Ranch Naturalists

Plus, out of the cast and into the brace

First, the big news

We have a house!

Julie’s father supervised the delivery and placement. Julie had planned to be there, but stayed home to be my nurse and caretaker.

It’s going to be an adjustment moving from a traditional home to a manufactured home, but the inside size is almost identical to our current home. The outside area is almost infinitely larger. 😁

Still to come:

• House trim out and making it pretty

• Well, septic and electric

• Driveway gravel

An update on my arm

I’m able to type again! Kind of.

After the surgery, I had a full cast to completely immobilize my arm. Here’s my youngest trying to make me feel better.

Yesterday, I had the cast removed and a brace put on. Apparently, this will be my companion for months to come.

This has thrown quite the wrench into our plans. Not only did Julie have to stay here for the house delivery, we need to plan around physical therapy, which won’t even start until early July!

Being mostly one handed and weight-limited has a horrible effect on our packing and moving plans. We can handle a lot of the remaining building and installation long-distance, but putting stuff in boxes and stacking them into moving containers will not be easy.

I’m listening to music as I write this, and John Legend is telling me to “take it slow”. Maybe I should listen to him.

One option, of course, is just to hire a company to move us. I’ve moved a lot in my life (I spent 20 years in the military), and paying strangers thousands of dollars to touch my stuff just doesn’t appeal to me.

At some point, we would have had to hire help, anyway. Even without my injury, loading large furniture and appliances would have been difficult. But there’s a difference between loading a few items and packing everything I own.

We have had lots of friends offer to help, and we very much appreciate that. We still need to get organized enough to get to that point, though.

I’m open to suggestions. Anybody move long distance recently and have any tips that might help our planning? Our plan right now is to use uBoxes from uHaul — we can take our time getting them loaded and unloaded.

Lessons learned

I’m sure there’s a lesson in here somewhere about being careful about what you do and not to rupture your bicep, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is. I tossed a little piece of wood underhanded, and I’ll be paying the price for months.

But, things happen. In the bigger scheme of things, this is just an annoyance. We’ve got really good health insurance, we’ve got a new house, and we have lots of people willing to help us with whatever we need.

Life continues to be good.