Oct. 31/ 2016
I was off today since I worked Saturday and yesterday, Sunday. I had a peaceful morning as Nick had a dental appointment and a few errands to run. I wanted him to get some chipboard to make a roof for the calves' shelter he built in their pasture. It is quite nice and has three and a half walls rather than just three like most run-in sheds have. That's what they call the buildings erected in the fields for the livestock to go into to get out of the rain or snow and wind. It has been without a roof for nearly three months now and snow will be on its way before long.
Last summer when Nick had to leave the farm to go anywhere he would insist that I go with him. He didn't want to leave me here alone, thus providing me an opportunity to rendezvous with the guy(s). As much as I hated wasting my day off sitting in the car and as much as it bothered my lower back, it was preferable to listening to his ranting if I stayed home by myself. He no doubt would somehow have an incriminating audio tape for that date and time.
He stopped demanding that I accompany him everywhere after he hurt his back late last fall and he realized how much sitting in the car aggravated the injury.
So I stayed home and stayed in bed until Nick was ready to leave. I was fooling around with some videos I had made of the horses and trying to upload them to YouTube and Facebook, which I can't do in the evenings because the internet service we get out here in the country is very slow and unreliable during peak usage times. After he left I got up and made some zucchini loaves and a tomato and parmesan cheese casserole to put in the freezer in an attempt to use up vegetables from the garden before they went bad. It wasn't until Nick arrived home in the middle of the afternoon that I was out in the barn mucking out the stalls.
After we came inside I went downstairs to switch the laundry from the washer to the dryer. The washer had not completed its spin cycle and the clothes were still dripping wet. Nick figured out that the washer had stopped because the power bar it was plugged into had been switched off. I have no idea how that even happens but Nick immediately jumped to the conclusion that I had not been alone while he was gone. He yelled at me, asking if 'that !%&*$! had been in the basement. Then he walked over to a piece of gym equipment that was down there - there is no room for it upstairs in the second living room so it was put downstairs - and announced that neither he or his son ever leave anything attached to the pulley, pointing to the lat pull-down bar dangling there. He took it off and threw it across the cement floor into the corner, vowing that 'this is it, this is the last straw, I can't put up with that (lots of bad words) Schwartzenhegger wanna be coming into my house, using my gym equipment to work out and stealing my vitamins and supplements'.
Nick stormed upstairs and I finished starting the laundry again before going upstairs myself. By the time I did, he was on his computer listening to some music with the volume turned way up. He has since turned the volume down and I am typing this as I sit in bed.
I walked up behind him on the computer twice last week and saw him on Date.Com or Match.Com, with a picture of a blonde woman in a red top on the screen, presumably the person he is communicating with. When I asked him about it the first time, he said he was on that site to check out something one of his buddies told him to check out. I haven't told him yet I caught him on there again. I should actually go downstairs right now and see what he is doing on the computer, he has been very quiet for awhile now. I think I will and then get some sleep. Stay tuned.
Monday 31 October 2016
Friday 28 October 2016
Friday, October 28, 2016
Oct. 28/2016
Well the stuff really hit the fan yesterday. And Nick is right next to me in bed here at present, reading. I'll see how far I get.
I was off yesterday and we were in the barn, the horses had been fed and were outside until suppertime, we usually bring them in just before it gets dark. Hunting season opened today and our neighbour two doors down has a lot of land that adjoins ours along our back pasture on the west side of our property. He uses it as a source of wood, as a place to store some of his larger junk and he also hunts deer from it. He has a bunch of 'blinds' set up, which are like little treehouses that folks hide out in and wait for the deer to come along. These things are set up in spots that deer frequent, near the opening to a meadow or near some apple trees. Some people 'bait' the deer a few weeks before hunting season opens, which means they put out apples or carrots or something else the deer like so they will come looking for it when the humans are ready in their blinds with their guns. There is a lot of male bonding and beer drinking and beef jerky eating done in these blinds as well, and often there are four, five and six guns aimed on a deer or two and I don't really consider it much of a sport when it's done this way, but I have no control over what this guy does with his little piece of the planet. Unfortunately for me, it is next to my little piece.
So I thought I would take a walk in the woods and take a few pictures of our neighbour's littered lot and his blinds and I asked Nick's permission to go and take a few pictures, explaining that I thought I might post them on Facebook to let people know what a great white hunter lived right next door. And off I went.
When I returned Nick was yelling at me asking if I had heard him yelling and calling for me. Well I had heard something but I didn't know at the time where the noise was coming from so I had ignored it. I guess I should have known. Nick flew into a rage accusing me of being in the woods with this Chris motherf----- (and many more adjectives) and then when I denied it, which was the truth, he told me that our next door neighbour on the other side of us had surveillance cameras on his property that had recorded me on his lot, again with Chris person. Also saying that there were tapes of me there with him, on three or four or more occasions. He was furious and was yelling at me about four inches from my face. He was so angry he was shaking. It was the first time I was actually afraid he might hit me. I told him not to touch me. Really, I don't know what good speaking those words would do. Nick is a very accomplished martial arts fighter and I have no doubt he could kill me or paralyse me with one well-aimed strike - but I said it anyway.
We yelled at each other, he saying he had proof I was with someone else and me telling him it was not true, and asking him how he thought he could make something the truth by just yelling about it and claiming to have it on tape. That didn't he know that I knew I did nothing of what he claimed I had done, so of course I knew he was lying or making stuff up or both. And then more rage at me calling him a liar and/or delusional.
He said something about taking his forty percent and leaving, and I jumped in to remind him that he would not be getting forty percent of anything, because I had paid for everything. We yelled about that for a few minutes and the he stormed out of the barn, slamming the barn door after him.
He went into the house and spent the next few hours on the computer while I mucked out the stalls and refilled water buckets and put hay out for the evening. I put some tulip bulbs in the ground and cleaned up my rock gardens for the winter.
After we came in from outside for the evening I did a bit of housework and he was on the computer again, and then I went to bed. He came into the bedroom and tossed and turned in bed for a few minutes and then left, slamming the bedroom door so hard I thought the ceiling might come down. He continued to slam and bang things downstairs so I took a half of a travel sickness tablet and drifted off. I was vaguely aware of the turmoil in the house as I slept but at two-thirty in the morning I was lifted from my bed by Nick slamming the door to his daughter's room as he finally turned in for the night. Her room is just across the hall but it sounded and felt more like an clap of thunder. Maybe the gods had spoken.
Well the stuff really hit the fan yesterday. And Nick is right next to me in bed here at present, reading. I'll see how far I get.
I was off yesterday and we were in the barn, the horses had been fed and were outside until suppertime, we usually bring them in just before it gets dark. Hunting season opened today and our neighbour two doors down has a lot of land that adjoins ours along our back pasture on the west side of our property. He uses it as a source of wood, as a place to store some of his larger junk and he also hunts deer from it. He has a bunch of 'blinds' set up, which are like little treehouses that folks hide out in and wait for the deer to come along. These things are set up in spots that deer frequent, near the opening to a meadow or near some apple trees. Some people 'bait' the deer a few weeks before hunting season opens, which means they put out apples or carrots or something else the deer like so they will come looking for it when the humans are ready in their blinds with their guns. There is a lot of male bonding and beer drinking and beef jerky eating done in these blinds as well, and often there are four, five and six guns aimed on a deer or two and I don't really consider it much of a sport when it's done this way, but I have no control over what this guy does with his little piece of the planet. Unfortunately for me, it is next to my little piece.
So I thought I would take a walk in the woods and take a few pictures of our neighbour's littered lot and his blinds and I asked Nick's permission to go and take a few pictures, explaining that I thought I might post them on Facebook to let people know what a great white hunter lived right next door. And off I went.
When I returned Nick was yelling at me asking if I had heard him yelling and calling for me. Well I had heard something but I didn't know at the time where the noise was coming from so I had ignored it. I guess I should have known. Nick flew into a rage accusing me of being in the woods with this Chris motherf----- (and many more adjectives) and then when I denied it, which was the truth, he told me that our next door neighbour on the other side of us had surveillance cameras on his property that had recorded me on his lot, again with Chris person. Also saying that there were tapes of me there with him, on three or four or more occasions. He was furious and was yelling at me about four inches from my face. He was so angry he was shaking. It was the first time I was actually afraid he might hit me. I told him not to touch me. Really, I don't know what good speaking those words would do. Nick is a very accomplished martial arts fighter and I have no doubt he could kill me or paralyse me with one well-aimed strike - but I said it anyway.
We yelled at each other, he saying he had proof I was with someone else and me telling him it was not true, and asking him how he thought he could make something the truth by just yelling about it and claiming to have it on tape. That didn't he know that I knew I did nothing of what he claimed I had done, so of course I knew he was lying or making stuff up or both. And then more rage at me calling him a liar and/or delusional.
He said something about taking his forty percent and leaving, and I jumped in to remind him that he would not be getting forty percent of anything, because I had paid for everything. We yelled about that for a few minutes and the he stormed out of the barn, slamming the barn door after him.
He went into the house and spent the next few hours on the computer while I mucked out the stalls and refilled water buckets and put hay out for the evening. I put some tulip bulbs in the ground and cleaned up my rock gardens for the winter.
After we came in from outside for the evening I did a bit of housework and he was on the computer again, and then I went to bed. He came into the bedroom and tossed and turned in bed for a few minutes and then left, slamming the bedroom door so hard I thought the ceiling might come down. He continued to slam and bang things downstairs so I took a half of a travel sickness tablet and drifted off. I was vaguely aware of the turmoil in the house as I slept but at two-thirty in the morning I was lifted from my bed by Nick slamming the door to his daughter's room as he finally turned in for the night. Her room is just across the hall but it sounded and felt more like an clap of thunder. Maybe the gods had spoken.
Monday 24 October 2016
Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Oct. 25/ 2016
Nick retired from his job at the end of January following the recording of the after Christmas tape. It wasn't really a huge transition as Nick was the office manager and pretty well came and went as he pleased, often taking most of a day to do personal things. We stopped getting up early every day to do morning chores and only did so when Nick had to be somewhere and then I would help him before I left for work at eight am. I helped with all of the chores on my days off, usually spending the whole day outside working on something that needed to be done or fixed that required an extra pair of hands.
Maybe he had too much time on his hands, I don't know. I do know that things around here got really weird after that.
Not only did Nick have the two audio tapes I have already mentioned but now he claimed to have tapes of at least two guys working out in our gym together. He claimed his protein powder, vitamins and other health supplements were now disappearing, presumably after these intruders worked out. He gave a list of tools that had gone missing from the garage and also from the basement. He lamented that he didn't matter if he locked the garage or not, stuff would still disappear. I started to cringe every time he went to look for something. If he couldn't find it then it suddenly became my problem because he would fly into a rage about it being one more thing to be added to the long list of his belongings that had been stolen.
