Working, waiting, forward plans

I have been limited this week to working with Lee rather than working on projects at the farm – which is okay but it sure slows down the things I have to look at every morning and evening and wish were done for Mama’s sake. I am hoping that she and Grandpa can work on those projects even as he works at Victoria’s house. It is a necessary trade off but a painful one since I earn only enough to pay the little bills we have to cover.

I am still putting in applications and spending time on job searches but not in a huge way. With all the layoffs that continue to happen around the area it has turned into a pretty tight job market. We will continue to pray and thrust the Lord as we struggle through the next several months but it is disquieting to get no feedback from anyone to whom I have applied.

Before I left to meet Lee and Jeff yesterday we put Daisy in the loading chute and put some worming medicine to her. That was the easy part. Next we got Dash into the loading chute and into the head gate so we could give him a shot of antibiotics. That took some patience as he thrashed about once trapped but Grandpa finally got the shot administered and we were able to let him back into the barn lot where we will keep him separated for several more days.

We have decided to keep him so that we can feed him out for butchering in the spring. Mama has mixed emotions about that decision but it is a prudent one from the financial perspective. As our first calf, he came to us virtually without cost so the only money we will have in him is the feed required to get him to the weight we are aiming for before he goes to the processors.

For the past several days Grandma has been patiently peeling apples so they can be frozen for later use. In the past we have used them for fried apples as a breakfast side dish but I had an idea the other day and asked Victoria to look up whether or not you could freeze applesauce. It turns out that you can. So we made the last few batches of peeled apples into applesauce – and it turned out fabulously. It may become our new favorite especially since we still have some of the apples she peeled and froze last year still in the freezer.

Mama, Victoria and I have a test on Monday for which none of us have studied. I am sure we will find the time this weekend but it is never-the-less looming over us at the moment; one of the many little things to which we have committed ourselves and are finding difficult to honor in a focused manner. Two more tests follow this one – spaced two week s apart – and this semester will be complete. We have four more semesters if we choose to finish; and I think we will continue.

Tuesday Mama and I met with an estate planner to set up a will and tomorrow we will meet again with the financial planner to get the 401k and the pension transferred to Edward Jones for management going forward. It is both sad and exciting to see the changes as I move all my life away from ConocoPhillips. Our next step is to get health insurance evaluated and set up.

I do miss my job with Conoco.

Busy days

Norman and Seth left for West Virginia this morning. They were a full week working on Victoria’s house, buying Seth a truck, finding a place in the area to rent when they do permanently relocate and surveying the area for prospective work. It was full week for the two of them and I believe they felt it was a good use of the time they gave to it. There are multiple projects that are waiting on them back home and they felt constrained to get back so they could complete those projects before the end of the year. That may turn out to be a very tall order since Norman is heading to the Ukraine in early December for a ten day stay.

Grandma, Grandpa and Mocha stayed in Chico with us and are settled into their room for the moment. I am not sure of the plan going forward but Normand and Grandpa laid out a plan for remodeling Victoria’s house and it looks like a very good plan. Victoria is very excited about it but I am not sure how soon the work will commence or how long it will take since Grandpa will be doing the work pretty much by himself – except when Victoria is off, or when I am available.

Lee Davis asked me to work full time for him in his plumbing business and in light of the fact that there is nothing else available at the moment I agreed. It will leave me free every Saturday to work at the farm but it puts a damper on the progress I was making on Mama’s coop building. So we are back to the common theme in life; when I have the time I do not have the money and when I have the money I do not have the time.

Norman did give me a contact from his travels here. The realtor in Sanger, TX where they looked at a rental property told him about one oil company in Denton that was hiring all positions and begging for leads on prospects for that initiative. I will be calling him this morning when I get a break from work. Bear in mind that things are often embellished when retold, but you never know where the Lord will meet your need from.

Plumbing is an interesting variety of work; from digging ditches to repairing roofs. I have enjoyed the work so far mostly because it has such variety and for the most part Lee is good to work with but we have been on half-day and full-day jobs for the time I have been helping. We will see how driven he is when it comes to pushing through the little jobs – the six repairs a day kind of work - and still try to make money. After all, he has a business to run.

So between working with Lee, finishing the coop building and the equipment shed, making upgrades and repairs to our home we have the added project of the remodel at Victoria’s. Throw in the holidays and all that accompanies these end of year events and it begins to look like it could be a fun time going forward.

I am looking forward to it – mostly.

 

Productive times, big plans

Yesterday was a bit more productive than Monday had been. I got to work on the coop building very soon after I got up – which was not too early since I took half a muscle relaxer at bedtime the night before. I got the east wall mostly done and was at a point that I needed to place the long back wall into place on the foundation to continue. I was completely out of two by fours but I had the rafters sitting in my small lumber pile.

I had been waiting for Victoria to be off so she could help me get the wall into place but I am working for Lee Davis today – Victoria’s day off – and I did not want to be delayed further. So I loosened the braces that were steadying the wall about six inches off of the foundation and carefully scooted it into place; being careful to lift it onto the linoleum when I got to that point. It took me a bit of time to get it done (it is thirty two feet long) but I got it in lace and anchored it to the center wall and the east wall. I got five of the ten rafters in place before I had to quit.

