Feb. 28/2017
Yay!! The last day in February. Just March to get through and we will be into April. It happens every year, of course, but I dislike the dreary winter months. I don't mind the cold weather and I don't mind the snow but I hate the mud, especially here at the farm. Everything smells at least twice as bad when it is wet and the pastures are muck because the fences that were up to divide the pastures so the horses have access to only a portion of the fields until the new grass has had a chance to establish itself have been broken one way or another over the past 3 years or so. I succeeded in getting Nick to block off one of the fields but there are two others that need to be done and they all need some new topsoil and some seed put down. If there is going to be anything there for the horses to eat this summer - there wasn't that much to begin with when we moved in and the little there was is now weeds and bare ground - something will have to be done by May. I have put some hay seeds down all three years but I am told that this will only give minimal results without new topsoil. I think that was why we bought the box blade attachment for the tractor which might have been used once or twice to start the garden.
I got a real hit over the head when I called the bank to ask about this line of credit against our home that Nick has managed to get in order to continue his spending. When we bought the property we originally purchased it with a line of credit - we paid $340,000.00 for it and I took out a personal line of credit for $90,000.00 to use as the down payment which I was able to get because I had about $150,000.00 equity in my previous home. The joint line of credit we got was for $255,000.00 - we needed $250,000.00 to make up the difference in the price and we got $5,000.00 extra to cover closing costs.
It made sense at the time to do it this way so we could pay off as much as we wanted without penalty when we each sold our respective houses which were not sold before the closing date on the farm. About a year ago Nick and I went to the bank to do what I was believed was converting the line of credit into a conventional mortgage. I found out today from the bank that we now had something that has a fixed rate like a mortgage but still has the original amount of $255,000.00 available as credit. I suppose this is similar to re-mortgaging your home but I am assuming both people on the mortgage would have to approve this. I was incredulous that the bank would extend this amount of credit to one person without so much as a phone call to the other individual on the mortgage and I asked to have the name of the person at the branch who actually approved it. The lady I spoke with did tell me that $31,000.00 was taken as a draft by Nick and I knew immediately when she told me the date and the amount that Nick had used this money to pay off his visa. This fits the timeline of when he complained so much about the amount owing on his visa that I asked him how much it was and he told me $27,000.00. I was furious about it and asked him if there was any way I could be held responsible for his visa and he told me 'no, that can only happen if we have visa with both or our names on it'. Well, I guess he figured out a way around that didn't he? He has spent all of amount that we have paid over the last nearly five years - I was thinking it has been four years but I am forgetting that we bought the place June 30, 2012 and moved in June 1,2013. We rented it back to the previous owners for the amount of interest on the line of credit because the home they were building wasn't ready yet and with the horses they couldn't just go stay somewhere else in the meantime. And we hadn't sold our homes and weren't ready to move yet either.
So we - and I really mean 'I' - am right back to square one. Nick has taken all that money and paid off his visa with it while I am stuck with my visa bill. I can't even do the same thing he has because he has taken all the funds available except for two thousand and some change. And while I am paying most of the bills - I am paying everything joint except for the Eastlink bill which is for internet and our 2 cellphones. I paid it all along until Nick needed his phone replaced twice in a relatively short period of time and the bill ended up in his name because of a new contract being made for that reason. We cancelled our cable TV around the same time which I wanted to do because all last summer Nick spent hours a day watching Donald Trump stuff. I suppose the day is fast approaching when the Eastlink bill is hopelessly overdue and either my phone service gets cancelled or I get my own contract. I was so pissed last December when I needed a new phone and I was told Nick would have to do it as I didn't have permission to make changes to the account that I was about to go to Walmart or Costco and get one of their phones. I get extremely lousy cell service at the farm with both Eastlink and Bell, and I thought I might get better reception with one of the other providers.
I also pay the power bill, the feed store bill, the hay bill and the insurance on the farm and on all the vehicles - my car, my daughter's car, the farm truck, the car his daughter drives that is mine and even on his car. I got stuck with it all because Nick and I added the farm to the same insurance as his car when we bought it and I left my vehicles separate, to retain some control on the policies I guess. I knew they could be cancelled and put all on one at a later date. And then the bill came on the anniversary date and we didn't have the full payment so I called and arranged to have it taken monthly out of my chequing account. It has been coming out of there every since. I have also paid for the vehicle registration for everything except Nick's car. Which I don't think anyone is paying. I know Nick has been stopped at least twice in the past year for driving without current registration/insurance. I noticed the other day a letter came from Service Nova Scotia 'Collections'.
I am not sure what my next move will be. The smartest one I guess is to draft a separation agreement and get him to sign it. I was so stupid not to have done this years ago. I really thought this was the one relationship that would last, and how wrong I was. Sometimes I wonder if Nick didn't set me up for this from the very beginning. Convincing me this was such a great idea - the farm, the horses - knowing I had the money for it and figuring he could get me to finance it all. And there is one moment in particular that haunts me everyday. We were in the lawyer's office signing the papers to close the sale and I told the lawyer I wanted Nick and I to be 'tenants in common' which means that my portion of the farm goes to my daughters and not to Nick in the event I should pass away while we are still living there together. Then the lawyer asked if the portions were going to be equal and I said no. He asked how it was to be split and 90/10 is what I wanted to say, but Nick said 60/40 and I guess I will forever regret not speaking my mind. But to be honest, at the time I was embarrassed for Nick and being deeply in love with him, for that reason I kept my mouth shut. After all, we did have a verbal agreement that when it came to making repairs and improvements and do-it-yourself stuff that I would be willing to provide the financing for a project if he supplied the labour and the knowledge necessary to get the job done. And this had worked very nicely for us in the past and I had no reason not to expect things to continue as they had for the previous 3 years or so. I guess I have been wrong about a lot of things.
