Drowning in tankards

Sorry for the silence, dear readers. Don and I have been drowning in tankards for the last few days.

To update our disastrous New Year's Eve and New Year's Day incidents: My mother continues to remain stable after rallying from what we all thought were her final moments. She's back at the nursing home, though she's in isolation (doubtless because of the pneumonia) and my dad is required to suit up in PPE before visiting her. The consensus is if her bouts of abrupt pneumonia continue, the family will turn to hospice.

Older Daughter's finger is on the mend, but she's severely limited in what she can do ... and that includes completing a massive 350+ piece order of tankards that must reach their destination within two weeks. Therefore Don and I have taken over the production run.

Don has been spending hours in the shop on the power tools. At various stages in the assembly process, he brings batches to the house, where I take over assembly. Right now the house is overrun with mugs.

Nearly every surface is covered in various style tankards in various stages of completion.

As an example, yesterday evening Older Daughter and I sat at the kitchen table to work on the smallest-size tankards in the repertoire, the coffee-sized mugs. These have solid, rather than multi-colored, sides. Older Daughter assembled the side pieces into groups of six, which I then taped and stacked for gluing.

These are the groups of six sides which will get taped.

Stacks of taped tankards. Altogether there were about 90 tankards to glue in this particular batch.

While I glued, Older Daughter sat opposite and entertained me by reading out loud various dramas posted on Reddit.

By the time of evening chores, I had worked my way through a bit over half of the three stacks.

The freshly glued tankards were left to dry for several hours (overnight, in this case).

Today Don will be working on another batch of the production run in the shop, which he'll then bring into the house for me to glue up.

Older Daughter is antsy and bored and apologetic for the need for us to finish the production run, but such is life. We're just very grateful her injury wasn't worse.

Anyway, that accounts for my blog silence over the last few days. Our deepest thanks for all of your prayers during our difficulties.

A really, really rough New Year's Eve

We are now two days into the New Year, and now I feel I can write about what our New Year's Eve was like. In a nutshell, it was very, very rough.

My mother (who, as you remember, is now in a nursing home) was hospitalized on Dec. 30 with pneumonia and a blood infection. It didn't sound good. Then on Dec. 31, the doctor (not her regular doctor, but the one on call over the holiday weekend) said she wasn't responding to treatments. He summoned the immediate family (my dad and all my brothers; I'm too far away) for a meeting on New Year's Day.

Doctors don't summon immediate family for no reason. We were braced for the worst. When I talked to my youngest brother (who lives geographically closest to my parents and has been a rock for them), he said he fully expected Mom to go into hospice. He's a big strong man, my brother, but he was crying as he told me this.

Since I couldn't physically be present at the meeting, my brother asked me to stay by the phone on New Year's Day in case my input was needed for whatever decisions were being made about my mother's care.

Needless to say we were a gloomy household on New Year's Eve. Younger Daughter (stationed in Europe) was traveling, and my brother urged me not to ruin her trip because she couldn't do anything anyway. Older Daughter was very upset about the news and buried herself in work, since she has a large wholesale order going out shortly.

On the evening of New Year's Eve, Don and I decided to call our pastor and explain the situation, and ask for prayers. This good man was – literally – in the middle of a prayer on the phone when Older Daughter came crashing into house from the shop, holding up a bloody and mangled finger. While working on the router, a piece of wood snapped and her finger connected with the router blade. She was in terrible pain, covered in blood and sawdust.

We yelled to our pastor that we had to go, and immediately embarked on a hasty first-aid for Older Daughter. We bundled her into the car and Don drove her to the emergency room, a half-hour drive away.

After they left, I called our pastor back and explained what happened, noting grimly that this was a helluva way to end the year. He finished the prayer he had started earlier, and then – without asking – went to meet Don and Older Daughter at the emergency room. (Apparently he does this a lot with congregants. They know him there in the emergency room.)

Don and Older Daughter were back within a couple of hours. OD's finger is swathed in gauze, of course, but it will mend. The router had chewed off the tip, but the injury didn't reach the bone and she should recover full use after it heals. Heavens above, it could have been way worse.

So New Year's Day dawned, and Don went out to the shop to take over the production run of tankards for Older Daughter's wholesale order. I, meanwhile, stayed inside by the phone, waiting for word on my mom. I took down the Christmas tree and cleaned the house as a sort of occupational therapy. Older Daughter slept much of the day, exhausted.

It wasn't until evening that my brother called with surprising news: My mother had rallied!

