Ready to Roll

We have been working hard the last few days to get things in order before we travel south.

One task was getting our bedroom set up so we did not have to do anything with it in December.  We had purchased a new bedding set a couple of weeks ago, and today Rick moved curtain rods and hung the valances that matched the new bedspread.  We still have a bit of wall patching to do, but that can wait until we have a bit more time.  For now, we are pleased with the new look in the master bedroom.

We selected another quilt for our bed.

The simple greens and blue pattern work well in the room.

Yard work occupied almost one whole day.  The leaves are late in falling this year, so we have contracted with the service who removes our snow in the winter to come in next week to do one final "fall clean-up" of the yard.  I have taken care of cutting down all of the hostas and other plants that needed trimming before the winter, and we took a huge load of debris and leaves to the yard recycling center.  A final raking of the yard will get us set for winter. Since we saw a few lazy snowflakes drifting down on Saturday, I think our preparations are none too soon.

On a side note, the City still has not completed the construction on our road.  We suspect that they may come in on Monday or Tuesday of the coming week to blacktop the street -- if the weather is not too cold for them to do so!

Today was a day of final laundry, final dishwashing, and packing.  We are getting better at this game, and what we need to haul down south is less each year.  Actually, we want to take some bricks of good Wisconsin cheese to Florida, so those and our electronics (computers, iPad, phones) take up the bulk of our suitcases.

The temperature of the average domestic refrigerator is between 35 - 40 degrees.  Why do I mention this?  Because right now is the perfect time to open that door and to really LOOK beyond the food to see what the refrigerator holds.  Has it been a while since you washed out the inside?  Do you have mysterious things growing mold on the lower shelf?  Are the shelves themselves beginning to resemble a science experiment gone rogue?  If so, do what I did today and getting scrubbing.

The weather is cool enough that refrigerated items can be put in a plastic tub or cooler and left in the garage while you tackle the task.  Actually, this moving from house to house every six months is the best thing that happened to my refrigerator because once I empty the 'fridge, I have no excuse not to clean it.

The refrigerator is no longer in danger of the
Board of Health closing down my kitchen.

Earlier today, we transported to Lindsay all of the not-consumed refrigerator and freezer items.  Then a sink full of hot water awaited the shelves and baskets of the 'fridge.  An hour or so later, it sparkles. Now I will not be afraid to store something inside when we come home in December!

If you are a procrastinator, I will give you a half-pass.  Wash out just the refrigerator part now.  You can wait until your garage becomes nature's own deep freeze to store your frozen items while you tackle the freezer later in the year.

All that is left is a little bit of packing, and we are on our way.  We had our first hard freeze of the year on Friday evening.  That is my cue to travel south.

Dust Bowl

Construction workers returned to our street this week to prepare the street for paving.  To that end, they have brought in a huge machine to dig everything down about 24 inches.  Then large trucks bring in loads of gravel which they mix with some of the dirt.  That mixture then is returned to the hole where it is compacted and smoothed over as a "sound" surface on which to pave. Those same huge trucks, empty of their load of gravel, then fill with the left-over dirt and drive away.

The problem?  What is waiting to be dug up is a mixture of old concrete, concrete dust, sand, dirt, and stone.  When the trucks rumble past, they raise such a cloud of dust that everything is covered.  We cannot even walk across our lawn without raising dust like Charles Schultz's character Pigpen.

A passing truck leaves such a cloud of dust that we cannot clearly
see our neighbor's house across the street.

 Walking in the neighborhood is almost impossible. For now, our exercise must take place either in our basement exercise room or out of the neighborhood. Our street was supposed to be completely finished last Friday.  I doubt it will be complete by this time next week. Needless to say, washing cars or windows or dusting inside the house is a lost cause.  I'll wait until the dust literally settles to do any serious cleaning in this house.

