Lawn Mower Update

Okay...so if you have followed this blog at all, you know that I have had a battle with the lawn vs. the lawn equipment.  Maybe...just maybe...I'm beginning to win.

After dodging rain, an old mower that wouldn't start in spite of a tuneup, and the delay for delivery of a brand new mower, the Fates finally converged on my house.  My mowing gal arrived to mow with the new mower.  She put in oil and gas...got everything set up...but the new mower wouldn't start.
I said a few nasty words.  As it happens, my neighbor to the north was mowing at just this moment, so my gal sought him for assistance.  (I know how hard this is for both of us independent women, but we were desperate!!)  He quickly discovered that something underneath the mower wasn't connected properly.  This took what?  Five minutes?  In very short order, the mower started, and my gal was off and running on an overgrown lawn.  When it was all done, she felt bad because the lawn clippings were thick and ugly.  Geez Louise...not her fault!  I'm just happy that all--FINALLY--has come to fruition.  About time!

I love happy endings.  Hope this is one of those.  Please pray that there are no future problems!

To My Friend Tim...the Latitudinarian

This is personal.  If you follow this blog, you might not understand it all, and that's okay.  I'm not writing it for you.  I'm writing for a friend of mine, a former clergyman of The Salvation Army, whose happens to be bisexual. 

Tim,

Until your Uncle Pat came into my life via amateur radio, quite by accident, I had zero knowledge of The Salvation Army.  Over the course of our friendship, I think he desperately wanted me to become a soldier in the Army.  I just couldn't.  Why?  Although I believed in the Army's mission, I was already actively churched (Methodist), plus I smoked and drank wine.  Further damning was the fact that I was twice divorced.  Even if I had wanted to become a soldier, I was already rejected.

I never pursued soldierhood because, in my mortal mind, even if I got rid of my vices, my past would follow me to perdition.  I didn't want to be part of a church that would judge me before I ever got in it.  Interestingly, although your Uncle Pat never smoked a day of his life, he died of lung problems that doctors didn't seem to be able to control.  And here I was, a smoker, still living.  I still don't understand it. 

I did attend a few Holiness services at Eagle Creek Corps in Indianapolis, plus other at the District and Illinois divisional locations with Pat and Carmella.  We never addressed too many issues other than providing for the poor and hopeless in disaster times.  My biggest beef with TSA was that the organization dictated whom one could marry.  Officers had to marry officers, no matter what.  That robbed everyone in the TSA clergy of their autonomic citizenship.  There was an elephant in the room that we never discussed.  Being a man of his word, when you ran into the problems that dictated your divorce, he never divulged your problems to me.  It was only through our associations on Facebook that I even have a clue.  And you know what?  It doesn't matter to me!

I believe in the Bible as a guide for how to live.  It was written several millenia ago, before society got to where it is now.  Is it the word of God?  Well...it was written by humans, and humans are slaves to their own interpretations.  I am a loyal skeptic.  When I hear of Bible-pounding Christian clerics having extra-marital affairs or molesting children or endorsing politicians who are the absolute antithesis of Christian values, I want to pretend that I'm not part of them.  It hurts.  It hurts, big time.

For any denomination to kick someone out of their fellowship is a negation of terms.  So...we are here to help the poor, the destitute, the homeless, and the addicted...but if they are gay, they can't be part of us?  These are the very people we need to draw in...to tell them that God loves them, no matter who/what they are or who they love.   Really, Tim...if The Salvation Army casts someone out, what other hope is there?  For many, TSA is the hope of acceptance and unconditional love.  Apparently not.

I am happy that you have found a church home beyond TSA.  I'm certain that it puts you at odds with your family, whose very roots go back a long way in TSA.  What I want you to know, from my own understanding, is that who you are and what you believe do not define you to the Almighty.  Your relationship with God is personal, and no one can keep you from Him.  I'm ashamed of TSA for what it has done to you...but I don't want you ever to question your devotion to God or Country because you have already given so much.

