August 2008
We finally have started on the basement. Something that we should have done a long time ago. We all need more room. My kids are here half the week and Dave’s kids are here every other weekend. So 6 people and 3 bedrooms don’t work out the greatest when we are all here. We are adding a bedroom in the basement for my girls, a large family room, and an office. We start on the stairs first. We honestly have no clue how to build stairs from scratch. Dave’s dad gives us a little handyman’s book on building stairs. Quite frankly – it was like reading Chinese to me. It made absolutely no sense. All that tread, rise, run… whatever. So while we were at the lumber store buying what we thought we would need, I found a neat book and there was a chapter on building all kinds of stairs. Score! This book explained things a lot better and now I actually understood what those terms meant and how to build them. Then I reread the handyman booklet. It wasn’t Chinese anymore, it was English! Now Dave is not a builder who likes to use plans on paper. He just looks, measures, and builds. It usually does work, however, we both knew that with stairs we couldn’t take the chance. Since he doesn’t have the patience to sit and figure out all the technical measurements, it was left up to me. I measured and re-measured the height, run, etc. Of course we had a limited run which made it a little more difficult since we had to make the stairs fit into a certain area and have a turn in them sothat they weren’t too steep. I finally got my measurements and instead of just cutting the wood and going, we actually took the time to draw the stairs on the wood to see if it would fit. Silly I know, but we are too cheap to buy more wood! Well my calculations were perfect except for one small detail – the stairs went straight to the wall. Hmmm, I am still not sure how that happened or where I went wrong. I won’t get into the details of how we made it work, but we adjusted and drew a new set of stairs with the correct measurements and cut the wood. Everything else went pretty smooth and in a weekend we had stairs with a landing to the basement. Yeah for us. We continue to work on the basement putting up the stud walls that would be the girls bedroom.
We had constant visitors to watch us work. Remember when I said that our chickens were like pets? Well if that basement door was open, then the chickens were in the house with us. We really didn’t mind since it was unfinished. But those weren’t really the only visitors. See picture for our other guests and the rooster "Elvis" in the basement...
Yes the horses. The horses actually came into the basement. I couldn’t believe it. See, before we mow the grass I block off the backyard from the front yard and let the horses eat it down for a day or two and then mow it. Works out great. They get nice fresh grass and eat less hay. So when they are in the backyard, they can come right up to the basement and right on in.
In late August the guineas were allowed out of their house.
For 5 days they didn’t even attempt to leave their house. Sitting in the window sill was as far as they would go. Barney – the only remaining guinea of the neighbors’ has been hanging out around their house during the day. I guess he finally decided that he was tired of waiting for them to leave the house and chased them all out. Of course at night all our guineas go back into their house, but Barney hadn’t ever had a house – so he would sleep in the tree next to the house. Within a few weeks though he must have decided that it wasn’t too scary to sleep in there and he started sleeping in the house with the rest of the guineas. We were actually pretty lucky as far as guinea casualties in their first few weeks. We did lose Puny around 2 weeks. I figured that he would because he was not growing much at all compared to the other keets. We lost one other one I think from suffocation. So both of those guinea keets got buried in the chicken graveyard.
Here is a picture of Samantha feeding the chickens. The kids keep changing their names as I really don’t think I hear the same name twice.
