Catching Up

It seems that I have been negligent lately in keeping up with our blog. Reason being, that in May 2005 after selling our home in Appleton, Wisconsin we purchased a large 5th wheel RV, a heavy duty PU truck and began our adventure of traveling and living full-time in an RV. This blog was created shortly afterward on 1/1/2006 so that our family and friends might follow us in our travels.
Mainly because of health concerns, this spring after six years on the road we decided to discontinue full-time RVing and moved into the Schlueter family farmhouse on a cherry farm in Leelanau County Michigan. We have a life lease on the house which has been vacant since the passing of Teddy's parents.
Teddy's brother, John owns and operates the farm and lives in his own house across the road from us.
And, since we are not RVing any more, I no longer feel compelled to update the blog very often.
Life on the farm or any permeant home for that matter, although not boring, is much more static than while traveling as day to day events often repeat themselves. I will, however, make an entry every so often for the benefit of the many RV friends that we have made while traveling.

Lets see  now...where was I...oh yeah...life on the farm... or "The Farm" as we have named our newly remodeled farmhouse.
I won't go into the updating and remodeling which actually began two years ago as it has been well documented in previous blogs.
We now have obtained Michigan drivers licenses and have registered to vote so as of January 1, 2012 we are now legal Michigan residents. We still remain loyal Packer fans even though we seem to be outnumbered by Lion loyalists. Some things just have to be regarded as sacrosanct.  ;-)
This winter I have been catching up on my reading, we both read on Kindles; I logged over 60 books read last year on two different web sites for readers Shelfari and Goodreads If you are a reader I highly recommend joining a readers club. It is an excellent resource for exchanging reviews and other info with like minded readers. Teddy has also been kept busy working as a volunteer at two local different thrift stores, one in Traverse City on Mondays and one in Lake Leelanau on Thursdays.
Up to now were fortunate to have an unusually mild winter but winter has now struck in its full fury with blizzard conditions for the past two days.

Here is how "The Farm" looked when we arrived

last  May...

...and this is how it looked last week, before our current blizzard.

As for the snow, the nice thing about being retired is the fact that we don't have anywhere that we have to go to; we don't even have to walk out to the mailbox to pick-up our social security check as we have direct deposit. So let it snow, and if need be I can do most of our shopping on the internet and let UPS & FedEx do the driving. Hell, you can even buy groceries on Amazon.com.

Life in the 21st century is good!

Wha's Up

Now that we are done with the inside remodeling, at least for this season, our attention is now directed toward our outside activities. 
Couch potato that I am...hey, I do run the garden tractor to mow the lawn but anyone that knows us knows that "outside activities" means Teddy's outdoor activities and busy she has been. When we began moving into the farmhouse last summer Teddy set about cleaning up the yard and flower beds and as these photos show, this summer she went at in full attack mode.  (Click on photos for larger size)

One of her first projects, started last summer, and continued this May was covering the cistern mound with iris bulbs. Although now done blooming they were in full bloom in late May.

Next she cleaned up this old rock garden that had been neglected for several years as her aging parents could no longer tend it.
Teddy's dad never threw anything away, he just stored it. She found a lot of old farm relics in one of the farm outbuildings including several old tractor seats, wagon wheels, an old kitchen sink, a hand pump, hand tools, & a hand cultivator  and has themed her gardens with them.

She also planted a variety of flowers along the front of the house.
These marigolds have been blooming all summer.

On the north side-yard of the house she made another flower garden and populated it with some more of her picks.
She isn't done, by a long shot, she scours the country side with her sister, Deb for old abandoned ghost farms where vintage flower bulbs might be ripe for transplanting. I often look out the window and there she is digging up another section of lawn.  ;-)

My outdoor efforts on the other hand have been more utilitarian.
When we arrived here in May we found that our cell coverage out here in the country was not reliable enough for internet use so I subscribed to HughesNet satellite internet and it works well. I am on a 24 month contract but can put it on time out winters when we are not here. (Oh..oh that means that it'll be about five years before I complete the 24 months)

Secondly, Teddy had been wanting an outdoor clothesline for some time so I had a welder make up this post from 3" pipe.

I told him that I wanted the cross section to be 4' long but neglected to specify the vertical length and when I got it it was 10' long which meant that I had to dig a 4' deep hole to plant it.

This did not turn out to be an easy job as he had welded two 12" cross members on the bottom to stabilize it. With Teddy's help we got the hole dug but it took about three hours. I mixed up a 50 lb. bag of concrete mix to set the pipe and this baby isn't going anywhere. Teddy spray-painted it green while  I lagged a 2 x 6 between two trees for the other end and we now have a first rate solar clothes dryer.

Memory Foam Mattress

The mattresses that manufacturers put in new trailers are generally bottom of the line mattresses and the one in our new Cardinal was not an exception.
Teddy had been complaining of backaches and I was waking up with my arms going to sleep. So we decided to upgrade to a better mattress. After extensive internet research and talking to other owners we decided to go with a "Memory Foam" mattress. If you aren't familar with memory foam it is a foamlike material developed by NASA, that contours to your body and temporarily holds it's shape when depressed. I researched brands & vendors and we finally purchased on-line from Healthy Foundations.
The mattress that came with the Cardinal was king size but we decided to go with a queen so before the new one arrived I had to cut down the bed platform to queen size. The mattress ships vacuum packed and rolled up so that it can be shipped by UPS. When I cut the binding, it rolled flat still in it's vacuum pack and was about two inches thick. Then when we cut the plastic vacuum sleeve and removed it, the mattress swelled to 10" thick in a matter of minutes. It was an amazing process to behold.
Well...we have now slept three nights on it and are quite pleased. Back in Appleton we had a "water bed" for many years and it feels something like a waterbed on steriods; sort of like a waterbed that you sink into. The feeling is hard to describe...It feels firm but yet soft, which doesn't make sense but I cannot think of another way to describe it. At any rate we think that we are going to enjoy our new mattress and look forward to many restful nights on it.