This took, literally, all of us by surprise. The entire family was braced for the worst. My brother said Mom looked terrible, was mostly comatose, and hadn't eaten in days (she had a feeding tube). My dad had tried to wake her up several times to no avail.

My dad tried to wake her up one last time. She actually woke up, but was terribly groggy. But then, miraculously, she kind of blinked herself awake over the span of about five minutes and became much more alert. She was responsive and cognizant and talking (as best she could; her speech was badly impacted by the stroke). Her vitals stabilized. The doctor was just as surprised as the rest of us by her rapid improvement, and decided to belay any recommendations for hospice.

My brother said Dad went from the darkest gloom to incandescent happiness in the span of an hour.

Mom is still hospitalized and she is by no means out of danger, but the likelihood of her imminent departure seems to have passed.

Phew. It's been a roller-coaster of emotions over the last couple of days, let me tell you. 

On a more positive note, something interesting and even amusing happened to Older Daughter while being treated in the emergency room, which I'll explain later in another blog post.

In the meantime, prayers for my parents would be deeply appreciated.

Happy birthday, Older Daughter!

Today is Older Daughter's birthday!

We had nothing special planned for the day – we're not big on going overboard for birthdays – but we got her a French silk pie and a gift card to her favorite café, and that was about the extent of it.

But we're all together and all healthy, so that's what matters.

And here's the obligatory newborn photo, just to embarrass her (smile).

It's the Forgetful Family!

Older Daughter had a shipment of tankards going out the other day. Her usual protocol is to prepare in advance the various components needed for shipping: Newspapers, strapping tape, boxes, bubble wrap, etc.

But she got stuck because she couldn't find the tape gun. We've had this tape gun for, oh, about 35 years. I'm fairly certain Don and I bought it shortly after we got married, and we use it constantly. We always store it in a small basket by my desk that holds office supplies. But poof, it was gone.

We all searched high and low. No dice. Meanwhile, Older Daughter had to get those boxes packed before FedEx arrived.

In desperation, she turned to her backup tape gun, which is smaller and less efficient. But at least she had it, and it was a good thing, too.

We got the boxes packed, and FedEx came and picked them up. Still, we couldn't find that tape gun, no matter how diligently we searched. Where did it go? We use it constantly; it's not like it could just disappear.

Finally, a couple days later, Older Daughter found it ... in her car. "Now I remember," she said. "I brought it with me when I went to town to tape up a small box I was shipping."

"Hey, it's the Forgetful Family!" proclaimed Don.

Don, as readers may remember, is famously absent-minded. He has what he calls his "squirrel" moments. 

Apparently absent-mindedness runs in the family. Specifically, the Forgetful Family.

Stop the presses!

The nearest town puts out a once-a-week newspaper covering regional stories and issues: Businesses, sports, schools, special events. We'll go in every few months and purchase bundles of older papers for $2 each for fire-starters or packing tankards.

I was helping Older Daughter pack some tankards for shipment this week...

...when the headline of a large and prominent article caught her eye: "[Name of grocery store] makes improvements."

Yes, it seems a local grocery store was undergoing renovations, including improved organization,  additional shelving units, and new refrigerator and freezer units, which gave the store the opportunity to expand its inventory (kind of a nice thing when town residents are a long way from bigger chain stores).

Well, I thought it was charming to the point of adorable that this information made the newspaper. Stop the presses! A grocery store is getting new shelving and refrigeration units! There was nothing about drug busts, or strings of murders, or terrorist attacks. Nope, one of the biggest news stories of the week was the local grocery store was making improvements.

Just a slice of life in small-town America.

Whatchamacallit Stirfry

Older Daughter has begun a new cooking campaign.

To recap, Older Daughter pays "rent" by cooking for us. She has become an impressive and creative cook and has introduced us to many new and wonderful dishes. She's also great at improvising, and she's been doing this a lot lately. How?

Well, with our spending lockdown after my job loss, she is determined to use up a lot of random things we have in the chest freezer. She is almost to the point of closing her eyes, extracting something random from the freezer, and creating a meal around it.

Today she pulled out a pound of ground turkey. From this, she created what we called Whatchamacallit Stirfry, which consisted of:

• Veggies we already had in the fridge, including sweet peppers, carrots, cabbage

• A few random potstickers from the freezer

• Angel-hair pasta

• Ingredients we keep on hand such as sesame oil, soy sauce, ginger

It. Was. Fabulous.

Older Daughter's culinary creativity is saving us a fair bit of money as we adjust to this new lifestyle. It's also underscores what items we hope to grow in the garden this year to supply ingredients for her next Whatchamacallit Stirfry.