He began to 'investigate'. He chatted with his friend Michael, who I have never met. This person would tell him this and another person would tell him that. I asked about these people, who they were and where he ran into them. Most days when I came home from work he would say something like ' I had a very bad day today. I am in a rage about a conversation I had with......'. He told me that he figured out who the Chris person was that I greeted on the occasion on tape a few days after Christmas. He just happened to be related to the guy who lives next door to us, the neighbour that Nick is so certain is stealing from us, helping himself to whatever he pleases.
Nick said he heard that I had engaged in threesomes, that everyone within thirty miles of our farm knew all about my running around and that the guys involved were bragging that they could visit me anytime they wanted to have some fun. I told him hundreds of times I wanted to know who these people were who were spreading these rumours so I could explain to them that what they were repeating had not one thread of truth to it and to suggest politely that I could care less what they gossiped about as I knew it all to be nothing but lies. But there was always a reason why I couldn't confront anybody, usually that his source was happy to pass information along to him, but that they otherwise wanted to remain anonymous. One woman even came to our house looking for Nick and she wasn't very pleased when I answered the door. I called for Nick to come downstairs and she and he walked abruptly away from me leaving me standing there like a fool, waiting for an introduction. She was the wife of one of the guys I was purportedly running around with and she wanted to talk to Nick to verify what she had been told. After she left Nick told me she had found out that her husband was having an affair with someone and that somehow she had suspicions it was either me or the wife of this next door neighbour. Well I knew it wasn't me and I told Nick I hoped she wasn't divorcing her husband based on anything she thought I was involved with, because it was absolutely not true and I felt I should tell her so. Nick just said I should stay away from her in the state of mind she was in, for my own safety.
Nick believes it was her husband who was allegedly seen removing sand from our riding arena. He said our neighbour across the street saw whoever took it and she said it 'looked like someone familiar to her'. When I suggested we go over and ask her a few more questions, he said she was afraid there would be repercussions if it became known it was she who had identified the guy and Nick didn't think it was fair to put her in any danger.
Nick retired from his job at the end of January following the recording of the after Christmas tape. It wasn't really a huge transition as Nick was the office manager and pretty well came and went as he pleased, often taking most of a day to do personal things. We stopped getting up early every day to do morning chores and only did so when Nick had to be somewhere and then I would help him before I left for work at eight am. I helped with all of the chores on my days off, usually spending the whole day outside working on something that needed to be done or fixed that required an extra pair of hands.
Maybe he had too much time on his hands, I don't know. I do know that things around here got really weird after that.
Not only did Nick have the two audio tapes I have already mentioned but now he claimed to have tapes of at least two guys working out in our gym together. He claimed his protein powder, vitamins and other health supplements were now disappearing, presumably after these intruders worked out. He gave a list of tools that had gone missing from the garage and also from the basement. He lamented that he didn't matter if he locked the garage or not, stuff would still disappear. I started to cringe every time he went to look for something. If he couldn't find it then it suddenly became my problem because he would fly into a rage about it being one more thing to be added to the long list of his belongings that had been stolen.
He began to 'investigate'. He chatted with his friend Michael, who I have never met. This person would tell him this and another person would tell him that. I asked about these people, who they were and where he ran into them. Most days when I came home from work he would say something like ' I had a very bad day today. I am in a rage about a conversation I had with......'. He told me that he figured out who the Chris person was that I greeted on the occasion on tape a few days after Christmas. He just happened to be related to the guy who lives next door to us, the neighbour that Nick is so certain is stealing from us, helping himself to whatever he pleases.
Nick said he heard that I had engaged in threesomes, that everyone within thirty miles of our farm knew all about my running around and that the guys involved were bragging that they could visit me anytime they wanted to have some fun. I told him hundreds of times I wanted to know who these people were who were spreading these rumours so I could explain to them that what they were repeating had not one thread of truth to it and to suggest politely that I could care less what they gossiped about as I knew it all to be nothing but lies. But there was always a reason why I couldn't confront anybody, usually that his source was happy to pass information along to him, but that they otherwise wanted to remain anonymous. One woman even came to our house looking for Nick and she wasn't very pleased when I answered the door. I called for Nick to come downstairs and she and he walked abruptly away from me leaving me standing there like a fool, waiting for an introduction. She was the wife of one of the guys I was purportedly running around with and she wanted to talk to Nick to verify what she had been told. After she left Nick told me she had found out that her husband was having an affair with someone and that somehow she had suspicions it was either me or the wife of this next door neighbour. Well I knew it wasn't me and I told Nick I hoped she wasn't divorcing her husband based on anything she thought I was involved with, because it was absolutely not true and I felt I should tell her so. Nick just said I should stay away from her in the state of mind she was in, for my own safety.
Nick believes it was her husband who was allegedly seen removing sand from our riding arena. He said our neighbour across the street saw whoever took it and she said it 'looked like someone familiar to her'. When I suggested we go over and ask her a few more questions, he said she was afraid there would be repercussions if it became known it was she who had identified the guy and Nick didn't think it was fair to put her in any danger.
Monday, October 24, 2016
Oct. 24, 2016
Nick had placed an audio recording device on his dresser in our bedroom. He says it recorded a couple sleeping, the alarm going off, the woman telling the guy it is time to get up, then the shower running. Also recorded is a love-making session in which the woman's voice sounds like mine. I have never heard this tape. And I certainly know it is not me on the tape, and I know the events Nick says took place in our bedroom could not have taken place on the dates he alleges they did. I was the only one sleeping in our bed while he was away and no amount of accusations can change the facts.
I was told about this recording only after a second one had been made, this time of me home by myself a few days after Christmas when I was off but Nick went into work. He set up his audio device in the front hallway of our house. Of course I had no idea it was there. It was well hidden.
What actually happened that day was I was drinking a bottle of Tia Maria liquor that I received as a gift and I was enjoying my time alone, puttering around and tidying up. I decided to get a breadmaker out of its box and try it out, it had actually been a present from my mother the year before. The only talking I did was to the dogs. I have a stupid dog-voice thing I say to them which a corruption of the phrase 'here you go'. It ends up sounding more like 'heres goes' and after a few drinks it sounds even less like anything in English. And I was wearing a pair of duck boots, if you know what those are. I had them on because I was going down into the basement and sock feet can't be worn in the basement as the wood chips and hay pieces stick to them and then get dragged upstairs. These duck boots are perfect because they are slip-on style.
Well....when Nick listened to this audio tape he heard me greeting a guy named Chris at the door who then came inside with his noisy boots on and received oral sex from someone. Which was me talking to the dogs, wearing my duck boots and stepping a bit too loudly (I don't wear them often) and the last part was one of the dogs having a drink of water. Then he said he could hear the guy clomping down the basement stairs, probably to sneak out via the basement door.
I have listened to this tape, a few times. You should try it sometime. Tape yourself doing nothing in particular for several hours and then listen to it a few months later - and see if you can guess exactly what you were doing. It's actually kind of amusing, except when your husband already has his mind made up about what he is hearing.
Nick had placed an audio recording device on his dresser in our bedroom. He says it recorded a couple sleeping, the alarm going off, the woman telling the guy it is time to get up, then the shower running. Also recorded is a love-making session in which the woman's voice sounds like mine. I have never heard this tape. And I certainly know it is not me on the tape, and I know the events Nick says took place in our bedroom could not have taken place on the dates he alleges they did. I was the only one sleeping in our bed while he was away and no amount of accusations can change the facts.
I was told about this recording only after a second one had been made, this time of me home by myself a few days after Christmas when I was off but Nick went into work. He set up his audio device in the front hallway of our house. Of course I had no idea it was there. It was well hidden.
What actually happened that day was I was drinking a bottle of Tia Maria liquor that I received as a gift and I was enjoying my time alone, puttering around and tidying up. I decided to get a breadmaker out of its box and try it out, it had actually been a present from my mother the year before. The only talking I did was to the dogs. I have a stupid dog-voice thing I say to them which a corruption of the phrase 'here you go'. It ends up sounding more like 'heres goes' and after a few drinks it sounds even less like anything in English. And I was wearing a pair of duck boots, if you know what those are. I had them on because I was going down into the basement and sock feet can't be worn in the basement as the wood chips and hay pieces stick to them and then get dragged upstairs. These duck boots are perfect because they are slip-on style.
Well....when Nick listened to this audio tape he heard me greeting a guy named Chris at the door who then came inside with his noisy boots on and received oral sex from someone. Which was me talking to the dogs, wearing my duck boots and stepping a bit too loudly (I don't wear them often) and the last part was one of the dogs having a drink of water. Then he said he could hear the guy clomping down the basement stairs, probably to sneak out via the basement door.
I have listened to this tape, a few times. You should try it sometime. Tape yourself doing nothing in particular for several hours and then listen to it a few months later - and see if you can guess exactly what you were doing. It's actually kind of amusing, except when your husband already has his mind made up about what he is hearing.
Sunday 23 October 2016
Sunday, October 23, 2016
Oct. 23/2016
Today was an OK day. Nick went back and forth for hay most of the day and I fed and put the horses out and then I mucked out the stalls. After I had cleaned out two stalls I decided I wanted some music so I came inside and dug out an old boom box and I almost enjoyed the rest of the chores. After three and a half years I finally have a radio in the barn.
Nick has now gone to drop off his compressor at Alex's for her husband to use. He also says he is picking up cupcakes from a friend of my daughter but I will believe that when I see the cupcakes. We don't have any money to pay for the hay we have sitting in our yard but we have money for little desserts. At any rate I now have at least two hours to myself to do whatever I want in total peace.
The first ten or eleven months at the farm were pure bliss. I had not been prepared for how fast and how deeply I fell in love with the farm and the horses and the routine of looking after them. Nick was still working so we would both get up at five-thirty each morning to do the chores together before we left for work. His job was flexible so he could be home by five or six to do the evening chores. My job requires I work eleven or twelve hour shifts so I wouldn't be home in the evenings on the days I worked. But on my days off the two of us would work together on whatever project needed doing.
I took the money from the sale of my house to purchase everything we would need for our life on the farm. I put the down payment on a brand new eight-five horsepower tractor (a really big one!) plus three extra attachments at almost a thousand dollars each which I had to write a cheque for when they were delivered, and I also bought a used Dodge Ram truck, a horse trailer, a trailer for hay, a portable sawmill to make our own lumber from the sixty acres of wooded land we had, and a generator. We also spent about twenty-five thousand on horses but Nick did pay for the ones he wanted and I paid for mine. I was very generous with this money - I wanted our life here to be comfortable and I wanted Nick to have everything he needed to run the farm and look after the animals.
I bought new queen-size beds for two of the bedrooms as well as some dressers and night tables so all of the bedrooms would be comfortable and nicely furnished. And new curtains for some rooms and blinds for others. I was quite proud of myself when it was completed and I still had plans for a few more minor improvements like painting the main hallway and upstairs bathroom.
I planned all along to change jobs as the ninety- minute commute each way was not sustainable so I left my job of fifteen years in February, after nine months in our new home. I took time off in between and as things worked out I didn't start a new job until the end of April. I thoroughly enjoyed my days keeping busy with the chores and getting to know and understand the horses. I had never lived on a farm before and all I knew about horses before I moved here was that I liked them a lot. I did give my daughters the riding lessons I had always wanted, and they rode every week for five or six years until they were in their mid-teens. I looked forward to finally learning to ride myself.