Warning About "Unknown" Calls

Twice in the last two weeks I have received calls from people who have said, "Hi. I see on my 'recent calls' that I missed you, and I was wondering what you were calling about."  In each case, I both had NOT called them and did not know them.  Mystery.

I assumed with the first one that I had just somehow "pocket dialed" the number.  I apologized for bothering the woman and hung up.  When the second call came in the same way, I decided to investigate.

Rick reminded me that I could not have "pocket dialed" anyone because my new iPhone 6s has a security lock on the screen.  Without my fingerprint or the correct code, the phone is locked from all access.  OK, so there must be something funky with my new phone.

A trip to Verizon, my phone carrier, revealed that I was not the only person who had complained about something like that happening, but the mysterious calls had nothing to do with the type of phone I had.  Instead, the Verizon personnel told me to call the FCC (Federal Communication Commission) to report that someone was "cloning" my number and using it to sell bogus products to others. Terrific.  The "that only happens to other people" nightmare was now happening to me.

Back at home, I called 1-888-CALL FCC to report the problem.  The nice FCC lady was very helpful and educational.  I learned:

1. What was happening was not "cloning" as Verizon personnel had said.  Instead, I was part of something called "Caller ID Spoofing."  Remember, these are the Feds we are talking about, so one has to get the vocabulary correct.

2. There was nothing I could do about it.  The FCC lady said that some criminals (probably in an off-shore location) were using my number and calling people in order to scam them. You know those calls -- they can give you a better rate on your credit card, and all you need to do is give them the number, or you have won a fabulous new car, and all you have to do is send $500 to pay to have it delivered to your house, etc.  If by some chance you are lucky enough to miss the call, what appears on your caller ID is a number -- in this case MY number -- that cannot be traced back to the scamming organization.

3. The only people who can complain to the FCC are the people who receive the calls.  If the FCC receives a complaint from someone who receives such calls, they can investigate and try to shut down the scammers. If you receive such calls, immediately use the number listed above to report it to the FCC.  No complaints = no action.

4. If you check your phone and see a call came in from a number that you do not recognize or the ID says "Unknown," DO NOT CALL BACK.  The FCC lady said that in some cases the scammers DO use their own numbers, and calling back will just encourage them to call you more often.  Never respond to such calls.

Once again, I am saddened to think that someone who is smart enough to set up a system whereby my number is used even though he is calling from a different number would want to use his knowledge only to try to rob others.

I thought about changing numbers, but then the scammers have at least scored a little victory.  Changing my number and letting my friends, family, doctors' offices, church, insurance companies, financial advisor, and the million other places that have it would be a royal pain, and in the end, the same thing could happen to any new number that I would get from Verizon.

So if I call you, I hope that you have your phone set up to reveal my name along with my number.  If a missed call contains an unfamiliar number and is accompanied by the tag "Unknown," don't call back.  Chances are the person who called you truly is unknown to you. And if you really want to talk to me, call me. You know my number.

Deconstruction Day

We have been waiting all summer long for this day to arrive: deconstruction has started on our street!  I really wish that my grandson Owen were here because he would have loved all of the trucks, big noisy machines, and commotion that is going on in the front yard.  I will let pictures tell the first part of the story:

The machine that grinds up the old asphalt moves with the
lead truck in a kind of elegant, coordinated dance.

They keep a steady pace, and when one truck is filled...

...another quickly takes its place.

They move down the street at a steady pace.

I cannot believe how quickly they move down the street!

The deconstruction of the road started at 6:48 this morning, and I assume that they will be done grinding up and hauling away the old asphalt by the end of the work day today.  Hopefully, we will see some new asphalt down by tomorrow.

After living on this street for 25 years, we finally will have a new road with no potholes at the end of our driveway! Yeah!

Sod King

For those of you who have been following this blog, you will be amazed to learn (as was I) that this is the 300th blog posting for Sherry's Second Wind.  I started this blog in May of 2011, creating it mostly to keep all of my friends and family abreast of our remodeling progress on our recently purchased house in Florida.  I hope you have enjoyed following the ups and downs of that (and other) adventures I have recorded.  If not, why are you still reading this?

