The NFC B-Day Chat Thread

My goodness you kids are chipper in the early morning. 😁. Went to see a nephrologist this morning. Long story short, looks like my kidneys are good, and I , don't, have an adrenal problem! Mammogram yesterday looked good, they just can't figure out my woozy head. I don't think that will ever be resolved now. Bummer. :(. Oh well, no one ever said getting older is a fun trip.

Glad things checked out Cynthia (but sorry about your woozy head).
 
I haven't, but I once had a fabulous recipe for a pound cake using peach brandy. I lost it and haven't been able to find it anywhere. I also lost my recipe for mulled sweet wine. It was so much better than any other that I've had.
I'm sounding like a regular sot. 🤣I'm truly not much of a drinker.
Peach brandy pound cake sounds pretty delisherous Janie!
 
My poor DS is not very well. He's picked up a bit of a stomach bug (not sure from where as we don't go anywhere). At first it was just a sore stomach (I thought it might have been a sugar overload from all our leftovers) but this morning he's been vomiting a bit. :(

And madam house cow is looking tasty. 🤣 She's started holding up her milk and barely giving me any. I'm just trying to decide the best course of action going forward. She can be a stubborn little brat when she wants to be. I don't think she'll be my long-term house cow but she's all I've got at the moment.

And I've had to bring 2 cockatiel chicks in a little ahead of schedule because the parent/s started plucking them. But they are eating well and they are going to be pretty birds once their feathers open up.

We have one older cockatiel we will be keeping. He eats and drinks just fine, and he weaned just like the others, but he's very scruffy. He tries to preen himself but doesn't do a very good job (some of the base of his feathers haven't lost their pin feather coating). He's also very clumsy and pretty 'slow' in general. His siblings were all fine and we've kept his older brother for breeding because of the mutations he's carrying (whiteface and lutino). But I'm not sure what happened to Dash here. He's as sweet as honey but I wouldn't like to sell him just in case something is wrong.

View attachment 2944452View attachment 2944454

Hope everyone is having a great day.
Sorry about the kiddo, hopefully he’s been through the worst of it.
 
Kidneys.


Sounds like you already had a few helpings IM!!!
Ahh..just got back from my Nephrologist today. Mine are looking good. Took a couple of photos on the way the home. Getting more snow tonight.
20211230_120300.jpg
20211230_120403.jpg
20211230_120059.jpg
20211230_115931.jpg
 
Okay, my computer is still missing in inaction, but we did manage to find the keyboard for my iPad. So I guess I can type my saga with this….at least it‘s easier than trying to do it on a touch screen! This is going to be LONG!!

I‘ll start with the move, although it kinda combines the kidney sage and the house saga a bit. Back in very early spring, my numbers tanked. A GFR of 15 is usually when they start talking dialysis (which as most of you know I refuse to even consider), and my number had crept down to 19. I sank into a bit of a depression - it seemed that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep those numbers up. I’d have a pretty good series, in the mid to upper twenties, then start to drop again. One day I looked around at the old trailer and I burst into tears. I told Ken that I didn’t want to die in that old place. I know, melodramatic, but that’s exactly how I felt. So we started looking at modular homes. He let me do the choosing. I chose the Mt. Hesperus, by Champion.

At first, from the moment I chose the house and the dealer, a wonderful young local woman named Hannah, things went fast. She and I spent hours choosing options, designing my dream kitchen, redesigning, adding windows in the bedrooms, choosing cabinets and flooring, and I could feel my spirits lift with every phone call, text message, and email. Funny, I’d never stepped foot in this house until it was delivered to Cowley, and even then I could only get into one half at a time. Hannah doesn’t have a show lot, and that’s why she can sell the same homes for thousands of dollars less than dealerships in Billings. Instead her clients become her friends, and they are thrilled to let her bring potential buyers for tours of their homes, just as we will be. The models aren’t the same, but the quality, some of the options, the color schemes and so on gave me a real good idea of what I liked and what I didn’t. I found our home online, I studied reviews online to find the best dealer I could, I contacted her online, we met at her house/office a few times finalizing pricing and options, she helped us find the best financing - online though a local bank - and finally on April 30 we closed on our construction loan. Then fast slowed down….way down. By then there was a 300% increase in demand as people were flooding out of Covid and violence-ridden cities and coming out west to buy up any postage stamp piece of land they could and putting up modulars. So we were delayed. And delayed. And delayed even more as building supplies were all but dried up. But we hung in there. Hannah is a night owl like I am…she has 7 boys so nighttime is when she gets most of her work done. It wasn’t unusual to suddenly get a text message from her at 11:30 pm saying, “Hey, Di - what color did you want your soap dishes in the master bath?” or the trim on the outside, mosaic kitchen tiles as shown, or something else? I was enjoying myself tremendouosly. And my numbers started going back up. I think in 2 months I went from that scary 19 to 29!