Tim, you have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make sense out of nonsense in issues of faith.  What I want for you now is to give that up and just enjoy your blessings and be God's servant, no matter who likes or doesn't like you.  You are so blessed!  In spite of the pain, there aren't many who have received what you have had by way of experiences to advance God's Kingdom, in Germany and at home.

May God bless you and your family on this lovely spring day!

Peggy 

The Saga of the Lawn Mower(s)

With the early spring of every year comes my search for someone to mow my lawn.  Ever since I became sufficiently disabled that I couldn't do it myself anymore, I have been somewhat at the mercy of my pocketbook and whoever I could scare up to do the work for me.  I'm not terribly pernickety about having a perfect lawn, but--like everyone else on the planet--I like things to look good, at least from the street.

For several years, I got lucky in that the husband of a former student of mine was willing, able, and proud of his work.  He was also disabled, but it was hard to tell because he was such a hard worker.  And then, he and his family moved to another community.  It was far enough away that it became inconvenient for him to take care of my yard, but he continued to try.  And then the day came that he had a job that consumed more of his time.  He still tried, but I finally had to admit that it wasn't working for either of us.  His spirit was willing, but his time, distance, and his broken-down old truck were weak.  He had used his own equipment, so my lawn mower sat in my mini-barn, unused.

The next year, I hired a professional.  He was reliable but charged more than I could afford.
The year after that, I went back to the former student's husband, at his request.  He had acquired a riding mower with a leaking gas tank.  It leaked gas all over the yard, killing the grass in strips.  Oops!
The year after that, my Good Neighbor Fred offered to do the job, for pay.  Fred is at least six years older than I.  He has a riding mower that worked okay for the front, but he was stuck using his push-mower in the back yard because the gate to my fence wasn't wide enough to allow the rider back there (which was an issue for ALL of my helpers).  Why couldn't he use MY mower?  Because it had been sitting, unused, for quite a few years.

This year, I was weighing my options when my cleaning gal told me SHE wanted to do my lawn.  I quickly decided that I needed to have my old mower serviced.  Almost as divine intervention, a post on the Nextdoor website came from a man who does lawn mower repair as a retirement job.  He does repairs on location rather than requiring people to cart mowers to him.  Perfect for me!

Mr. C. came over several times to work on the mower.  He changed the oil, replaced the spark plug, cleaned the air filter, took the carburetor home with him to soak it (or whatever one does with carburetors), sharpened the blades, and replaced the primer bulb.  (That's the little rubber doo-hickey that you press several times before starting, to get gas in the motor in order to make it start.)  He got it going.  I heard it!  I heard it more than once!

I was so satisfied that I had done everything possible to help my cleaning gal get started on my yard work.  She came over to mow....but....you guessed it...the mower wouldn't start.  Blah!  I am a woman alone.  I know nothing about motors.  I just need them to work when they are supposed to.  As the lawn continued to grow, I began to consider other options.  I began to add up the years since I had purchased the mower.  Couldn't come up with an exact date, but what I could come up with was that the mower was probably close to 19 years old.  I decided just to buy a new one.

Easy, right?  Au contraire!  I hadn't budgeted for a new mower this month, but stuff happens, right?  I made a purchase online from Walmart--a Snapper 21" self-propelled mulching mower--to be delivered to my house.  It was scheduled to arrive on Tuesday of this week.  I had a meeting at church that day but figured I would just stick around until it was delivered, then go to my meeting, even if late.  Stuck around all day.  No mower.  Finally, by 6:30, I checked the tracking and discovered that it was "delayed" and wouldn't come until Thursday.

I had stuff to do.  Wednesday was totally full with my cleaning gal and the HVAC technician coming to do a tune-up of my AC.  That took ALL day.  No chance to do my errands.

