Good News/Bad News

I have a couple of good things and a couple of not-so-good things going on.

First of all my dental implant is about three weeks away from being finished. I went in on Thursday to get the impressions made. Then I was hit with the bad news. I knew I was going to have to pay for the crown, but for some reason I had been thinking it would be in the $400 range, similar to what I paid for another regular crown. I was informed that the insurance wouldn't pick up any part of this crown and the bill for this portion of the dental work would be $1600!

Ouch! I'm sure the person from the office went over everything with me way back when I started all this almost a year ago but for some reason all I could focus on at the time was the cost of the implant part itself, which was about $3,000.

Well, now for some more good news. My husband's boss called him and said they could reinstate him to the job he had before they layed him off. He'll be starting at the beginning of the next pay period, in about two weeks. It couldn't have come at a better time.

Tomorrow my husband will be taking off to do his little "look-see" around Oregon, searching for a likely place for us to relocate. As I mentioned in a previous post, we do like the Roseburg area but want to make sure we check out all options. For example if he just happens to find 4o acres on the beach, then I'm sure I could put up with the coastal weather for that. (Although realistically it's highly unlikely that we'll find forty acres on the beach that we can afford!)

Now for some more good news! It's been five years since we last put up any olives. There were two reasons for this. Our olive tree has been sickly, and wasn't producing its usual great bounty of olives. They were on the small side and they were growing at several different rates. So while some of the olives were ready to pick, others were already too ripe and others were no where close to being ready.

The other reason is that you can no longer buy Red Devil Lye (or anything similar) in the grocery store or hardware store anymore. We used the lye to process the olives. Thanks to all the crank producers pure lye has been removed from the general publics' availability. The last time I tried to find lye on-line the smallest portion I could find was from a chemical company that sold the smallest increments in 20 pound sacks. We use a little over one pound of lye for our small production.

In the last year a few changes happened. Thanks to some homesteading blogs I was able to find a few places on-line that sold "food grade" lye in smaller portions, ie: 2 and 4 pound containers. Those bloggers were using the lye to make soap, but after clicking on their suggested links to find lye I was happy to find the food grade lye.

Our poor olive tree did not do too badly this year and we got some nice looking olives. We also were able to find another tree that we were able to use to supplement what we got off of our tree.

Now we are about half way through our olive processing process. I have been taking photos as we go along so some time next week I'll start posting all about it.

Meanwhile here are a few preview photos. This was our olive picker helper.

Have a good Labor Day Weekend!