Last week we went to Minnesota to visit Stephanie.  We planned to leave early on Friday.  Intrigued by news reports that morning of long lines outside of phone stores since the Apple iPhone 6s and 6+ were being released that day, Rick said that he was going to "take a detour" to see how long the lines were outside of our Verizon store here in town. OK.  Fine.  It was only a couple of minutes out of our way, and I have learned long ago what issues were worth objecting to and which were not.  This detour was not what I had planned, but it was no big deal, I thought.  Boy, was I wrong.

When we got to the store, we saw lots of cars parked on the side of the building, but no lines and only a couple of cars in the front.  Neither of us could believe what we were seeing, so I agreed that we could go in to see when new phones might be available.  Rick has been having problems with his 5s phone dropping calls, so we had planned on getting new phones after we were in Florida.

We walked into the store to find a full staff of almost-bored employees, and only a couple of customers.  Brian, our employee who waited on us, told us that the pre-orders were huge and already taken care of, and that they had an ample supply of phones if we wanted new ones.  They also had a promotion going on with unheard-of deals on iPads.  Long story short, we now are the proud owners of new 6s iPhones which we miraculously were able to secure on their release day, and we have a new iPad to play with also.  The only drawback (other than the sucker-punch to our budget) was that we got off to a very late start for Minnesota. However, the visit went well, and Stephanie was there to help the old folks figure out how to configure all of their new-fangled electronics.

My ever-calendar conscious husband has reminded me numerous times that we only have three weeks left in Wisconsin.  This summer has been delightful -- a little warmer and somewhat drier than normal, but pleasant nonetheless.  This fall has had record-breaking temperatures in the high 70's and low 80's, so it seems that summer has hung on.  Last night, however, a cold front came in, so fall is definitely in the air.

The cooler weather prompted me to bring in the patio small tables and to bundle the rest of the patio furniture together under secured covers.  It will winter nicely under the covers on our covered, screened-in patio until the spring thaw.  I usually do not put the furniture away until later in October, and I generally freeze my fingers getting everything under wraps.  After all of these years, perhaps I have learned my lesson.  Besides, I still have chairs on the front porch if I want to enjoy sitting outside, and they will only take 30 seconds to bring into the house once we are finished with them for the season.

This week started with Rick getting a bee in his bonnet to sod the remaining part of our lawn that the City dug up when they put in a new section of curbing.  Yes, the City came around, threw in 2 inches of dirt, and dusted the disturbed area lightly with the grass seed.  Ha!  I think it's a little late in the season for grass to germinate, especially since temperatures are supposed to drop into the high 30's overnight by the end of the week. On to Plan B...

Rick called around the city until he found a nursery that still had sod available.  We picked up three rolls, Rick dug out the pathetic soil that the City provided, and he laid down the new sod.  Now I admit, the sod this time of year would not make it to the pages of the Sod of the Month magazine, but it still has a better chance of growing than the seed the City provided.  We'll just have to keep it watered, pray for warm weather, and hope for the best.  If nothing else, the sod will keep the dug-up area from turning into a giant mud patch until we can pay more attention to it next spring.

The strip of sod is not the best I have seen,
but it is far better than the pathetic seed the City
provided to fill in our yard.

Other chores yesterday included taking an inventory of our freezers to best plan how to eat everything before we leave, sorting items that we want to ship down to Florida, and washing both the truck and the car.  We both slept well last night.

Today we tackled the back yard with the first leaf-blowing session of the season.  We have four bags of sticks and leaves that we need to haul to the yard-refuse area tomorrow... if we can get out of our driveway.

Today also marked the first day in weeks that men have returned to finish resurfacing our street.  This work originated on May 28 of this year, and they may actually grind up the old street tomorrow.  Perhaps by the end of the week, we will have a newly-asphalted street.  They started the street two weeks after we came home in the spring, and they will finish the street two weeks before we return to Florida for the winter.  Well, if nothing else, they balanced the construction with our calendar.