Going into fall, there isn’t much too exciting going on around here. Just lots of work, things to fix, animals to tend to. Kids are back in school now. Dave and I got to do a little traveling in September because he had training for work. The first time we left, we went to Pittsburgh. Neither of us had ever been there. I was excited to go because just south of Pittsburgh is where part of my family came from. Both of us love genealogy and learning about our ancestors. Not that we really have a whole lot of time for it, but we work on it when we can. Going to Pittsburgh was great because while he was in class, I drove to Greene County, PA and went to old homesteads, cemeteries, and the genealogy guild there. I discovered tons of information and was able to supply the guild with a bunch that they didn’t have about my family. Thank god for my Tom Tom though! I would have gotten SO lost. I went to Greene County 4 days in a row to research. I literally drove all over the county to different cemeteries that my ancestors were buried in. Some of these cemeteries were in the middle of nowhere. I really mean that! There was this one old cemetery and abandoned church on top of this high hill and as far as I could see, there were no other houses. Just fields. It was at that cemetery that I took a picture of an apparition in front of a tombstone. I did not see this “shadow” when I took the picture, only discovered it when I was going through the pictures when I returned to the hotel. I also met some really nice people that lived in the old family homestead. They let me take some pictures and told me what they knew about the house which wasn’t much since they had only lived there for a few years. Most nights Dave and I walked around Pittsburgh taking pictures. Both of us love photography. I am not sure that I want to post any of our sellable pictures on here because it may limit where I can sell them later. Maybe I should just create a website for them…
Our wonderful neighbors across the street from us took care of the animals while we were gone. Everything went smoothly except that all the guineas are now sleeping in the trees at night. I really hate that because of the predators they can encounter. Guineas do not like a change in their routine at all. I have a pretty specific routine that I follow every night which is good and bad – good because it means that bedtime goes faster because the animals know what is expected of them and bad because when someone else needs to take care of them they don’t do it like “mom” and the animals don’t like it. So I guess the guineas retaliated by sleeping in the trees. It took me an entire week to get them to sleep in the house again.
The guineas like to sun themselves on the front steps. Here is a picture I took of them from inside the house.
Later in September Dave had more training. This time we went to Washington DC. I was really excited to go as I hadn’t been there since I was in 8th grade. I remember loving it then, but I really don’t think it meant as much to me then as it did this time. If I was to ever live in a city and I mean a downtown city, it would have to be DC. We stayed at a hotel about 2 blocks from the White House. At night, the blinking light from the Washington Monument was visible while we were in bed. It was really cool. I was actually a little leery my first day there. Not because I was scared or anything, but I certainly wasn’t going to sit in the hotel room all day – and I had never been a tourist by myself! How pitiful is that? I had brought a bunch of genealogy stuff with me to do at the National Archives and the Library of Congress but I didn’t want to spend all my time doing that. So on Monday I literally MADE myself get my stuff together, all my camera stuff, etc and off the National Archives I went. It was only about a 4 block walk but I figured it was a great starting point for me. I spent some time in there doing research and made friends with one of the guards. He was really nice and we had a nice talk and I told him that I would be back Wednesday to do more research. The Archives are really cool for research – they have SO much stuff. Next time I will be better prepared as I know what to expect. At any rate, I spent my days being a tourist and going to museums, monuments, taking pictures, doing research and doing TONS of walking. I bet during the day I walked 6 miles and then after Dave got out of class we would do it all over again. We did a lot of after dark pictures with all the sensational lights in DC. I could really write a whole book chapter on our trip to DC.
We lost another guinea while we were gone. It got hit on the road. This was the first one I had lost to a car and I hate that. Ben (the neighbor) buried it for me in his yard.
Last fall we had another sad episode as a dog came into our yard and killed two of our chickens. It got the rooster and one of the hens. I felt so bad! Like it was my fault for not protecting them. So we had one hen all by herself. She was so lonely that she literally would not leave us alone while we were home. She went everywhere we went. We were still working on the basement a lot so we let her some inside and sit with us so she wouldn’t get so lonely. We started calling her Chicken Chicken. So now that’s her name. Original I know. A few weeks later I found some chickens on Craigslist that I wanted. They are called “Easter Egger” chickens. These guys were only about 3 months old but it was 1 rooster and 2 hens. It took a few days for Chicken Chicken to bond with them but I know she was happy for the company. We are also talking about getting a dog. We are looking into getting an Anatolian Shepherd puppy. Anatolians are livestock guardian dogs so it would be nice to have the protection for the chickens, guineas, horses, and our property.
Part 3 coming soon and then we should be caught up!
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