Category: Barbara

10:12 – We got an offer on the Winston house yesterday. We countered. They countered. We accepted. This morning, our realtor sent us a contract to sign. We signed it, I scanned it to PDF, and I emailed the executed agreement to our realtor. Now we wait. If things go well, we might expect to close around the end of June.

Barbara is getting ready to leave Sunday for a week-long trip to Brasstown, NC, which is about as far down in the southwest corner of NC as it’s possible to go–about a 200 mile drive from here. She’s going to a resident folk school that teaches various old-timey skills. Last time, she did a week-long course on wood carving. This time, she’s doing a stained-glass course.

I told her last night that I didn’t intend to take any showers while she’s gone. I just don’t trust my balance enough to do that without her in the house. So I’ll be taking sponge baths for the duration.

13:04 – We spent all morning at the hospital for Barbara’s colonoscopy. Neither of us got much sleep last night, particularly Barbara. She’s supposed to take it easy for the next 24 hours, eat only soft, bland food, and not operate a main battle tank or other other heavy equipment.

09:48 – Barbara’s oral surgery went fine. She’s off to the gym and supermarket this morning. Colin has been sleeping through the night again instead of walking around all night whining and whimpering. That was going on Sunday and Monday nights. Barbara thinks it was because Frances and Al had stayed with us Saturday night and Colin was looking for them.

I’m going to check Blevins and Farmers Hardware today for firewood racks. We have probably a cord or more of wood in a pile in the corner of the back yard, just sitting there rotting. We want to get a rack or racks set up under the deck, order in a cord or two of firewood, and get it racked and under tarps. We won’t burn it routinely, so I’m considering whether there’s something I can spray on it to keep down the rot, insects, and snakes. I was thinking something environmentally-friendly like potassium cyanide, but I may just use some kind of organic pesticide.

We’re almost finished emptying out the Winston-Salem house. We’ll have to do a dump run to get rid of a lot of stuff we’re discarding, and Goodwill will have to bring a large truck to pick up the stuff we’re donating, but at that point the house will be empty. We met with a real estate agent on our trip down last weekend. She recommended we sell the house as-is instead of doing stuff like painting, refinishing some of the hardwood floors, and so on. I think that came as a relief to both of us. Yes, the house will sell for less than it might have otherwise, but we’d have to spend a lot of time, effort, and money getting all that stuff done. The house should sell pretty quickly, my guess is either to a young couple who’d rather do things themselves as we did when we bought it in 1987, or to someone who wants it as a rent property. It’s close to Wake Forest University, and with four bedrooms upstairs and a full granny apartment downstairs, the new owner could generate a nice rental income from it.

09:17 – Spring seems to have arrived early in Sparta. It’s been warm for a couple weeks, and the last few days we’ve had highs near 70F. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a period of Indian winter at some point. The weather here is nothing if not unpredictable.

Barbara drove down to Winston this morning for an appointment with an oral surgeon. She was originally scheduled for mid-April, but there was a cancellation. She grabbed it, because she didn’t want to go another month of having to chew food on one side of her mouth.

The dentist wrote her prescriptions for cephalexin and twelve 375/5 mg acetaminophen/hydrocodone, which is far too small a dose of the latter and far too large of the former. And I see that the FDA is cracking down on prescriptions for opioid painkillers, as if it’s any of their business. All scheduled drugs should be de-scheduled immediately and made available over the counter. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to walk into Costco and buy large bottles of hydrocodone, oxycodone, or heroin or cocaine for that matter. It’s none of the government’s business.