Lost and Found

Because I have been diabetic since I was a child, I have worn a medical alert bracelet for many, many years.  Several years ago, I wanted something a little more stylish and petite than the standard, clunky bracelets offered through most drug stores.  I found an online organization called Lauren's Hope who sold bead bracelets to match various outfits; the bracelets attached to a slim medical alert tag that did not overwhelm my small wrist.

The bracelet from Lauren's Hope had two drawbacks: the bracelet itself was 14K gold (which was good) and thus cost $80.00 (which was bad).  The medical alert tag that went with the bracelet, sadly, was the standard silver color.  I have never worn silver jewelry, so although I could get the bracelet in yellow gold, the tag itself did not match.

I solved that problem by going to the jewelry teacher at the college where I taught.  She ordered a petite gold medical alert tag and engraved it with "Diabetic" and "No Sulfa," the two things that I would want ER people to know about me in an emergency.  Throughout the years, I found a need for a "back up" second tag after I lost (and then found) the original tag.

The original Lauren's Hope bracelet with
14K gold beads still works fine.

This seems to be my year for temporarily misplacing the medical alert bracelets and tags.  While Stephanie was moving from her old house this spring, I lost one of the bracelets at her house while helping her pack.  OK.  Sad, but I had a back up.  Two weeks later I was at her house helping her pack more, and I lost the second bracelet.  Dang! I was five hours from home with no back-up medical alert identification!

I should mention that during the years since my initial purchase of the gold bracelet from Lauren's Hope, I discovered that I could make my own beaded bracelets to go along with the tags.  I now have 45 additional bracelets in numerous colors to match a variety of outfits. I also have a smaller collection of bracelets in Florida.

My collection of alternate bracelets keeps
my options open.

As the movers came to Stephanie's house to load her possessions onto the trucks, Rick found the first bracelet I lost buried in Stephanie's basement carpet.  The clasp that held the bracelet together came undone, and the bracelet slipped off my wrist as I was moving boxes around.  That same day, Stephanie found my second lost bracelet that had slipped from my wrist due to a faulty mechanism and had landed in a bathroom drawer.  OK, I was back in business.

This past Sunday, I mowed the front yard of our house.  Unknown to me, the crimping bead that holds the bracelet together broke and the bracelet fell into the grass.  After I had finished mowing the lawn, we ate dinner and then went for a walk through the neighborhood.  Only as we settled to watch TV for the evening did I notice that the bracelet was missing.  I had no idea if I had lost it earlier shopping at Kohl's or if it was in the yard or in the streets of the neighborhood.

Rick and I took a second walk around the neighborhood looking for the bracelet.  Why spend all of that time for a bracelet that costs only a few dollars in materials?  Because the engraved tag would cost me anywhere from $200 - $400.  I could think of many, many other things I could buy for that money.  Sadly, retracing our steps yielded nothing but a bit more exercise for us.

On Monday we both walked through the front yard but found nothing.  Rick decided that he would rent a metal detector since he also wanted to locate our northern property lot stake.  As he was backing out of the driveway, he saw our neighbor Gary who collects and sells minerals and rocks to jewelry manufacturers.  Rick asked Gary if a metal detector would locate a 14K gold bracelet.  He assured Rick that it would, and then he offered to let us use his metal detector to search the yard.

I was convinced that the bracelet was probably lost at Kohl's or in the house somewhere, but for a few new batteries, Gary's metal detector was worth a try.  Rick had no problem finding the large metal property line stake on the northern perimeter of the property.  His search of the front yard, however, found little but the assurance that we have metal pipes connecting our house to the utilities in the street.

Rick asked what route I had taken to bring the lawnmower from the backyard shed into the front yard.  I told him, and he left to search the back yard.  I had little hope that he would find anything.

