What I've been up to March 4 - June 8, 2015

I've been busy.

I stopped posting to my blog for several months because I was busy with:

1. Taking photos and posting to Flickr and 500px.
These photos were taken at the W.A.Wright and Sons Machine Shop and Foundry, a shop that closed its doors, leaving everything as it was on the day it closed in 1969. I'm usually more into color photography rather than black and white, but the dusty old place just seemed to call for B&W and muted colors for most photos. Click on images for larger sizes.

"Rounds 2"

"Rounds"

"Rope"

"Mystery Machine"

"Tabletop"

"Wire Wheel"

2. My local Photography Meetup group.
I'm now a Co-Organizer and this eats up a lot of my time.

3. Home renovations.
This old house is close to 100 years old and we've put off many renovations and repairs for years, but finally decided this was the year to do the work  We had planned a trip to Brazil but are postponing that until next year after the Olympic madness is over in Rio.

Although we have hired contractors to do the work, we still had to search for good contractors & arrange for dozens of estimates. Then we had to move things to make room for window installers, for example, to get at the window areas.  So far we've had 11 new windows, three new doors plus one garage door installed.  On our huge garage, we had 5 windows boarded up.  They are about 3 feet from the wall of a neighbor's garage so provide no view and little light anyway.  One old door from the garage was moved to replace our basement door.

We still need to move other things around in order to have a huge plumbing problem repaired, the house painted, siding installed on the garage, exhaust fans installed on both garage and house,have more windows replaced, and have the driveway and some sidewalks repaved.  We need bathroom fixtures renovated or replaced and a new shower stall in the basement. We want to add a bulkhead door to the cellar, and replace the basement windows with glass block.

...new door.

Old door in the
garage is replaced by.....

One of our workers in an Amish man who brings several of his 5 sons and/or neighbors to help.  If we had unlimited funds, we could have him and his family move in for about 5 years.

There is so much more to do and we're already hemorrhaging money, so some of this might have to wait for another year or two.

I was hoping by now we could sell the house my mother left me, but she died when the housing market was terrible, so decided to wait. Meanwhile I allowed my niece to move in, and well, it's difficult to throw out a relative.  I thought she might be able to buy the house, but now she has one son starting college and two more children going to college within the next 3 years, so I figure it will be seven years before she can do that.  I've been charging her only enough to cover taxes and insurance, but I think I'll have to raise that, enough to bring in a little income but not enough to be a burden on her.

4. My left foot.
I mentioned that we need to have our concrete repaired or repaved. I was walking to the car one day and I turned my left ankle on an uneven patch where the concrete is broken. I fell, bruised and scraped my right knee, had a bloody thumb, & bruised my right wrist.

It was early in the morning.  No one was around and my husband was still in bed. Because I'm a night owl and sleep in the afternoons, we have disconnected the phone in the bedroom.

The problem getting up is that I have arthritis in both knees.  To stand up, I had to start in a kneeling position, which is hell on the knees. Then, when I need to get one foot on the ground to push up, it's painful to push off of either knee. I had my cell phone in my bag, so I could have called 911, but I was determined to get up on my own.

"My Left Foot"

Luckily, I had fallen right behind the car, so I used the key-remote to open the trunk.  I reached in and pulled out two huge padded/insulated Costco bags and placed one on top of the other on the driveway concrete.  I was able to kneel on those ---still painful, but not as bad as bare concrete.  With the trunk still open, I was able to grab onto the lower part of the opening to pull myself up.

It was only then that I realized that my knee wasn't the worst of my injuries.  It felt like a knife had been pushed into the bottom of my left foot. In severe pain, I hobbled to the house.

Often if I injure myself, it hurts like hell for a while, then the pain subsides, so I thought I'd be okay. I took a couple of Tylenol and went to bed in the afternoon. But when it still hurt then I got up that evening I decided to call the doctor the next morning. On my doctor's advice, I  headed to to the emergency room. There, it was determined that I had a broken bone in my foot.

So now I have a 'boot' on my foot and a walker.  I have an appointment to see my orthopedic doctor tomorrow.