High On Polyurethane and Some Reflections on 2008...

Oh my word I haven't been around the blog world in forever. The last week has been a whirlwind of remodeling. If you need a refresher, see Our New House Oh, and remember, Internet Explorer hates my blog so you pretty much need to download the new IE or use Firefox, Safari or pretty much any other browser on the planet to really maneuver through the site. Dude, I don't know what the problem is, and I am not a code genius, so I have no idea how to fix the problem. Just download Firefox, please, you'll thank me for it later.

So anyway, last Friday we started stripping the hardwood floor upstairs, ridding it of the atrocity of paint on hardwood. After paint stripping, a massive sanding job, and finally deciding on a stain after hours in the hardware store discussing the good and the bad of a million different stains, we are now down to the final stages. Who knew that redoing a floor would take hours of sanding, two coats of stain and three coats of polyurethane? If I had only known. And the worst part, I don't know, I'm debating whether the worst part is my terrible backaches, knee aches, and butt aches, the fact that when you redo a floor, absoluely everyhing in that room has to somehow make friends with the furniture somewhere else in the house, or maybe it's the massive layer of sawdust that ended up accumulating over absolutely every surface imaginable in my house. I think even my front porch is covered in sawdust. I don't know for sure, but I think it has some sawdust on it.

Last night was the first night since probably Saturday that I went to bed before 3 a.m. On Tuesday night I actually went to bed at 5:30 in the morning. I didn't go to bed until the entire staining project was complete. Around three or four I think the room started spinning.

But here's the finished product with the new walls and the new floor in Kaydn Rye's room. He wanted blue walls and a purple floor. I think this was a good comprimise though. I'll post some more pictures once we get the furniture in and the pictures on the wall.





So anyway, after that remodel update (which I'm sure you've just been dying to read all week), while I've been getting high on massive layers of polyurethane I have also been reflecting on the last year. Replaying the events of 2008, we started the year hoping to thaw from our new life in the frozen plains of North Dakota. From there hubby acclamated to his new life as an insurance agent and I continued my investigations/judgment enforcement business here in North Dakota with all the massive licensing requirements and other bureacratic red, black and orange tape that went with it.

That spring Kaydn Rye turned the big three. I'm not really sure how to completely describe it, but he's like a little person all of a sudden. He's got his own little thoughts and ideas about how life should be, and I know now why you prety much have to control them at all times when their young in order to control them when they're teenagers. The teenage years are creeping up on me and I'm nipping them in the bud while I still can.

The joys of working from home with a preschooler have been... joyful I guess, but sometimes...not so much. I love the kid, which is why it's tough, but in the three years he's been alive, I think I'm learning a thing or to about parenting. For more on my little leech of a child, see I Need My Space!

We also started home preschool, which was an adventure. We will eventually home school starting in Kindergarten, but I was hoping to have a few more years of non-homeschooling, which is why Kaydn Rye was promised he could attend a regular preschool when he turned three. That's actually how I got him to stop peeing in my closet and start peeing in the toilet - he couldn't go to preschool until he stopped peeing at will. It worked and he was on his way to preschool. Except I forgot to get the application in in time to the only preschool in town that would take him immediately after his third birthday, and some other kid got our spot. That's how I got roped into home preschool and we continued that through June. I needed the summer off, so we took the summer off, and that was my launching into home school.

Most of the spring I also worked on my biggest judgment collection yet, about $15,000. To collect that I ended up drafting the motion of my career to try and convince the judge that a deadbeat hiding behind a corporation should be made personally liable for his massive corporate debts. The motion did its job and in a few days I had a check in the mail.

After that, my business was plagued with all kinds of crap only G-d could have sent to let me know that my time as a judgment enforcer is about up. Let's see, there was the unauthorized practice of law accusation and subsequent investigation, there was the judgment that I had worked on forever that ended with the debtor and I sitting at his bankruptcy hearing. That was great. And then there were the absolutely wonderful licensing examinations by the state that go on all throughout the year just so I can keep my license to collect judgments. I am way too republican to allow a state government official to rummage through my files, my computer, my business checkbook and interrogate me for hours about my accounting practices, which really suck by the way.