So...today is Thursday.  Knew I was stuck at home until the delivery came, BUT, I had some things I absolutely needed to get, so I was at a local store before they even opened, just to make sure I could take care of that before there could be any hope of my lawn mower delivery.  I needed to catch the FedEx delivery dude to have him bring the package inside the house.

Came home and waited...and waited...and then--Hallelujah!--I got the email notification that my mower had been delivered.  Except it wasn't.  I got in panic mode.  Did they deliver my mower to the wrong address?  What do I do now??  I got online to find out where to go next.  I wanted the company to know that my package had, indeed, NOT been delivered.  I wanted them to know right away so they could backtrack and retrieve my lawn mower before it was stolen.  What I found, instead, was advice from the website that I needed to wait 48 hours before reporting it missing because "sometimes packages are listed as delivered before they are received at their shipping destination".  What the dickens does that mean??

After having put my life virtually on hold for over 1 1/2 days waiting for this delivery, and now hearing that it was delivered when it wasn't...and further knowing that "delivery" doesn't always mean something has actually been delivered...I left the house for ten minutes--TEN MINUTES--to infuse my wine supply.  When I came home, true to my luck, the package was on its side by the door.  Missed the delivery person altogether.  Argh!

My gal came over.  She got it out of the box and onto the patio.  If all goes as planned, she will have a brand new mower to work with.  If it doesn't start, we are back to Square One!

Honestly, all I want out of life right now is to have things be easier than they are.  Now, I have an old mower to dispose of and the hope that the new one will work!

Much Ado About an Ancient Cathedral

Last week, alerted by my daughter to the fact that Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was on fire, I watched in horror with the rest of the world as an 850+ year old building--a bastion of French faith and historical identity--burned.  What a helpless feeling!  Although no one was killed or seriously injured, I watched with the same hopeless feeling that I had when the Twin Towers in New York came down.  I thought that all was lost.  I was wrong.

Much of the building was destroyed, but much was also saved.  The iconic spire came down.  The internal roof came down.  But the irreplaceable stained glass windows were spared.  Some of the priceless artifacts also were saved.  France was hurt watching their treasured cathedral burn, and so was the rest of the world.

Shortly thereafter, some French millionaires pledged millions apiece to help rebuild/restore the cathedral.  The final tally was $1 billion or more.  I think it will take at least that.  No tax monies were used or pledged, according to my information.  And now the fun begins.

There are objections to the fact that "people" are willing to give that much to restore a building, yet there are causes and hungry people whose poverty and needs would be taken care of for less.  It is a shame, for sure.  And yet, if the money were yours, shouldn't you be able to decide how to spend it??

Judas Iscariot complained to Jesus that Mary Magdalene was "wasting" expensive ointments on washing Jesus' feet when the money for those ointments could bring in funds to feed the poor.  Jesus said, paraphrasing, that there would always be poor but that he wouldn't be around that much longer.  His message was that priorities are necessary.  I think that applies now.

There is a building in France that is ancient and wonderful.  It is a source of faith, identity, and comfort.  Part of it--a big part--burned.  People of means pledged mega-bucks to repair the damage.  The rest of us just need to say thank you and carry on.  Notre Dame de Paris--Our Lady of Paris--is just as much a part of France as the Statue of Liberty is to the US.

May God bless whatever fund-raising happens to restore the cathedral, even if the rest of the world is outraged.  I guess my question would be...do you want this place to lay fallow and untouched due to lack of funds to fix it?  If so, history will not treat you as well as the 850-year history of this magnificent building!     

A La Table <--That's French

In my last post, I talked about the book I am reading in preparation for teaching the lessons in it for my adult Sunday School class.  If you can follow the machinations of my brain, the flow looks like this:

Read book about biblical foods--think about what it means--find associations of that with the current world--have my daughter write to me online to say that her teenage children are driving her nuts with what they will and will not eat--think about how she was about food as a youngster--think about how my siblings and I were about food when we were kids--think about the dinner table rules in our household and how it all translated into our food/etiquette philosophies in our own households as adults.  That's my train of thought.  If you can follow that, congratulations!

