Archives for 2019

After three weekends of yard sales, and 3 weeks of working my butt off to get ready for them, we finally closed the gates this past Sunday, leaving us with still a whole lot of stuff to clear out. Well, I should say “me” since Hubby still isn’t able to help much. He had his first back procedure two weeks ago, and it made a huge difference, but they can only do one side at a time, and the other side started hurting him so much he was back to nearly disabled again. Then on Thursday, he stressed himself out trying to walk around the store, pushing himself a bit too hard, which made his heart go into A-fib again, so that started to hurt him across his shoulders in the back, and that didn’t help him much. In addition, we decided that trying to cram 5 days of dialysis in every week, no matter the schedule, was actually detrimental to him because by the end of day three-in-a-row, he was feeling so weak he could hardly stand up. Today was supposed to be the end of his back pain, as they were going to do the other side today, but when they found out about the A-fib, they said they didn’t feel comfortable doing it until that was straightened out. I had told them about it on the phone, and no one had said anything about that possibility, so we ended up wasting most of the day again running down to Manchester for nothing. We did shop, but that could have waited. Anyway, we have the A-fib reversal procedure tomorrow in Murfreesboro, then our monthly Home Hemo Clinic in Tullahoma on Thursday, so this week is mostly wasted. I’ve been posting a lot of stuff on Facebook marketplace and getting a pretty good response, so hopefully I can sell a few more things before we finally clear the house out. Looks like most of it will have to be given to charity, as there’s not enough value left in anything to persuade a liquidator or auctioneer to bother with it. I did finally manage to finish dubbing all the VCR tapes that I had to onto DVD, so those have all been trashed now. I’m getting ready to bring some realtors in to see who we can work with, and are still hoping to get out of here by mid-June. Our departure can’t come soon enough for either of us!! We stopped for a nice dinner at a new little restaurant in Manchester called Eurobites, which is a combination English Pub, French bakery and German biergarten, and very cosmopolitan choice for Manchester! In any event, we had a lovely glass of Founders Ale on tap and a Shepherd’s pie that we shared before heading home. Another late evening, I’m afraid, and an early morning tomorrow!

Well, even though I had 9:00 posted on my ads and signs for the yard sale, people were showing up early. We had a good crowd all day long, with one car coming in just as the last car was leaving. Sold a lot of stuff, especially the big ticket items, which were selling for quite cheap, naturally. Halfway through the day, after telling me he wasn’t leaving until tomorrow because they were going to stay and help, Glenn and his wife decided to leave early in the afternoon. Worse, brother Karl decided he was going with them. He’d been having a pain in his shoulder, and even though the hot tub on the deck was helping, he concluded it needed to be seen by a doctor so he had to go home. Meanwhile, they had packed the motor home full of stuff, furniture, tools, etc. and hauled it away with them, gone by 2:30, waiting just long enough for me to get Hubby on his dialysis machine. Can’t say it was entirely unexpected where my family is concerned, sorry to say. I’d say more but it would be uncharitable, and life is too short. So I was left on my own, in the rain, trying to handle everything at once, including monitoring Hubby’s dialysis session for 3 hours. Sigh. This is going to be even more work than I thought. Finally closed the gate up around 7:00 after the last customer left, and crashed, exhausted, for the short evening that was left.

After several hours, Glenn managed to get enough trees down to clear out the view a bit, then his wife spent the rest of the day trimming off the bluff. He left a few tree stumps for some reason, I guess I’ll try to pull those out with the tractor later. Nice to see the valley clearly again, though. When we moved here, all the trees were a good 10-15 yards below the bluff, but of course have been steadily growing so that they had reach about 20 yards above the bluff, blocking most of the view. Hopefully that will help with selling the house later. Meanwhile, Karl and I continued to clean and sort and label as much stuff as we could, mostly from the garages, lots of tools and equipment!

At the last minute, another brother, Glenn, decided to show up in his motor home with his new wife. He decided his contribution to our preparation for the yard sale was to cut down trees below our bluff in order to open up the view a bit. Not exactly my priority, but it was no use arguing and I’m happy for whatever help he wants to give. Meanwhile, Karl and I spent the day doing more cleaning and sorting.

Spent the day cleaning and sorting in preparation for the yard sale. Hard work!

After setting Karl on a list of things to do, Hubby and I went into McMinnville to see two more doctors, one mine, one his, did a little shopping then came home to see a bit of progress on the journey to clearing out the house. Not much, but it can only be one step at a time at this point!

Runaround day, going to two doctor’s appointments in Murfreesboro, then picking up brother Karl, who volunteered to help me clear out the house and get ready for my upcoming yard sale this weekend.

Didn’t do much else this week except work, work, work, work, work around the house, sorting, cleaning, organizing, trying to get ready for the yard sale I have planned for May 4-5, as we try to clear out thirty-plus years of accumulated stuff. It may be an arduous task, but the parameters are quite simple: if it doesn’t fit in the Trailrider trailer it doesn’t go. If we don’t need it, it doesn’t go. If it adds too much weight to our already “nearly at the limit of our truck’s tow capacity” weight, it doesn’t go, etc. We survived quite comfortably all winter, and my list of “things to get from home” was actually quite short, and consisted of a couple of very lightweight things, like a yoga mat and a program disk. We’ve added a couple of tools that might be useful (we’ll see soon enough), but otherwise have been pretty brutal in our selections. I remember seeing a Facebook post a while back that said, “Just think. All this clutter used to be money,” and when I see how much money we spent over the years on stuff we literally used just one, it seems ridiculous. What else is ridiculous is the number of the same thing I’ve found. A bunch of tools and hardware, some still in the package that never got used, it makes me crazy. Can’t wait to get this job done and get out of here!

Didn’t get much sleep thinking about all the things we needed to start doing today. Woke up in the middle of the night and starting adding to my “to do” list on my phone, and every time I was about to go back to sleep another thing would pop into my head and I had to write that down. This went on for what seemed like hours. Think I finally went to sleep around dawn for an hour, but still woke up pretty tired. Immediately started on the list, though, so it turned out to be a productive day. Took Hubby down to renew his driver’s license, picked up a couple of bales of hay, spoke to my mechanic about doing the bearings on the trailer (don’t think they’ve every been done, and I don’t want to end up on the side of the road-been there, done that!), filled up the hot tub, did some laundry, got all my drains set up, dialyzed Hubby, then finally settled down, once again, with my glass of wine and TV remote for the evening.