I was wrong.  Within a couple of minutes, he came back with my medical alert tag and the wire that used to hold gold and purple beads.  He said that he could not find any of the tiny beads (some of which were just seed beads), but he found the most important and most expensive part.  I was amazed.

The missing tag that Rick found in the back yard.

So we thank our neighbor Gary for allowing us to use his metal detector.  I thank my husband for being persistent (or perhaps just cheap) for continuing to hunt until he found my lost bracelet.  And as for the missing beads?  I hope that some bird has found them buried int he grass and has a new, beautifully decorated nest.

Water, Water Everywhere

The theme of the past two days seems to be water.

Rick and I have made a habit of taking at least one if not two walks a day around our neighborhood to get a little exercise.  Yesterday as we headed south from our house, we were looking at the new curb and gutters that had been installed that day.  (Hopefully we will have a completely new street within in the next couple of weeks.)  We looked at the new gutter at the south border of our property, and I noticed what appeared to be a small hole in the mini-storm sewer pipe that was uncovered when the construction company removed the old curb and asphalt.  "Look," I said to Rick, "They hit the drain pipe."

We both were surprised that the top of the drain pipe (which is probably the air chamber for the pipe) was so near the surface of the ground.  Rick examined the pipe further by pulling away the dirt by the hole that I saw.  What he uncovered really shocked us.  The contractor did not just "ding" the pipe a little, resulting in the approximately 1" high by 2" long hole that I originally saw.  Instead, with the piled dirt in front of it removed, we found a 1" by about 6 - 7" gash through most of the pipe! "This is a problem," Rick said.

While the pipe actually carries the sump pump water away from the neighbor's house rather than our house, we still were not happy with what we saw.  First, the neighbor is a recently widowed woman who is renting the house.  She does not need flood water in her basement if dirt is allowed to fall into the pipe and plug the drainage system.  Secondly, she is downstream from us, so if her section of the pipe gets plugged, our section will soon follow.  We ALSO do not need a flooded basement this winter.

The gaping hole in the pipe just above the dirt
was not a welcome sight!

We called the City to report the problem and then went on our walk.  About 45 minutes later, someone was at the pipe, talking on a phone, taking pictures.  Since we reported the problem to the City, we hope that the pipe will have to be repaired, inspected, and approved before the contractor can just come back in a backfill the hole.

That was our first encounter with a (potential) water problem.

This morning I awoke at the usual time, ate breakfast, used the bathroom, and then stepped into the shower.  When I stepped out of the shower, I noticed that I still could hear water running. Oh-oh.  Running water in our house is NEVER a good sign.  As I dried off, I discovered that the running water was coming from the toilet that was continually trying to fill the bowl as the water drained away.

I called Rick up from the exercise room where he was working out on the stationary bike, and he found that a plastic piece of the internal mechanism had broken off. He called Kohler to see if they could send us a free replacement part, but they told us that the toilet only had a one-year warranty.  They gave us the part number, and Rick was able to locate it online as available at our neighborhood Home Depot.  Great! I wasn't even dressed yet and already was rushed to get to my favorite store...

Thankfully, my wonderful husband is good with plumbing, so in a short time, he had replaced the broken part and the toilet stopped draining water (and my money) from its bowl.  We discovered, however, that the shut-off valve to this toilet was probably original to the house.  That part, while doing its job right now, also will need our attention.

That was our second encounter with a water problem.

Tonight after dinner we ventured out for our usual evening walk.  We kept an eye on the sky as showers were predicted for later this evening.  One dark cloud loomed overhead, but we could see blue skies in the distance beyond that dark cloud.  We were approximately eight blocks from our house when the cloud decided that it would dump its rain before it moved onward.  The few sprinkles quickly morphed into a pretty steady rain which then transformed into a fairly hard downpour.

By the time we aerobically walked home, we both were more than damp.  That was our third encounter with a water problem.  This problem, however, had a bonus.  The blue sky behind the cloud was still blasting the earth with sunlight, so as we reached our front yard, we were rewarded with a beautiful rainbow.  At least this problem was both short-lived and colorful in the end.