All of that is the precursor to what I am writing about today.
We are all creatures of habit.  Some of those habits were formed when we were young children, usually as a result of what we were taught by our parents.  Some of them just happened by way of our childhood fears.  Some of the most interesting discussions my classes had came when I challenged them to think about their bedtime routines.  Do you sleep with a night light?  Door open or closed?  Keep water by your bedside?  Sheets and blankets tucked in at the bottom of the bed, or kept loose?  Fan on?  If yes, why?  For white noise?  For breeze and temperature control?  Window open or closed?  Do you sleep covered up or uncovered?  Stuffed animal for snuggling?  You get the picture.  Rarely is anyone ever ambiguous about their bedtime circumstances and routine!

The same is true with meals.
Unless you are Jewish and keep Kosher, meals are prepared without much fanfare.
They are presented at the table in whatever way the family accepts.  Some people are given plates already filled, as with a restaurant.  Others fill their own plates from the pots on the stove.  Still others have the food put in serving dishes and taken to the table, to be passed "family style".  Which is yours?

Our family did the family style thing.  Our food was put in serving dishes, placed on the table, and passed.  That implies choices.  Children--being children--aren't always offered choices.  Things that are good for them and necessary for good nutrition are often not the things that taste the best to immature palates.  This is where Dinner Table Rules come in.  Consider these:

1.  You cannot have dessert unless you clean your plate (that your parents filled).
2.  Clean your plate, dessert or no dessert.  You will stay at the table until you do.
3.  You must at least taste a tiny bit of everything on the table.
4.  Take what you want, but eat what you take.  Don't waste food.
5.  Take ONE helping of things you like.  If there is anything left after everyone has had their portion, you may have more.
6.  If you don't like something on the table, it isn't polite to mention that as it is offered to you.  Just say, "No thank you."
7.  This is what we are having for dinner.  The cook will not provide other things just because you don't like what we are having.
8.  No elbows on the table.
9.  No singing or electronics while at the table.  And no TV.
10.  You must stay at the table until excused by an adult.
11.  No feeding pets from the table.

Do any of these ring true to you?  How many of these rules happened at your house when you were a kid, and how many of them have you continued with your own children and grandchildren?  And the bottom line is:  did it matter?  Did your children/grandchildren grow up malnourished?  Did they fail to thrive?  Were you holding up a standard that meant something?  Or were you just following what you had been taught?

I often had to explain to my child, grandchildren, and students that rules weren't made by adults who stayed up at night just to figure out how to make kids' lives miserable.  They happen for a reason.  Yes, even dinner time rules.  Without them, life is just chaos.  Not sure if everyone agrees, but the proof is in the pudding.  If meals are the things that fill our bellies and our souls, they must follow rules so we know what to expect.

Am I wrong?? 

     

Taste and See

My adult Sunday school class divides the year into quarters and asks the members of the class to sign up to manage the lessons for each quarter.  In the past, I was in the summer group, which was problematic because my grandchildren often came to visit then, plus my ability to travel to Seattle was thwarted by the teaching responsibilities.  This year, my quarter is NOW.

My team has an ordained minister leading a couple of months of class, teaching from Rev. Dr. Adam Hamilton's book on Simon Peter, the "rock" on which Jesus founded his church.  Meanwhile, I volunteered to teach from a book in June called Taste and See, which is a study of the foods of the Bible and how God provides for our needs, both spiritually and physically.  The first lesson in the study of Peter, the presenter went into great geographical detail about where the action takes place.  The next day, I started reading the book that I would be teaching.  Our presenter could have been teaching Chapter 2 of Taste and See!