It is after midnight now and I asked Nick just before 10pm to keep the volume down on his computer as I was going up to bed. I always add that it will be at least 20 minutes before I will actually turn in. But I can hear talking on the computer and I can hear him walking around downstairs. I always hear him come up the stairs and use the bathroom before he goes to bed. Maybe tomorrow night I will sneak back downstairs to see what he is doing down there. I wonder if he is still closing the door to the room where the computer is. Stay tuned.
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Monday, 27 February 2017
Monday, February 27, 2017
Feb. 27, 2017
An ordinary day off. I rolled over and went back to sleep when I woke up because the bedroom was so cold. I heard Nick up earlier but he had gone back to bed to read or fall asleep reading. He usually does the latter as he is up late nearly every evening. I finally did get up to give the dogs some water and put them out again as my dog was whining to get someone's attention. Nick never hears anything or says he doesn't hear stuff. I have asked him hundreds - well at least one hundred - times to have his hearing tested but he just tells me it is completely fine. It is so annoying repeating myself 3 times so he can hear what I am saying. I feel I am yelling by the third try. He says I mumble and that I speak with my head turned away but I am certain he has some loss of hearing from years of fighting or from standing close to speakers while working security at concerts or from sticking Qtips in his ears every day. I also believe that he is able to read lips when I am facing him and either he doesn't realize he is doing this or he knows he does and uses this to compensate.
Another package of merchandise he ordered from the internet arrived today. Or rather, he picked it up at the post office. Four bottles of high potency vitamin D capsules. I am amazed at how he continues to buy stuff when the balance on his visa as confirmed by him is at least $27,000.00 and likely closer to $30,000.00 because he told me a coupe of months ago he had managed to get the limit increased. And now the line of credit of which I don't know the amount available. But which I intend to find out tomorrow when I make a phone call to the bank from work.
Yesterday we got the calves Cassidy and Sundance moved from on stall to another so we can shovel out the one they were in. I was beginning to be ashamed of myself when I saw them in the dirty one. We thought we would put them in separate stalls to give them more room to move around but the second guy, Sundance, was having nothing of going anywhere by himself. He refused to be coaxed into another stall, even with sweet feed, and in the end we gave in and let the two bunk together as they have since they were several days old. I asked Nick when we would be able to put them back outside in their pasture which is surrounded by an electric fence and has a small shed for them to go into to get out of inclement weather. They ended up in the barn because the battery for the electric fencer wasn't charging properly and they managed to figure out that the fence would no longer give them a shock. One morning I found them in the neighbour's back yard and two days later a man came knocking on our back door to let us know they were up in our garden, close to the highway. They followed me into the barn bribed with some feed and have been there since. Nick did get a new charger but it turned out the battery wasn't holding the charge. This I found out today along with the news that we would have to buy a new battery before they would be once again safe outside. I suppose that will come out of the extra pay I get next month, it is one of the two months a year with three paydays. Getting the second hand transmission put in my daughter's car is also on the short list of what I can do with that money.
Nick is presently in the room with me as I type at the kitchen table. He is making bread, which he used to do about a year ago. The bread you purchase at the grocery store has a type of plastic in it to keep it light and fluffy. The same stuff that those blue pads you put under your sleeping bag when you go camping and that things like yoga mats are made from. Nick says it accumulates in the brain, among other places in the body.
When he made bread previously he added a lot of honey to it and it ended up being too sweet to make sandwiches with. Of course that is just my opinion but I didn't eat it for that reason. He has agreed to follow a more conventional recipe this time so I won't get stuck eating 'plastic bread'. Nick is a disaster in the kitchen, he always leaves behind a huge mess. A thin layer of flour will coat the entire counter as well as the floor where he was standing. Drips of egg will be here and there and the dishes will be in the sink. I will have to clean this up before I can make anything for supper.
It is now 5pm and we have yet to shovel in the barn. I have had a splitting headache all afternoon and that's why I am sitting here typing during the day. I drank a couple of glasses of water, hoping I was just dehydrated, which helped a bit. I probably should have gone to another room and left Nick alone, he being his usual cranky self. He told me he was going out to the barn while the bread was rising and I guess I should go with him. At the moment he is furiously digging in the kitchen drawers looking for something he needs for his breadmaking, swearing as he goes. I will have to get up and find it for him before he accuses someone of stealing it.
An ordinary day off. I rolled over and went back to sleep when I woke up because the bedroom was so cold. I heard Nick up earlier but he had gone back to bed to read or fall asleep reading. He usually does the latter as he is up late nearly every evening. I finally did get up to give the dogs some water and put them out again as my dog was whining to get someone's attention. Nick never hears anything or says he doesn't hear stuff. I have asked him hundreds - well at least one hundred - times to have his hearing tested but he just tells me it is completely fine. It is so annoying repeating myself 3 times so he can hear what I am saying. I feel I am yelling by the third try. He says I mumble and that I speak with my head turned away but I am certain he has some loss of hearing from years of fighting or from standing close to speakers while working security at concerts or from sticking Qtips in his ears every day. I also believe that he is able to read lips when I am facing him and either he doesn't realize he is doing this or he knows he does and uses this to compensate.
Another package of merchandise he ordered from the internet arrived today. Or rather, he picked it up at the post office. Four bottles of high potency vitamin D capsules. I am amazed at how he continues to buy stuff when the balance on his visa as confirmed by him is at least $27,000.00 and likely closer to $30,000.00 because he told me a coupe of months ago he had managed to get the limit increased. And now the line of credit of which I don't know the amount available. But which I intend to find out tomorrow when I make a phone call to the bank from work.
Yesterday we got the calves Cassidy and Sundance moved from on stall to another so we can shovel out the one they were in. I was beginning to be ashamed of myself when I saw them in the dirty one. We thought we would put them in separate stalls to give them more room to move around but the second guy, Sundance, was having nothing of going anywhere by himself. He refused to be coaxed into another stall, even with sweet feed, and in the end we gave in and let the two bunk together as they have since they were several days old. I asked Nick when we would be able to put them back outside in their pasture which is surrounded by an electric fence and has a small shed for them to go into to get out of inclement weather. They ended up in the barn because the battery for the electric fencer wasn't charging properly and they managed to figure out that the fence would no longer give them a shock. One morning I found them in the neighbour's back yard and two days later a man came knocking on our back door to let us know they were up in our garden, close to the highway. They followed me into the barn bribed with some feed and have been there since. Nick did get a new charger but it turned out the battery wasn't holding the charge. This I found out today along with the news that we would have to buy a new battery before they would be once again safe outside. I suppose that will come out of the extra pay I get next month, it is one of the two months a year with three paydays. Getting the second hand transmission put in my daughter's car is also on the short list of what I can do with that money.