But onto something a little less political, after the spring, there was of course summer. As my second summer working from home, we again took advantage of my ability to just scrap everything for the afternoon and head to the park for hours of fun with screaming children running amuck around the monkey bars. Kaydn Rye learned to ride his trike like an Olympic bicyclist, and we lived about four blocks from the park. Put those two together and you have pretty much daily trips to the park with the kid and dog in tow.

This summer also marked the beginning of my many years as a chauffer I'm sure. Kaydn Rye started swimming lessons and Itty Bitty Sports at the YMCA while I chatted it up with all the YMCA moms.

And there were also the many summer nights we spent just sitting on our front porch getting eaten alive by the North Dakota state bird, the mosquito.

There were a few trips to the lake, which cost us each a kidney to even afford to drive there. There was a trip to the always wonderful Blaisdell Rodeo (see This is How We Do It...In North Dakota anyway) and the summer was complete with a couple trips to the fair, which left Kaydn Rye nauseous and almost puking on the big bear ride. I thought for sure I was going to end up carting around a smelly, puke-stained child for the remainder of the day, but all was well after the spinning finally stopped.

I turned 27, or is it 26 (I think it's 27) during the summer and we marked the occasion with a trip to the fair and a Sugarland concert. I received the lovely gift of a working vacuum (see My Vacuum Sucks). Around that time my closest great-aunt died as well (see Legacy of Two Norwegian Immigrants). My paternal grandfather, who I feel like I never really knew until the time of his death, died as well. All I can say about that is that I will always feel like a piece of my history that I may never really understand was put into the ground and that's just the way it is. See Grandpa's Funeral.. For most of my life I guess I saw my grandfather as someone who could never die.

Also at the end of the summer, while hubby was on a local short term missions trip, Kaydn Rye and I were on our way with some friends to Otter Tail, MN for the yearly Firestarters tent/worship revival called The Gathering. See A Word of Prophecy For the Future. It was there that I was given a word of prophecy for the future, and that was really one of those life-transforming moments for me.

The summer also marked the purchase of our house in the middle of nowhere. We knew that we were not going to be able to buy the house we had been renting since the last minute decision to move to crazy North Dakota, so we started looking for another one in June. While browsing through some online listings, a passing, "Oh, that's a cute house, I wish it wasn't an hour away from civilization in the middle of nowhere, then we could buy it," turned in to me driving an hour to look at the house with a friend to not really liking the house enough to move to the absolute middle of nowhere, to driving by another house with a for sale in the yard as we were on our way out of town and calling up the realtor to look at it. That turned into, "I'll have a contract for you by the end of the day," to days of finagling about the price to finally having a contract on the house.

But in July the seller decided we were seriosly ripping him off, so he sold the house from under us. From there, we were back to the drawing board. Well, if we had a drawing board we would have gone back to it, but instead, we went back to driving around and looking at houses. You would think that would have been the end of the talk about moving to Kenmare, but after taking a drive through Kenmare on his way back from an appointment with a client, hubby ended up seeing a for sale sign by a house he knew he couldn't pass up even if it just happened to be in the middle of nowhere in the tiniest town imaginable. All of a sudden it was back to Kenmare again and by the next day we had a contract on that house (see The Journey to Our New House).

So we bought it and packed up all our junk and headed down the highway to the wonderful town of Kenmare. We picked up some paint, some wall-paper remover and a lot of ambition, and we are gradually de-wallpapering every room in the house.

With the move to Kenmare, I was also able to get Kaydn Rye enrolled in the fall semester of preschool here in Kenmare. Well, actually it wasn't that easy. We ended up getting caught in the mortgage mess, and our wonderful no down payment loan ended up getting flushed down the toilet. Somehow the down payment money showed up, but it wasn't without having our closing date come and gone by about two weeks.

So for those two weeks, Kaydn Rye was enrolled in preschool in Kenmare and we were living an hour away. I put on my driving shoes again and made the trek twice a week to Kenmare so that Kaydn Rye wouldn't miss his first couple weeks of preschool. I never have quite figured out what the proper preschool attendance etiquette all entails, but I erred on the side of caution and assumed that it was a pretty big faux pas for me to not have him there everyday.

Now that we are all moved in, we live two blocks from school so we venture into the subzero temperaures and walk to school most days. I still do some home lessons with him as well, but who knew how much home preschool could completely take over your life.

