Bye, bye SC!

    We said goodbye to our house yesterday. A house that we bought 7 years ago, with hopes and dreams. A lot of the hopes came true in that we renovated an old, neglected home in Aiken,SC. The house hadn't been lived in for over ten years when we bought it and it showed. I was pretty disgusted when I first saw the interior (it was really gross!!), but Jonathan had a vision and it turned out that he wasn't wrong. We made it our home and it wasn't perfect, but it ended up being a lovely space to live in.  Painting, sanding, staining floors, designing the kitchen, watching it transform from a total mess into a home that we loved was pretty fun. We learned a lot of different skills that neither of us ever imagined we would know how to do.  We said goodbye to a few of our older pets while living there and we welcomed two new four legged members to our family.  We had many ebbs and flows in our attempts to continue to make a living, all the while working on the house whenever we could afford it.  After a while, five years to be exact, we looked each other in the eyes and said, "Enough".  It had become clear that we had to make a change to continue, or we were going to fail financially. Things weren't pretty.  Fast forward to now. Now. Here we are. We bolted for the north two years ago and managed to find a job that's a perfect fit for both of us.  On a whim, we listed our house for sale at the end of November and it went under contract in a few days. Wow.  Our house is intended to close on January 15th so a new person can enjoy the space and property. This past week we packed and purged, both the house and garage. However, saying goodbye wasn't the least bit bittersweet.  I'm not that kind of person. Perhaps in my younger years I may have allowed myself to wallow in tinges of "what could've been", but that's not who I am now.  Before we drove away we did a final walk through the back fields, now hugely overgrown. And I stopped at the graves of Remy, Marbles and Big Zekie to tell them I loved them and we weren't leaving them, because they are in our hearts forever (hey, I'm not some kind of heartless, cold monster!).  As we drove out of the driveway I asked Jonathan to stop so I could just check the mailbox one last time.  I opened the latch to find a lone card that said, "God Bless You".  It was the back of a business card placed there by a landscaper, who noticed the neglect of the property and was looking for a job.  There you go, it was our sign of closure for that chapter in our lives. I took it as South Carolina's way of saying, "y'all can come visit, but get outta here and go on home now!" Two years ago right before we drove north we saw a newly applied bumper sticker on the back of a stop sign we passed daily that said, "Yankee Go Home".  Okay, okay, we got it!!!!  We didn't belong there! We are meant to live in the northeast! South Carolina is in our rearview mirror and it feels just fine to me. 

New blog title, same old writer

     It's taken me quite a bit of time to figure out a new blog name, but I think this is the one. Ironically, to be truthful I'm not feeling right at the moment. I have strep throat.  Only my second time having it, but it's pretty terrible.  My throat feels like I swallowed a ball of yarn that has tiny spikes all through it, and it's stuck about midway down.  I have to brace myself each time I swallow for the few seconds of blinding pain that simple act induces.  No wonder why people died from this crap before antibiotics came along. I was ready to off myself the night before I went to the doctor.  A quick trip to the walk in clinic, a hearty swab on the sides of my red lined, puss pocketed throat and boom, diagnosis!  I have amoxicillin pills to take twice a day for ten days.  When I opened the bottle I had to do a double take.  The pills are HUGE.  By huge, I mean they're bigger than the pills we give horses.  You know how people joke about "pills being the size of horse pills"? These are actually larger than horse pills.  Don't the people who make these things know if someone has a throat that is so swollen and agonizingly painful the act of swallowing a pill the size of an almond is almost impossible? Before I got the antibiotics I was finding that swallowing tiny Advil pills was enough of a challenge. Sipping water alone is daunting when you have strep throat. They are a very cheery shade of Pepto Bismol pink so if you don't manage to get it down, you can be comforted knowing that you choked on something that looks like Barbie's 1980's cell phone.
 "Things were going great for her in life, until she choked to death on a pill resembling vintage Barbie memorabilia", said my obituary.  So far I've swallowed two of them without mishap. I give myself a little pep talk before I pop it in my mouth, do a quick sign of the cross (even though I'm not Catholic, what can it hurt?) and very carefully tip my head back to allow that big bastard to glide down my inflamed gullet without getting stuck. I'm feeling slightly better than I was this morning, so at least I am under the impression that they're working.
    The doctor strongly advised me to stay home for at least 24 hours until the antibiotics took hold and I was no longer contagious, so here I sit surrounded by my dogs and cats as I type away.  The animals are thrilled that I've been home sick for two days.  Every time I leave one room to go into another, it's a parade of all four of them marching behind me, and if I head to the kitchen it becomes a stampede. I'd like to think that if something actually happened to me, like I passed out or something, one of them would pull a Lassie move and go find help, but in reality I feel like they'd all just get bored of my prone body and go find more comfortable places to sleep.


   On another note, we're at the tail end of what was a very mild winter in the northeast. We have a small army of snowdrops that recently popped up in a grove of trees in the yard.  The days are getting longer, and we're about to spring ahead with the clocks this coming weekend.  Though the winter was mild, it still was...winter. Bleak landscapes, bitter winds,frozen ground, followed by epic thaws that created biblical mud in the horse fields. It'll be nice to be able to leave the house in just a light jacket, instead of putting on sixteen layers of down and fleece.  Jonathan and I are still really happy with our decision to leave the south for Rhinebeck, NY.  We love our job, the area and it just really feels right. Now I just hope I don't die from all of the germs that my little riding students share with me.  Here's to spring flowers!!