Nick is presently in the room with me as I type at the kitchen table. He is making bread, which he used to do about a year ago. The bread you purchase at the grocery store has a type of plastic in it to keep it light and fluffy. The same stuff that those blue pads you put under your sleeping bag when you go camping and that things like yoga mats are made from. Nick says it accumulates in the brain, among other places in the body.
When he made bread previously he added a lot of honey to it and it ended up being too sweet to make sandwiches with. Of course that is just my opinion but I didn't eat it for that reason. He has agreed to follow a more conventional recipe this time so I won't get stuck eating 'plastic bread'. Nick is a disaster in the kitchen, he always leaves behind a huge mess. A thin layer of flour will coat the entire counter as well as the floor where he was standing. Drips of egg will be here and there and the dishes will be in the sink. I will have to clean this up before I can make anything for supper.
It is now 5pm and we have yet to shovel in the barn. I have had a splitting headache all afternoon and that's why I am sitting here typing during the day. I drank a couple of glasses of water, hoping I was just dehydrated, which helped a bit. I probably should have gone to another room and left Nick alone, he being his usual cranky self. He told me he was going out to the barn while the bread was rising and I guess I should go with him. At the moment he is furiously digging in the kitchen drawers looking for something he needs for his breadmaking, swearing as he goes. I will have to get up and find it for him before he accuses someone of stealing it.
Sunday, 26 February 2017
Sunday, February 26, 2017
Feb.26, 2017
Well I did have a good start to the day. I had written 3 or 4 long paragraphs here and then I it something when I reached to turn off my alarm and lost it all. Lesson learned - hit the save button from time to time you idiot.
I was earlier than usual for me as I got up to put the dogs out. The rooster was crowing and Nick's dog was barking to out. She barks short high pitched barks at 5 or 10 minute intervals, as if to only awaken one person and not the whole house. The rooster doesn't bother me at all although he does wake me up every morning. Sometimes it is at 4am and sometimes at 7am but he will crow half a dozen times or so and then stop. I always smile to myself when I hear him.
Most days I let Nick get up to look after the dogs mostly because it is his dog who is doing the barking and also because he doesn't put the dogs out one last time before he goes to bed which is often in the wee hours of the next day. I do this before I head upstairs for the night but this is more like 11pm.
Let me mention while I am on the subject that it was I who bought the dog for Nick, specifically for Nick's son. Nick kept telling me that he had promised his son when he was little that he would buy a dog for him, and it was a Doberman that he son wanted. Probably because Nick had owned Dobermans before and I am certain this had some influence on his choice. But his son's mother wouldn't permit a dog in her home and Nick didn't want to be tied down to a dog when he was single.
My Golden Retriever-Lab cross was at Nick's most of the time where I stayed when my daughters were away at university so I told Nick if he was ever going to get a dog for his son he should do it soon as he would soon be old enough to move out on his own. Nick didn't have the money to buy a puppy and because I was so foolishly in love at the time I offered to pay for it. Besides everyone adores puppies.
Nick found a puppy he liked on-line and she was flown down from Ontario - this is quite often done. He started to train her to be an attack dog but I insisted he stop this when my daughters expressed concern for their safety and that of their friends when staying at or visiting the farm. I myself didn't want to be responsible for having such an animal in my home. Being a Doberman she is still aggressive with strangers but if she is introduced slowly and in the right environment she will accept them as non-threatening and will ignore them. This we usually do outside of the house and with treats.
I must also mention that the same summer as we got the puppy I also purchased a second hand car for Nick to drive as the van he had was completely unsafe. He later got himself a new vehicle and I asked him several times what had happened to the car I had bought. I felt we could get at least half of what I paid for it but I never did really find out where it ended up. I am guessing he sold it or gave it to someone. This should have been a red flag but I chose to rationalize it out of the picture. Another lesson learned the hard way. You would think I would know by now that the old sayings about life never fail to be the truth.
I arrived home from work last evening around 6:30 or so to find Nick in the house dressed in street clothes, as opposed to barn clothes. It was also apparent that he had gotten a haircut sometime during the course of the day. I mentioned to him that I had noticed the barn lights were on, which happens quite a bit when he comes inside to get a coffee or use the bathroom and then ends up sitting down at his computer for an hour or so. But this time I found it odd because of the fact he still had street clothes on and had obviously not been out to the barn since arriving home. He replied that 'someone else must have been out there' implying it was this Chris person, up to no good and probably up to stealing. I know this was a lie and that it was Nick himself who had left the lights on, likely all day, as he does quite frequently especially when it is sunny and the difference between being in the barn and going outside is not so stark. I am constantly reminding him to turn the lights off when he comes in - I am never able to pay the power bill in full each time it arrives in the mail. It is for this same reason that I go to bed most nights dressed in two pairs of socks, a T-shirt and a pyjama shirt and a sweatshirt, a pair of jeans, a knit hat and one of those indoor scarves wrapped three times around my neck to stay warm without turning on the electric heat in the bedroom.
I dawdled around for about half an hour or so after Nick went out because I knew he hadn't done the shovelling yet and I felt like being stubborn and letting him do it by himself. The forecast was for heavy rain overnight so after helping to bring the horses in and feed them I closed up the hens and worried about the leaky barn roof which I could do nothing about. By this time it was 8:30pm and as I walked by the tractor parked in the yard I noticed that there still wasn't any plastic or anything covering where the door had been broken and there wasn't anything protecting the dash or seat. I unleashed my frustration about this on Nick, emphasizing that I wanted and expected to recoup as much of my investment in the tractor as possible when the time came to sell it. Again Nick blamed the entire thing on the Chris guy and suggested that maybe it should be he who did something about the missing door. But he did go into the garage to get stuff to put up a makeshift covering although I haven't been out yet to see what it is. I do know that we got a lot of rain last night as I heard it start shortly after I went to bed and it continued beating on the window for several hours.