Nick and I decided to get married the second summer because we wanted a very small wedding with just family and a few friends that could take place in the farmhouse, and we thought it would be wiser to wait a year as the first summer was so busy getting ourselves and our young horses settled into a new home.
As I began to pick a date and decide on some details for the wedding, I felt Nick was rather disinterested in the whole affair. He didn't want to invite anyone but his two children, his daughter Alex and his son Luke. And he wasn't going to insist that Luke come, if he didn't care to attend. That was fine with me but I did need Alex there, as I was going to have Alex and my older daughter be the witnesses for the ceremony. After the date was set and everything was starting to fall into place, Nick kept asking me over and over again what the date was that we chose. There wasn't much that needed any great amount of planning, but Nick really didn't have the least bit of enthusiasm for anything I asked his advice or his thoughts on. I did find this odd at the time, because Nick had been the one who wanted to get legally married, not me.
We had a wonderful day, my sister and niece flew in from Toronto to surprise me so that my mom and my two sisters, two nieces and two daughters could all enjoy it together. The weather was perfect and after the ceremony we changed into our barn clothes and enjoyed our first evening together with our horses as man and wife.
Monday morning came as it always does, and Nick and I continued with our routine of early mornings and busy days. I was settling into my new job and Nick was thinking about retiring. He was going to be sixty-five on his next birthday so he could throw in the towel any time he pleased. We were both looking forward to him being able to work full-time on the farm.
Then came October and Nick went to Ottawa for a conference for work. He was gone for three days and two nights, which meant I would have to feed and muck out the stalls after I got home from work at nine-thirty and then get up early to do chores again before I left for work at eight am. I was exhausted by the time I came in from the barn at eleven-thirty at night, and Nick insisted on calling me each night to chat for twenty or thirty minutes. I was literally falling asleep as I was talking to him and all I could think about was how early I had to get up the next morning. The weather was cold and rainy to top it all off.
So I was very proud of myself when Nick arrived home and could see that I had managed to hang in there and get it all done by myself. Perhaps one more night would have been my limit but I made it through what I had had to do.
I don't really remember exactly when the accusations started. I will never forget how they kicked my feet out from under me and knocked me breathless as I hit the hard ground. Figuratively of course. But it felt the same.
Today was an OK day. Nick went back and forth for hay most of the day and I fed and put the horses out and then I mucked out the stalls. After I had cleaned out two stalls I decided I wanted some music so I came inside and dug out an old boom box and I almost enjoyed the rest of the chores. After three and a half years I finally have a radio in the barn.
Nick has now gone to drop off his compressor at Alex's for her husband to use. He also says he is picking up cupcakes from a friend of my daughter but I will believe that when I see the cupcakes. We don't have any money to pay for the hay we have sitting in our yard but we have money for little desserts. At any rate I now have at least two hours to myself to do whatever I want in total peace.
The first ten or eleven months at the farm were pure bliss. I had not been prepared for how fast and how deeply I fell in love with the farm and the horses and the routine of looking after them. Nick was still working so we would both get up at five-thirty each morning to do the chores together before we left for work. His job was flexible so he could be home by five or six to do the evening chores. My job requires I work eleven or twelve hour shifts so I wouldn't be home in the evenings on the days I worked. But on my days off the two of us would work together on whatever project needed doing.
I took the money from the sale of my house to purchase everything we would need for our life on the farm. I put the down payment on a brand new eight-five horsepower tractor (a really big one!) plus three extra attachments at almost a thousand dollars each which I had to write a cheque for when they were delivered, and I also bought a used Dodge Ram truck, a horse trailer, a trailer for hay, a portable sawmill to make our own lumber from the sixty acres of wooded land we had, and a generator. We also spent about twenty-five thousand on horses but Nick did pay for the ones he wanted and I paid for mine. I was very generous with this money - I wanted our life here to be comfortable and I wanted Nick to have everything he needed to run the farm and look after the animals.
I bought new queen-size beds for two of the bedrooms as well as some dressers and night tables so all of the bedrooms would be comfortable and nicely furnished. And new curtains for some rooms and blinds for others. I was quite proud of myself when it was completed and I still had plans for a few more minor improvements like painting the main hallway and upstairs bathroom.
I planned all along to change jobs as the ninety- minute commute each way was not sustainable so I left my job of fifteen years in February, after nine months in our new home. I took time off in between and as things worked out I didn't start a new job until the end of April. I thoroughly enjoyed my days keeping busy with the chores and getting to know and understand the horses. I had never lived on a farm before and all I knew about horses before I moved here was that I liked them a lot. I did give my daughters the riding lessons I had always wanted, and they rode every week for five or six years until they were in their mid-teens. I looked forward to finally learning to ride myself.
Nick and I decided to get married the second summer because we wanted a very small wedding with just family and a few friends that could take place in the farmhouse, and we thought it would be wiser to wait a year as the first summer was so busy getting ourselves and our young horses settled into a new home.
As I began to pick a date and decide on some details for the wedding, I felt Nick was rather disinterested in the whole affair. He didn't want to invite anyone but his two children, his daughter Alex and his son Luke. And he wasn't going to insist that Luke come, if he didn't care to attend. That was fine with me but I did need Alex there, as I was going to have Alex and my older daughter be the witnesses for the ceremony. After the date was set and everything was starting to fall into place, Nick kept asking me over and over again what the date was that we chose. There wasn't much that needed any great amount of planning, but Nick really didn't have the least bit of enthusiasm for anything I asked his advice or his thoughts on. I did find this odd at the time, because Nick had been the one who wanted to get legally married, not me.
We had a wonderful day, my sister and niece flew in from Toronto to surprise me so that my mom and my two sisters, two nieces and two daughters could all enjoy it together. The weather was perfect and after the ceremony we changed into our barn clothes and enjoyed our first evening together with our horses as man and wife.
Monday morning came as it always does, and Nick and I continued with our routine of early mornings and busy days. I was settling into my new job and Nick was thinking about retiring. He was going to be sixty-five on his next birthday so he could throw in the towel any time he pleased. We were both looking forward to him being able to work full-time on the farm.
Then came October and Nick went to Ottawa for a conference for work. He was gone for three days and two nights, which meant I would have to feed and muck out the stalls after I got home from work at nine-thirty and then get up early to do chores again before I left for work at eight am. I was exhausted by the time I came in from the barn at eleven-thirty at night, and Nick insisted on calling me each night to chat for twenty or thirty minutes. I was literally falling asleep as I was talking to him and all I could think about was how early I had to get up the next morning. The weather was cold and rainy to top it all off.
So I was very proud of myself when Nick arrived home and could see that I had managed to hang in there and get it all done by myself. Perhaps one more night would have been my limit but I made it through what I had had to do.
I don't really remember exactly when the accusations started. I will never forget how they kicked my feet out from under me and knocked me breathless as I hit the hard ground. Figuratively of course. But it felt the same.
Saturday 22 October 2016
Saturday, October 22, 2016
Oct. 22/2016
It is a loud day today. Nick went through a phase about a year ago where he would slam and bang everything he did or touched. I was very thankful when he began to get his rages more under control, but today he didn't try at all. Sometimes I think he does this because of the restless energy males accumulate when they are overdue on their intimacy schedule. I am aware of this and I realize that although I find it difficult to be 'in the mood' in the evening when Nick has been unpleasant all day, he will be more unpleasant if I don't find myself in the mood at least once every three or four days.
To pick up where I left off with the phases of coming to grips with the rest of my life, after I went from the angry phase to the bargaining phase I morphed into the planning phase.
I have fallen in love with living in the country. I have fallen in love with the land and all the creatures we share it with, domestic or wild. And I have fallen in love with each one of the horses we have, they all have their own distinct personalities as well as their own little quirks and preferences and ways of doing things. I love taking care of them, working in the barn and outside on fences and stuff.
I can't imagine living anywhere else, or at least I couldn't until I had navigated my way through this phase and into the next.
I decided that I could stay here on the farm by myself and manage to keep two horses, the ones that were bought for my two daughters. It doesn't take much time at all to feed, water and muck out just two horses. One of the problems would be having their hooves trimmed, but Nick only did it about once a year and I figured I could afford that as I would have to pay someone else to do it with Nick gone. Yes, I planned to ask him to leave if he didn't stop his ridiculous behavior as I was coming to the point where I could not and would not tolerate it any longer.
Clearing the snow from the driveway in the winter is also a major issue. We have a big tractor to do that, which I can't afford the payments on myself and which I can barely operate anyway. The plan for that was to trade it in and get a much smaller one that could plow snow as well as rototill and move the round bales of hay around.
We have an old Dodge truck we use to pull a trailer we transport the hay from the farm we buy it from to our farm, and I doubt I could do this moving by myself. I could switch back to using square bales which we used in the beginning and which are a more expensive option, but I was able to handle them with no problem at all. This is important in the winter months when the hay for the next eight months or so is bought and stored until spring.
I just can't bear the thought of selling the farm and the livestock. I have so many plans for the farm, for the horses, for the land. Nick and I had talked about doing a bunch of things in the future and I was really looking forward to retiring from my first career and starting on a second one. We planned to use the house as a bed and breakfast to host families or anyone who wanted to spend a weekend or a vacation living on a farm. We even thought we might make a small campsite in the woods for folks who had never been camping but wanted to try it risk-free before buying all the gear. It could be part of the 'country experience'. We have our own free-range organic eggs and chicken and will have a supply of beef available in a year or so. Combined with the large garden we put in every year, our visitors would get to see where the food that ends up at the grocery store comes from. A couple of goats for milk and cheese and we will have almost every food group covered!
Then I got realistic about the whole thing. We would never be able to host visitors. I would be pulling my hair out trying to keep the place neat and presentable while Nick went ahead of me messing things up and leaving stuff out everywhere. He literally never puts anything back where it goes. The other problem is that a lot of things will need to be fixed around here and the embarrassment factor would be overwhelming unless an awful lot of stuff gets fixed and Nick stays on top of it. I have wished over and over again that he was the kind of person who takes pride in his house and property and is always keeping it neat and well-looked after, but I must admit I knew that wasn't Nick even before we moved to the farm.
I hated to admit to myself that all of these plans I was making were just pipedreams. I felt stupid having told them to friends, to family, to co-workers. Actually now I know as the words leave my mouth that they are nothing but the dreams of a fool.
It has taken me about two and a half years to complete this circle of acceptance. I know I can't live here much longer, existing in this twilight zone as I do. Every day is a struggle to pick my path carefully across broken glass and pray he doesn't confront me with his accusations. They are so incredibly outlandish and yet he believes them to be real.
It is a loud day today. Nick went through a phase about a year ago where he would slam and bang everything he did or touched. I was very thankful when he began to get his rages more under control, but today he didn't try at all. Sometimes I think he does this because of the restless energy males accumulate when they are overdue on their intimacy schedule. I am aware of this and I realize that although I find it difficult to be 'in the mood' in the evening when Nick has been unpleasant all day, he will be more unpleasant if I don't find myself in the mood at least once every three or four days.
