A Quiet House

The only sound I hear right now is that of the refrigerator motor.  I could let it distract me but I’ll opt to transform it into the sound of a distant ocean as I try to regain some of my sanity.  I need a quiet house.  It’s been more than chaotic for far too long.  Our Norwegian guests left last week and I still haven’t fully recovered.  I got a massage on Friday, which helped some of the built up stress, but the beds upstairs still aren’t made and life is not quite back into a groove.  This week looks promising, however.  It might be the first “normal and routine” week we’ve had in over six months.  I’m looking forward to every day.

Kaleb has been away at a Junior High retreat this weekend.  Kory and I tried to have a little date night while he was gone, but it didn’t turn out like I’d hoped.  I’d ordered up a movie from Netflix that I thought was a comedy but it turns out it was just a bad drama and very depressing at that.  We both shook our head and wondered why we wasted our time on it.  We thought maybe we should get out of the house for a change, so we did.

There’s a “cabaret” place not far from where we life.  Lots of live music on the weekends and the place is always packed.  We thought Friday would be a good time to go check it out since Kaleb was gone.  We weren’t in there thirty seconds before I wanted to leave.  It was more of a bar atmosphere than I had expected and there were plenty of bar flies to go with it, and I don’t mean the insects.  It was sad, really, to sit and watch the bar scene with eyes over fifty.  I ordered a sparkling water, Kory got a beer and some steamer clams.  He couldn’t have eaten them fast enough.  I’ve never been a fan of the Nightlife, I guess.  Home never felt so good.

Last night was a much better night out.  We attended the memorial service for Rognar, a 97-year-old, very godly man we know.  It was so encouraging to hear about the legacy his life has left behind and to celebrate with his family that he’s now in the presence of our Lord and Savior.  A gospel quartet sang a very lively song about saying goodbye to this world and hello to eternity.  His 94-year-old wife got up and started dancing a jig during the song!  She was followed by their sixty something year old daughter and the entire front row.  Then the whole church joined in and I must say, I’ve never seen things so lively at Bethany Covenant Church!  Rognar’s legacy has even extended beyond the grave as he’s now broken free the outpouring of the Holy Spirit!  Later, his wife told me, “I just don’t know why I did that.”  But I do.  It was the spirit moving her.  Hallelujah!  I hope people dance  at my funeral – for all the RIGHT reasons – not because I’m finally gone.  Rognar’s family fully celebrated his life well lived and that he’s now gone on to his ultimate reward.  Hallelujah!  I’ll go on that kind of date anytime. 

My poison ivy is still lingering with an itch here or there but that misery has been replaced by the “atomic sniffles,” as Kaleb says.  He came down with something last week and shared it with me.  The cold and flu season has arrived.

Last weekend we took the Norwegians over to Port Townsend for the day.  It was a beautiful fall day and it was nice to get out of the house a little.  Kaleb spent the time with a friend of his as looking in boutiques and stopping in cafes is not his cup of tea, literally.  I think we need more balance in our lives.  We’re gone from the house for weeks and months on end, but then when we’re home, we don’t get out much.  A day spent in Port Townsend was quite the treat.

Our plans to be totally rid of the summer kitchen (our #1 Fall project) have been delayed while we try to find someone to take out the concrete foundation walls.  The bids we got for cutting the concrete were higher than what Kory felt was reasonable, so now we go with Plan B (the cheap plan, AKA – Kory’s ideas) and just jack hammer out the walls altogether.  He swears he can rebuild cheaper than trying to save bits and pieces of what’s there.  In the meantime, I’m getting anxious that a few things from our punch list from 13 years ago when we moved into this house are still not done, so I’m heading on to Project #2 for this fall as I can’t stand all the waiting and indecision for Project #1.  We’re getting a new fireplace insert.

Normally I budget $300 every other month to pay the diesel fuel bill for our furnace, so when the bill came this time and it was $686, I decided it was time to stop using the furnace.  Our fireplace is very inefficient in throwing off heat and I’ve long wanted to redo not just the face of it, but the guts as well.  Saturday we had a guy come give us a bid for putting in a flush insert that would heat up the house as well as improve the looks of the thing.  So this weekend we picked out the new fireplace guts as well as the tiles we’ll use to resurface the face.  I want a wood mantle, carved in that cool style of Norwegian rosemaling, but that will have to come later since the fireplace alone is costing more than twice what I anticipated.  It won’t take long to pay it back though, through the savings we’ll have on the diesel bill.  It’s supposed to be a cold winter this year and there’s nothing better to combat that than having a warm house.  We have an abundance of wood around us so the cost of wood won’t be as bad as diesel.  And, it will be one more thing I get to cross off the list I made when we moved into this house.  As Kory says, “House done when man die.”  He needs to live forever.