I just heard Nick get up and feed the dogs. I have been on my computer now for a couple of hours with my relatively early rise eaten up by having to make this entry twice. I am so happy I have tomorrow off as well.
Well I did have a good start to the day. I had written 3 or 4 long paragraphs here and then I it something when I reached to turn off my alarm and lost it all. Lesson learned - hit the save button from time to time you idiot.
I was earlier than usual for me as I got up to put the dogs out. The rooster was crowing and Nick's dog was barking to out. She barks short high pitched barks at 5 or 10 minute intervals, as if to only awaken one person and not the whole house. The rooster doesn't bother me at all although he does wake me up every morning. Sometimes it is at 4am and sometimes at 7am but he will crow half a dozen times or so and then stop. I always smile to myself when I hear him.
Most days I let Nick get up to look after the dogs mostly because it is his dog who is doing the barking and also because he doesn't put the dogs out one last time before he goes to bed which is often in the wee hours of the next day. I do this before I head upstairs for the night but this is more like 11pm.
Let me mention while I am on the subject that it was I who bought the dog for Nick, specifically for Nick's son. Nick kept telling me that he had promised his son when he was little that he would buy a dog for him, and it was a Doberman that he son wanted. Probably because Nick had owned Dobermans before and I am certain this had some influence on his choice. But his son's mother wouldn't permit a dog in her home and Nick didn't want to be tied down to a dog when he was single.
My Golden Retriever-Lab cross was at Nick's most of the time where I stayed when my daughters were away at university so I told Nick if he was ever going to get a dog for his son he should do it soon as he would soon be old enough to move out on his own. Nick didn't have the money to buy a puppy and because I was so foolishly in love at the time I offered to pay for it. Besides everyone adores puppies.
Nick found a puppy he liked on-line and she was flown down from Ontario - this is quite often done. He started to train her to be an attack dog but I insisted he stop this when my daughters expressed concern for their safety and that of their friends when staying at or visiting the farm. I myself didn't want to be responsible for having such an animal in my home. Being a Doberman she is still aggressive with strangers but if she is introduced slowly and in the right environment she will accept them as non-threatening and will ignore them. This we usually do outside of the house and with treats.
I must also mention that the same summer as we got the puppy I also purchased a second hand car for Nick to drive as the van he had was completely unsafe. He later got himself a new vehicle and I asked him several times what had happened to the car I had bought. I felt we could get at least half of what I paid for it but I never did really find out where it ended up. I am guessing he sold it or gave it to someone. This should have been a red flag but I chose to rationalize it out of the picture. Another lesson learned the hard way. You would think I would know by now that the old sayings about life never fail to be the truth.
I arrived home from work last evening around 6:30 or so to find Nick in the house dressed in street clothes, as opposed to barn clothes. It was also apparent that he had gotten a haircut sometime during the course of the day. I mentioned to him that I had noticed the barn lights were on, which happens quite a bit when he comes inside to get a coffee or use the bathroom and then ends up sitting down at his computer for an hour or so. But this time I found it odd because of the fact he still had street clothes on and had obviously not been out to the barn since arriving home. He replied that 'someone else must have been out there' implying it was this Chris person, up to no good and probably up to stealing. I know this was a lie and that it was Nick himself who had left the lights on, likely all day, as he does quite frequently especially when it is sunny and the difference between being in the barn and going outside is not so stark. I am constantly reminding him to turn the lights off when he comes in - I am never able to pay the power bill in full each time it arrives in the mail. It is for this same reason that I go to bed most nights dressed in two pairs of socks, a T-shirt and a pyjama shirt and a sweatshirt, a pair of jeans, a knit hat and one of those indoor scarves wrapped three times around my neck to stay warm without turning on the electric heat in the bedroom.
I dawdled around for about half an hour or so after Nick went out because I knew he hadn't done the shovelling yet and I felt like being stubborn and letting him do it by himself. The forecast was for heavy rain overnight so after helping to bring the horses in and feed them I closed up the hens and worried about the leaky barn roof which I could do nothing about. By this time it was 8:30pm and as I walked by the tractor parked in the yard I noticed that there still wasn't any plastic or anything covering where the door had been broken and there wasn't anything protecting the dash or seat. I unleashed my frustration about this on Nick, emphasizing that I wanted and expected to recoup as much of my investment in the tractor as possible when the time came to sell it. Again Nick blamed the entire thing on the Chris guy and suggested that maybe it should be he who did something about the missing door. But he did go into the garage to get stuff to put up a makeshift covering although I haven't been out yet to see what it is. I do know that we got a lot of rain last night as I heard it start shortly after I went to bed and it continued beating on the window for several hours.
I just heard Nick get up and feed the dogs. I have been on my computer now for a couple of hours with my relatively early rise eaten up by having to make this entry twice. I am so happy I have tomorrow off as well.
Saturday, 25 February 2017
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Feb.25, 2017
I must try and make entries more often. Most days when I get home from work I am too weary to do anything but get a few things ready for the next morning and then climb into bed. I don't get up early anymore - 7am gives me time to get ready for work and still make a stop to pick up oats for the horses and feed for the steers and hens enroute. It is a 45 minute commute each way and I don't get home until 9:20 or so. Thank goodness we close the store at 8pm and not any later.
I am usually in a pretty good mood as I drive home, but as soon as I pull into the yard any happy feelings I may have completely disappear. And when I step into the house, my day is completely ruined. There is always a mess everywhere, stuff laying around and footprints on the floors because Nick is too lazy to take his boots off when he comes inside. It doesn't matter what I tidy or clean the day before, it is all undone within about 24 hours.
