Using time wisely – I hope

It has been less than two weeks since I was laid off but it seems like a lot longer. I have kept myself very busy getting projects completed at the farm and making repairs and improvements to the house. Monday and Tuesday I tore out the gun cabinet stands and put shelving behind those glass doors. The result was pretty impressive. Even more impressive was that Mama had the shelves loaded with canned goods and other items we had kept packed away in totes by the time I had completed the shelving. It really made our butler’s pantry clean and functional.

While weather permitted and I had materials available I worked on the coop building. It is coming along pretty well. I held off Monday and Tuesday working on the building because I needed both Mama and Victoria to help me put the linoleum on the floor of the building before the walls were put in place. (That is why I worked inside early in the week.) I had expected the linoleum to take a couple hours to lay but we were done in less than an hour – and it came out very nice. Victoria is still picking the glue off of her clothing.

I put a pallet in the hog pen for the water trough to sit on because the hogs had been rearranging the dirt to the point that Mama could no longer get the trough in and out of where we normally set it. She cleans it daily so the pigs can fill the clean water with muck as they stand in it to get a drink. For some reason it makes her feel better and I am all for her feeling better.

When we got several inches of rain later last week we were very disappointed to find the little covered area I had build for the hogs to bed down in was completely full of water and there was nowhere for them to lay. So I got four pallets and placed them in the area under the roof (wile it was still raining very hard)and put a piece of wood that was supposed to be a door for the other hog building over those pallets. With a little straw from Mama they made their beds made within a few minutes and probably slept better than I did that night.

Saturday Mama and I worked on pictures – sorting, hanging and repacking them. Mama worked for several hours going through photographs from the past. To her credit she discarded a fair amount of them. I talked her into only keeping those that were relevant or meaningful to someone in our family. So pictures of zoo animals and trees and flowers and settings that we no longer recognized were thrown away. It took a sizable box to contain them all. But it was time well spent.

This morning Mama has me scheduled for a visit to the chiropractor. I resisted the idea a little but eventually gave in – I do not want to spend either the time or the money on the appointment, but thought it not worthy of too much negative conversation. After that I can get back to work on the walls of the coop – until I run out of materials.

This week I hope to divide my time between getting applications posted online and getting things done for Mama. Those of us who lost our jobs were given access to a help group for things like resume writing, job searches and overall guidance in getting further employment. I have about ten hours of work to get done on their website. That will have to be done at the library or the church. It is a bother not having access to the internet at the house, but we can compensate.

Grandma, Grandpa, Norman and Seth are supposed to come down later this week but that is still up in the air. None-the-less, we are ready for them when they do finally arrive.