But let me leave that for a moment and focus on things in the T and S's book's introduction.  The author, Margaret Feinberg, talks about how she and her husband attended a dinner party, hoping just to endure and get it over with, only to be shocked at what an enriching experience it was.  She goes on to discuss other dinner parties...then, when drawing it all together, she describes an evening when attendees were asked to talk about their happiest, most fulfilling dinners.  She then drew conclusions about the experiences.  Her description really hit home to me.  Please indulge me as I quote from her book:

"I saw a pattern unfolding before me that I couldn't ignore.  The stories were different, but the theme remained the same:  God had been intentional in each gathering.  He used these encounters to uncover a deep need and satiate a deep hunger.

"Driving home, I became curious whether it was all a fluke.  Were my friends and I uniquely vulnerable during meals times or were our table experiences shared by others?  Was there a connection between spiritual and physical hunger?

"I couldn't stop thinking about it.  Digging even deeper into my story, I realized that there were layers below the surface of the charcuterie and the thirty-six hour roast.  My deepest hunger was my longing for connectedness and friendship.  I was raised by hippie-like parents who moved to new remote locations every few years.  Few children ever lived nearby, so I spent much of my youth surrounded by adults and ached to contact with others my age.  The few hours I spent with schoolmates in class never felt like enough, and I carried a deep loneliness during childhood.  As an adult, I still ache for the rich relationships and the rootedness that comes from knowing and being known.  And although my story is unique, I have a suspicion this hunger resides in each of us."

BINGO!  That spells out my military childhood in a nutshell.  When I was living it, I wasn't aware of the holes in my soul, but when I became an adult, it all came home to roost.

My father was born into poverty.  He lived hungry and was in survival mode most of his young life.  My mother was a farm kid.  Her family didn't have money, but they did have food.  My parents met in college, married, and had kids.  It was a union made in Heaven.  Dad made sure that we never, ever went hungry.  Much of my youth was fashioned around food.   Many, many times, we gathered around the farm table of my grandparents with entire meals provided by the garden and the chickens that roamed the yard.  We weren't fat.  We were healthy.  Bib lettuce, swiss chard, new potatoes and peas, green beans out the wazoo, radishes, green peppers, huge tomatoes, sweet corn on the cob--all products of my father's green thumb and desire to feed us all from the land.

Dad wasn't a church-goer.  He expressed his faith by working hard in the military, in school, and growing things in the land--all to provide his family with a better life than he'd had.  I believe, 25 years after his death, that he and God were satiating a hole in his life.  The rest of my family has always considered family meals as manna from Heaven.  We do what we do as part of filling the holes in our own souls.

Our big meal of the day--evenings during the week, early afternoon on Sunday, whether we were at our grandparents' farm or not--were all family meals.   We ate together, without fail.  It was a time to gather at the end of the day, to touch bases with each other.  My then-husband's family did the same thing, but with a difference.  My ex would enjoy the meal, then would say, "Thank you for dinner" and leave the table.  Polite.  Thoughtful.  My family, however, didn't just eat and thank the cook.  We celebrated the food.  We oohed and aahed over it.  We discussed how the cook had outdone him/herself.  We commented on it, savored every bite, and bragged about how good it was, grunting our approval as we partook of "the necessities of life".  At Thanksgiving, my father would special order a fresh turkey from the market--usually a 25-pounder or more--then practically hover over it in every step of its preparation.  Dad was the true appreciator of every meal.  And Mom was a good cook.  Our meals weren't fancy, but they were food for the soul.  (I would kill to have some of those meals and the fellowship that went with them again!)  After the men folk left the table, the women stayed and gabbed, taking extra little bites of what was left in the serving dishes, until we finally decided it was time to put the food up and get started on kitchen duty.  We were, in a word, satisfied, in more ways than one.

God bless the family gatherings around food.  God bless the food.  God bless all who believe that we have what we have through divine intervention.  It's hard for me to even consider my father's impoverished youth.  He worked tirely to make sure that his family would never suffer the way he did.  He never talked about this.  I just know this about him.