Enough whining about stuff that goes on and on. The day before yesterday when I was off I noticed some scraps of paper stuck in the mud by the garage where we put the garbage. Actually, to be truthful, where I put the garbage. I don't think Nick has ever put the kitchen or barn garbage in a black garbage bag and set it by the corner of the garage. I had walked by these three scraps of paper earlier that day on my way to the barn so on my way back in I picked them up. My plan was just to cram them into one of the bags that was there, but I couldn't help but recognize one of the pieces as part of a bank statement. I knew I didn't tear mine up and put them anywhere someone might get an account number and a name, so I knew it had to belong to Nick. It said 'Home Equity Line of Credit' with the mortgaged property as our farm. The date was January 4th, 2017. I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Well, I knew what it must be and what it must mean, and for a few minutes I was incredulous that Nick would have the nerve to do such a thing without my permission, but then I realized that there was no reason for me to be surprised by the degree of his deception and denial. Each time I was sure we were as dysfunctional as we could get, down another notch we would go.
I suppose the bank thinks Nick owns half of the farm, which of course, is not true. Every penny of the down-payment was mine, as is more than half of the equity. We started out by agreeing to each put $1500 into a joint chequing account each month, from which the $800 tractor payment would come and the rest was to go on the mortgage. The mortgage payment was around $1000 but we were planning to pay it down as quickly as we could. Oh boy, those were the days! As things started to fall apart, I did check a statement every few months to make sure that the mortgage was being paid off, but for the past two years or so I have been giving Nick a cheque for $1000 every month, which means I am paying the $1000 mortgage payment and he is covering the $800 tractor payment, which translates into my paying 20% more than he is.
I am really steamed about the fact he was approved for this without my permission and I intend to call the bank my next weekday back at work. I plan to ask to speak to whoever it was who set it up - I have dealt with this branch for about 23 years and I know most of the staff by name. I could wager a guess it was Danny who is involved, and I am also going to ask him if he checked the balance of Nick's credit card. When I finally asked Nick a few months ago how much he owed, he told me his unpaid balance was $27,000.00. Then I noticed he was still buying stuff with his visa and when I asked him how he was doing this he told me he had had the credit limited raised. So obviously he maxed that out and still has not stopped buying his expensive protein powder and amino acid powders - he takes several different kinds as well as creatine. Like I mentioned before he gets a parcel in the mail at least once a week and sometimes 2 and 3 times in the same week.
Besides the fact that I need to know exactly what this line of credit on the farm means to me as far as the extent to which I can be held legally responsible, this out-of-control spending of his means that it is me who has to now pay for all the feed for the animals as well as everything else. I have noticed he has started doing local errands on my days off now and the past two times has asked if he could take my car because his has a flat tire - and so he uses my gas. And when the snow needed clearing after the snowstorms a couple of weeks back Nick announced he was out of diesel fuel for the tractor as well as a supply of gas for the generator. It cost me nearly $100 to fill the four containers we like to keep topped up in case of emergencies, two with diesel and two with gas. Descriptions of the signs and symptoms and the type of behaviour typical of morbid jealousy include an addiction of some kind - and I am now certain that Nick is addicted either to on-line shopping or all the performance and physique enhancing supplements he takes or perhaps to both.
I must try and make entries more often. Most days when I get home from work I am too weary to do anything but get a few things ready for the next morning and then climb into bed. I don't get up early anymore - 7am gives me time to get ready for work and still make a stop to pick up oats for the horses and feed for the steers and hens enroute. It is a 45 minute commute each way and I don't get home until 9:20 or so. Thank goodness we close the store at 8pm and not any later.
I am usually in a pretty good mood as I drive home, but as soon as I pull into the yard any happy feelings I may have completely disappear. And when I step into the house, my day is completely ruined. There is always a mess everywhere, stuff laying around and footprints on the floors because Nick is too lazy to take his boots off when he comes inside. It doesn't matter what I tidy or clean the day before, it is all undone within about 24 hours.
Enough whining about stuff that goes on and on. The day before yesterday when I was off I noticed some scraps of paper stuck in the mud by the garage where we put the garbage. Actually, to be truthful, where I put the garbage. I don't think Nick has ever put the kitchen or barn garbage in a black garbage bag and set it by the corner of the garage. I had walked by these three scraps of paper earlier that day on my way to the barn so on my way back in I picked them up. My plan was just to cram them into one of the bags that was there, but I couldn't help but recognize one of the pieces as part of a bank statement. I knew I didn't tear mine up and put them anywhere someone might get an account number and a name, so I knew it had to belong to Nick. It said 'Home Equity Line of Credit' with the mortgaged property as our farm. The date was January 4th, 2017. I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Well, I knew what it must be and what it must mean, and for a few minutes I was incredulous that Nick would have the nerve to do such a thing without my permission, but then I realized that there was no reason for me to be surprised by the degree of his deception and denial. Each time I was sure we were as dysfunctional as we could get, down another notch we would go.
I suppose the bank thinks Nick owns half of the farm, which of course, is not true. Every penny of the down-payment was mine, as is more than half of the equity. We started out by agreeing to each put $1500 into a joint chequing account each month, from which the $800 tractor payment would come and the rest was to go on the mortgage. The mortgage payment was around $1000 but we were planning to pay it down as quickly as we could. Oh boy, those were the days! As things started to fall apart, I did check a statement every few months to make sure that the mortgage was being paid off, but for the past two years or so I have been giving Nick a cheque for $1000 every month, which means I am paying the $1000 mortgage payment and he is covering the $800 tractor payment, which translates into my paying 20% more than he is.
I am really steamed about the fact he was approved for this without my permission and I intend to call the bank my next weekday back at work. I plan to ask to speak to whoever it was who set it up - I have dealt with this branch for about 23 years and I know most of the staff by name. I could wager a guess it was Danny who is involved, and I am also going to ask him if he checked the balance of Nick's credit card. When I finally asked Nick a few months ago how much he owed, he told me his unpaid balance was $27,000.00. Then I noticed he was still buying stuff with his visa and when I asked him how he was doing this he told me he had had the credit limited raised. So obviously he maxed that out and still has not stopped buying his expensive protein powder and amino acid powders - he takes several different kinds as well as creatine. Like I mentioned before he gets a parcel in the mail at least once a week and sometimes 2 and 3 times in the same week.
