This ‘N That Thursday

We’re joining the brown dawgs this week with our first This ‘N That Thursday post. I’ve left a couple of strings dangling in previous posts and so much has gone on all at once, I thought I’d bring you up to speed.

This ‘N That Thursday is for those times when you want to post about unrelated topics or each topic isn’t quite long enough to make up a whole post.  It can be anything you want, so feel free to grab the button and join us!

First and most important, I’m SO happy to report that DH got a job offer from the first company he interviewed with a couple of weeks ago. This was the job he was most interested in, so it worked out well. ::WHEW!:: Turns out they already knew they were going to hire him before they even interviewed him based on his business reputation alone. Now I can take my worry wart hat off….or rather, switch hats from worried-about-unemployment to worried-about-his-working-in-NYC. This wouldn’t have been a worry for me before 9/11 and all the foiled (thank God) terrorist plots since then, but now I see him working in a big target city and that scares me. It also scares me that random daytime shootings are becoming far more prevalent than ever before. (Hey – my grandmother was a Class 1 Worry Wart; she got a triple gold star in that field, so I blame my Worry Wart genetics on her. It’s the one thing I didn’t want to inherit!) He’ll be working from home a few days a week eventually, but of course for the first few weeks he has to go into the office to become acclimated to the company and meet his new colleagues. It’s an exciting new start for him and he’s really looking forward to it. 🙂

Second, he’s been using his time well during his unemployment. The kitchen is close to completion, and it would have been done by now except we ran into some  issues with the backsplash tiling. This is so typical in this house – no project goes smoothly – either measurements, plumbing, or electrical doesn’t conform with today’s standards (our house is 50 years old). So we came up with a good solution to the problem that will look like a design treatment rather than a solution to a problem. But that meant searching for another type of tile and ordering it, which is holding up the entire process. DH has a couple more weeks before he starts his new job, so he’ll have plenty of time to finish everything once the new tiles come in next week. Right now he’s painting the final window frame. 🙂

Last but certainly not least, THE ROOF IS FINALLY GETTING FIXED!! WOOHOO!!! It’s going to be great to get literally half the bedroom furniture OUT of the living room, back where it belongs, and stop living with tarps and buckets on the floor!

This is just a small portion of the damage – you can see broken tresses, boards, and sunlight coming in through one of the holes.

As you probably remember, the roof and ceiling have been damaged since Hurricane Sandy back in October; we’ve been waiting since we signed the contract three months ago for the roofers to fit us into their schedule.

Roofers and tree services have been at a premium since the hurricane – everyone needs them, and they’re making more money than they ever dreamed. What’s awful is that the tree services are gouging everyone – they raised their prices phenomenally and they know people will pay what they ask because everyone’s either got trees that were damaged and need to be removed or they’ve learned from what happened to homes like ours and are having trees that threaten their own homes removed before the next “Big One”. Weather experts say Sandy was just the first of at least another decade of unusually strong storms that will hit our area, and we’ve seen that starting to prove out already. We get strong wind storms on a regular basis now that we never had before – gusts up to 60 mph and high sustained winds.

During summer, these huge trees form a shady canopy in the front half of our back yard. In fall their yellow leaves cascade down like a gentle snowfall. I will miss them dearly.

I’ll never forget that horrible sound when the tree crashed through our roof that night, and how one entire side of our home was cloaked in darkness even during daylight hours until the tree was removed. The whole experience made me very jittery about high winds, and I’ve realized that we need to have four large trees that are very close to our home taken down. I can’t tell you how upsetting that is to me because (a) I love nature and never destroy it – I don’t even pick flowers because I want their beauty to last as long as possible, and (b) a LOT of birds flit in and out of these trees, and one of them is home to a red-bellied woodpecker family for years.

Image via Wikipedia.

I love birds and the thought of taking these trees away and having fewer of them near the house really hurts. The other trees on the property are too far back for me to enjoy any bird life there. But I can’t go through that again, and these trees would cause even more damage. So I have to shove my practical side over my emotional side. Ugh.

One of many beautiful bird scenes I’ll miss tremendously when these trees are gone.

And Daisy? Well, she’s not happy that the roofers are here at all. She’s on constant alert. Yesterday they were working in the master bedroom taking down a huge area of the damaged ceiling, so Daisy was on a shriek-barking kick all day. My ears may never be the same. 😉

I don’t like this at all. I can’t get my daytime beauty naps!

Thanks for reading my ramblings – back to happy Daisy posts next time!

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