Lorena, very impressively, fixed the non-filling of our toilet by installing a new float apparatus. And she did it all while I was not looking nor aware by watching online videos. I am totally amazed, but not at all surprised. She can do ANYTHING!!!
Category: House and home Page 1 of 12
I talked to my buddy, Bryan from Oregon, today and it was kind of surreal. They are having a spectacular, warm, sunny day there while we have rain and enough cold for Lorena to fire up the outdoor fireplace. We have gotten enough rain this spring that everything is very green. Even the lawns are all looking Willamette Valley, Oregon level green. We are planning to stay in tonight, eat a grilled ribeye steak, and enjoy that ambiance. Until then, Lorena is practicing on a watercolor that she wants to see if she can perfect. Pretty excellent first pass!
The weather here in our part of Texas has turned just about perfect for gardening and working outside. Lorena is in a near nirvanic state. When the weather is like this and she has some dirt and plants near by, she is wildly happy. She has gotten most of the maintenance stuff she wanted out of the way and is now moving on to special new projects, planting at least one new tree, putting borders around the trees in the front yard, making the ornamental drainage rocks flow more nicely in the landscape, replacing a bush that died, figuring out some new herbs she can plant that grow well in Texas, and the BIG project of working with a contractor to extend the sprinkler system and add some sod to manage erosion in an area where we are starting to get a little bit of an arroyo.
Yesterday we learned that we need to do about $700 worth of work on our irrigation system. That was after our 8-year old dryer’s motherboard went out and we had to buy a new dryer. This is the joy of home ownership. I think we have decided to downsize again, by a lot. We love our house, but do not need the hassle. In Mexico, we have plenty of local resources to work on these kinds economically. Here, not so much.
Well, shoot. We just found out our dryer is kaput and it is only eight years old. The repair guy was just excellent, but we all decided (he, Lorena, and I) that it made a whole lot more sense to just buy a new one than to try to repair this one. That is frustrating, but it is also just life. After Lorena finish lunch we are going to head out to Lowe’s to order a new one. Oh, well.
This is a nice view of the Huasteca from our house on the hill. The new Tesla plant is being built toward the left side of this photo and the large buildings right in front of the Huasteca, off in the distance, is the center of Santa Catarina. With the passing away of our next door neighbor and the funeral we attended this weekend, Lorena and I have been giving a lot of thought to what we are doing living so far away from family right now. Our idea is that we want to make the house in Mexico our primary residence while we still have Grandma Conchita and, maybe, while we are there start figuring out how to downsize. We have to figure out where to go before we can do any downsizing, but it is definitely on our mind.
We have been in our current neighborhood for just about three years now. Our next door neighbor, Darrell was a good friend during our time here, helping us out with one thing or another and reminding us it was time to do some seasonal maintenance or adjustments, always ready to stop and chat about local and national politics-we had similar ideas about most stuff. We were shocked when our neighbor across the street knocked on our door after church this morning to tell us that Darrell had passed away. It was a sudden and totally unexpected event for everyone. Lorena and I talked about the relative unimportance of whole swaths of our lives. Darrell will be missed. He was a good friend and a good neighbor.
Lorena returned from her visit with Christian in Boston today and life is profoundly better now that she is here. It is just not as nice when she is not where she loves to be in her house. I had fallen off the wagon on my diet and exercise program, but she has me up and going again–Salmon, salad, and asparagus for dinner tonight–high protein, low calorie, filling, and extremely tasty. I am in the middle of a bunch of heavy stuff at work so having her here is a huge help. She has to go to the doctor tomorrow, but that does not get in the way of managing her house and managing me for which both the house and I are very grateful. I think I might be working all weekend this weekend because of pressing requirements at my day job. It is not a problem at all when Lorena is here to keep things under control.
I had all kinds of big plans for my first day of work after the new year, but got off too a very slow start. I finally just gave up at about 3:00 PM and took a two hour nap. I did get a few things completed at work and, more importantly, after lunch at Panda Express, met with our friend Brad to discuss the addition of a bonus room to our house. He had some amazing ideas and we came away with a plan to get us started. He is going to have his CAD guy draw up the ideas as soon as Lorena can get him the house plans. From there we will make any need adjustments and negotiations and then proceed, step-by-step to do the work. He said we do not need to do it all at once only keeping in mind that certain things need to be fully completed and cannot be stopped in the middle. I think this might work OK. We will see what he comes up with.
Grandma Conchita has now displayed my dissertation in the highest place of honor in the dining room. I am very gratified. She is not shy about her pride in her children and I count myself a very fortunate man to be on her list of approved people. She was here for a few weeks and we are very happy she was here, but she very much likes to be in her own home. Hopefully we will be able to get down there again very soon.