Bushed

Our day started at 7:00 am when we thought that we heard construction trucks on our street.  We are waiting for crews to come in to replace curb and gutters that were cut last week.  Then the crews will grind up the old, broken, split concrete and will blacktop our street.  We had expected the work to start yesterday, but so far nothing has happened.  Whatever woke us up this morning was not construction crews in our neighborhood.

We ate a quick breakfast and headed back to Lindsay's house with the intension of just cutting down the remaining two bushes in front and hauling the debris to the curb.  She gets her garbage collected today, so when the sanitation crews go around, they note who has yard debris that needs collecting.  We wanted to get the branches from the bushes out to the curb so when the village picks up branches, they will get all of the bushes.

Rick tackles cutting into the first of the two remaining bushes.
Note how huge these bushes were.

Temperatures in the 80s were expected today; that is another reason we were at her house by 8:00 this morning.  Today is September 1, so it is Christopher's first day back at teaching and Owen's first day back at his school/daycare.  Since we did not have to worry about his safety while we worked, we were able to move at a rapid pace without keeping an eye out for him.

The second bush proved to be even a
greater challenge.

The first bush we took apart today revealed to us just how tangled and dense these last two bushes were going to be.  They were huge, so even though at one time they were planted within the two-foot wide "garden" area in front of the house, the bushes themselves had grown at least four feet into the yard. Rick did the cutting and pulling apart while I carried all of the branches to the curb where I could add them to the pile. I logged in almost 3.5 miles just walking back and forth!

The last bush proved to be even more of a challenge than the previous one.  The branches were so deeply entangled that when one was cut, three more had to be cut just to extract the whole section from the bush.  Since that bush also was at the corner, through the years it had been trimmed to wrap around that section of the house.

I had to extend the brush pile at the curb until it went around the other side of the tree and pretty much covered the entire front of the property.  I am glad that we do not have to feed all of that tangled mess into a wood chipper. we will leave that to the experts.

Yesterday the brush pile was just to the right of the tree,
but today I had to add more to cover most of the front
of their property.  This pile is at least five feet high.

I thought that we were going to quit once the bushes were down, but I knew that was not going to be the case once Rick said, "Let me put the strap around this first stump and see how hard it will be to get it out." Oka-a-a-y. I knew we were in for the long haul.   Actually, the time was just 9:30, so the temperature had climbed only from the mid-60s when we started into the higher 70s at that point.  Working outside was still tolerable.

When the house originally was landscaped,
both bushes were planted within the two-
foot wide flower garden.

The first stump took a couple of tries and a bit of digging to get it to budge, but it finally broke free of the dirt.  The second stump turned out to be the real trouble-maker.  That stump had a deep root and several smaller roots that wrapped around the house and dove deeply underground.  We did a lot of digging before Rick got out the SawsAll with a pruning blade.  Even cutting down under the stump took more than one attempt.

The second stump fought us to the end.

Meanwhile, of course, the temperatures continued to rise to the point that we were beginning to notice both the heat and the humidity.  We gave extracting the root one last try, and this time the truck was able to drag it out of the ground.  Success!

The yard still looks fine because of the tree in the front yard.

Carrying the stumps to the curb, cleaning up the yard, smoothing out the defined flower beds, and picking up all of the tools took the last of our energy. We are both bushed!  In the end, though, we both agreed that the house looks a lot better at 10:18 am than it did at 8:00 this morning.

Next spring Lindsay and Chris can plan new shrubs
and flowers for their yard.

Yes, the gardens need redefining, the house needs paint, and new shrubbery and flowers need to find homes in the yard, but for the rest of this growing season, just getting the grass to grow where bushes covered the yard and getting the debris hauled away will be enough.  In the spring, Lindsay and Chris can decide what they want to plant to make their house truly their own.