Tuesday, September 21

Today I am grateful for:

More beautiful fall weather.

Our mechanic was able to come and fix my little car. I've been driving the truck this past week, because my sweetie accidentally drained the transmission fluid instead of the oil. It took that long for our local guy to come out and refill it. Any other shop would make you tow your vehicle into town to do it, so we waited. I am pretty happy to have my car back.

I picked some more veggies so that my sweetie can take them to work, and some potatoes to give to his parents.

Today was pretty overwhelmingly stressful, in a very quiet, insidious way.

Nothing is a big emergency, thankfully, but there are getting to be a number of thing creating enormous amounts of pressure. One is just dealing with my Mom, and other family members being very frail. There are about four people in my family that are in rough shape (besides Mom). Like they might not be there in a few years. There isn't anything for me to do, but you think about it.

My sweetie is stressed because his family is in more or less the same situation as mine. His Mom has Dementia, and his Dad is struggling to care for her. They are selling the cabin at the lake this year, which was a place they all loved. Other members are dealing with health things too, including his 17 year old niece who is dealing with something very mysterious that MIGHT be ""long Covid" that has left her very weak.

We are STILL trying to work out our mortgage. We got a line of credit to continue working on the house, but it's a higher rate of interest than a mortgage. We had the assessment done on the house that the bank required (again), and apparently it is now being reviewed. I am SO pissed off at this bank in general, and our financing has been a constant, low-grade (sometimes spiking) source of stress through this entire project.

There are a few things now that we are putting off until my husband is back to work and we get a few full pay checks under our belt. He's been getting "holiday pay" all summer, which is about 60% of his normal wage. It's what his company does instead of paying over time.

We didn't get as far as we'd hoped on the addition this summer. We did do a lot, but we still have a ton of work to do before it is finished inside and we can live in it.

There are a few things that have to be done before my sweetie goes back to work. He needs to get a drug test, to figure out where he's going to live for work (he usually shares a place with other guys at the job site, but he doesn't know who's on that job yet), get the siding finished.

Although the timing is terrible, we found an old house that is being demolished with the same fir flooring as our house, and it should work for the addition. We have only a small window of time to get the flooring out before that house is torn down. So, that's the next couple of days.

I'm supposed to be working towards some specific things with River, and when I am at the barn, I can suspend some of the other stuff and be present with River, and that's good. We did go to the barn together tonight, and I worked on the lead line class stuff and made progress, and he did well under saddle. He was doing much better not throwing his head up during transitions. His breathing is doing well with the cooler weather.

The new cat, Hans, is doing really well. We've had to feed him in another room, because he really has this starving farm cat thing going on, and will eat EVERYTHING. He would eat every other cat's food. He tries to eat the dog's food. He wasn't starving when he showed up, but cats who have known scarcity are like this. Part of me is curious how much he actually could eat, if given a pile of food.

I'm feeding him more than double what the other cats are getting for now, because he is still growing. I will cut back the moment he starts filling out. Hopefully his sense of desperation subsides once he trusts that he will get fed regularly.