Saturday, January 20, 2007

Have A Heart

My lifestyle finally caught up to me and I had my first (and hopefully last) heart attack. Happened Wednesday night, 1/17/07, and within ten minutes after deciding to go to the emergency room I was being treated for what eventually turned out to be a 99% blockage in one artery and 80% blockage in another. A third artery has a 60% blockage but they decided to try diet, exercise and medication to reduce it.

By Friday afternoon I was back home, and although restricted from doing much for five days, I was feeling pretty good.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

New Porch

Today we took down the "temporary" porch we put in about fifteen years ago. It was never meant to be a permanent solution to our "back porch" lifestyle but it served us well all those years in spite of quite a few leaks.

In its place we're having a real porch put in as part of a whole-house re-roofing project. When it's all finished (next week sometime) we will probably start tearing up the wood deck we put in about that same time and replacing it with landscaping items, including tables and chairs among bushes and walkways and lighting. Yes, it should be pretty when we finish.

Why are we doing all of this? Well, we've pretty much decided that this is home for the foreseeable future. We like it here and all the places we thought we might like are either too expensive, too cold, too hot or just not our cup of tea. So we're sticking around and we want to make sure our home is everything we would like it to be.

Even with the eager anticipation of what will be we're going to miss the old look we built with our own hands and became accustomed to over the years.

The nice thing about all of this is that we will be able to enjoy our back yard more, as well as our new outdoor kitchen (still under construction).

After all of this I think I'm going to stick to small projects in the future. But what am I ever going to do with all the cedar lumber that we took out of the porch? I'll think of something, for sure.