I took a bit of time to redo the steps so that they are a bit more functional – for Mama’s sake. Now I am at the point that I need the roofing material. I will be calling Rex Cobb at BBI to see if he can spare some of the metal removed from the church roofs which we donated to BBTI. I am fairly certain that it is more than they need but I will not know until I do ask. If not, I will order the metal from a place in Bridgeport and have the roof on sometime next week.

We are forecast to have heavy flooding rains Friday but things clear up for a few days after that. We are in one of those weather patterns that bring rain every weekend. That would be more frustrating if I was working fulltime, but at the moment that is not the case.

Last night I took Mama to a ladies meeting at the church. While she was there I worked on Victoria’s laptop in the hope of getting some revisions made to my resume but that did not work out. She does not have Office on her laptop so I moved to listening to some training videos and eventually started an update to Windows 10. (I hope that was a good move.)

The update to the new operating system took all the time I was there and then some. Mama and I went to Wal-Mart after her meeting was over – about 9 pm – and came back to the church, where I had left the computer, only to wait another ten minutes or so for the update to finalize. As I go forward using the laptop I will know if that was a good move or not.

Grandma and Grandpa, Norman and Seth are due to arrive this evening. They made it to Union City last night. That is about the halfway point for them. They drove in the rain all day yesterday – which frustrated and really wore out Grandpa. Hopefully, they will have better weather for the remainder of the drive today.

They have pretty ambitious plans of getting the roof on Victoria’s little house in one day. We will see how that goes. Things look much easier from the ground when it comes to putting on a roof. I happen to be very aware of how steep her roof is and how slowly they will have to move to get the metal attached. But there will be three of them (at least) in the crew.

If I am available to help it will be from the ground – Mama will see to that.

Slow progress

When I went to Mom and Dad’s (Grandma and Grandpa Kline) in Chappell Hill a week ago I told Mom I would need to take a small portion of the roof to work on because I am pretty slow. I did manage to get a good bit done – especially on the portion of the roof that was leaking – but it took me hours to accomplish. That slow pace I keep has truly manifested itself in the ongoing projects here. On the positive side, I called Grandma Kline to see if the repairs I had made actually made a difference. One roof leak was eliminated but the second, more troubling one, still persists in a much attenuated form.  I will have to work on that next time I am there – which could be soon.

I am making very slow progress on the coop building. Of course I am working by myself and am constantly being called away to help Mama on one thing or another as well as having to make repairs on the tools I am using. Yesterday I had to take the guard off of the compound miter saw because it was too loose to continue to keep using it. After I got it off, tightened and reassembled and put back all the tools I had to get for that chore I had used up nearly an hour. Those things slow me up – but they are all part of life at the moment.

I also had to take time to get the truck and tractor out of the pasture where I had both of them stuck since Saturday. I had bought some more two by fours for the walls I am building on the coop and tried to get them to the coop via the roadway through the middle paddock. That worked only to the point where the ground, softened by five inches of rain, was too soft for me to go further.

When the truck was stuck I got the tractor out of the barn, loaded the lumber onto the forks and put it by the coop in the pile I have there. Since the tractor had done so well I drove it to where the truck was stuck and pulled the truck out of the very soft ground of the roadway but in doing so, I buried the front wheels of the tractor in a soft spot. So there they sat until yesterday evening the ground had dried enough to get them both free.

I feel a sense of urgency about getting the coop finished because Mama has thirty young chickens that need that spaced as soon as I can have it available. They are all getting large and will soon outgrow the cages we have them in. Of course, money is the issue. Sadly, it is required to get the materials I need to get the job done, but the Lord has provided so far. I am buying only a limited amount at a time because it feels better to spend smaller amounts at a time and I am using up what I have before getting more. That too takes time.

While we were at Lowe’s yesterday Mama and I agreed on the siding and the interior wall materials so I am at the point of moving forward to get those. By tomorrow I should have the rafters on and be ready for the roof so sheeting the outside would be the next step. If we can accumulate the materials I could have the project finished in a couple weeks.

Meanwhile I am honing my resume, getting some requisite work done for the employment agency hired on our behalf and searching for available job postings that are more than a manager at McDonald’s, Braum’s or Sonic. Such is the world we live in today.

Grandma called this morning to confirm that they are on their way here. I have mixed emotions about that; mostly positive.

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.

Mama’s snack, change is coming

Several weeks back Mama bought some pumpkin spice flavored chips to use in a recipe for a dessert for RU. It turned out okay but I was not a huge fan of the pumpkin spice flavor of the chips so the leftover pieces of the dessert sat around for a while before Mama finally threw them away. I think she was a little disappointed that I did not like them more – since I like pumpkin pie, pumpkin cookies, etc.