I've veered off from the message of the book I am reading, but true to my aging brain, I make associations to real life.  If it fits, it feels good.  I can't wait to delve further into Biblical foods, their symbolic meanings, and how they nourish the body and soul.  On to the next chapter!

New Roof Accomplit!

Tuesday dawned happy and warm. 
Roofing materials had been delivered on Monday afternoon, as had a dumpster of sorts.
I woke up for the second time at 7:00 AM.  It wasn't even really light out yet when the truck arrived with five workers in it...and only one of them spoke a lick of English!

They soon got to work, and what a noisy job roof removal is!  The guys had to strip two layers of roofing.  Shortly before noon, I was informed that five sheets of plywood decking would need to be replaced due to rot.  I was shown pictures which I never doubted.  It added to the estimate by a bit, but I was happy to do what needed to be done to have a great roof. 

The crew didn't take a single break until almost 1:00.  (How do they do that?)   They sat on the ground in front of my split rail fence and asked nothing of no one.  There was a plate of beans and  pork that I saw...who knows what else?  I scraped up five bags of 100-calorie chocolate crisps from Aldi to give them, just because it was all I had!  No one asked for a thing. 

The dirty work--stripping--happened in the morning.  The afternoon was dedicated to shingle installation and cleanup.  I was mostly trapped in the house due to falling shingles, so I can only speculate.  At one point, I went out front and handed my phone to a worker and gestured to have some pictures of the process.  He handed it up to the roof, then it came back to me.  Yeah!

When the shingles were being installed with nail guns, I was hearing their pattern.  Over and over and over again, the pattern was "shave and a haircut"...but nothing after that!  My poor compulsive brain was supplying "two bits".  Ack!  It went on for hours!

At one point, the one woman in the crew knocked on my door to report, in broken English, "No power."  The nail guns had tripped a breaker, so I found it and reset it...then shut off everything in the house except the TV and the computer.  The rest of the day went smoothly.

By 2:30 in the afternoon, the roof was finished.  The crew was mopping up.  When they finally departed, there was no evidence that a roof replacement had ever happened unless you were looking for it.  Hallelujah!

The relief, the pride, the confidence of having done what needed to be done waved over me.  I will have a small loan payment for the next three years, but my little house-on-a-slab is so much better because of it.  And I suddenly realized that these roots have been, aside from my daughter and grandchildren, a reason to stay alive. 

Happy to finally say that the roof over my head is solid.  God's in His Heaven.  All's right with the world!

Finding Humor in Little Things

Now you're going to make fun of me.

All my life, for as long as I can remember, I've had what is known as a "skin tag" inside my belly button.  I have the blasted things all over my body now, but this one was probably present at birth.  Yay!

According to the Internet, the skin tags are tiny, benign tumors that occur where skin rubs against skin or clothing.  Certainly true in my case...but...in the navel?  What rubs against what that early in life?  Wish I knew.

I don't remember that my navel became an "outie" when I was pregnant with my daughter, but now that I'm just fat, it comes close.  And with that, the skin tag, which is as old as I am, is more prominent.  I could strangle and remove it...but the limitations of doing it within the confines of my belly button hole are daunting.

I'm thinking of just accepting it as part of my family.  Love me, love my belly button...or something like that.

Gotta keep laughing...right?

The Roof Over My Head

Having a "roof over your head" is an idiom for having shelter--a place to be.  A home.  Safety.  A soft place to fall.

I purchased my little house-on-a-slab here in Plainfield, Indiana, in 1992.  At the time of purchase, I required a new roof from the sellers.  I got that.  Whoever put on the new roof put the new layer on top of the first.  I guess that's common with roofs that don't leak.  And, although it seems like the roof was new just yesterday, the roof over my head is now 27 years old and growing moss.  It doesn't leak, but it looks bad...made worse by the moss on the ground that has gravitated to the roof.