A cat in the house

Older Daughter was away for a week, house-sitting for some friends several hours away. This meant Frumpkin, her cat, was alone on her side of our house. (For those unfamiliar with the story, we partitioned our house several years ago when Older Daughter took over our woodcraft business. Her suite has the two tiny bedrooms, a bathroom, and a "catio" porch with her own outside door.)

Anyway, normally when Older Daughter leaves for any length of time, either Don or I will go into Older Daughter's suite to play with Frumpkin and give him some attention and affection. But this time, since she was going to be gone for so long, we took the easy way out. We opened the connecting door and just let him out into the main part of the house.

We figured it was easier to just let Frumpkin be part of the household (during the times Lihn the parrot was in her cage, of course) than to spend time giving him attention on his side.

Both Frumpkin and Darcy were both gentlemen about the arrangement. Mr. Darcy hates all cats, but he knows by now that Frumpkin is the exception, so he tolerated him very well.

After spending the first hour or two exploring, Frumpkin – in typical cat fashion – spent the rest of the time sleeping in various locations.

Here he's curled up on the leather welder's gloves we keep next to the woodstove. No spot in the house is warmer!

For a full week, he just luxuriated wherever his little heart desired.

I think he tried out every chair.

Yet another chair.

Darcy and Frumpkin came to a truce during this time, and the lion laid down with the lamb quite often.

Interestingly, I wondered if we were creating a monster during the week. Would Frumpkin yowl and scratch at the connecting door, demanding to be let out once Older Daughter returned?

In fact, no. He's so thrilled to have Older Daughter back that we haven't heard a peep from her suite. I guess all is right with the world once more.

The overworked tankard-maker

Older Daughter has been slamming through the first of several massive tankard orders from her customers. We're talking anywhere from 300 to 500+ pieces per order.

This particular production run was somewhere on the order of 190 pieces.

Needless to say, she's been burning a lot of midnight oil to meet her deadlines.

So when a friend of hers put together a cartoon meme titled "The Overworked Tankard-Maker," she cracked up.

This is her.

Very accurate. And it gave Older Daughter some much-needed levity during a very busy time.

Snow whomp + power outage

If I've been silent for the last couple of days, it's because we finally got our power back on. It went out late Tuesday night after we got a snow whomp. It looks like winter arrived at last.

I mean, seriously. While the rest of the country already had their snow whomps, we were mild and snow-free. Sure, we had some chilly temps, but otherwise bare ground.

All that changed this past week. At first it was just a soft and picturesque snowfall of a couple inches.

The cows didn't seem overly fazed.

Most of the snow melted off over the next couple of days. And then, overnight, WHOMP.

Unsurprisingly, we lost power during this blitz. Out here, the power grid goes down for seemingly any reason: a heavy snowfall, a wind, a Tuesday. We knew this was likely to happen and had everything prepped just in case.

The cows were a little more fazed by this snowfall. We decided to keep them in the corral for immediate access to shelter. Filet, our stand-offish formerly-range-cow Angus, is due to calve sometime in the next month (probably less), and we don't want to be chasing down a new baby in deep snow on the far side of the pasture.

I took a yardstick into the yard and measured how much snow fell overnight.

Twelve and a half inches of new snow, and we've gotten more since.

It almost came over the tops of my boots.

The effect was very pretty...

...especially after the clouds cleared and it turned into a strikingly sunny day.

The snowfall was an opportunity for every man in the neighborhood to climb onto whatever equipment he had available, and work to clear the road. I counted at least six different neighbors on six different pieces of equipment, not counting Don's efforts.

I kept the bird feeder filled, since I knew the feathered ones would have a hard time finding food under such conditions.

The quail had to literally break trails in the snow.

Since Older Daughter's side of the house isn't heated during power outages, she let Frumpkin (her cat) into the main part of the house (making sure Lihn the parrot was safely in her cage, of course). Frumpkin was fascinated by the activity at the bird feeder. Cat TV.

Toward dusk, we took Mr. Darcy for his afternoon walk and noted a large herd of elk, at least 25 animals, spread across a neighbor's field.

We lit the oil lamps and settled in for an evening of reading. Frumpkin was perched on Older Daughter's lap, looking quite pleased with himself.

The power stayed off for forty-eight hours, through clear sunny days and very dark nights.

Don used the back blade on the tractor to plow the lower driveway.

Frumpkin stayed in the main part of the house, looking very cute...

...while Darcy looked very worried. "That cat isn't supposed to BE here."

The power came back on early Friday morning and life got back to normal. And the elk? Well, they went strolling by right below the house. Gorgeous.