Besides the fact that I need to know exactly what this line of credit on the farm means to me as far as the extent to which I can be held legally responsible, this out-of-control spending of his means that it is me who has to now pay for all the feed for the animals as well as everything else. I have noticed he has started doing local errands on my days off now and the past two times has asked if he could take my car because his has a flat tire - and so he uses my gas. And when the snow needed clearing after the snowstorms a couple of weeks back Nick announced he was out of diesel fuel for the tractor as well as a supply of gas for the generator. It cost me nearly $100 to fill the four containers we like to keep topped up in case of emergencies, two with diesel and two with gas. Descriptions of the signs and symptoms and the type of behaviour typical of morbid jealousy include an addiction of some kind - and I am now certain that Nick is addicted either to on-line shopping or all the performance and physique enhancing supplements he takes or perhaps to both.
Monday, 20 February 2017
Monday, February 20, 2017
Feb. 20/2017
I am upstairs in my bedroom writing this at 4pm, which is an odd time for me. I usually get around to this just before I switch the lights off and scurry off to dreamland. But Nick's daughter has a photographer downstairs taking pictures of her and the cat we have been looking after for her. A lump was discovered on the cat's belly, which was biopsied, and which came back malignant. The vet feels the cancer has already metastasized and so the poor cat is being treated as if it is already dead. Thus the photographer - to take pictures of the daughter with her cat before there is no cat left.
My daughter had texted me at work yesterday and asked me if I was off today. It is a provincial holiday today, known as Heritage day here, so she had the day off as well. Since I was off and had no particular plans for today she drove out last evening and spent the night. She left early afternoon and gave me a lesson in makeup application that I had asked for the next time the opportunity presented itself. I had reminded her yesterday to throw some basic makeup in her overnight bag.
Nick had told me last night when I got home from work that we were having the photo shoot today, so my daughter vacuumed last night and I tidied up a bit. I left most of the cleaning for this afternoon, and I was just on my way to the kitchen sink to rinse the mop out before putting it away when the young lady who was going to take the pictures arrived. So my house is presentably clean and tidy and Nick and I will go out closer to suppertime to do the second lot of barn chores for the day. I helped him this morning while my daughter walked the dogs and spent some time on her phone and tablet answering emails and communicating with her boyfriend who was back to work today in England after spending just over two weeks here with her. He got a terrific introduction to our Canadian winter, at its finest - with all the snow we had last week - plus his first live hockey game, his first afternoon of tobogganing with the traditional hot chocolate finale and a mere two tumbles on our beautiful outdoor skating oval where he tried ice skating for the first time one evening under the lights. They also spent a romantic night in a seaside cottage complete with a fireplace, which is of course, the epitome of coziness in a maritime province in February.
My daughter left just as Nick's daughter pulled into the driveway, and I power-cleaned the rest of the house before grabbing a bite to eat and then I escaped upstairs.
Before I came up to my bedroom, I stuck my head into the bedroom downstairs where we have the desktop computer to ask Nick to check the fire as the house was starting to feel chilly. He had been burning wood off and on for the past few days since his son-in-law was out two days ago and split some of the wood in the basement and had started a fire on Saturday when he was here.
As often happens when I interrupt Nick on the computer without knocking first, he quickly clicked away from the page he had been looking at onto some news page. A few weeks ago - well actually a few months go now, it was sometime in November - I walked into the room one evening and saw him on the match.com dating website before he could click away from it. A few times after that I came back downstairs after I had 'gone to bed' to find him on that site again and once I stood there and watched as he communicated with someone 'live'. He would sit and wait for her to type something, read it and chuckle or smile and then type a response. I watched this exchange for several minutes before going back upstairs. Then I walked into the room when he was on the dating site and stood there quietly to see what he would do when I coughed or spoke and he realized I must have seen what he was doing. He quickly turned around and spread both arms as nonchalantly as he could to block as much of the screen from my view as possible. He somehow managed to click off the site at the same time. I said nothing and pretended not to notice but I brought it up the next day or the day after, telling him that I saw him on a dating site. His response was that he was communicating with a woman merely as a messenger for someone else who was married and afraid of being found out. My reply was that I wasn't born yesterday and that I knew what I saw and that there is only one reason why a person goes to a dating website. The next day when Nick was on the computer, he had the door closed.
I told him that night or the night after that I wouldn't be having marital relations with him if he was seeing someone else, which was obvious to me that he was or that he intended to. He went to sleep in his daughter's room and has ever since. I love having the king size bed to myself and I love not being woken up multiple times every night by snoring. Did I mention that his dog also snores so loudly I can hear her upstairs? My dog is not completely innocent, he does snore from time to time, but far less often.
I know I did say that Nick managed to charm himself back into the bedroom one weekend when things were going well between us and he caught me in a brief moment of hopefulness. But on Monday morning he went outside and I was in the kitchen about to follow him out when I noticed that his cell phone was sitting face down on the counter. I found this odd because it is always face up so I picked up the phone and swiped to unlock it. It is the same phone as I have so I know exactly what to do. Immediately I saw the most recent email that read 'my heart is with you'. I was standing right beside the sink which is directly under the window and the next thing I knew Nick was standing outside tapping on the glass and pointing to his phone in my hand. He came inside the house and asked me 'what the heck were you doing?' And he didn't use the word heck. I told him what I saw and he just snatched the phone away from me and started to make some story that I can't even remember enough of to repeat it here. I was so flabbergasted and so completely blown away after the reconciliation I thought we had decided to work on just the day before that I just stood there. I am sure my mouth was open. It was almost like I had that little person of reason and reality on my shoulder to tell me to pick up the phone so the decision I needed to make about our relationship would become clear again.