I have come to understand over the years that my bungalow needed a new roof.  I inquired quite a long time ago of some family members in the construction business just how much I could expect to pay for one.  I was told that it could run from $8-$10k...and that scared the waddin' out of me.   I had no savings and a bad credit rating back in the '90s.  The new roof was going to have to wait.  Wait for what, I'm not sure.  As long as the roof over my head didn't leak, I was okay.  Still am.

Four or five years ago, we had a nasty hailstorm in Plainfield.  The next day--and for weeks thereafter--roofers and construction companies were hungrily rubbing their hands together, going door to door to sell their services.  It seemed that many houses in my neighborhood were getting new roofs because the roofers were more than willing to jimmy the estimates in order to help people get past their deductibles.  I've never had a claim on my house, but I did think I should call my homeowner's insurance agent to check things out.  The gals in his office asked if I wanted them to send out a construction guy that they often use just to take a look.  Sure.  Why not?  He came.  Nice fellow.  Looked things over and said I had a claim.  Said there was damage.  Maybe I was going to get a new roof just for the cost of my deductible?

WRONG!  State Farm (my company) sent an adjuster to take a look.  She walked around on my roof for a few minutes.  Came down and said that my roof needed "attention" but that it wasn't damaged from hail.  She estimated $700 worth of needed repairs--which is $300 less than my deductible--and denied my claim.  After that, two other roofer/construction dudes were up on the roof to tell me I had damage.  When I told them my insurance wouldn't pay, every stinkin' one of them said, "State Farm"?  In all of my 27 years in my little bungalow, I've never made a claim on my homeowner's insurance, yet the insurance rates have gone up yearly.  If my roof didn't have hail damage, it didn't have hail damage.  I'm not trying to cheat the system, but I'm the ONLY one in the neighborhood that desperately needed a new roof, yet seemingly the only one who didn't get one!

Last fall, when the mortgage was paid off, I changed insurance companies.  They sent out a fellow to take pictures of the house.  All was well EXCEPT they had a problem with the moss on the roof.  The company suggested that I have the roof pressure-washed to get rid of the moss, and gave me a deadline to get it done.  (Even **I** know that pressure-washing the roof isn't going to fix the problem.)  Thus, I embarked on getting bids from companies--one for moss removal only, and one for total replacement.  I figured that just having the information wasn't going to kill me, even though I dreaded to hear what they had to say.

I only got two bids.  Was prepared to get more but just decided to bite on the bullet to find out what I needed to do.  I was pleasantly surprised that the estimates came in quite a bit lower than what I had come to expect, and one bid came in considerably lower than the other.  Like $175 less on moss removal and $500 less on replacement.  Both are reputable companies.  My decision was made, but now I needed to figure out how to pay for it.

My mantra for a very long time has been "Nothing is ever easy anymore".  In this particular venture, I was wrong.  My mortgage has been paid off.  I have no car payment.  I have no credit card debt.  But I still worried about getting a loan for a new roof because it makes me vulnerable if turned down.  I approached my bank by phone.  Within an hour, I had approval...by phone!  It seems that my credit rating has improved significantly over the years.  So, all that is left to do is schedule the roof installation.  I'll be meeting with the roofer dude on Monday.  Woo-hoo!

Yes, I'll have a reasonable loan payment for the next three years, but the end result will be that my house-on-a-slab will have a new hat with no moss and another 20 years of usefulness before everything goes to crap.  I probably won't be around then, but my daughter won't have to worry about that one thing when the time comes to sell this little place.  Strange, isn't it, that the decisions we make this late in life have more to do with whom we leave behind than how things are with us??

This little house has been my home for almost three decades--the longest I have been anywhere in my entire life--a life seeking roots.  Over the years, I have made many improvements to this little place, as I could.  And now...at long last...I can assure that my bungalow will continue to provide a roof over my head, with a little help from me and the bank!