Luna Tail

Okay so it’s been about three weeks… well, three and a half weeks. I go back to the doctor next Tuesday for a checkup to see how I’ve been doing.

Well, I think I’m dong pretty good. I’m doing well enough to have cleaned the house today. I cleaned the bathroom, the spare bedroom, and the front room. Mopped and dusted too. And I scrubbed the bathroom with a toothbrush so it’s cleaner than it has been in along time.

Dang how does dirt get everywhere? Nooks and crannies and even on the walls and ceiling! Ugh! Well, for now the house is getting clean. I just don’t like cleaning on a regular basis. Ugh. I’d rather have someone else do it, maybe the Wilmington NC real estate company will clean for me!

So anyway back to the Candida… At the beginning of last week I felt rotten again, and I don’t know if it was doing Obedience with my dogs Saturday and Sunday, or if I ate too much of the cheese and coconut milk ice cream I had bought. Maybe that ice cream had too much sugar or something. Either way, by Thursday I felt better. And today I feel better too.

I do seem to need a nap in the middle of the day for an hour or two. It makes me feel much better. Unfortunately I can’t really do that at work. So I’m dragging by the end of the work days. But I think, all in all, I’m on my way back to health. Yay!

So we have peas in the backyard! Only a couple have been ripe though, so far. They need a few more days to ripen so we can start eating them. The ones I ate today were amazingly good. I love backyard veggies they are so much better than store bought veggies.

I got this fun picture of them too, I love taking closeup pictures.

And now for an update of my Candida diet. Well, I’m so way more addicted to sugar than I had realized. Every afternoon I have the most intense sugar cravings! I’m supposed to not eat sugar or even fruit. And I’ve been sticking with it… except I cheated once yesterday and had a caramel, pecan, almond paste thing that my husband didn’t like.. which probably put me back a couple of days from getting over these darn sugar cravings.

But I’m sticking with it, and taking my meds, and hoping the yeasties all go away so that I can feel better. And even without using top rated diet pills, I’ve lost a couple of pounds on this Candida diet, so that’s a good thing too!

Well, I want to move to Central Utah. I went and looked at buying land last week, Friday, and it was so much fun! I love looking to buy land and houses and property.

It seems, however, that buying land might be a bigger pain that it’s worth. And my biggest concern is that after we buy the land and dig the well and put in the septic tank and build the house, the amount we paid for the whole kit and kaboodle will be more than the finished product is worth.

So if the land costs $73,000, we would still need to dig a well and put in a water pump. That costs about $20,000. Ouch! And I don’t know how much it would cost to put in a septic tank, or a propane tank either. But all of those are needed because this is a very rural area.

The 5 acre lots we looked at were pretty nice, though.  Up against a hill and I could easily open the back door and let the dogs run out!  However, the money… dangit, I wish Money wasn’t an issue. But it is.

So we are considering an already built home on a farm, though I’m not going to tell you what it is exactly, because it’s not really up for sale yet. I’m waiting on news from the realtor. But it’s about 7 acres and we drove by and it looked so neat!  Maybe my husband’s next job is farmer…. but not just any farmer, a certain type that’d be fun!

I’ll update as I know what happens.

House Mouse

I like mice.. really. I think they are cute. I do wish I could have some rat companions someday but right now I don’t have time for them, plus my dogs and cats would probably think they were part of their raw diet.

Our house has mice. We try to not have food accessible to them, all our dried beans and stuff are now in bins they can’t get into. But sometimes I leave mostly empty bags of chips (I know I’m not supposed to eat chips!) on the upper shelf in the basement and they get the crumbs. Or they carry off ice cream sticks (my husband saw one carrying one off a bit ago) into the nooks and crannies of our house.  Our cat, Phoebe, stares at the walls a lot. And once we heard some scurrying in the ceiling in the basement, and something fell.. it was a half eaten almond. I’d bought some nuts in the shells and apparently the mouse dropped it while fleeing. Our cats are not, apparently, very good mousers!

We have a ton of nooks and crannies.  Our entire basement has holes into the walls. We need to finish it up but it’s one of the zillion things we need to do with our house and it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

I don’t really mind living with mice. However, I don’t like that they might carry disease. And I don’t want them eating all of our food. But I’m not willing to put down horrible mouse traps. We have a live trap but so far no little mousy has wandered into it. Oh well, not sure what we’d do with the little guys anyway.

So mice, please go away.. even though it’s cold outside.

Spare Bedroom

Yuckola.  There’s a technical word for you, eh?  Super Yuckola has got to be even better.

Slowly, bit by bit, I’m working on painting my spare bedroom.  After being in this house almost 9 years I figure it’s time. And now I know why I’ve been putting it off for so long.

It’s awful. This wall under the window was puckering and bubbling so I pecked at it and what did I find? The last person who painted this room painted over wallpaper. And not that that would be all that bad, except that wall was moist with condensation and the wallpaper bubbled. It just peeled off for me… well, what you see there did.  Now I have to decide on whether I want to work at getting all the wallpaper and paint off all four walls, or just patch it as best I can and paint and be done with it. Or maybe in summer I’ll have a few dollars where I can hire someone to come and do it all right.

Ugh.  We’ll have to see. With all the moisture on the walls I can’t paint anyway. So I gave up after pulling the icky painted wallpaper off as best I could.  So now I just have to wait. And see how my husband and I job situation is in the next few months. I would so love to have someone come in and do it right. I wonder how much it would cost. It’s a mess!

Okay Okay I know, the logical answer is to get up and clean it! LOL but.. I hate to clean. And I don’t have any good patterns to follow, habits maybe I should call them, that are conducive to a clean house. Rather, my habits are conducive to a pretty messy house. And I think that I have a need for a messy house, in addition to having a need for a clean house, and therefore I am in conflict!