One of the people whose home we toured lives close by, 6 miles away in Byron. We were there when it was still a foundation with 2 halves on the lot, then we watched the process of her house being set on the foundation. The company that does the setting is from Sheridan, Opie’s Mobile Home transport. So I told him our biggest concern was our giant trees…could he even set one on our lot? (we had already had ‘The Giant’ removed at a cost of $5000, and sure couldn’t afford to take down anymore) He came over and took a look, and assured us that he could. (He wasn’t just bragging - he could back a 64 foot modular section through a keyhole and line it up perfectly with the foundation on one try - we watched him do it with ours!). Anyway, he asked us what we were going to with our old 1972 trailer and we told him we had no clue. He went inside, looked around, and said, “I’ll take it.” Now bear in mind that to move that house off our lot, a house that had been sitting in the same spot since 1972, would have cost us about $8000. Instead Opie gave me a dollar for the house, I wrote a bill of sale to please the port of entry authorities, then I gave him the dollar back for prepping the house and moving it off. He hauled it to Sheridan, where he donated it to a young lady with two teenaged daughters. She’d lost her home in a fire, no insurance, and had been living out of 2 storage units for 3 years. She works part-time for his wife in a thrift store in Sheridan, which was how she’d been accumulating household goods. She was thrilled.

Okay, so the house was ordered, arrangements were made for removal of the old trailer, financing was approved and the money already in our construction account…..piece of cake, right? If you think that, you don’t know Blooie. We got word that construction of our house would start at the factory on September 13th. We had set up the timing so that Opie would move the old place off the lot on October 2. Ken and I had Motel 5 1/2 set up and we moved into it on September 28th, since by then all of our household stuff was already out of the old place. We figured it would just be for a few weeks, and the weather was still nice. We had no running water, and had to rent an outhouse, but it was just for a few weeks. Yeah, right.

Our contractor started the foundation on October 5th. We were supposed to be moved into the new one before Halloween. The new house was actually not delivered until October 21. So much for Halloween. We had one section across the street to the north and the other across the street to the east, and an empty foundation. Finally the house was set on the foundation on November 8th, so we figured we’d be in before Thanksgiving. Nope. It was getting colder and colder, with snow, and that outhouse wasn’t fun at 2 am. The issue was the finishing work, some of which is still not finished. But on December 4th, after two days of temps in the single digits, Ken said, “That’s it….come hell or high water I’m sleeping in the house tonight. We‘d had power, water, and sewer already going. What we didn’t have was gas. No gas, no heat. Gas wasn’t hooked up until December 3, and by then the house was so cold that it was taking forever for it to get warm in here. He and Kenny went to the storage unit and brought over our bed. We set it up, and began a bare bones existence among the ladders, the bits of trim and wallboard and people popping up out of the crawl space, but by golly we were IN!

It’s a beautiful home, with three bedrooms, two baths, and a totally custom kitchen totally designed by yours truly. It’s 1856 sq feet, a palace compared to where we’ve spent the last 25 years. We have a long way to go to be totally settled yet, the front porch isn’t finished, and all we have surrounding is dirt - no more lush green yard with flowers everywhere, but that will come! In a separate post I’ll put up some pictures…this one has already gotten too long!
 
Wow Blooie. You've been busy! I remember when wood was hard to come by. Things have certainly changed since covid. I wonder if we'll ever get back to a "normal" again. My little sister went through dialysis, maybe you remember. She didn't do well with it, kept clotting in her fishulas. She decided no more last year. Passed in May here at home. Little did I know my husband would pass the next May, here at home. I just went to a Nephrologist today. My PC was concerned after I did a 24 hr urine catch. Thought something was up with an adrenal gland. And I keep spilling potassium for some reason. Long story short, I came home with great news about my kidneys. They're fine. Whew. I just need to continue taking potassium pills. Not sure I would go through dialysis after watching my little sis. Nope. Glad you're in your new home! It's sounds exciting. More room for sure. You will have so much fun getting a garden started. What about chickens? 😁.
 

New posts New threads Active threads

Back
Top Bottom