hqueen's collection of Far From the Usual stuff.

baymule

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If you can wait until a holiday weekend, they might go on sale. I bought a laptop AFTER a Father's Day sale once, a $700, marked down to $500, then on clearance for $300.
 

hqueen13

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Yeah, @baymule that's what I'm hoping I can do!
Thanks FEM, :hugs

Easter is one of those holidays that I just don't really celebrate much anymore. Since I'm not religious, and my day in the barn falls on Sunday morning, I don't go to church. (I'm also terribly uncomfortable going with the BF to his catholic church.)

Saturday we got a lot of running done. We made a dump run (forgot to empty the other trash cans in the house and forgot to clean out the fridge. Gah!), and then headed down to fix the door on the hay feeder that we sold to GH, it was sticking really badly. Of course the batteries weren't fully charged for the power tools, so we ended up sitting there waiting for those for a while. Finally had enough charge to get the boards cut down and then rescrewed back together again. Headed over to my hay guy to pick up a load of hay (next farm over from GH! really convenient!), and then took that up to the farm. Managed to avoid getting stuck in a conversation with TM (I LOVE her, but sometimes we just need to get in and out again!), and got the hay unloaded quickly, then cleaned out the back of the truck, and grabbed some more things from the barn where our stuff is stored. We got the chairs for the porch, and the hose reel, plus some other odds and ends. Then we grabbed lunch, and headed back home.

Thankfully it was beautiful, so we were able to do some more work outside. I got my truck vacuumed out from the potting soil explosion (spilled potting soil when I picked up plants for the office... then drove with my windows down.... potting soil ALLLLLLLL over my truck!!!!!). It felt good to get it cleaned up again, and get all the various random things put away neatly in all the awesome storage cubbies in my truck! The BF worked on a few things, and then spent some more time working in the basement getting his work benches fixed and the lighting stuff put in. Otherwise, we didn't do a whole lot after that.

Sunday morning I had to get up and head to the barn. The BF had told the family he'd bring a cheesecake for dessert, so he started making that. He was late to church, but his brother's strolled in about the same time so I guess it was all ok. I got my chores done reasonably quickly, and then headed home. I had just enough time to soak in the bath for a few minutes and then shower before we had to head to his cousin's house. We were the first ones from his family to get there, no surprise there, but it was nice to hang out for a little while while it was quiet. It was great to see some of his family that we haven't seen for a while. We finally were one of the last ones to leave and got back home and finally cleaned up the basement. It was GROSS between the cat litter and the mess from the wood stove, and all the junk lying around, I was done. The BF has been so wrapped up working on his work benches that he hasn't been interested in doing anything else. So I got after him about it and he agreed to help me get it all cleaned up. We finished that up pretty quickly and got some laundry started. I noticed that the washer was smelling like rotten eggs, which we smelled the week before when we were running laundry but didn't connect it back to the machine. After we finished most of the other chores I went upstairs and relaxed for a while, and when I got dinner started the BF came up and said he'd taken the washer apart to see what was going on with it. Who does that?! He found out that two stabilizer arms were broken, which is why it makes such a god awful racket sometimes, and that the pump which pumps out the dirty water was right in the front. He also said he really felt like it would probably be smartest to just buy a new machine rather than trying to fix this one. It has the worlds smallest drum anyway, so it takes 3 loads to get our laundry washed, where the machine at GH's house would do it all in ONE load. The energy and water savings from doing fewer loads of laundry in and of itself will be worth buying something newer/bigger, not to mention that I'm sure something newer would be more efficient anyway. So we'll see what happens, but I think we're in the market for a new machine. I guess we'll have to see how much we can squeeze out of the budget to cover that in the next month. In the mean time I'm not sure what we'll do about laundry, but I guess we'll see what he says. The darn thing locked the door and wouldn't open after he ran another load, so what the heck do we do if we can't get the door open!?

In other news I worked way too few hours last pay period, and so now I'm stuck with not quite enough money to keep things covered until I get paid again. Fun times. I really need to make sure I'm working all my hours for the next few weeks so I don't miss out on anything. I've been taking part in a program for my business, and the calls have been on Mondays, so I've been leaving the office early, which hasn't helped my hours any. Thankfully it's only a month, so I'll be back to a more normal schedule again pretty soon. I just have to get creative between now and then...

Not much else happening... Need to get my business moving a bit more and follow up on some contacts that I've made to see if I can get some more income rolling in. That would be a really good thing!
 

frustratedearthmother

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Oh geeze - really sucks about the washing machine. You expect that to get things sweet smelling and clean - not to stink to high heaven! :( Hope you can get a new one quickly!
 

sumi

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I got my truck vacuumed out from the potting soil explosion (spilled potting soil when I picked up plants for the office... then drove with my windows down.... potting soil ALLLLLLLL over my truck!!!!!).
This reminded me of something that happened to me a few years ago. We had a contact for cow manure from a farmer a few miles from us and we went there a few times with feed sacks to get dried manure for our compost heaps (I made and sold some compost and used a ton of the stuff in our garden nursery). My car's driver side window got smashed and we didn't get round to replacing it yet, but headed out with a friend to collect some manure. It was a hot day and we were sweating like mad. Driving back my ex had the great idea to go fast… Being sticky from the sweat already of course did not help that mini hurricane of fine dry cow manure going on inside my poor car, so by the time we got home we all three were covered from head to toe in a dusting of cow manure.. We did what we could, burst out laughing and cued for the shower!
 

frustratedearthmother

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Ohhhh noooooo @sumi! I can only imagine the mess that made! Nothing worse than being hot and sweaty and covered with powdered cow manure!
 

baymule

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I HATE going to a laundromat. If I go to he!! when I die, my punishment forever will be to go to the laundromat and do ALL the dirty laundry.