To pick up where I left off with the phases of coming to grips with the rest of my life, after I went from the angry phase to the bargaining phase I morphed into the planning phase.
I have fallen in love with living in the country. I have fallen in love with the land and all the creatures we share it with, domestic or wild. And I have fallen in love with each one of the horses we have, they all have their own distinct personalities as well as their own little quirks and preferences and ways of doing things. I love taking care of them, working in the barn and outside on fences and stuff.
I can't imagine living anywhere else, or at least I couldn't until I had navigated my way through this phase and into the next.
I decided that I could stay here on the farm by myself and manage to keep two horses, the ones that were bought for my two daughters. It doesn't take much time at all to feed, water and muck out just two horses. One of the problems would be having their hooves trimmed, but Nick only did it about once a year and I figured I could afford that as I would have to pay someone else to do it with Nick gone. Yes, I planned to ask him to leave if he didn't stop his ridiculous behavior as I was coming to the point where I could not and would not tolerate it any longer.
Clearing the snow from the driveway in the winter is also a major issue. We have a big tractor to do that, which I can't afford the payments on myself and which I can barely operate anyway. The plan for that was to trade it in and get a much smaller one that could plow snow as well as rototill and move the round bales of hay around.
We have an old Dodge truck we use to pull a trailer we transport the hay from the farm we buy it from to our farm, and I doubt I could do this moving by myself. I could switch back to using square bales which we used in the beginning and which are a more expensive option, but I was able to handle them with no problem at all. This is important in the winter months when the hay for the next eight months or so is bought and stored until spring.
I just can't bear the thought of selling the farm and the livestock. I have so many plans for the farm, for the horses, for the land. Nick and I had talked about doing a bunch of things in the future and I was really looking forward to retiring from my first career and starting on a second one. We planned to use the house as a bed and breakfast to host families or anyone who wanted to spend a weekend or a vacation living on a farm. We even thought we might make a small campsite in the woods for folks who had never been camping but wanted to try it risk-free before buying all the gear. It could be part of the 'country experience'. We have our own free-range organic eggs and chicken and will have a supply of beef available in a year or so. Combined with the large garden we put in every year, our visitors would get to see where the food that ends up at the grocery store comes from. A couple of goats for milk and cheese and we will have almost every food group covered!
Then I got realistic about the whole thing. We would never be able to host visitors. I would be pulling my hair out trying to keep the place neat and presentable while Nick went ahead of me messing things up and leaving stuff out everywhere. He literally never puts anything back where it goes. The other problem is that a lot of things will need to be fixed around here and the embarrassment factor would be overwhelming unless an awful lot of stuff gets fixed and Nick stays on top of it. I have wished over and over again that he was the kind of person who takes pride in his house and property and is always keeping it neat and well-looked after, but I must admit I knew that wasn't Nick even before we moved to the farm.
I hated to admit to myself that all of these plans I was making were just pipedreams. I felt stupid having told them to friends, to family, to co-workers. Actually now I know as the words leave my mouth that they are nothing but the dreams of a fool.
It has taken me about two and a half years to complete this circle of acceptance. I know I can't live here much longer, existing in this twilight zone as I do. Every day is a struggle to pick my path carefully across broken glass and pray he doesn't confront me with his accusations. They are so incredibly outlandish and yet he believes them to be real.
Wednesday 19 October 2016
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
Oct. 18/2016
I am not a writer. I can spell and I can make sentences that sound pretty good sometimes, but now that I am nearly sixty, I have long given up any illusions that I might someday be a writer.
So why am I writing this? Because everybody else is blogging? Well honestly maybe I did fantasize that I would create something that a lot of people would be interested in reading but I can quickly bring myself back to reality if I feel I'm going to plummet in that direction anyway.
I also know that the only way to get anywhere to take the first step so I figured out how to do this - I am not very tech savvy. I can check my email and post a few pictures on Facebook but I'm not even sure how to send a comment to someone that is private. So I started telling my story, mostly to myself and I decided that was OK. Nobody had to read it to validate it. It was a true account of what had happened/was happening to me and this way I wouldn't alienate or bore to death any of my co-workers or family.
And then after a few entries I started feeling much better about things. I am starting to care more about housework and keeping the house tidy. I had nearly given up on trying to keep it clean. I no longer had the floors vacuumed and mopped and then Nick would walk right in from the barn or from being in the garden and track manure or mud into every room in the house. He would walk into the bathroom by the back door on the white tiles and then into the kitchen and down the hall to the computer room and often upstairs into the bedroom. To be fair, he usually took his boots off at the door but he almost never took his shoes off, which he wore most of the time when there was no snow on the ground. The dogs seem to shed all the time and the wood furnace seems to dust the surfaces of everything with a fine mist as if someone is sanding a floor in another room.
I decided writing this diary was helping me sort things out and put them in order - chronologically if nothing else. I think a lot about each event as I record it and often something occurs to me that I hadn't thought of before. I gain new insights into the possible reasons for this nightmare, how I let it destroy my life and perhaps into a plausible way out of the dysfunction that is my marriage.
I realize now that I have gone through many stages of disbelief and acceptance. At the very beginning, I would beg Nick in tears, day after day, to stop acting the way he was. Then I would plead with him to tell me why. To tell me what I had done to make him so angry all the time.
I got angry. He was ruining my life. What right had he to take everything we had, almost the entirety of which I had paid for, and just let it crumble and rust and rot. And I mean literally. Fences were crumbling and rotting until horses got out, our sawmill was left out in the rain and snow with the cover blown off day after day until I tugged it back into place and secured it myself.
After the angry phase I entered the bargaining phase. Here I tried to fix our marriage. I stopped drinking. I thought this might have been a problem for Nick as he didn't drink when I met him and has never had a drink in the seven years we have been together but I do believe he had his own struggle with alcohol in the past. I won't say I struggled with it, I'll just say I enjoyed it a bit too much. (Isn't just like humans to minimize and rationalize our own shortcomings and to exaggerate those of others?)
I tried to think of other things I could do. I know I could be getting up at 5:30 am to go outside and help get the horses fed and out so Nick would have the whole day to do other things, but I'm not quite there yet. I feel he would just spend more time on the computer every day while I am hard at work. I know I have a bad attitude but I did this when we first moved to the farm - actually up until Nick retired I did this. I enjoyed getting out to the barn and being around the horses as the sun came up. But it was mostly Nick who kept me from the barn. I won't deny I enjoy the warm, cozy covers of the comfy king-sized bed we have however he was not pleasant to be around and definitely not the way to start your day. He still isn't pleasant to be around. He swears and bang things around, throws the plastic dishes around (the ones we portion out the horses grain into, each white plastic bowl has the horse's name on it) and calls the horses names I can't print here. Of course he never hits them but I know they can feel the negative energy he is emitting. I certainly can.
I am not a writer. I can spell and I can make sentences that sound pretty good sometimes, but now that I am nearly sixty, I have long given up any illusions that I might someday be a writer.
So why am I writing this? Because everybody else is blogging? Well honestly maybe I did fantasize that I would create something that a lot of people would be interested in reading but I can quickly bring myself back to reality if I feel I'm going to plummet in that direction anyway.
I also know that the only way to get anywhere to take the first step so I figured out how to do this - I am not very tech savvy. I can check my email and post a few pictures on Facebook but I'm not even sure how to send a comment to someone that is private. So I started telling my story, mostly to myself and I decided that was OK. Nobody had to read it to validate it. It was a true account of what had happened/was happening to me and this way I wouldn't alienate or bore to death any of my co-workers or family.
And then after a few entries I started feeling much better about things. I am starting to care more about housework and keeping the house tidy. I had nearly given up on trying to keep it clean. I no longer had the floors vacuumed and mopped and then Nick would walk right in from the barn or from being in the garden and track manure or mud into every room in the house. He would walk into the bathroom by the back door on the white tiles and then into the kitchen and down the hall to the computer room and often upstairs into the bedroom. To be fair, he usually took his boots off at the door but he almost never took his shoes off, which he wore most of the time when there was no snow on the ground. The dogs seem to shed all the time and the wood furnace seems to dust the surfaces of everything with a fine mist as if someone is sanding a floor in another room.
I decided writing this diary was helping me sort things out and put them in order - chronologically if nothing else. I think a lot about each event as I record it and often something occurs to me that I hadn't thought of before. I gain new insights into the possible reasons for this nightmare, how I let it destroy my life and perhaps into a plausible way out of the dysfunction that is my marriage.
I realize now that I have gone through many stages of disbelief and acceptance. At the very beginning, I would beg Nick in tears, day after day, to stop acting the way he was. Then I would plead with him to tell me why. To tell me what I had done to make him so angry all the time.
I got angry. He was ruining my life. What right had he to take everything we had, almost the entirety of which I had paid for, and just let it crumble and rust and rot. And I mean literally. Fences were crumbling and rotting until horses got out, our sawmill was left out in the rain and snow with the cover blown off day after day until I tugged it back into place and secured it myself.
After the angry phase I entered the bargaining phase. Here I tried to fix our marriage. I stopped drinking. I thought this might have been a problem for Nick as he didn't drink when I met him and has never had a drink in the seven years we have been together but I do believe he had his own struggle with alcohol in the past. I won't say I struggled with it, I'll just say I enjoyed it a bit too much. (Isn't just like humans to minimize and rationalize our own shortcomings and to exaggerate those of others?)
I tried to think of other things I could do. I know I could be getting up at 5:30 am to go outside and help get the horses fed and out so Nick would have the whole day to do other things, but I'm not quite there yet. I feel he would just spend more time on the computer every day while I am hard at work. I know I have a bad attitude but I did this when we first moved to the farm - actually up until Nick retired I did this. I enjoyed getting out to the barn and being around the horses as the sun came up. But it was mostly Nick who kept me from the barn. I won't deny I enjoy the warm, cozy covers of the comfy king-sized bed we have however he was not pleasant to be around and definitely not the way to start your day. He still isn't pleasant to be around. He swears and bang things around, throws the plastic dishes around (the ones we portion out the horses grain into, each white plastic bowl has the horse's name on it) and calls the horses names I can't print here. Of course he never hits them but I know they can feel the negative energy he is emitting. I certainly can.
Sunday 16 October 2016
Sunday, October 16, 2016
Oct. 16, 2016
I apologize now for missing entries from day to day. Like last night's for yesterday. I worked an eight-hour day, a relatively short one as most are eleven hours. When I got home around 6:30 pm Nick was in the house, on the computer. We chatted for a few minutes about our day and when I announced I should get upstairs and get changed to go out to help him feed the horses because I had some housework I wanted to do before bed, he announced that he hadn't finished shovelling the stalls yet. By this time it was almost 7 pm, but I was flexible and stayed inside to do my housework while he finished in the barn. If I had been in a generous mood I would have quickly jumped into my barn clothes and gone out to help him shovel, however, now that Nick has been retired for about 18 months, I don't feel I should have to help if I have worked that day. I almost always help on my days off. And to be fair, Nick doesn't get a day off from looking after the livestock. (I am sitting here trying to think of a plausible reason why he should do it every day without my help but all I can come with is that I am not in generous moods all that often).