The temperature has stayed in the forties all day with lots of wind and abundant rain. Lorena thought rightly that today would be a good day for a fire in the fireplace. I concurred completely. I am working on an assignment for my professor, Troy, at University of Nebraska so am not getting the total benefit yet, but am looking forward to reading my book and warming my feet with a hot cup of decaf (cocoa would be better, but that is definitely not in my nutrition plan. We have plans to use the fireplace a lot this year.
We ate the three figs we thought were the yearly harvest of Christian’s very pathetic little fig tree about a month ago. Lorena was out looking at it this morning and hollered at me to go out and look at it. It has more than doubled in size and now has an additional four figs growing on it. We are pretty inspired with the thing right now. We still miss our apple, pear, peach, and plum trees from Washington, but boy are we enjoying this. We need to trim it up a little so it looks more like a tree than a bush, but it seems like we are on a good trajectory.
Lorena harvested the first fruit from Christian’s fig tree today and we split it. EXTREMELY sweet. We only got two last year, but this year there are four left on the tree after we ate the first one for a total of FIVE! This has been a years long project and massive fun. We are not sure what we will ever do if it keeps growing like this and then we move. There is no way we want to leave it behind.
Christian bought a VERY small little fig tree when he was in his Ph.D. program at Arizona State. When he got a job in at Cambridge, MA, he donated the tree to us. We kept it growing through a move from Washington to Texas. It produced two or three figs each year, but it did not prosper. Lorena pruned one of the two trunks last year and this year it has taken off. It looks like there are four figs growing on it (they are small, but SUPER sweet) and it is about twice as tall as last year. There is another spur growing off the bottom, so Lorena is going to try to prune that and start a second tree in the same pot. We are not sure it is possible, but we are investigating it on the Internet.
We sold our house, packed all our earthly goods, and are ready to load it on the truck so we can leave for our new house in Texas. We thought we would have been closed on the house in Texas by now, but the house was not ready on the date promised by the builder. They promised that it would be ready yesterday and that might have actually happened, but we are not sure about it. Nevertheless, we have an inspector lined up for next Tuesday, our real estate agent lined up to do a final walk-through on Wednesday, and a closing lined up with the escrow agency on Thursday. We just hope we can get to Texas in time to sign for the closing by 4:30 on Thursday and then all we have to do is wait for the truck to arrive with our stuff between May 3 and May 5. Excited to get this done!
We are on the move again. One of the things for which I am most grateful is the opportunity Lorena and I have had to live in lots of interesting places in the United States and Mexico. It would have been nice to do that around the entire world, but the USA has been good to us. Giving the kids the perspective that there are lots of nice people in lots of nice places. We enjoyed our time in Washington a LOT–especially the apples and the people. We very much look forward to Texas–we love the people and the culture of friendliness there, but will still buy Washington apples. God willing, we will be living in Texas by mid-May.
Lorena and I have started a new project in Mexico. We bought an older house in a municipality of Monterrey named San Pedro. I wrote about that previously here. Lorena’s brother Lynn, who is a lawyer and a developer helped us find and buy the house. He is also managing its remodel into a four unit apartment building. Hopefully, we will be able to sell it when it is complete and buy another in the same area. Here is how the house appeared when we bought it.
The remodel started yesterday. The first step is to remove the balcony to extend the size of the rooms on the top floor of the house. At the same time, his team will clean up the entry to the lower story of the house. The new facade of the house will be much more modern and secure. We plan to blog the whole remodel and report on what kind of luck we have selling the house. If it goes well, we will try it again. Here is the sophisticated architectural drawings developed by the designer (Lynn) to guide his team on the replacement of the facade.
The next few photos show the first day of demolition.
Christian shocked us all with an amazing gift for Lorena’s birthday–a robotic vacuum cleaner. He got one for himself to clean his apartment and absolutely loved it. I have to admit I was skeptical about how good the thing might be, but have to admit I am a complete believer after seeing it do its thing.
One of the most amazing things about the device is how easy it was to set up. It took about a half an hour to unpack it and get everything installed. Lorena and I can both start it, stop it, adjust what parts of the house it should clean, watch it move around on a map as it is cleaning, etc., etc.
On top of that, the height of devices is low enough that it can go under things that were hard to reach with our regular vacuum. The path in the map in this post is in our bedroom. The side-ways ‘T’ in the middle of the room is the post holding up the middle of our bed. In addition to that, it was able to clean under the sofa and the Barcalounger in the living room. The amount of cat hairs and dust and the repository was nothing short of amazing.
One thing I can say for sure, though, is that it is not really saving us any time because it is so fun that we usually just sit there with a cup of coffee the whole time it is doing its thing.
All the paperwork for the house we have been buying in San Pedro Garza Garcia, Nuevo Leon is complete and we are now the owners. I have actually never been to the place and I am not sure how long we will own (we have a potential buyer looking at it now and our eyes on the next place), but for now, it feels pretty good!
It is a spectacular fall day in the twin cities. I have not put up a picture for a long time, but could not resist this one.