When I came in from the barn later that day and saw Nick's phone on the counter, I picked it up but this time it had been locked and a password was required to get any further. Now he had his phone locked and closed the door to the bedroom when he was on the computer. To me these are clear affirmations of guilt.
He has been studying the Ukrainian alphabet and has a book or two on learning the language. He also has one of those little travel books you can get to help with common phrases and things that are handy to know about places and customs in the Ukraine. He texted me twice while I was at work telling me that a fellow he knows wants him to go overseas to inspect a vessel for a client to see what kind of shape it is in and what it might be worth before the client makes an offer to buy it, or passes it by. I just replied that he can't leave me alone with all these horses in the wintertime. I can do morning chores before I go to work but I don't get home in time to do evening chores. If the horses are left out that late they will undoubtedly get out of their pastures. The fences we have can't be trusted to keep the horses on the property, they haven't been inspected for 4 years and any repairs have only been to spots through which the horses have already escaped.
I don't believe for a minute that there is any vessel to inspect, or if there actually is one, I am certain there will be a side trip planned to visit someone he has met on the internet. As if we have the money to do any of this. I am still struggling to finish paying for the hay - I managed to squeeze $400 out of my last two pays, but the cash is presently sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to be delivered. I have paid all but $200 on the power bill but there will be another one arriving soon. My daughter's car is sitting in the yard of a friend of Nick's waiting for a new transmission, which I have purchased but have not had the money to have installed. There are three paydays in March so I am going to devote one to getting her car on the road again and to catching up on some bills. My Visa and my line of credit also need some attention.
Well the photographer has left and as I sit upstairs I can see two of the three pastures the horses are in. I guess it was the frantic running around that caught my eye, but all of them are in one pasture and that means that a fence is down again somewhere. The spot they got through the other day was fixed I was told, but I am going to have to get my boots on and go out to help. It is nearly 6pm so it is time to do evening chores anyway.
I am upstairs in my bedroom writing this at 4pm, which is an odd time for me. I usually get around to this just before I switch the lights off and scurry off to dreamland. But Nick's daughter has a photographer downstairs taking pictures of her and the cat we have been looking after for her. A lump was discovered on the cat's belly, which was biopsied, and which came back malignant. The vet feels the cancer has already metastasized and so the poor cat is being treated as if it is already dead. Thus the photographer - to take pictures of the daughter with her cat before there is no cat left.
My daughter had texted me at work yesterday and asked me if I was off today. It is a provincial holiday today, known as Heritage day here, so she had the day off as well. Since I was off and had no particular plans for today she drove out last evening and spent the night. She left early afternoon and gave me a lesson in makeup application that I had asked for the next time the opportunity presented itself. I had reminded her yesterday to throw some basic makeup in her overnight bag.
Nick had told me last night when I got home from work that we were having the photo shoot today, so my daughter vacuumed last night and I tidied up a bit. I left most of the cleaning for this afternoon, and I was just on my way to the kitchen sink to rinse the mop out before putting it away when the young lady who was going to take the pictures arrived. So my house is presentably clean and tidy and Nick and I will go out closer to suppertime to do the second lot of barn chores for the day. I helped him this morning while my daughter walked the dogs and spent some time on her phone and tablet answering emails and communicating with her boyfriend who was back to work today in England after spending just over two weeks here with her. He got a terrific introduction to our Canadian winter, at its finest - with all the snow we had last week - plus his first live hockey game, his first afternoon of tobogganing with the traditional hot chocolate finale and a mere two tumbles on our beautiful outdoor skating oval where he tried ice skating for the first time one evening under the lights. They also spent a romantic night in a seaside cottage complete with a fireplace, which is of course, the epitome of coziness in a maritime province in February.
My daughter left just as Nick's daughter pulled into the driveway, and I power-cleaned the rest of the house before grabbing a bite to eat and then I escaped upstairs.
Before I came up to my bedroom, I stuck my head into the bedroom downstairs where we have the desktop computer to ask Nick to check the fire as the house was starting to feel chilly. He had been burning wood off and on for the past few days since his son-in-law was out two days ago and split some of the wood in the basement and had started a fire on Saturday when he was here.
As often happens when I interrupt Nick on the computer without knocking first, he quickly clicked away from the page he had been looking at onto some news page. A few weeks ago - well actually a few months go now, it was sometime in November - I walked into the room one evening and saw him on the match.com dating website before he could click away from it. A few times after that I came back downstairs after I had 'gone to bed' to find him on that site again and once I stood there and watched as he communicated with someone 'live'. He would sit and wait for her to type something, read it and chuckle or smile and then type a response. I watched this exchange for several minutes before going back upstairs. Then I walked into the room when he was on the dating site and stood there quietly to see what he would do when I coughed or spoke and he realized I must have seen what he was doing. He quickly turned around and spread both arms as nonchalantly as he could to block as much of the screen from my view as possible. He somehow managed to click off the site at the same time. I said nothing and pretended not to notice but I brought it up the next day or the day after, telling him that I saw him on a dating site. His response was that he was communicating with a woman merely as a messenger for someone else who was married and afraid of being found out. My reply was that I wasn't born yesterday and that I knew what I saw and that there is only one reason why a person goes to a dating website. The next day when Nick was on the computer, he had the door closed.
I told him that night or the night after that I wouldn't be having marital relations with him if he was seeing someone else, which was obvious to me that he was or that he intended to. He went to sleep in his daughter's room and has ever since. I love having the king size bed to myself and I love not being woken up multiple times every night by snoring. Did I mention that his dog also snores so loudly I can hear her upstairs? My dog is not completely innocent, he does snore from time to time, but far less often.
