Ugh. What a year it has been so far. And it's only April. Seriously...ugh.
Delays in blogging were actually really easy to explain (not fun, but easy). I had a ton of paperwork and stuff to do this year as I am trying to get everything in the works to get adult guardianship of Alvah sorted before he turns 18. Seriously when did my kids grow up? Anyway, that paperwork got submitted and now we wait from word from the court to start investigation proceedings to make sure Alvah is disabled enough to warrant needing an adult guardian and then we have the court date to get through. They kind of want a neuro-psych eval for adult guardianship cases, from what my pediatrician was telling me, but we are on about four different waiting lists now and haven't gotten anything from any of them, so we are doing what we can with what we have. I at least got a letter from his psychiatrist submitted with his paperwork to the court to hopefully make them happier about the situation. Then there was IEP paperwork for the year, his 5 year review meetings and paperwork for that to get done and stuff. Finally got that all done...it was a lot, honestly.
And then March rolled around and we all got horribly sick. It was like a flu that would not end. My husband got it first and was over it within two weeks or so, which was definitely a good thing. Meanwhile the kids and I went down like the Titanic. Armina kept taking steps backward, so I finally took her to the doctor and we found out the reason for the duration of the thing, why it had different symptoms that effected us and such. We caught a Covid variant. We were down, no joke, all of March with it. We are still trying to get over the residual fatigue and congestion, but I was so happy to get my sense of taste back completely (well, nearly...some things still taste weird to me) last week that I kind of don't mind fighting the cough on and off. Somehow I managed to keep on top of housework (to a point...clean clothes stacked up and I had a huge folding day when it was all said and done and the downstairs needed to be deep cleaned when I was feeling somewhat human) and got the paperwork submitted to the court for Alvah, but boy howdy it hasn't been fun.
Combine that with a record breaking cold spell in March (my electric and gas bill definitely reflect that...ouch), high winds (though not as bad as December) in the first three months of the year, and our tax return being a little over 100.00 this year (losing the daughter as a dependent and Alvah getting old enough to nearly lose the child tax credit...that creamed us...at least we didn't owe anything)...it's been a depressing year on a lot of fronts.
So, anyway, now that you are up to speed on the last three months (more or less), let's get onto the last of our year in review from last year. The winds of December.
I remember some of the quotes people were using during those wind storms...
"Whoever is holding onto December's beer, please pour it out. They are already drunk."
"Who hurt you, December?"
"Man, not again!!!"
The last one was the most commonly repeated.
We had winds, high high winds, for 19 days out of 31 in December. Over 80 MPH winds on a lot of days. My husband spent his Christmas vacation watching as things flew apart around here. It was not fun. At least Christmas Day was relatively calm, which was nice as we were all eating Cortisol like crazy and we desperately needed a break.
Damage on our end part one is that we are going to have to repair our garage roof as it lost about 1/3 of it's shingles. No joke, you drive around the Valley and look at roofs 9 out of 10 roofs have damage to them. It's nuts. We have homes built to withstand wind out here as wind is a regular occurrence around these parts, but the wind was horrible because it blew in EVERY direction for way too long. No joke. You'd look out the window and you could watch it change direction three times as you watched it. It was crazy. We, along with everyone else, lost trees (luckily none of ours fell on anything important). People were without power for days, some for weeks, on end. Thank goodness Alaskans tend to be prepared, as pretty much everyone had to use their wood stoves/alternative heat source and generators this winter. We were lucky in that we are right off the main power line, so we never lost power for too long compared to everyone else. My sister-in-law down the road from us wasn't so lucky and was without power a lot.
Other than the roof, our biggest loss was our barn. It is done for. The roof finally gave up the ghost, split in half and is now sitting inside the building (RIP old friend).
We lost part of the side of the building too, but at least that got lodged in some trees and didn't go too far. Honestly, I'm just amazed it's still standing at this point.
The roof on the shed lifted up in a few places and really wanted to come off, but by some miracle it held. But, yeah, my husband's plan at this point is to buy material to put in a new floor for a new shed, use the wood from the barn as much as he can to help reduce costs, and just make us one building to replace the shed and the barn as they need to be replaced with something we can actually use reliably (the shed is not in great shape by any means, but at least still has a roof). We desperately. need to reduce costs and save money as much as we can. The lack of a tax return (I used the 160.00 we got to buy the daughter a much needed new mattress), medical bills for my husband (MRI on his shoulder to test for a need for a shoulder surgery, heart tests to make sure he was okay as his blood pressure was really high, etc), licensing fees for my husband and other bills just have been put on credit card because with the cost of everything else going up...well I am wracking my brain on ways to save money little bit by little bit to get things paid down as quick as possible.
Back to damage on a lesser scale. We lost the bottoms to two of our downspouts. I found one jammed under our camper, but the other one flew to OZ, I think. We'll have to figure that one out later. No picture as the picture got corrupted.
Our well cover/wishing well, flew off during the wind storms and is currently sitting at the front of our yard until we can figure out how best to rebuild it. It is in a lot better shape in the photo I'm showing than it actually is after all the wind storms. It's pretty flattened at this point and in pieces for sure. At least the wood for it stayed in the yard (I hope...we'll see when we rebuild it if we are missing some).
Honestly, I am depressed about the damage, but try to count my blessings. Everyone, it seems, has some type of damage they suffered in the Valley. We got creamed pretty good, no doubt. So many others got it worse, though. I found out that at least 1/2 of the Valley with the wind and just record cold we were having all winter (wind would blow away snow when we'd get it, so not enough insulation on the ground for the consistent below zero temps), had sewer lines that were completely frozen up. This was as of last week when we found out a friend of ours was having that problem. Thank goodness we didn't have to deal with that. I had to climb up on the roof to secure a chimney cap that was going to bend and fly off because it lost some bolts in the wind and my husband had to climb up on the roof to break some ice on our sewer vent pipe as the wind had blown too much ice and crap down it and it was plugged (weird having your toilets not flush, but the sinks still work when that happens...it was a first). But, at least our sewer still worked. We didn't have a fence to blow down (a LOT of people did) and we didn't have sheds that blew completely apart and hit things on our neighbor's property (also a thing that happened)...at least our barn roof stayed with the building for the most part, so at least we can use the wood to rebuild something in it's place. We didn't completely lose the roof to our house and have to go and live in a hotel until insurance could help to replace it (also a thing that happened to poor people). It's a bright side to our personal dilemma and I'll take any bright side I can get.
So, yeah, house repairs and projects are in our future, so I'll try to take you all along for that. Hopefully it all works out.
Enjoy.
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