Crochet Projects

During the past year I haven't been totally doing nothing. At first I didn't want to do any extra projects because that would mean just that much more stuff to pack and move when the time came. But I was itching to do some crochet and it suddenly occurred to me that I could crochet some afghans and give them as gifts!

The first one I made was a simple basketweave stitch. I used a variegated yarn to add a little interest. I have a tendency to make the stitches larger than the pattern calls for so you can see on the completed blanket there is a color change where I had to buy extra yarn in order to make the blanket as big as I wanted. Once it's folded nicely on the sofa you don't really notice anyway.

Here you can see the basketweave pattern better. This stitch makes for a really heavy, thick, warm afghan. (Click on the picture to enlarge.)

The instructions called for a simple border you can see here.

The second afghan I made using the open/closed heart pattern. I had made this pattern once before as a baby blanket for my granddaughter. The difference this time was I added a couple of extra rows to make an adult sized afghan. This yarn was a no dye lot yarn so I didn't need to worry so much about matching color lots.

A closeup of the border.

The first blanket I gave to my sister in law for being such a good sister in law and taking care of the dogs and putting up with me while my husband was in the hospital. The second blanket I gave to our friends in Roseburg who frequently fed us and gave us a lot of moral support while we were still looking for a house in that area and also for just being great friends!

Yesterday I unpacked a box with a lot of my "crafts" stuff and I started getting the itch again. It'll have to wait until the rest of the boxes are unpacked and put away. *sigh*

First Snow

We woke up this morning to 27º and two inches of snow on the ground!

The dogs exploring. I think they liked it.

As for the bull (on the left) and the horses (on the right) I'm not too sure they are liking the cold white stuff.

The house from the side/front (it's kind of an odd configuration). I think I'll just call it the garage side.

And this view we'll call the deck side.
And looking down the driveway towards the street.

As beautiful as it is it brings some problems we are not really prepared for. This is the first time we've ever owned a home on it's own well. There is a faucet at the animal pens but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. (There are no such problems with the house itself!) We will need to learn how to properly take care of the well.

We were told the former owner had something to do with reining horses so the pens are actually set up for horses. There is a hot wire running along the top of the fence line but it isn't connected to any power source at this time. The fence is a three wire fence (straight wire, not barbed).

Dakota, the bull, quickly figured out how to crawl under the fence so he could "help" the horses finish their meals. So now until we get the e-fence figured out we've had to contain him in an area surrounded by about four cattle panels tied together.

With the freezing weather I have to break the ice on top of their waters. We have to hook the hose up to an outlet inside the garage that gives off hot water to melt the ice in the hose. I think until we get the electrical part figured out I might run a long extension cord to the shop and put a water heater in the waterers. We have a call in to a fence specialist and I hope he'll be calling us soon.

Meanwhile we are making progress on the boxes, little by little. It's a good thing we don't have to worry about any deadlines to get stuff put away!

Moving

Our furniture that was in storage was delivered the other day. Because of the configuration of the driveway the moving van driver said we would have to do a shuttle. That meant instead of driving the van to the house he would be parked in the grocery store parking lot about five miles down the road. We rented a large U-Haul, then two local guys and the driver unloaded the moving van and reloaded that stuff into the U-Haul, then drove to the house and unloaded the U-Haul into the house. It took two loads of a 26' van.

Here's the first load coming down the driveway.

The two local mover helpers are in the truck behind the U-Haul.

Here's Bill supervising the movers while they get ready to hump the oak roll top desk to the nook up the stairs.

After a couple of false starts they got it figured out and made it up.

Besides the gun safe the desk was probably the toughest thing they had to move.
This is what the kitchen looks like right now.
Boxes of stuff everywhere.
Seriously... I had no idea we had so much crap STUFF.
One of the bedrooms is totally full of boxes. HELP!!
I guess we have our work cut out for us!

And I do realize I'm kind of doing this out of order, but I promise I'll show the pictures I took of the empty house when we first looked at it.

Home At Last

It's a little surprising to see my last post was way back in June. But there was a good reason for that. While I have mentioned the difficulty in finding our perfect place what I did not share at the time was that my husband was very sick.

Our family and close friends knew what was happening but it was all a little overwhelming for me and I felt I didn't need the added pressure of reporting everything on this blog. To make a long story short after months of increasing discomfort it was determined that my husband had a tumor on his pancreas. We conferred with a surgical oncologist in Eugene and surgery was scheduled for early June.

He underwent a difficult surgery called "the Whipple procedure" which was successful and fortunately they found that the tumor was encapsulated. (Just for clarification it was NOT pancreatic cancer.) Unfortunately the recovery for the Whipple is very difficult. He ended up having to have a second surgery about two weeks later to correct a kink in his intestines near where the food tube was connected. That went well but recovery was long and difficult. All in all he was in the hospital for 27 days.

During that time I was staying with my sister in law in who lives just outside of Eugene. The hospital is in Springfield, about 30 minutes away. She graciously allowed me to stay with her during this difficult time and took care of our dogs while I was at the hospital with my husband. The cats were still at the rental in Roseburg and I would drive back to fill their bowls, clean their litter box, and check the mail about every four days.

Finally my husband was released from the hospital with a good prognosis. It was a slow growing tumor which may or may not return. However even if it does he'll probably die of old age before he starts having those same symptoms.

After we got back to Roseburg we resumed our search for our "perfect place". Since we were having a very difficult time finding what we were looking for (I wanted 20+ acres, he had to have a nice house he wouldn't be embarrassed to have friends come visit) I decided I would lower my expectations and we started looking at properties with 15 acres, then 10 acres, and then five acres.

It seemed we always came up against the same old, same old for Douglas County. For our price range either the house was good and the property was not suitable for what I wanted, or the property was great and the house was unliveable. There were nice suitable places that met both our requirements but they were asking too much because everything was being listed as "vineyard potential". It was getting frustrating.

Then just a few weeks after being released from the hospital for the Whipple, my husband suffered an appendicitis attack and had to have yet another operation to remove his perforated appendix! I guess when it rains it pours!

Since things weren't looking too good for us property wise in Douglas County we decided to expand our search to Central Oregon. His mom has a summer home outside of Bend and one set of his grandparents lived in Bend for a while. So my husband was familiar with that area and has always liked that high desert area. Just prior to a visit to his mom I looked on Realtor.com for homes with acreage in that area and found a place in Prineville.

We made an appointment to see the house, which was a bank owned, and we were immediately impressed and felt like "this is it!!!". The house is a great custom built home on 52 acres outside of Prineville. It has been a little neglected and does need some work but it is in terrific shape for a bank owned. When we returned to Roseburg we had the agent we've been working with write up an offer.

After a little back and forth action we got the house. We certainly had a different experience than we expected from hearing about bank owned properties. Everything went very quickly and relatively smoothly. I think from the day we made our offer to the day of closure was less than two months!

This is downtown Prineville from the Ochoco (OH chuh ko) Viewpoint (looking east).

Basically the same view but backed out a bit. The road you see at the bottom is the main road that comes in to town after dropping off a bluff. I'll get better pictures to show this later...

We've owned this house for two weeks now! I find it highly amusing that my last post, about Smith Rock State Park, is a location just 3o minutes from our new home!

I'm looking forward to sharing more about our new house, but that will have to wait until another day. So until then!