So I went out around 7 to help and by the time I finished vacuuming, mopping, a little dusting and bathroom wiping when I got back inside, it was after 9 pm and I decided to get to bed a little early.
Nick has come upstairs into the bedroom and is standing about six feet away from me now. I am going to shut this down now before I get caught. That wouldn't be good.
I apologize now for missing entries from day to day. Like last night's for yesterday. I worked an eight-hour day, a relatively short one as most are eleven hours. When I got home around 6:30 pm Nick was in the house, on the computer. We chatted for a few minutes about our day and when I announced I should get upstairs and get changed to go out to help him feed the horses because I had some housework I wanted to do before bed, he announced that he hadn't finished shovelling the stalls yet. By this time it was almost 7 pm, but I was flexible and stayed inside to do my housework while he finished in the barn. If I had been in a generous mood I would have quickly jumped into my barn clothes and gone out to help him shovel, however, now that Nick has been retired for about 18 months, I don't feel I should have to help if I have worked that day. I almost always help on my days off. And to be fair, Nick doesn't get a day off from looking after the livestock. (I am sitting here trying to think of a plausible reason why he should do it every day without my help but all I can come with is that I am not in generous moods all that often).
So I went out around 7 to help and by the time I finished vacuuming, mopping, a little dusting and bathroom wiping when I got back inside, it was after 9 pm and I decided to get to bed a little early.
Nick has come upstairs into the bedroom and is standing about six feet away from me now. I am going to shut this down now before I get caught. That wouldn't be good.
Saturday 15 October 2016
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2016
Home from work about 45 minutes ago. I stayed about 40 minutes extra because I have an inspection tomorrow and everything has to be up to snuff. I did some work at home yesterday and finished up the rest of what I wanted to do tonight. Nothing left to do tomorrow but pray.
Nick was still in the barn and has just slammed the back door to announce his entrance. Did I tell you he slams and bangs and throws everything. He always claims it is by accident or the wind caught it or whatever. He is much better about keeping it less obvious and not quite as deafening as he did a year ago, but I still feel the waves of anger reverberating in the walls and doors of wherever we might be at the time.
He came up the stairs to tell me not to run the water in the shower tomorrow morning until I decide it is hot enough, but I should just hop in because there is now only one burner working on the hot water tank. Well there were two working yesterday and he acts as if I should have known not to do this in the first place. And well, well, well - the house is so cold in the mornings that I have to warm up a bit before I jump under water of any temperature. I have started turning the electric baseboard heater on in the bathroom as soon as I close the bathroom door and this way it is nearly tolerable to pull the curtain aside when I am finished and not freeze to death while I dry off. This might sound a little dramatic to the rest of the civilized world however the house is often 16 or 17 degrees Celsius and that is downstairs on the main floor. There are no floor vents from the furnace on the second floor. There is a large open area where the stairs are that lead up to the balcony and hallway to the other two bedrooms on the second floor, but none of the hot air is blown into any of the bedrooms and they get pretty cold at night with the doors closed. Each room has electric heat but I dislike sleeping with it on, by the morning I always feel crusty and all dried up. It is nice to be able to turn it on crawl back under the covers for 20 or 30 minutes but right now we don't have the money to pay for both kinds of heat. I have already explained the heating ridiculousness. The oil furnace is also too expensive to run. It is the best, the whole house is warm and toasty in half the time of anything else.
Last night the house got pretty cold and I just thought this morning that Nick had forgotten to top the wood up before he went to bed, so I decided I should remind him to do it tonight so he wouldn't forget again. Then it occurred to me to go down into the basement myself to put a piece of wood or two on and I must admit I was totally surprised or shocked to see there was absolutely no wood at all sitting on the floor next to the furnace. Or anywhere else for that matter.
I had nagged all summer long about the fact that we had run out of firewood every winter and had spent unnecessary money on power and oil, and I was told a million times not to worry. There would be firewood this winter. It just wasn't in the basement yet. It was lying all over the property, cut and ready to chain-sawed up into two-foot lengths or just gathered up and thrown into the tractor shovel and dumped in the yard. Nick had hurt his back and the chain-saw motion did make it worse, but that had been his excuse last winter. He had left he wood until the very last minute, as is his extremely exasperating habit - then he had poked himself in the eye somehow and detached his retina. He had to have surgery and couldn't lift anything for six weeks or so afterward to avoid the possibility of the 'laser stitching' coming undone. For more than three months I had to shovel the horses myself on my days off. We did get a lot of help from Nick's daughter and her boyfriend and also from Nick's son. Our boarders arrived in February and they became a big help as well. But I was 'it' if no one else was available. And I had trouble sleeping without guilt if the stables weren't clean and dry before the horses came in for the night. If I was going to be cozy under the covers I wanted to think that the animals in the barn were comfortable as well.
Home from work about 45 minutes ago. I stayed about 40 minutes extra because I have an inspection tomorrow and everything has to be up to snuff. I did some work at home yesterday and finished up the rest of what I wanted to do tonight. Nothing left to do tomorrow but pray.
Nick was still in the barn and has just slammed the back door to announce his entrance. Did I tell you he slams and bangs and throws everything. He always claims it is by accident or the wind caught it or whatever. He is much better about keeping it less obvious and not quite as deafening as he did a year ago, but I still feel the waves of anger reverberating in the walls and doors of wherever we might be at the time.
He came up the stairs to tell me not to run the water in the shower tomorrow morning until I decide it is hot enough, but I should just hop in because there is now only one burner working on the hot water tank. Well there were two working yesterday and he acts as if I should have known not to do this in the first place. And well, well, well - the house is so cold in the mornings that I have to warm up a bit before I jump under water of any temperature. I have started turning the electric baseboard heater on in the bathroom as soon as I close the bathroom door and this way it is nearly tolerable to pull the curtain aside when I am finished and not freeze to death while I dry off. This might sound a little dramatic to the rest of the civilized world however the house is often 16 or 17 degrees Celsius and that is downstairs on the main floor. There are no floor vents from the furnace on the second floor. There is a large open area where the stairs are that lead up to the balcony and hallway to the other two bedrooms on the second floor, but none of the hot air is blown into any of the bedrooms and they get pretty cold at night with the doors closed. Each room has electric heat but I dislike sleeping with it on, by the morning I always feel crusty and all dried up. It is nice to be able to turn it on crawl back under the covers for 20 or 30 minutes but right now we don't have the money to pay for both kinds of heat. I have already explained the heating ridiculousness. The oil furnace is also too expensive to run. It is the best, the whole house is warm and toasty in half the time of anything else.
Last night the house got pretty cold and I just thought this morning that Nick had forgotten to top the wood up before he went to bed, so I decided I should remind him to do it tonight so he wouldn't forget again. Then it occurred to me to go down into the basement myself to put a piece of wood or two on and I must admit I was totally surprised or shocked to see there was absolutely no wood at all sitting on the floor next to the furnace. Or anywhere else for that matter.
I had nagged all summer long about the fact that we had run out of firewood every winter and had spent unnecessary money on power and oil, and I was told a million times not to worry. There would be firewood this winter. It just wasn't in the basement yet. It was lying all over the property, cut and ready to chain-sawed up into two-foot lengths or just gathered up and thrown into the tractor shovel and dumped in the yard. Nick had hurt his back and the chain-saw motion did make it worse, but that had been his excuse last winter. He had left he wood until the very last minute, as is his extremely exasperating habit - then he had poked himself in the eye somehow and detached his retina. He had to have surgery and couldn't lift anything for six weeks or so afterward to avoid the possibility of the 'laser stitching' coming undone. For more than three months I had to shovel the horses myself on my days off. We did get a lot of help from Nick's daughter and her boyfriend and also from Nick's son. Our boarders arrived in February and they became a big help as well. But I was 'it' if no one else was available. And I had trouble sleeping without guilt if the stables weren't clean and dry before the horses came in for the night. If I was going to be cozy under the covers I wanted to think that the animals in the barn were comfortable as well.
Monday 10 October 2016
October 10, 2016 continued
Oct. 10, 2016 (second entry)
I just have a few minutes here before Nick comes upstairs. He has turned his computer off and is taking his vitamins and supplements, and I am hearing the 'F' word as he shakes some of the bottles. He will tell me that someone has been stealing his stuff again. Most of it is locked up - he has a large safe right in the kitchen and he also has a lock on one of the cupboards. I have no idea where the key is nor do I want to know. In fact I don't have a key to the garage or even to the house.
Someone and on occasion, two or three of them, started coming into the house and were recorded on audio working out in our gym, and stealing supplements and food from our pantry and some of the healthy stuff like the large containers of honey and olive oil and coconut oil that Nick buys. He claims that dog biscuits were stolen - well they disappeared and that is the only logical explanation.
So this thief or thieves claim to have been given permission by me to help themselves and so they were given keys to the house. At first I thought that maybe there had been keys around from the previous owners, after all these were the next door neighbours and actually the only house that was close enough to see if any emergency like a fire should happen to occur. It made sense because the owners had travelled quite often and had had a local teenager stop by twice a day to feed their horses.
Nick said he had checked with all the neighbours and had asked the best friend of the couple if she had a key or if she knew if anyone else did. She confirmed that the only person that sometimes had a key was the girl who looked after the horses from time to time. So the only way the thieves could be getting into the house was by using keys supplied by me. Which I knew wasn't true. Yet Nick insisted this was the only plausible explanation. I knew there had to be another.
Nick changed the locks on all the doors and I asked him not to give me a key so there would be no way I could give it to anyone else. Any inconvenience caused by this was nothing compared to the possibility that I had given another key away.
I just have a few minutes here before Nick comes upstairs. He has turned his computer off and is taking his vitamins and supplements, and I am hearing the 'F' word as he shakes some of the bottles. He will tell me that someone has been stealing his stuff again. Most of it is locked up - he has a large safe right in the kitchen and he also has a lock on one of the cupboards. I have no idea where the key is nor do I want to know. In fact I don't have a key to the garage or even to the house.
Someone and on occasion, two or three of them, started coming into the house and were recorded on audio working out in our gym, and stealing supplements and food from our pantry and some of the healthy stuff like the large containers of honey and olive oil and coconut oil that Nick buys. He claims that dog biscuits were stolen - well they disappeared and that is the only logical explanation.
So this thief or thieves claim to have been given permission by me to help themselves and so they were given keys to the house. At first I thought that maybe there had been keys around from the previous owners, after all these were the next door neighbours and actually the only house that was close enough to see if any emergency like a fire should happen to occur. It made sense because the owners had travelled quite often and had had a local teenager stop by twice a day to feed their horses.
