Changes, changes

I can't believe it has been almost a month since my last post. I'm way behind. As someone has said, when we're quiet, you know it is time to pray. There's so much to say and once again, I don't know where to start. I guess that means I might just as well start with the big one since it is always on our minds. For a number of reasons, Nate and Maggie Regier have decided that they need to return to Kansas before winter. They will be leaving in less than a month. Rodney will be taking over as director of maintenance as he is now the only full time maintenance person. Needless to say, having been here just a year now, Rodney does not feel remotely prepared to fill Nate's HUGE shoes, or probably more appropriately, waders. In addition to loosing a valued coworker and respected boss, we'll also be seeing a lot less of some very good friends. Needless to say, we're feeling a bit disoriented. Fortunately for Nate and Maggie, Arvin and Kathy are still here from Kansas and will be able to haul some of their belongings back to Kansas. We're trying to spend as much time as schedules will allow with both Nate and Maggie and Arvin and Kathy. They're good people. Annie will be leaving too in about one more week. *sigh* We're going to miss her tremendously.

The work teams are all done for the year which is a mixed blessing. It was so wonderful to get to meet and work with such great people all summer, but with school starting, our schedule has gotten a bit on the crazy side again. I'm desperately trying NOT to have to go to town twice a week, but I'm not so sure I'm going to be able to pull it off. Andrei is in his senior year this year and still isn't certain if he will have all the credits he needs to graduate or not. It is clear now that we should have made more of an effort last year to get all the credit transfer details worked out. Oksana is home schooling again this year and is quite happy with that choice. We chose to work with one of the districts that has a huge home school program and that seems to have been an excellent choice. We were able to talk with an excellent teacher who was able to help us pick curriculum based on Oksana's strengths and weaknesses.

My computer is definitely dying so we have purchased another laptop which we are now using for all of our computing. I still need to try Photoshop on it to see if it can handle it but have not gotten around to installing that yet. Unfortunately that means another post without pictures. I promise I'll make it up once things settle down a bit. I still need to get a few things off the other computer and then ship it out for repairs. At least I can still keep on top of things a LITTLE bit with this computer!

I'm still recovering a bit from my roll-over with the ATV a week or so ago. Oh wait, I suppose you hadn't heard that one yet. I was coming down the steep hill behind the house and reached out to grab something that was falling out of the basket. That meant that I wasn't really paying attention to my driving if you can imagine that. The right front wheel caught the right bank of the trail and just started heading straight up the bank! Oops. I wasn't going fast fortunately, but I did tip the ATV over on it's side, catching my ankle under the foot peg. It's still a bit bruised and still sore on and off. I do pretty well walking on level surfaces. The problem is that we don't have a lot of level surfaces around here. ;) There was a bit of a contributing factor to the roll-over. I had a migraine at the time and no migraine medication because I'd forgotten to order it. Oops. I did make an interesting discovery though while I was medication-less. The migraines weren't as bad as I thought they would be. I didn't have that many and they would be gone within a day or two. Then when I DID get the medication, I got incredibly sick when I did take it. Hmmmm. Interesting.

To round out our bad news, Eider has something called trigeminal neuritis which is a neurological problem that can occur in animals, causing them to lose control of some of their jaw and facial muscles. He currently can not eat or drink without assistance. I'll spare you the detailed progression and lengths we've had to go through to get food and liquid into him, but suffice it to say that it has been a long week. We aren't certain what caused it, but suspect that it may be from bashing his head on the floor sneezing with seasonal allergies. Just when we thought it couldn't get any worse, it did. Ugh! We're hoping it will start to turn around SOON, but it could be a couple of weeks, if it even does correct itself. It most likely will, but there is no guarantee.

The good news is that there's no more bad news for this post. I think. We've had the first frost of the season and the weather is as gorgeous as can be! We've FINALLY gotten our summer; beautiful sunshine, warm temperatures and low humidity. The ATV trail is drying out for the first time this summer! :) We even have nights now so we can actually see stars and the moon again! It's all rather exciting when you haven't had night time all summer, not to mention that when we did start getting night time again, it was too cloudy to see anything! The garden is doing pretty well aside from no tomatoes. We have been eating plenty of lovely new potatoes and the kale did phenomenally well. The lettuce and spinach grew like crazy too this summer. A lot of the other stuff we got in a bit late so it didn't do quite as well as I would have hoped. That's ok. We'll try again next year! This was a great learning year.

The boy from Russia that went to camp with our boys this summer came over for the Labor Day weekend and the boys all had a BLAST together. Yegor is like a smaller, more active version of Sergei if you can imagine that. Talk about long lost brothers from a different mother! :) It was a lot of fun. They spent one day climbing Anthracite which is an all day affair. Our boys (and girls) have been busy cutting fire wood so hopefully Rodney won't need to cut much this winter if at all. That is VERY good news! The beavers are also busy preparing for winter. They've been stealing some of the wood from the piles of brush that the teens moved out of our yard this spring. Rodney has been busy preparing for trapping season which starts in another week or two. He's cultivating beavers. ;)