A Winner & An Apology

So I may be the worst blogger ever.  My deepest apologies.  All I have to say for myself is that the summer just got away from me.  I can’t believe we’re already officially a week into fall.

The winner of my June Is Adopt A Cat Month feature is PAWS.  You can read more about them at Animal Shelter Volunteer Life.  The check is finally in the mail.  I am so sorry it is so late!  Thank you to everyone who participated.

Our summer was crazy and busy; some bad stuff, some good stuff, mostly just life. 

Nick’s grandfather, who has always been incredibly healthy and active, was hospitalized, and now has a major heart problem.  I’ll try to make a long story short.  He was initially hospitalized for pneumonia, after Urgent Care sent him to the Emergency Room and the Emergency Room sent him to ICU, largely as a precaution due to his age.  Less than 12 hours later he was on a ventilator.  Things were very up and down, and he ended up being moved to a different hospital.  He’s home now, and will be going back for major heart surgery later this week.  If optimism counts for anything, he should be just fine.

This has been the summer of appliances for us.  We finally bought a small chest freezer after talking about it for years.  We planted a much bigger garden this year, and everything lived, so it was nice to be able to freeze so many things.  The CSA boxes have also been very full most weeks.  I had mixed feelings about adding a second freezer when it’s just the two of us, but I think it’s a good thing.  Using our own homegrown produce this winter instead of paying outrageous prices for it in the grocery store should help make up a lot of the cost of the freezer.  And I’ve been able to freeze things like home-made chicken broth that we just didn’t have room for before. 

Our HVAC finally gave up.  We’ve known for a while that we would be replacing it sooner rather than later.  No one is sure when our old one was put in, but everyone who ever came to work on it said you just didn’t see those anymore.  There’s a chance it was as old (or older) than we are, so it did its time.  “Sooner” became “now” in July, though it took until August to get everything together to get it done.  The new unit is great.  It doesn’t run all of the time like the old one did, and we’ve noticed a difference in the power bills.  I’m very excited about the heat working better this winter! Hopefully no more mornings of waking up to ice crystals on windows. 

I’ve often heard that things happen in threes, and that proved to be the case for buying appliances for us when the washing machine died/flooded. I was doing laundry before my sister came to visit, and when I went to move it from the washer to the dryer I walked through standing water. That’s never a good sign.  We thought we had it fixed and it flooded again. We finally determined that fixing it properly was going to cost about as much as a new washing machine, so we opted to get a new one.  I’m mildly obsessed with doing laundry, so I’m still really excited about the new one. It’s High Efficiency, and it’s huge.  It can handle a dog bed, which is a big deal in our house.

No summer would be complete without something involving pets.  We fostered two adorable little kittens for about a month.  More on them later, because that much cute has to have a separate post.  We also officially adopted Duke (we’re currently at about a 50% “fail” rate as foster parents).  More on that later as well.  Duke’s journey has been long and intense. 

The garden did better than it ever has before.  We put in two raised beds, and (mostly) maintained what we had before.  We ended up with lots and lots of squash, zucchini, peppers, basil, and tomatoes.  We shared quite a bit, and froze quite a bit to enjoy later.  I think we would have had more, but I hurt my back and the garden was left largely untended for nearly three weeks.  The cherry tomatoes are still going strong, though; last year they made it almost to the end of October.  The basil is still holding on, though it’s no longer thriving.  Now I just need to get out there and pull out all of the dead plants. 

So what about you?  How was your summer?  I’m looking forward to catching up and seeing what I missed.