Now, we walk to most places - the post office, the library, the drug store, the chinese place. And everybody knows our name. When I walk into the post office, Barb, who according to Kaydn actually lives in the back of the post office, is there with all my mail ready and some friendly banter about my packages and of course the weather. And when my books are late at the library, Pauline always renews them for me without even a phone call. And of course, the lady at the drug store now knows my entire life story because, well, you can't move in to Kenmare without telling the entire town about where you came from and why you moved to town. And the lady at the chinese restaurant probably knows my dress size, my date of birth, how much I purchased my house for and all about how much money I make each year because she just does not hesitate to ask such questions. I can't understand her half the time because her language is pretty much all chinese to me, but I simply nod and smile.

Since the move we have been remodeling, remodeling, remodeling and the difficulties that seemed to plauge us upon first moving to the tundra seem to be behind us. Except for the fact that it's 3 below zero half the year here, but that's a problem that I cannot fix.

We still do our monthly get-togethers with friends for games and food and enlightening conversation, but the crowds aren't quite as large now that everyone has to drive an hour just to get here. We still attend the church of G-d that we've attended since we moved to North Dakota a little more than a year ago, so Sunday is pretty much a wash, with an hour drive to church, some time sitting in church, a lunch date with friends after church and an hour drive home after that, but I make do because I don't think I'd survive just cruising around Kenmare all week. And you guessed it, I have a post about surviving the full week in Kenmare too, see I am the Pioneering Woman.

In November, now that I live almost in the epicenter of pretty much all my family, it was my turn to make Thanksgiving dinner for all of them. I seriously rocked the turkey and fun was had by all. See Greased Up Turkeys and Machetes for the details. Hubby and Kaydn Rye ventured to Idaho for Kaydn Rye's first meeting of hubby's family, and I spent an entire week in heaven, ALL BY MYSELF.

Despite the fact that you can't venture outside for much of the year here without practically a spacesuit on, I am so thankful to be back where I can see my grandparents almost once a week. They are simply an ice and snow packed 45 minute jaunt down the road.

And now, hubby's job has been reaping many financial blessings after some time of definiely not reaping financial blessings. But I consider those times a blessing as well. After that time of really struggling, it seems I now look at the provision of Jesus in a whole other light. And of course, I now know how to hit every grocery store in town looking for every single sale item I can find in an attempt at living on a $300 a month grocery budget in an area that has some of the highest food prices in the entire country (do you know how much it costs to truck the food all the way up here to the middle of nowhere?!). So, life lessons learned, and blessings gained out of doing what we can with what G-d has given us.

Also in 2008, actually, pretty recently, I began a new freelance job. I haven't told you about that one yet because I pretty much needed to wait and make sure that it was going to work out first. Wouldn't that be great, tell all of you about my great and wonderful new job just to tell you a week later, "Oh, by the way, that job didn't really work out after all." But it looks like it's a go, and that the prophecy is coming to pass. I won't reveal too many details about the job until next week, but let's just say that I quite possibly could have completed my last wage garnishment of my entire investigations career last week. If the job works out I'll work way less hours than I did with my business for the same amount of money, and I don't have to do any accounting. That's worth it's weight in gold right there.

And of course, earlier this year I also started this little blog. Now you can find me here, at Boutique Flair as the resident writer on all things having to do with "eco-friendly" living, and at Take Root and Write where I blog about beauty and wellness. Not sure how I landed those gigs, but nonetheless, you can find me at Boutique Flair on Tuesdays and Take Root on Thursdays. See Where You Can Find Me for all the details.

We ended the year with the exchanging of New Years presents yesterday (in lieu of Christmas presents), and a little get together yesterday at our house with the most awesome ham dinner ever. I seriously rocked the ham with my praline glaze (it's honey, brown sugar, melted butter and chopped up pecans if anyone wants to know). We gave Kaydn Rye his Leapster and he was quite a happy camper, or gamer I guess I should say.



Don't ask me what was up with my hair. It had been a long day and I don't even think I put on much more than some cover up and lip gloss yesterday. When that happens you know I am seriously worn out.

So, 2008 has brought a new life, a new house, a new job, after a lot of years of just real struggle, disillusionment and some realy crappy life stuff. I'm excited about 2009 and what G-d has in mind for this year.

This year has really been exhausting, so right now, in the middle of the afternoon, I am off to take a bubble bath and spend a relaxing day full of nothin.



Show Me Your Web Site and I'll Vote For You!!