The Calm Before the Storm

We're in kind of an awkward state these days... We know we've got some big changes coming, but for the moment we're at kind of a standstill. There are so many things that we will need to get done, but it's still too early to start most of it.

Take packing for our upcoming trip to MN, for instance. I can't really do any packing yet, because we still have about 2 1/2 weeks of living here before we head out, and we all still need all of our clothes and toiletries pretty much until the day before we leave.

Since we haven't sold our house yet and we aren't moving all of our things, and our house is being shown from time to time, we can't really pack up any of those things either.

Our basement needs to be cleaned out and things disinfected due to this discovery, but we don't want to do that until it comes time to move, so that we can take everything out, disinfect it, and put it right into the semi trailer that my brother-in-law is so graciously going to help us move with.

Instead I am trying to finish up some small projects and keep up with the day to day tasks as best I can. Today I spent quite a bit of time cooking and even had some time to play with some photos.

As I'm going about my day I keep on stopping and asking myself, "Wait. Shouldn't I be doing something else? Something that will get us ready for the move?" Then I realize that we're pretty much on schedule for most things in that regard and I keep on putsing along with what I was doing.

I also find myself realizing how many things that I do every day (and have been doing almost every day for a couple years now) that very soon I will no longer do every day. Most of them are really nothing significant, just the idiosyncrasies of our life... Pulling up the shades on our windows every morning and looking out at the horses, greeting the little boy that I've been watching three days a week, talking to the neighbors about this or that, letting the dogs in and out, Mr. Blue Eyes calling me on his lunch break and on his way home from work. Since I've been a stay-at-home mom, this house and I have gotten quite intimate. I can't say that I'm sad to leave it really, but it has been a good little first home for us, so it's special to me in some way.

I guess that's just how life is... Everything stays the same until, well, it changes.

As the next few weeks roll along I'm sure we'll get more into the nitty-gritty of packing and preparing, but for now things are strangely quiet and mundane. It's hard to believe that in a few short weeks this quiet and mundane existence will have vanished into thin air.

Not that things in the future won't be quiet and mundane too. I'm sure we'll quickly settle into our new routines.

We're quiet people. And we like being mundane. It suits our nature.

It's this whirlwind that lies between the quiet and mundane in Colorado and the quiet and mundane in Minnesota that gives me something to stir about. I can't help but wonder...

p.s. I tell you no lie... Shortly after I finished this post we started to hear the rumblings of our first thunder of the spring. The winds of change are a'blowin'!

Disturbing on So Many Levels

In the mountains, there are certain animals that seem to exist in the food chain, and certain animals that... Well... Don't. 

The ones that survive seem to be the really big ones, like bears, mountain lions, coyotes, deer, elk, moose, etc... Small ones, like mice and rats, seem to do fairly well for themselves as well.

Cats are part of the grouping of animals that.... Don't.... really..... have..... much luck surviving in the mountains. The mountain lions and coyotes really like to eat them. It's a fact.

And you know what happens when the cats don't survive? The mice do.

Above is a picture of our beloved, dearly departed (we're pretty sure), Redford.

Oh, Redford... He was SUCH a good cat. The best. Not only did he single-handedly keep the mouse population at bay around our house, but also was sweet, house-trained (no litter box... he went outside), and good with the kids.

When I was pregnant with Little Blue Eyes and experiencing some cramping early on, nothing helped until he crawled into bed with me and layed on my abdomen for a couple hours, helping me fall asleep. I don't know what it was -- the warmth or the weight of his soft little body -- but when I woke up, the cramping was gone.

Like I said, he was SUCH a good cat. Sob.

We were very sad when he disappeared last June. At first we weren't going to get another cat, but then I figured I would rather have a cat than mice, so that is how Paula Deen came into our family...

I really like her and she is almost everything I could ever want in a cat.

She's really pretty.

But guess what... Pretty is as pretty does.

She really is not a very good mouser. We don't let her outside because, like I happened to mention, cats don't fare so well living outdoors in the mountains, and we'd rather keep her alive, unlike poor Redford.