Nick said he had checked with all the neighbours and had asked the best friend of the couple if she had a key or if she knew if anyone else did. She confirmed that the only person that sometimes had a key was the girl who looked after the horses from time to time. So the only way the thieves could be getting into the house was by using keys supplied by me. Which I knew wasn't true. Yet Nick insisted this was the only plausible explanation. I knew there had to be another.
Nick changed the locks on all the doors and I asked him not to give me a key so there would be no way I could give it to anyone else. Any inconvenience caused by this was nothing compared to the possibility that I had given another key away.
Thanksgiving Monday, October 10, 2016
Oct. 10 /2016
Beating down rain outside. Tail of a hurricane they call Matthew. I'm not sure how they spelled it, I have only heard it on the radio. I have lots to do besides recording my dismal life for all to see but I ma not motivated to do anything else.
Nick's daughter Alexa is here with her husband and I have no idea how he is out there cutting wood for us to burn this winter in this weather. Nick is supposed to be helping but I hear his voice downstairs from time to time and I hear the tractor outside. The horses are inside and I remember we ran out of hay last night. Nick had called our hay guy, a dairy farmer who lives eight or ten miles away and who sells us the large rolls of hay or silage and who likes Nick partly because he is funny and charming but mostly I think because he is easy-going and will buy whatever he has left over from his cattle.
Nick and I met over seven years ago. He found me on Plenty of Fish, a popular internet dating site, sent me his picture and we met for coffee four days later. It was love at first sight for me, both with the picture and in person. He was funny, charming and also very intelligent. Very good-looking, in excellent physical shape and he had an awesome body. I am not 'picky' about physical features but I do look for someone who is funny and intelligent. Nick also speaks perfect French and better English than I do, although French is his first language. I found this to be the icing on the cake, and his muscles didn't detract much from him either.
We both fell in hopelessly in love and within several months we were spending every night together and most days when we could. He mentioned one day he would like to 'raise horses again someday after he retires' and so here we are today. Seemed like a dream come true for me. And for him, he says, until I started having an affair with the next door neighbour.
It is alleged to have started sometime before he went away for work in October of our second year here. We had moved on the first weekend of June. Two horses were purchased from the previous owners and we drove to Ontario three weeks later to pick up two more, which were yearlings, from a Mennonite fellow near Kitchener. We had purchased four in total so the plan was to make two trips. But we ended up buying a fifth horse from him, this one a three-year old gelding who could be broken and trained to ride the next summer. The yearlings would have to be four before they were 'started' and Nick wanted a horse he could ride sooner than that. So we hired a guy the Mennonite fellow put us in touch with to bring down the remaining three horses for us and that made seven. Our eighth horse was an awesome black colt born on the same Mennonite farm we had purchased the other horses from, and Nick drove up in November to bring him here when he was weaned from his mother at eight months of age. By the end of February we had eleven.
I had tried to get the couple of days off that Nick was going to be away but my co-worker also needed those two days off because her husband also had to be away and because she has two small children under four, I took the shifts while at the same time wondering how I was going to manage all those horses by myself and work the eleven-hour shifts each day plus the one hour commute each way. Early mornings and late nights. It wouldn't kill me. So I thought then. If I had only known then what I know now. What a cliché but how well it describes the next two years.
Beating down rain outside. Tail of a hurricane they call Matthew. I'm not sure how they spelled it, I have only heard it on the radio. I have lots to do besides recording my dismal life for all to see but I ma not motivated to do anything else.
Nick's daughter Alexa is here with her husband and I have no idea how he is out there cutting wood for us to burn this winter in this weather. Nick is supposed to be helping but I hear his voice downstairs from time to time and I hear the tractor outside. The horses are inside and I remember we ran out of hay last night. Nick had called our hay guy, a dairy farmer who lives eight or ten miles away and who sells us the large rolls of hay or silage and who likes Nick partly because he is funny and charming but mostly I think because he is easy-going and will buy whatever he has left over from his cattle.
Nick and I met over seven years ago. He found me on Plenty of Fish, a popular internet dating site, sent me his picture and we met for coffee four days later. It was love at first sight for me, both with the picture and in person. He was funny, charming and also very intelligent. Very good-looking, in excellent physical shape and he had an awesome body. I am not 'picky' about physical features but I do look for someone who is funny and intelligent. Nick also speaks perfect French and better English than I do, although French is his first language. I found this to be the icing on the cake, and his muscles didn't detract much from him either.
We both fell in hopelessly in love and within several months we were spending every night together and most days when we could. He mentioned one day he would like to 'raise horses again someday after he retires' and so here we are today. Seemed like a dream come true for me. And for him, he says, until I started having an affair with the next door neighbour.
It is alleged to have started sometime before he went away for work in October of our second year here. We had moved on the first weekend of June. Two horses were purchased from the previous owners and we drove to Ontario three weeks later to pick up two more, which were yearlings, from a Mennonite fellow near Kitchener. We had purchased four in total so the plan was to make two trips. But we ended up buying a fifth horse from him, this one a three-year old gelding who could be broken and trained to ride the next summer. The yearlings would have to be four before they were 'started' and Nick wanted a horse he could ride sooner than that. So we hired a guy the Mennonite fellow put us in touch with to bring down the remaining three horses for us and that made seven. Our eighth horse was an awesome black colt born on the same Mennonite farm we had purchased the other horses from, and Nick drove up in November to bring him here when he was weaned from his mother at eight months of age. By the end of February we had eleven.
I had tried to get the couple of days off that Nick was going to be away but my co-worker also needed those two days off because her husband also had to be away and because she has two small children under four, I took the shifts while at the same time wondering how I was going to manage all those horses by myself and work the eleven-hour shifts each day plus the one hour commute each way. Early mornings and late nights. It wouldn't kill me. So I thought then. If I had only known then what I know now. What a cliché but how well it describes the next two years.
Sunday 9 October 2016
Sunday, Oct. 9/2016
Thanksgiving Day, Sunday, Oct. 9/2015
The day had a good start, a very stressful middle, a lovely third half and a mediocre end. Nick and I joined my daughter and her-husband-to-be along with his parents and his sister. My other daughter was also there, introducing to all of us her new boyfriend who she had met while earning her Master's degree at Western University in London, Ontario and who had travelled from England the day before to spend five days here in Nova Scotia with her. Everyone prepared their favorite/their specialty recipes and as a consequence there was tons of delicious food and lots of lively conversation. We had contributed two of our free-range chickens and had brought from our garden almost every traditional harvest vegetable imaginable, including some of our giant zucchini and to-die-for tomatoes. One chicken had been stuffed and cooked in the oven surrounded by potatoes swimming in butter and juices from the meat and the second chicken had been deep-fried outside over a propane flame. I doubt anyone celebrating Thanksgiving ate any better than we did.
The problem was getting there on time. I woke up at 8am in Alex's bedroom where I had gone to escape Nick's snoring. I find it almost impossible to spend the entire night in the same bed as him unless I am completely exhausted. He wakes me up every night and snores so loudly I cannot get back to sleep. Usually when he hears me leaving the room Nick will get up and leave himself instead, which pleases me because I prefer sleeping in our bedroom on the quieter side of the house.
There had only been the bedspread on Alex's bed and although I woke up several times knowing I was cold, I didn't wake up enough to get out of bed and get another blanket. This I finally did at 8am and decided I needed to go back to sleep for a bit longer now that I would be warm. At 9am I got up and started with my food preparation for dinner. Everything was proceeding smoothly and on schedule until I realized around 1230 that Nick had just put the horses out and was not nearly done in the barn. He still needed to pick some things from the garden for me, help load the car as well as get himself ready. We had planned to leave at 3 but it was 30 minutes after that when we pulled out of the yard. I get so annoyed at this, and it happens every time we go anywhere. In June of this year we flew to Ontario to attend my daughter's graduation from Western and we managed to miss our flight, arriving in Toronto less than half an hour before the ceremony was to begin, about two hours away.
Although we had been running late I had thought we had to be checked in 30 minutes before our flight but this deadline had been changed in the last two years or so and while we did arrive about 35 minutes before
The day had a good start, a very stressful middle, a lovely third half and a mediocre end. Nick and I joined my daughter and her-husband-to-be along with his parents and his sister. My other daughter was also there, introducing to all of us her new boyfriend who she had met while earning her Master's degree at Western University in London, Ontario and who had travelled from England the day before to spend five days here in Nova Scotia with her. Everyone prepared their favorite/their specialty recipes and as a consequence there was tons of delicious food and lots of lively conversation. We had contributed two of our free-range chickens and had brought from our garden almost every traditional harvest vegetable imaginable, including some of our giant zucchini and to-die-for tomatoes. One chicken had been stuffed and cooked in the oven surrounded by potatoes swimming in butter and juices from the meat and the second chicken had been deep-fried outside over a propane flame. I doubt anyone celebrating Thanksgiving ate any better than we did.
The problem was getting there on time. I woke up at 8am in Alex's bedroom where I had gone to escape Nick's snoring. I find it almost impossible to spend the entire night in the same bed as him unless I am completely exhausted. He wakes me up every night and snores so loudly I cannot get back to sleep. Usually when he hears me leaving the room Nick will get up and leave himself instead, which pleases me because I prefer sleeping in our bedroom on the quieter side of the house.
There had only been the bedspread on Alex's bed and although I woke up several times knowing I was cold, I didn't wake up enough to get out of bed and get another blanket. This I finally did at 8am and decided I needed to go back to sleep for a bit longer now that I would be warm. At 9am I got up and started with my food preparation for dinner. Everything was proceeding smoothly and on schedule until I realized around 1230 that Nick had just put the horses out and was not nearly done in the barn. He still needed to pick some things from the garden for me, help load the car as well as get himself ready. We had planned to leave at 3 but it was 30 minutes after that when we pulled out of the yard. I get so annoyed at this, and it happens every time we go anywhere. In June of this year we flew to Ontario to attend my daughter's graduation from Western and we managed to miss our flight, arriving in Toronto less than half an hour before the ceremony was to begin, about two hours away.
Although we had been running late I had thought we had to be checked in 30 minutes before our flight but this deadline had been changed in the last two years or so and while we did arrive about 35 minutes before
Saturday 8 October 2016
Saturday, Oct. 8 /2016
I did have a great day at work today. Giving away stuff from the garden is fun! Everyone ohs and ahs about the size of the zucchini, and I am very proud to have grown it myself, organically with horse manure as the only fertilizer. I had promised one of the girls at work I would lend her my cat carrier while she moved today but I couldn't find it last night so I found a tote that would serve the purpose. I hauled it out and dusted it off, and as I peered inside I was rewarded by the phony smiles of a dozen Barbie dolls in various stages of dress and undress. I hadn't seen them for about 17 or 18 years, and I immediately knew what I was going to do with them. I knew someone who came into the store who had a four-year old, and she would be delighted to be their new owner. And indeed she was. It is nice when you can make someone's day with such a small gesture. We all should do it more often.
It got busy near the end of the day and I wasn't able to finish up and get out of there as early as I had hoped, knowing I would likely have to listen to sarcastic comments from Nick about working late. The implication was that I had stopped somewhere on the way home. I don't think he meant stopping for turnip and sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.