I have a Sanyo front loader and I adore it. I can cram a butt load of laundry in it, it saves me from spending all day on laundry. I got the dryer to go with it and a stacker thing to go between them. I've always had top loaders, but this front loader is fabulous!
 

hqueen13

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Hmmm, I'll have to research that one @baymule I haven't heard of it!

OMG @sumi that's hilarious!!!! I've had a few moments like that in my life, too. Thankfully this wasn't poop, so that was a little better at least!

Not a whole lot happening, which I guess is good. I managed to stop by a little woowoo shop in town and scheduled a day to sessions. I hope that goes well, income would be awesome! I also had lunch with a good friend of mine that I haven't seen in a while. We both said we must do it more often, and I would really love to be able to to do that.

I finally got my new logos back and I'm so excited to start using them. I've got to get all my images updated with the logo now, which takes a while, but I don't mind, that's fun work! I need to get business cards designed so I can start using them!

Not much else going on otherwise, I guess that's good. Of course they're calling for snow this weekend again, but they keep changing the amount, so we'll see what we actually end up with.
 

hqueen13

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We had an ok weekend, not much to write home about really. Saturday morning (most of the day, really) the BF worked overtime, which is awesome. He said that he was only a few hours away from the 60 hour cap that they give him, so that's GOOD. That'll be another FAT check and we can really make some headway into setting aside the funds for the washer and a new hot water heater. But it meant that I sat at home on my butt most of the day. I was going to go down to the barn and work Storm, but when I got there it was COLD and I ended up standing around talking to TM for over an hour, and then I was FROZEN and so I just went home. Waste of gas and time (though I love talking to TM and she and I hadn't had much of a chance to catch up in a while). I'm down to a quarter tank again, which is crazy. I use way too much gas! But I've got to get around, so it is what it is.

The BF got home and he snacked a little and then we decided to take a nap. I was STILL not fully warm from standing in the cold for so long and so we curled up and fell asleep for almost 2 hours. Oops. We finally got up and made a frozen pizza for dinner. Sunday morning I had to get up and go to the barn, so he stayed home and futzed around for a while. After I finished at the barn I had to head over the other farm where my friend was doing body work. I needed it soooo bad. I felt so much better after she got done working on me! I headed home and the BF had lunch started which was awesome. We ate and then he wanted to get a cabinet hung on the wall over the washer. That took some futzing, but we managed to get it up there. It's SO nice to have everything off the top of the washer and dryer now. It all has a happy place to go! Now the washer won't fling stuff off of it!

He wanted to pick up a few things at Lowes, and we decided to head down to his parent's house since they were away at the beach and get some more of our stuff. We took my old black explorer, and didn't have as much room as we'd hoped, there's really only mostly big stuff left, at this point. We got all of our hand tools, which was a LOT (I have no idea how we went from owning NO garden tools to owning like 6 shovels in the time span we lived at the other farm, but somehow that happened). So we got all of that into the shed which we reorganized last week. We've still got to figure out a better way to store them, but hopefully we can get that sorted soon. The darn shed is too short for most of them to actually stand up, which is annoying, but we know we will be replacing it eventually. I REALLY wanted to get the grill back, but it wouldn't fit into the truck, so we'll have to actually bring the pickup truck down at some point and get the bigger things. I hope we can do that this weekend because I'm ready to grill again! I want burgers!! They're just not the same when they're not cooked on the grill!

The weather that was supposed to come in was a total bust, thankfully. Saturday it was cold, gray and windy. Sunday was at least sunny, so if you could be out of the wind the sun felt great and made up for the cool temps. I'm glad it didn't come through the way they were saying because that would have been really annoying! I don't know who got it, but it missed us! It looks like it's supposed to warm up this week, it might still be a bit windy, but at least it will be warmer! Hopefully I can actually work Storm and then trim his feet again. I'm aiming to do that tomorrow, so we'll see what we can do.

My grandmother is back in the hospital again. They think it might be congestive heart failure, but they're still trying to sort it out. She keeps going into AFib and they can't get her heart rate under control. She has fluid in her left lung, but yet doesn't have poor lung sounds, and her white cell count is up. They thought it was pneumonia, but one of the docs suggested the heart failure. It's really hit me hard, harder than losing my other grandmother was. So now we're looking at planning a trip down some time this summer. I just hope we do have enough time. We'll see. She'll be 90 on her birthday in August, so I think there's a party being planned. I hope that it can happen! So we'll see how things go.

That's about all that's happening around here at this point. Looks like a fairly normal week for me. I have to make sure I keep my hours up so I can get a good check in the office to catch up on some of these bills (and pay my taxes. UGH). In addition to that I need to keep working on my biz stuff. It should be a pretty good week to get things done.
 

frustratedearthmother

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Sounds like things are moving along - even if they're not moving at the speed you want! Hope your grandmother improves and enjoys a wonderful b'day party!
 

baymule

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We had a killing frost last weekend and are on track for another cold weekend. But it's supposed to be warm this week, so working outside all we can!
 
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