Sob.

This leads me to the incredibly disturbed state that I find myself in at the moment.

It all started innocently enough... Some family had passed onto us some baby clothes. I had the urge to wrangle up all of our baby clothes, some of which were packed away in our basement (which is unfinished and is not connected to the main level of our house... you have to go outside to another door) and sort through them, organizing them by size, gender, country in which they were produced and the RGB color scale.

Yes, I was going to get things organized.

I went down to the basement to get the tubs of clothes stored down there. Somehow this little task mushroomed to me embarking upon a full exploration of the contents of all of the tubs of randomness stored in our basement, as well as miscellaneous horse tack, fencing equipment, gardening supplies, household items, and the like.

I was getting way to big for my britches.

I'm always up for a big project, and since we're (hopefully) moving sometime soon here, I thought I had better just dive in and get the basement all tidied up.

The thing is -- and this is where my current state of mental disturbance comes in -- there was mouse poop EVERYWHERE.

Shudder. Shake. Cringe. Squint. Gag. Shiver.

I am not opposed to getting my hands dirty. I have done my share of dirty jobs and come out the other side sparking and triumphant. I can handle the dirt. I can handle some grunge.

But mouse poop is another matter.

Luckily, I did not do any sweeping or vacuuming or really anything that would have stirred it up much and made it airborne, but I am still totally freaked out. Why? Because I did a little internet research (after I emerged from the basement, of course) and found out about a little thing called the hantavirus.

Shiver.

In sort of a weird coincidence, Mr. Blue Eyes was meeting at our church with a local health department worker to keep up on the water system maintenance, so I called him and asked if he could pick the guy's brain as to how to deal with all this mouse poop. He said that they really don't worry too much about hantavirus where we live because it is transmitted by the deer mouse, and most of our mice are field mice.

O.k., so that's good.

He said to use a bleach solution to disinfect before cleaning.

O.k., good. I still don't want to have anything to do with the mouse poop, but at least we don't have to hire a haz-mat team or anything.

The chances are slim that I would have inhaled anything, and even slimmer that anything I did inhale would contain the virus.

Sure, good.

But in all honesty, I am still FREAKED OUT! I think all my internet research almost gave me a heart attack.

I'm just a bit shaken up about the whole thing.

To get my mind off of it, I immersed myself in the world of baby clothes. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy for awhile. Then I realized the immense amount of clothes that I have to sort through and that feeling of approaching heart attack crept back. Then I started having visions of all the boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes that I'll have to deal with when we move, and I felt like I was going to faint.

Seriously... The head spinning, walls closing in and everything.

Now I'm sitting here, writing to any of you who will read, sharing my freaked-outed-ness. And you know what, I think it helps me feel a little bit better! I just needed someone to know what I'm going through. Thanks for listening. You're super.

I think I'm ready to take on those baby clothes now.

p.s. - Redford, I miss you so, so much. If by some small chance you're still alive, please come home and lay on my uterus and kill all the mice.

Bloggerlust

There's something stinky in my house.

It's perplexing.

How could there be something stinky in MY house?

It's not like we have two dogs, a cat, a dirty mountain lumberjack and two children in diapers living here or anything.

It's not like we've been really, really busy lately and haven't had time to keep up on our general homestead sterilization techniques or anything.

It's not like it's possible that several rogue grapes could be wedged in the cushions of the couch or anything.

It's not like I have a little boy who on occasion may miss the target and pee around the toilet instead of in the toilet or anything.

No, it's not like we've got any of those things going on. Not around here. No sir.

See? Perplexing.

I think that I have deduced that it's probably coming from the garbage. This is really a good thing. If something is going to stink in your house, the smell really should be coming from your garbage. That's where stinky things, indoors, are really supposed to reside.

So, I really shouldn't be here to say 'hi' to any of you. I really shouldn't be posting a blog at this moment. I should be sniffing out the source of the stink and dousing it with baking soda or lysol or something.