He was in the barn when I pulled into the yard and the horses were pacing back and forth along the fences anxious to come in for the night, and eager to have their evening meal of oats and hay. He was sitting in the feed room texting someone. That's when I realised he hadn't even finished shovelling out the stalls yet, which was done every day and always before the horses came in. I hadn't expected a whole lot to be done as it was Saturday and Nick kept his Sabbath on Saturday, but he did make allowances for work enough to take care of the daily needs of the livestock. Not wanting to be in the barn too late after working all day, I went into the house to change to come back out and help to finish up the evening chores. I was greeted by the two dogs, who were looking hopefully at my movements to see if I would lean towards the leashes. I decided to change my clothes first, but one of them started to whine, which meant he really needed to go out, so I clipped them to the pieces of rope tied to the porch instead of taking them for a walk, to save a bit of time.
We finished in the barn and on the way inside Nick turned to me and announced that his daughter and her husband were coming to the farm on the Thanksgiving Monday to help him chainsaw and bring in some wood for the winter. This was going to be our fourth winter here and the fourth without firewood to burn to heat the large house. We also had an oil furnace and electric baseboard heating, but with sixty acres of in-cleared land, the plan had been to cut and use our own firewood while at the same time making a trail or two for riding. But each year so far we had had to spend hundreds of dollars on oil and power to stay even halfway comfortable. I found it very hard to crawl out from a warm bed when I could almost see my breath in the bedroom. I didn't like the heat on in the bedroom during the night but I sure didn't mind it during the day and there was no reason that made any sense to me why I should have to be cold in my own home when I was making more enough to pay heating bills. But the fact of the matter was that we were spending way too much money on feed for the horses and we had been doing this for three years and four months now.
After filling me in on the details of where they planned to cut and how much they hoped to bring in, Nick told me that there was almost a cord of wood missing from the back trail where they had felled some trees early last spring and had cut a lot of them into four-foot lengths. Just in case we ran out of wood this winter, he was making sure that there was no way it could be blamed on him. It was the fault of whoever had taken this wood and thus left us short. Nothing was ever Nick's fault. Someone else was always involved.
Nick had had a farm with horses before and I assumed and he assured me he knew all there was to know about owning, training and raising horses. And I am still certain he does know all we need to know, but knowing how and when to do something is quite different than actually getting right down to doing it. Nick was a master at telling everyone what should be done but he was a slave to procrastination. Stuff would break around the house and never get fixed. It was incredibly frustrating because I knew he knew how to fix whatever it was. But his reason for not fixing things was that the tool or tools he needed for the job had been stolen and that he was too sick of this happening that he refused to replace the stuff any longer. I cannot verify that nothing has been stolen, I don't know what a lot of these missing tools look like in the first place and I have to take his word for the fact that they are now nowhere to be found, but some of the ones I am familiar with have turned up here and there where Nick has set them down and failed to put them back after he has finished using them. We found one his missing tape measures in the woods under the apple tree a few weeks ago while we were picking up apples to give to the horses and I found about a half of a roll of barbed wire down at the back of one of the pastures when I had been there taking some pictures of the horses.
He still leaves the garage door wide open all of time, actually I think he told me it is off its track and is something else that needs to be fixed. Anyone can look inside and see what there is to choose from. And anyone could choose what they please when both cars are gone from the yard.
So I don't doubt that there were a few tools and such that were stolen, but it didn't stop at that. The RCMP were called by Nick and he filed a complaint against our next door neighbours alleging that they had stolen these items. And apparently when the officer paid a visit next door to ask if anyone could offer an explanation, the officer was told that I had given permission for these neighbours to "help themselves to anything they wanted". And also apparently, the neighbours hinted that they "knew me very well". So when the RCMP gave their report to Nick, they admitted there was nothing they could do as it wasn't theft as long as they had permission, and in addition, they felt it "was a domestic matter".
It got busy near the end of the day and I wasn't able to finish up and get out of there as early as I had hoped, knowing I would likely have to listen to sarcastic comments from Nick about working late. The implication was that I had stopped somewhere on the way home. I don't think he meant stopping for turnip and sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.
He was in the barn when I pulled into the yard and the horses were pacing back and forth along the fences anxious to come in for the night, and eager to have their evening meal of oats and hay. He was sitting in the feed room texting someone. That's when I realised he hadn't even finished shovelling out the stalls yet, which was done every day and always before the horses came in. I hadn't expected a whole lot to be done as it was Saturday and Nick kept his Sabbath on Saturday, but he did make allowances for work enough to take care of the daily needs of the livestock. Not wanting to be in the barn too late after working all day, I went into the house to change to come back out and help to finish up the evening chores. I was greeted by the two dogs, who were looking hopefully at my movements to see if I would lean towards the leashes. I decided to change my clothes first, but one of them started to whine, which meant he really needed to go out, so I clipped them to the pieces of rope tied to the porch instead of taking them for a walk, to save a bit of time.
We finished in the barn and on the way inside Nick turned to me and announced that his daughter and her husband were coming to the farm on the Thanksgiving Monday to help him chainsaw and bring in some wood for the winter. This was going to be our fourth winter here and the fourth without firewood to burn to heat the large house. We also had an oil furnace and electric baseboard heating, but with sixty acres of in-cleared land, the plan had been to cut and use our own firewood while at the same time making a trail or two for riding. But each year so far we had had to spend hundreds of dollars on oil and power to stay even halfway comfortable. I found it very hard to crawl out from a warm bed when I could almost see my breath in the bedroom. I didn't like the heat on in the bedroom during the night but I sure didn't mind it during the day and there was no reason that made any sense to me why I should have to be cold in my own home when I was making more enough to pay heating bills. But the fact of the matter was that we were spending way too much money on feed for the horses and we had been doing this for three years and four months now.
After filling me in on the details of where they planned to cut and how much they hoped to bring in, Nick told me that there was almost a cord of wood missing from the back trail where they had felled some trees early last spring and had cut a lot of them into four-foot lengths. Just in case we ran out of wood this winter, he was making sure that there was no way it could be blamed on him. It was the fault of whoever had taken this wood and thus left us short. Nothing was ever Nick's fault. Someone else was always involved.
Nick had had a farm with horses before and I assumed and he assured me he knew all there was to know about owning, training and raising horses. And I am still certain he does know all we need to know, but knowing how and when to do something is quite different than actually getting right down to doing it. Nick was a master at telling everyone what should be done but he was a slave to procrastination. Stuff would break around the house and never get fixed. It was incredibly frustrating because I knew he knew how to fix whatever it was. But his reason for not fixing things was that the tool or tools he needed for the job had been stolen and that he was too sick of this happening that he refused to replace the stuff any longer. I cannot verify that nothing has been stolen, I don't know what a lot of these missing tools look like in the first place and I have to take his word for the fact that they are now nowhere to be found, but some of the ones I am familiar with have turned up here and there where Nick has set them down and failed to put them back after he has finished using them. We found one his missing tape measures in the woods under the apple tree a few weeks ago while we were picking up apples to give to the horses and I found about a half of a roll of barbed wire down at the back of one of the pastures when I had been there taking some pictures of the horses.
He still leaves the garage door wide open all of time, actually I think he told me it is off its track and is something else that needs to be fixed. Anyone can look inside and see what there is to choose from. And anyone could choose what they please when both cars are gone from the yard.
So I don't doubt that there were a few tools and such that were stolen, but it didn't stop at that. The RCMP were called by Nick and he filed a complaint against our next door neighbours alleging that they had stolen these items. And apparently when the officer paid a visit next door to ask if anyone could offer an explanation, the officer was told that I had given permission for these neighbours to "help themselves to anything they wanted". And also apparently, the neighbours hinted that they "knew me very well". So when the RCMP gave their report to Nick, they admitted there was nothing they could do as it wasn't theft as long as they had permission, and in addition, they felt it "was a domestic matter".
Friday 7 October 2016
Friday, 7 October, 2016
Oct.7/2016
Another disappointing day. I remember yesterday as being pretty good. Work went well and when I got home, Nick and I made some zucchini bread together. Actually he grated the zucchini and I did the rest.
As usual, Nick got out of bed in the middle of the night and either went to sleep in one of the other bedrooms, usually he goes to the one his daughter Alexa sleeps in when she is here, or he went downstairs to sit at the computer. He spends a lot of his time doing that.
So I dragged myself out of bed, giving myself just enough time to shower and get dressed and get out of the house, leaving a few moments to grab a bag of green tomatoes, some cucumbers and two zucchini to take along to work with me. We planted a huge garden and have tons more produce than the two of us could ever use, or even give away to family to enjoy. Nick insists that we keep it all and gets angry if I let him know I am planning to give anything away. But the previous two harvests were either left in the garden to rot or freeze, or were picked and left around in the porch to shrivel and dry up. So this year I have resolved just to put up with his protestations. This morning he announced that next year we wouldn't be bothering with a large garden if we were going to continue to give most of it away. I will admit he does a lot of the work getting the garden ready, but I do nearly all of the weeding and I have done all of the picking each year. But then, like everything else around here, he loses interest and the job or project is left half-done and is never finished or even put away for another day. It just sits where it was started.
I arrived at work, which I enjoy, I guess maybe because I get to return the land of sane and logical thinking, in the company of rational and well-adjusted, average people. I get to escape from the cloak of oppression and sharpened daggers of the place I call home. Then my cell phone pinged mid-morning. I glanced at the screen to see the name of the sender, unfortunately it was Nick. Sometimes I got lucky and it was one of my daughters or less often one of my sisters, but usually it was Nick with some comment or question that would suck all the air out from under my sails and leave me swirling in the middle my ocean surrounded by sharks. I would invariably spend the rest of the next few hours distracted and distressed. You would think by now I might have learned to shove all these interruptions into a box and blow them to smithereens, but I have yet to figure out how that is done.
The text on my phone was asking me if I had let anyone drive Nick's car last night, which I had had at work with me. We had discussed this the other day. I had taken the Chrysler to work today and obviously he was driving his car and something was wrong with it. Something else in addition to what he had discovered was damaged a few days ago.
But I managed to have a good day somehow anyhow. Until I turned down our driveway and saw the lights still on in the barn. It was almost nine thirty at night which meant he was behind schedule. I went out to say hi to the horses and let Nick know I was home. I then packed a couple more bags of tomatoes to take to work and I went into the garage to take a chicken out of the freezer. He yelled at me from the barn, asking what I was doing. I don't lie to him, although I wish I could and often I think I probably should. I knew how he felt about giving away any of the food we had raised to anyone besides family but I admitted I was taking a chicken to give to a customer because she couldn't afford a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner and I had decided I would surprise her with a gift of poultry. So of course we argued like we always do.
The house was still in the state of disarray it had been in the morning when I left. The turkey he had cooked three nights before was still sitting on top of the stove in the roasting pan. I was annoyed and depressed, as I often became upon arriving home after work.
He started getting his array of vitamins ready and then he paused, with his arms on either side of the counter above the cupboard and his head bowed down in a posture of defeat.