So I’ve been browsing the web looking for books and websites that can help me to develop some new patterns and habits. I need to start slowly.. maybe with only one habit. Maybe, like, dusting every day for five minutes or something. Or every other day… but bleh, even that sounds like a pain in the rear.

What patterns or habits do you have to keep your house clean? Or do you have a messy house like me?

So, here are all our tomatoes that didn’t go red on the bushes in the garden.  And so we brought them all in, hopeing that they will get red. My husband doesn’t really like tomatoes, so they are all for me! I love tomato sandwiches and have been eating a lot of them.

Speaking thereof, I’ve just been eating a lot. Dangit, I have been hungry lately. Is it true that if you exercise it’s supposed to reduce your cravings for sweets, salts, and fats? Because DANG I crave those way too much. Especially fats lately. Maybe I need more fat in my diet. Hrmph.

Anyway, I’ll probably be cutting these up, as they ripen, and freezing them to use for soup or chili this winter. I do love fresh garden tomatoes.  Do you have any tomatoes left from the summer? It froze this weekend, and snowed, so I had to rescue my tomatoes!

Man, I am getting old. I spent only three measly hours this morning sanding and cleaning two of the walls in the spare bedroom. And I am so stiff now I can hardly stand. You’d think all the dog sports I did would actually get me in better shape. Or be more flexible, anyway. But apparently not.

The first picture is before I emptied out the room and started. These last two are after I was done with the two walls. Whoever lived here before us must have smoked, because the walls are yellow and dripping. Not as bad as some I’ve tried to clean and paint over… but bad enough. Plus, whoever painted didn’t put any primer on the baseboard or the door molding. I’ve been sanding it off completely, and easily. And I just don’t know if I’ll have the gumption to sand it all off, or if I’ll just sand most of it off and call it good.

Maybe my sister will like to come help me paint once the prep work is done. Painting takes the least amount of time, though. Prep takes about 100 times longer. Oh well.. it’ll get done. I’ve been avoiding this room for almost nine years. It’s the last upstairs room to get painted (well, except the kitchen, but the kitchen is gonna be gutted so it doesn’t count). So finally I’m getting around to it.

I’m not rushing, though. I’m taking it easy and only doing what I feel like doing at one time. I don’t care if it takes me all fall, or all winter. I want to do it slowly and do it right.

Not sure what color I’m going to paint… the carpet (the only room in our house left that has carpet) is blue with grey flecks. And I don’t want either blue or grey, and I’m not sure what will match. Oh well, I’ll find something!

I am thinking of redoing our loan situation. We owe about $26,000 on our mortgage at 5.25% interest, and I have the new loan for the minivan at 6.49% interest, 7 years, long term so the payment amount would be super low.

Anyhow… if I get a Home Equity Line of Credit at 4.5%… wouldn’t that be better? I can pay off the other two, and we’d probably have a lower payment while the husband isn’t working.

Are there any catches to this? I talked to a guy at the Credit Union, he said there are no closing costs or fees, so that’s good.

From what I understand, it’s basically a line of credit where you have like a credit card, and you just use the equity on your house to pay for things. And you can have it for a certain amount of time, like 10 years, and then at the end you have to reapply or something.

However it’s a variable rate, that 4.5%… so it could (will) go up. But maybe we’ll have everything paid off by then. I guess that’s just a gamble. I don’t like variable, but maybe we can risk it. And we can refinance to a fixed if it goes up too much.

Hrm.. things to think about. Just like getting acne treatments. What to do, what to do? I’ll talk to the husband first, and see what he thinks!

bathroom before 01 I actually did some cleaning today. I’m afraid of cleaning… well, not so much the cleaning, but the anxiety that I always feel while I’m doing it. Always…? Well, today I was so much better. And it’s even Day 21. So for about the next 7 days I’ll be in high PMS mode. But the last time my friend and I were in to the Holistic Vet, she talked about how Magnesium can really help hormonal changes, and so I thought I’d try it out. And I spend about 2 or 3 hours cleaning today.. and the anxiety stayed away! I didn’t feel that awful hungry feeling of stress inside of me. It was weird, and quite nice, I will say!

bathroom before 02So I’ve been taking my Vitex Agnus Castus and adding in the magnesium,. and I think it’s really helping! I’m going to read up on magnesium and see what I can find. Oh.. and these are before and after pictures of the bathroom. The first two are before.. not sure if you can see the mold spots on the ceiling. Bleh. How does mold get on the ceiling? Man, I hate to clean. I hate that you have to do it over and over again, like every week! I’ll do it once a year or so, but dangit I have better things to do with my time than clean every week, and the dirt keeps coming back!

bathroom afterYeah.. this is the after picture, and it looks the same, to me, as the before. LOL but if you came to my house I hope you would notice a difference! No more mold on the ceiling! I was paying for a maid service, but I can’t afford it now with the husband not working. Oh well… so I get to clean myself once in a while. And it is just once in a while, for sure. I think, sometimes, when the house gets dirty, it’s just time to buy a new one. LOL. I’ll go have a look at some mortgage quotes to see what I could get!

Anyway, it felt good to do some cleaning today, to spend some time at home instead of off doing dog sports. Though that’s what I’ll be doing most of tomorrow, again. Which will also be fun. As I was cleaning I was thinking it was almost therapeutic and relaxing, to just be home, in my little cave which is my house. I like to cave up, it recharges me, energizes me, and I think it’s helping me to feel better.

I need to change this theme so that there is a wee bit of spacing between the images and the text, I do think.