For our FBI class last night Mama made pretzels dipped in those chips. Victoria had come up with the idea so Mama got out the little crock pot and melted the chips and dipped pretzels until she had used as much as she could of the softened chips. The ladies at the FBI class really liked the combination – salty pretzels with the sweet pumpkin spice chips. It was not until very late in the evening that one of the ladies in the class stuck her tongue out at Mama that they all discovered that the snack had turned each of their tongues a pumpkin orange color. Then everybody was sticking their tongues out at each other. It was one of those moments when grown women become little girls for a few minutes.

I was pretty quiet on the short drive home and Mama knew why. I am thinking about what lies ahead of us this week. My boss was in Dumas and Perryton yesterday and will be in Elk City, OK today conducting layoffs with each of those groups. One of my ladies got let go yesterday and it was not a quiet, respectful dismissal on the part of the employee. But it is what I had told him to expect. Tomorrow he will be back in this office to let go those of us selected for such a dismissal. I am resolved to it but not anxious for it. It will change many things in my life.

For several years now I have kept this blog going by writing it first thing in the morning – when I arrive at the office long before most of the office staff. That is about to change and I am not sure how I will be able to continue in the short run.  I have no access to the internet at the house and will lose my job, my work computer, my daily internet access and the early morning routine that has kept this going for many mornings in the past. It has been a pleasure to write my thoughts daily and I will look for a routine that will allow that to continue but it may be some time before I come up with a solution to enable me to continue.

Today, if nothing has changed, will be my last full day in the office working for ConocoPhillips. Tomorrow it will be my turn to talk with my current supervisor and our HR representative for my exit interview. I will be laid off. It is not all bad. It is not all good. But there is a balance that, in the short term (several months at least) will allow me and Mama to cope with the loss of income while I pray about and look for another job. God really is in control and I can trust Him to take care of us.

I have communicated with all the ladies in my group - which will be reorganized tomorrow – what things to look for going forward; what has not been properly planned, what things have no backup plan at all in place, what processes are going to be so short-circuited that they will cease to function and how to resolve those issues. I have laid as solid a foundation as possible for each of them to continue in their respective roles for many months ahead.

I feel good about what I have done and what I am leaving behind.

The weekend

I took off Thursday and Friday to burn some vacation and those turned out to be very productive days. I asked Bro. Daniel to meet me at Lowe’s Thursday morning to help me load twelve sheets of plywood for the floor of the chicken building I am building for Mama. It was a real help to have him there both to stack the plywood on the cart in the store and to load it into the truck for the trip home.

I did not realize how far from square I was on the foundation until we laid out our first piece of plywood. I was way off so we squared to the floor joists and cut where we needed to in order to get the flooring to fit. It turned our okay and I considered pulling up a couple corners to make the building more square but put that thought away when I really calculated the work involved to avoid cutting one piece of metal roofing when the roofing is attached. We were both worn out be the time we quit.

Friday I debated going to Lowe’s to get the linoleum Mama wants on the floor of the building but used the day to build the back wall of the coop building. I decided to use up the materials I had on hand before I buy anything else – since I am very low on cash and will be laid off this week. As it turned out the back wall, which is thirty two feet long took a majority of the materials I had on hand. I did have enough to make two of the partial front walls that are ten feet each before I ran out of two by fours. So, hopefully later this week I will get the walls in place and be able to determine just how much I need to finish laying out the walls and the roof.

That night we went to RU. Mama had arranged with Erin to get the kids from her so she and Sam could have the night without the kids. Victoria was to meet us at the church to help as soon as she got off work. It was one of those nights when Luke, their autistic son, was in one of those moods where he cannot contain his energy and will not be slowed by direction, by coaching, by threatening or any other normal means.

It would not have been too overwhelming except that we had the twins and another child and Mama decided that putting the icing on her cake took precedent over everything else. I did not realize how uptight I was until instead of telling Luke for the fiftieth time that half hour to leave the classroom door open I hit the door as he was closing it – and punched a large hole in it. That got Mama’s attention. So when Victoria arrived she took the Echavarria children home with her while Mama and I finished out the time with the three we had that evening. I called the pastor to let him know I had punched a hole in the door but that I would replace it. A rather humbling conversation.

Saturday Mama, Victoria and the children went to Trade Days. I told Mama she would have much more fun if I was not along – based on my outburst the night before. I continued my work on the chicken coop and when I ran out of materials I worked on a couple little items on the house and the farm. I got our last bale of hay to Daisy and as I was clearing that up I noticed Chester working on the fence across the road from us. We talked for a few minutes and he mentioned that a grass fire could be headed our way.

A neighbor was burning something on his property and the fire got out of control. Fortunately, it was a very slow burning fire. Through that fire I got to meet the owner of the property beside us, Ricky Taylor. I was impressed by him. I also go to meet Chuck Smith, Chester’s boss. In an attempt to hinder the fire from coming on to our property Ricky got his tractor and twenty foot disk to plow a firebreak. Chester, Chuck and I took down enough fence to get the tractor and implement through but the firebreak never got tested. Someone called the fire department and they showed up to put out what was left of the fire just before 9 pm.

It was an interesting weekend.