I asked him what was wrong. Sometimes I just ignore him when he does this and sometimes I am not smart enough to keep my mouth shut.He picked up the bottle of fish oil capsules, and told me that over one hundred of them had gone missing a couple of weeks ago. I chose to ignore the comment and sort of gave a disinterested grunt. I walked over to the turtle tank and started to feed them. This usually cheered me up. Until he announced that one third of the turtle food had also disappeared. I knew where this was going.
Nick had installed video cameras throughout the house and the property, carefully situated to survey every point of entry to the house or barn or any part of the central area of the main yard. I reminded him of this, to which he replied that there was no camera in the actual kitchen itself.
The camera was in the hallway and viewed the entrance to the kitchen. The implication was that these things had been taken from the kitchen without anyone of interest being caught on video. The implication was as it always was, that it was I who had taken these things and that they were now in the possession of someone else.
Another disappointing day. I remember yesterday as being pretty good. Work went well and when I got home, Nick and I made some zucchini bread together. Actually he grated the zucchini and I did the rest.
As usual, Nick got out of bed in the middle of the night and either went to sleep in one of the other bedrooms, usually he goes to the one his daughter Alexa sleeps in when she is here, or he went downstairs to sit at the computer. He spends a lot of his time doing that.
So I dragged myself out of bed, giving myself just enough time to shower and get dressed and get out of the house, leaving a few moments to grab a bag of green tomatoes, some cucumbers and two zucchini to take along to work with me. We planted a huge garden and have tons more produce than the two of us could ever use, or even give away to family to enjoy. Nick insists that we keep it all and gets angry if I let him know I am planning to give anything away. But the previous two harvests were either left in the garden to rot or freeze, or were picked and left around in the porch to shrivel and dry up. So this year I have resolved just to put up with his protestations. This morning he announced that next year we wouldn't be bothering with a large garden if we were going to continue to give most of it away. I will admit he does a lot of the work getting the garden ready, but I do nearly all of the weeding and I have done all of the picking each year. But then, like everything else around here, he loses interest and the job or project is left half-done and is never finished or even put away for another day. It just sits where it was started.
I arrived at work, which I enjoy, I guess maybe because I get to return the land of sane and logical thinking, in the company of rational and well-adjusted, average people. I get to escape from the cloak of oppression and sharpened daggers of the place I call home. Then my cell phone pinged mid-morning. I glanced at the screen to see the name of the sender, unfortunately it was Nick. Sometimes I got lucky and it was one of my daughters or less often one of my sisters, but usually it was Nick with some comment or question that would suck all the air out from under my sails and leave me swirling in the middle my ocean surrounded by sharks. I would invariably spend the rest of the next few hours distracted and distressed. You would think by now I might have learned to shove all these interruptions into a box and blow them to smithereens, but I have yet to figure out how that is done.
The text on my phone was asking me if I had let anyone drive Nick's car last night, which I had had at work with me. We had discussed this the other day. I had taken the Chrysler to work today and obviously he was driving his car and something was wrong with it. Something else in addition to what he had discovered was damaged a few days ago.
But I managed to have a good day somehow anyhow. Until I turned down our driveway and saw the lights still on in the barn. It was almost nine thirty at night which meant he was behind schedule. I went out to say hi to the horses and let Nick know I was home. I then packed a couple more bags of tomatoes to take to work and I went into the garage to take a chicken out of the freezer. He yelled at me from the barn, asking what I was doing. I don't lie to him, although I wish I could and often I think I probably should. I knew how he felt about giving away any of the food we had raised to anyone besides family but I admitted I was taking a chicken to give to a customer because she couldn't afford a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner and I had decided I would surprise her with a gift of poultry. So of course we argued like we always do.
The house was still in the state of disarray it had been in the morning when I left. The turkey he had cooked three nights before was still sitting on top of the stove in the roasting pan. I was annoyed and depressed, as I often became upon arriving home after work.
He started getting his array of vitamins ready and then he paused, with his arms on either side of the counter above the cupboard and his head bowed down in a posture of defeat.
I asked him what was wrong. Sometimes I just ignore him when he does this and sometimes I am not smart enough to keep my mouth shut.He picked up the bottle of fish oil capsules, and told me that over one hundred of them had gone missing a couple of weeks ago. I chose to ignore the comment and sort of gave a disinterested grunt. I walked over to the turtle tank and started to feed them. This usually cheered me up. Until he announced that one third of the turtle food had also disappeared. I knew where this was going.
Nick had installed video cameras throughout the house and the property, carefully situated to survey every point of entry to the house or barn or any part of the central area of the main yard. I reminded him of this, to which he replied that there was no camera in the actual kitchen itself.
The camera was in the hallway and viewed the entrance to the kitchen. The implication was that these things had been taken from the kitchen without anyone of interest being caught on video. The implication was as it always was, that it was I who had taken these things and that they were now in the possession of someone else.
Wednesday 5 October 2016
Wednesday October 5, 2016
Oct. 5/2016
First entry - I wish I had started this at the beginning of the madness, but I don't think I realised how deep the downward spiral would or could go. And I don't think it has reached rock bottom yet. I know I am close to rock bottom. The only thing that keeps me breathing at all is the thought of the embarrassment of family discovering what a horrid mess I have made of my life. Oh, and of course, the faint light of hope I cling to as humans tend to do.
So I will start here, today, not really knowing at one point I am beginning this diary. I have no idea how this will eventually end, but I do remember exactly how it began. On July 6, 2009. I will reminisce another day. I want to get into print what today has offered.
It is about 10am and I am lying in bed as I type. My husband Nick is downstairs on his computer. He got up earlier to feed our horses and put them out before he went to a doctor's appointment in town. We live in the country about an hour away from where we met and both lived before we got together. We moved here three years ago and continue to travel to medical, dental, and other appointments which we will probably not bother to transfer closer to the farm as long as it is feasible to make the short trip to familiar people and places.
So Nick arrived home about an hour after he had left. I was snoozing upstairs when I heard a dog's tail hit the floor in a lazy wag of a greeting and knew someone had entered the house. Someone well-liked to the dogs as there was no barking. My first thought was that I had managed to sleep for the whole two hours and a bit that Nick would have been away, but I glanced at the clock and confirmed it was only ten minutes before his stated appointment time an hour away. I heard him tread quietly up the stairs, with his shoes still on (this drives me crazy- should I say crazier?) and he opened the bedroom door. He explained that there had been an accident and the highway would be impassable for several hours so he had rescheduled his appointment and turned around.
Then he started to tell me why he had taken our 'good' car to town, because his car had the emergency brake cable broken or stretched or locked on or something, as the result of some idiot doing power turns (I envisioned 'doughnuts') with his car, the kind the police do in the movies. I guess the bad guys do them now too.
Of course, he said, there was no way I had done that, and also the front tie rod was screwed and needed to be replaced. In his words, his car was 'fu****'. I am afraid I will use that notation often.
I told him that I had backed the car over the asphalt driveway at work and onto the soft back yard of the home beside it at work and that I had had to back the car up further and drive a small way alongside the pavement before I was able to get the wheels back off the grass and onto the driveway, and that there had been a five or six inch drop between the two surfaces. There was also multiple spots on the way to work where ongoing road construction had left gravel bumps in the highway that still needed to be paved. I knew driving back and forth over these for several weeks couldn't be doing the cars any good and I have to admit I can be an aggressive driver at times, especially when I am running late.
So I had to listen to a five-minute rant on how the next door neighbour has been driving his car, the proof being in the apparent abuse and also that folks in the area had seen him driving Nick's car. He named off a few of his 'sources' so of course, this makes it the undisputed truth. And the neighbour gets the keys how?
I will have to leave that explanation for another time. I am terrified he will come upstairs to find me making this entry. It is my day off today and, as usual, it has started with accusations and aggression leaving with the yearning to crawl back under the covers in the hope of waking up in another century. But I guess we don't have the technology for that yet, so I will get up and get dressed and see what I can piece together from these tatters of my day.
First entry - I wish I had started this at the beginning of the madness, but I don't think I realised how deep the downward spiral would or could go. And I don't think it has reached rock bottom yet. I know I am close to rock bottom. The only thing that keeps me breathing at all is the thought of the embarrassment of family discovering what a horrid mess I have made of my life. Oh, and of course, the faint light of hope I cling to as humans tend to do.
So I will start here, today, not really knowing at one point I am beginning this diary. I have no idea how this will eventually end, but I do remember exactly how it began. On July 6, 2009. I will reminisce another day. I want to get into print what today has offered.
It is about 10am and I am lying in bed as I type. My husband Nick is downstairs on his computer. He got up earlier to feed our horses and put them out before he went to a doctor's appointment in town. We live in the country about an hour away from where we met and both lived before we got together. We moved here three years ago and continue to travel to medical, dental, and other appointments which we will probably not bother to transfer closer to the farm as long as it is feasible to make the short trip to familiar people and places.
So Nick arrived home about an hour after he had left. I was snoozing upstairs when I heard a dog's tail hit the floor in a lazy wag of a greeting and knew someone had entered the house. Someone well-liked to the dogs as there was no barking. My first thought was that I had managed to sleep for the whole two hours and a bit that Nick would have been away, but I glanced at the clock and confirmed it was only ten minutes before his stated appointment time an hour away. I heard him tread quietly up the stairs, with his shoes still on (this drives me crazy- should I say crazier?) and he opened the bedroom door. He explained that there had been an accident and the highway would be impassable for several hours so he had rescheduled his appointment and turned around.
Then he started to tell me why he had taken our 'good' car to town, because his car had the emergency brake cable broken or stretched or locked on or something, as the result of some idiot doing power turns (I envisioned 'doughnuts') with his car, the kind the police do in the movies. I guess the bad guys do them now too.
Of course, he said, there was no way I had done that, and also the front tie rod was screwed and needed to be replaced. In his words, his car was 'fu****'. I am afraid I will use that notation often.
I told him that I had backed the car over the asphalt driveway at work and onto the soft back yard of the home beside it at work and that I had had to back the car up further and drive a small way alongside the pavement before I was able to get the wheels back off the grass and onto the driveway, and that there had been a five or six inch drop between the two surfaces. There was also multiple spots on the way to work where ongoing road construction had left gravel bumps in the highway that still needed to be paved. I knew driving back and forth over these for several weeks couldn't be doing the cars any good and I have to admit I can be an aggressive driver at times, especially when I am running late.
So I had to listen to a five-minute rant on how the next door neighbour has been driving his car, the proof being in the apparent abuse and also that folks in the area had seen him driving Nick's car. He named off a few of his 'sources' so of course, this makes it the undisputed truth. And the neighbour gets the keys how?
I will have to leave that explanation for another time. I am terrified he will come upstairs to find me making this entry. It is my day off today and, as usual, it has started with accusations and aggression leaving with the yearning to crawl back under the covers in the hope of waking up in another century. But I guess we don't have the technology for that yet, so I will get up and get dressed and see what I can piece together from these tatters of my day.
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