play for at least half a day any time we're around next week. She and Bob are getting married on Saturday, so she's in the last minute rush of getting things done.

Oh yeah, this weekend, I think, we've been in Oregon for 5 years. Again, time flies! No, we don't have any plans to move back to Florida, although we will still be visiting there. I'm not so sure about this year, the fire has made life a little stressed. Oregon is paradise for me though. Even with skunks under our chicken coop (sort of neat, if we don't have a bad encounter!) mud tracks all winter, and no cardinal birds. We moved to the right place. It is funny to think about - while living in Florida, John and I talked about the possibility of moving to land with no house, provided we could work out how to put a small apartment in to a barn. Basically, although not in the barn, we're not living in that sort of small apartment. It's just later than we'd thought when we were planning.

John and Logan are asleep, and the computer says it's after midnight. Time to quit typing, post this and go try to sack out myself. We all had tooth cleanings this week - no cavities or new problems for any of us. I had a worn spot filled over on one tooth (sort of like patching a pot hole I think), and got my teeth cast for a rubber cover that should stop me from grinding them or clenching them when I sleep, which was the cause of the worn spot. The gadget looks like a big improvement over the one I tried in high school, which covered teeth and gums and left me miserable. I'll try for some pictures soon, when I get a quieter day.

Where have I been?

.: 21:52 :.

Well it sure hasn't been OZ. (John says one can punctuate that sentence with the expletives of your choice.) We're back on line from home, with some new to old computer issues, and a lot of time, space, and energy issues. John's managing to be on line a couple times a day, I've been averaging once a day, if it's a good day. Maybe that will increase soon, I don't know. Cheryl-Ann, I see you, but I don't have any spare brain cells for reacquainting right now. Keep reading if you'd like.

The computer is in our laundry room shed, which was ¼ laundry room, fridge and freezer, and ¾ storage. Now it will be ¼ laundry room and ¾ living space. By John's estimate this shed is nearly double the space we have in the Playbus. John says, for Ruzz's info, this shed is a little over 500 square feet. And I can see living in here for five months, if we can figure out bathing, kitchen, and toilet facilities. It would be crowded, or maybe cozy, but it would be a big improvement over that damn playbus. The playbus is too small, too rickety, and not study enough to stand up to every day living. I've decided that for the record, I vote with Grandma Dot, I hate rickety tables, and rickety anything else's. Bleh!

This will be in no particular order. It's how my brain is working right now. One of the good sides of the fire is that we get to do some house redesign things that we'd wanted to do long term here. We'll come out of this with wood floors (bamboo it looks like) and a bathroom with bathtub (we did have only a shower) that is arranged the way we'd liked it. We'll be adding some closets, which the house was very poor in, and other storage in places that are unobtrusive. We're going to switch to instant hot water heaters, which will give us storage where the old one was, and an unlimited supply of hot water to boot. I wasn't really prepared to think about all that now, while trying to sort and inventory burned and sooty things though. And now there's a ton of decisions to be made. And our cost verses what Insurance pays, and John's time as he works between ¾ time at Umpqua Research and two days a week as a construction guy.

The insurance adjuster has been a really nice guy so far. I do have to keep reminding my self that it's his job to protect the insurance company and make sure we aren't ripping them off by claiming things we didn't ever have, that the fire didn't damage, etc. He seems to also be a decent guy, but I believe that we are his second priority. Yesterday he picked up receipts from us, for our first month of post fire living. Yesterday was four weeks to the day. We spent the evening at home, sleeping thank you very much, not thinking about fires at all. The adjuster pointed out to John that we'd been in the play bus for three weeks (not by my calendar, we moved in to it March 18th, a day and a half after it was delivered. And he didn't like seeing how much we'd been eating out on the Insurance Companies tab since then. Let's see, our first week we at meals with friends for more than half our dinners. So they had mainly breakfast and lunch. After that they had dinners too when we didn't have food from friends available. Then we moved in to the playbus, found we had a little cooking equipment, but not much of what we'd normally use -- the cleaning and packing ladies had helpfully packed and taken John's box of supplies -- an oven with no racks making it effectively unusable, none of our regular cooking ingredients, spices, etc. And still no time or energy to speak of. What did they expect us to do? Go back to a diet of meals-from-a-box or nuke-em dinners? Neither John nor I has cooked those, or eaten those on purpose for more than a decade now. I can reheat things in the microwave, but I don't really like to. I don't think using one is healthy. And, while Mr. Adjuster was checking our receipts he could have checked the number of "good meals" we had verses the number of Subway Sandwiches, truck stop and Diner meals. Not exactly gourmet.

Mr. Adjuster is not The Twit who we dealt with after our laundry room fire. (What is the deal with this? Neither of us has ever been associated with a fire in the past. What god or goddess did we piss off that we've had two stuff destroying fires in three months? Yes, it could have been much worse. I'll go in to all that another time. This is quite bad enough. I'll let you know when the bad dreams aren't such a regular part of my life any more, or when I stop grieving for the two cats that died in this fire.) Mr. Adjuster is much better than she was in many ways. Which is good since I couldn't handle any more stress than what I've got right now.

***

This has sat for a few days, without me finding time to get back to it. So I'll go ahead and get it posted, for all the family who is wondering where we are and what's up. Or at least for my mom and sister, who I know check here occasionally. And, for your reading pleasure, here is what I was writing during wildlife rehab class, the weekend before the fire. I'll get back to this and write more about what's going on currently when I get a chance. I have notes for a lot more, but I'm just not getting to it.


Whoops,
I didn't mean to go off and forget to post here for a week. Has it been a week? I think so. Logan's been riding a rollercoaster with her asthma medication, and I've been taking a course of antibiotics for bronchitis too, so it's been even harder to stop and write anything.
This weekend I'm taking the Umpqua Wildlife Rehabilitation class on how to rehab animals. It's a lot of first aid. And some second aid, how to give shots, re-hydrate an animal, things like that. We even gave shots to rats and chickens. And put a tube down a chicken's throat to put water in to it's stomach (crop actually). The chickens and rats weren't thrilled, but they were well treated, and are now even better hydrated than before.
John and Logan have been home. Today they cleaned house. John is a much better housewife than I am, I think. This should be a grocery shopping weekend. Oops. Maybe when I'm in Roseburg Tuesday, meeting other knitters,

And at present I don't even know how I intended to finish that sentence, or what other knitters I was thinking of. Ah well.