But I am... I am here... Yes, I'm blogging. I just would so rather do this, and maybe dabble in a little photography or cooking tutorials online than act as a stink-sniffing-searching bloodhound. Blogging and photography and cooking are just so much less stinky.

I also have all these fresh and new ideas for different blog section designs. I could just sit here all day and play with graphics and layout. I really could.

Why do I find my moments of inspiration during times when I really, really, really am supposed to be doing something else? And why is that 'something else' always an undesirable task?

It's so funny how that works.

I'd love to sit here all day and play, but my contribution to the household is general cleaning and organization, and... You guessed it... Stink prevention.

As Simon would say, "Off I go."

But before I leave, can I just leave you with something? A little photographic love letter that I can think back on when I'm elbow deep in stink and chaos and dog hair and baby poop?

I can? Thanks. You're the best. Here you go...

Ah, yes. That should do it. I can practically smell the freshness radiating out of the flowers. That should be enough to counteract the stink I am about to encounter.

If you're having a stinky day, I hope these flowers help you as much as they've helped me.

 

p.s. It's also not like I boiled milk over on the stove the other day and still haven't cleaned it up or anything. This stink is just the darndest thing. I can't figure it out.

Backflow

As I begin to write I can't help but notice how use of that word -- backflow -- almost never has good implications...

"Ma'am, what you've got here is backflow from your septic system into your toilet."

"There was significant backflow from the river into the flooded area."

"My cookies backflowed from my stomach into the trash can."

O.k., that last one may not be the most accurate usage of the word. But you get what I mean... In general, things are supposed to flow one direction. And when they flow in the opposite direction, for whatever reason, it's usually not good.

Unfortunately, that's the case with Miss Peaches. It started a few weeks back when she had her six-month check up. As expected, she developed a fever after getting her immunizations. However, after three days and a continued fever, I was worried, so I called the doctor and they had me bring her back in. All signs of a respiratory infection were absent, and they didn't think that the shots were what was causing the problem, so they suspected a urinary tract infection.

A what? A urinary tract infection? In my baby? No! She's too little for that kind of problem! Isn't she? Turned out not.

I don't know why, but the thought of that was traumatic enough for me as it was. Unfortunately (I may use that word a lot throughout this post) that was not the entire problem. Turned out that, at this age, when a baby has a u.t.i. they also suspect a reflux of urine from the bladder to the kidneys when they pee.

Did I offend anyone by saying 'pee'? I hope not. I'm just too familiar a person to be saying 'urinate' or 'void' or any other of that technical jargon. I mean, we're all friends here, not medical colleagues, right? 

So, this morning we had to take her back for an x-ray procedure, called a VCUG, in which they put a dye in the bladder that shows up on the x-ray and shows if the urine is backflowing (I'm really starting to hate that word) or not. She was brave. Braver than me. While I was praying to God that the test would just come back negative and having flashbacks of being in the hospital with my dad as he was dying a few months ago, she was gurgling and playing with the blown up latex glove they gave her like a little champ.

Unfortunately, the test did come back positive. She does have backflow, or more accurately, vesicoureteral reflux. But that was really hard to spell, and I'm pretty sure I couldn't pronounce it if I tried to say it out loud, so let's just call it backflow. The good news is that it's not as bad as it could be. The bad news is that it's not as good as it could be (i.e. absent from her precious, innocent little anatomy). Out of grades 1-5, 1 being the best and 5 being the worst, she has grade 2/3.

We have to meet with a urologist for a final opinion, but our doctor thinks that we will likely put her on a low grade antibiotic to prevent any u.t.i.'s from reoccurring (this is the whole problem with this problem... u.t.i.'s can develop into a kidney infection, resulting in kidney damage) for six months to a year and then repeat the test to see if it has resolved itself. And I guess that's more good news... It's likely that she will grow out of this. And the other good news is that we caught it early, hopefully before any kidney damage can occur.

I'm never opposed to prayer, for me or others, so if you've got a spare minute to put a little whisper in God's ear on Miss Peaches' behalf, I'd be ever so appreciative.