I know I did say that Nick managed to charm himself back into the bedroom one weekend when things were going well between us and he caught me in a brief moment of hopefulness. But on Monday morning he went outside and I was in the kitchen about to follow him out when I noticed that his cell phone was sitting face down on the counter. I found this odd because it is always face up so I picked up the phone and swiped to unlock it. It is the same phone as I have so I know exactly what to do. Immediately I saw the most recent email that read 'my heart is with you'. I was standing right beside the sink which is directly under the window and the next thing I knew Nick was standing outside tapping on the glass and pointing to his phone in my hand. He came inside the house and asked me 'what the heck were you doing?' And he didn't use the word heck. I told him what I saw and he just snatched the phone away from me and started to make some story that I can't even remember enough of to repeat it here. I was so flabbergasted and so completely blown away after the reconciliation I thought we had decided to work on just the day before that I just stood there. I am sure my mouth was open. It was almost like I had that little person of reason and reality on my shoulder to tell me to pick up the phone so the decision I needed to make about our relationship would become clear again.
When I came in from the barn later that day and saw Nick's phone on the counter, I picked it up but this time it had been locked and a password was required to get any further. Now he had his phone locked and closed the door to the bedroom when he was on the computer. To me these are clear affirmations of guilt.
He has been studying the Ukrainian alphabet and has a book or two on learning the language. He also has one of those little travel books you can get to help with common phrases and things that are handy to know about places and customs in the Ukraine. He texted me twice while I was at work telling me that a fellow he knows wants him to go overseas to inspect a vessel for a client to see what kind of shape it is in and what it might be worth before the client makes an offer to buy it, or passes it by. I just replied that he can't leave me alone with all these horses in the wintertime. I can do morning chores before I go to work but I don't get home in time to do evening chores. If the horses are left out that late they will undoubtedly get out of their pastures. The fences we have can't be trusted to keep the horses on the property, they haven't been inspected for 4 years and any repairs have only been to spots through which the horses have already escaped.
I don't believe for a minute that there is any vessel to inspect, or if there actually is one, I am certain there will be a side trip planned to visit someone he has met on the internet. As if we have the money to do any of this. I am still struggling to finish paying for the hay - I managed to squeeze $400 out of my last two pays, but the cash is presently sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to be delivered. I have paid all but $200 on the power bill but there will be another one arriving soon. My daughter's car is sitting in the yard of a friend of Nick's waiting for a new transmission, which I have purchased but have not had the money to have installed. There are three paydays in March so I am going to devote one to getting her car on the road again and to catching up on some bills. My Visa and my line of credit also need some attention.
Well the photographer has left and as I sit upstairs I can see two of the three pastures the horses are in. I guess it was the frantic running around that caught my eye, but all of them are in one pasture and that means that a fence is down again somewhere. The spot they got through the other day was fixed I was told, but I am going to have to get my boots on and go out to help. It is nearly 6pm so it is time to do evening chores anyway.
Friday, 17 February 2017
Friday, February 17, 2017
Feb.17/2017
Today was rather uneventful, but in a good way. The snow that has accumulated over the past few days is still blowing around and drifting onto roads and such, making driving tricky. And if it is not my imagination, more snow continues to fall off and on.
Nick has his daughter who lives close to us visiting overnight tonight and she plans to stay tomorrow night as well. They were watching a movie when I arrived home from work around 9:15pm, and they have started to watch another movie now, around 11:00pm. Lots of animal roaring of some kind going on. I am upstairs in the master bedroom as I type this, all bundled up although I don't expect to be cold tonight as Nick has the oil furnace turned up for the benefit of his daughter. I am secretly hoping the oil we have runs out while she is here so maybe she will get a glimpse of what really goes on around here. I hope Nick sticks to his normal routine tomorrow and Sunday, for the same reason.
I did notice when I got home that the aerosol can of dry shampoo - that I bought for my dog for Christmas as a joke for my girls - was sitting on the kitchen counter in a prominent spot, moved from where I had put it under the sink in the main floor bathroom yesterday when I tidied up. It had been bouncing around the kitchen since I had taken the tree down, unable to find a permanent home. I picked it up and took it to the living room where I explained to Nick and his daughter after the first movie had finished that it had been purchased for a laugh because my girls had complained before the holidays that their dog needed a bath and I had given the lame excuse that I couldn't get him into the bathtub. I knew that later in the evening I was going to be asked by Nick to explain its arrival in our home anyway, as it was obvious to me by the way it had been moved from the bathroom and placed back in the kitchen that he hadn't noticed its presence in the house before today, and I wanted to cut off his interrogation at the pass before it had the chance to cause an argument in defence of an accusation of some wild conclusion Nick had swooped in on to proclaim as the truth.
He later managed to make up for my avoidance tactic, however, by coming upstairs and into the bedroom as I was folding some clean clothes he had dumped on the bed from the laundry basket I had left in the corner, and demanded to know 'how I had managed BYMYSELF' to maneuver the metal sliding doors on the double closet back onto their tracks. To which I replied that I had no idea they were off the tracks, and which I then proceeded to demonstrate how I had closed the three doors the way I wanted them because we both know how much I hate to look at the clothes in the closet with the doors open. Nick eyed me suspiciously as I completed my explanation but I chose to ignore his attempts at a visual engagement. Then he decided to simply leave the room without another word on the matter. Which suited me exceedingly well.
Today was rather uneventful, but in a good way. The snow that has accumulated over the past few days is still blowing around and drifting onto roads and such, making driving tricky. And if it is not my imagination, more snow continues to fall off and on.
Nick has his daughter who lives close to us visiting overnight tonight and she plans to stay tomorrow night as well. They were watching a movie when I arrived home from work around 9:15pm, and they have started to watch another movie now, around 11:00pm. Lots of animal roaring of some kind going on. I am upstairs in the master bedroom as I type this, all bundled up although I don't expect to be cold tonight as Nick has the oil furnace turned up for the benefit of his daughter. I am secretly hoping the oil we have runs out while she is here so maybe she will get a glimpse of what really goes on around here. I hope Nick sticks to his normal routine tomorrow and Sunday, for the same reason.
I did notice when I got home that the aerosol can of dry shampoo - that I bought for my dog for Christmas as a joke for my girls - was sitting on the kitchen counter in a prominent spot, moved from where I had put it under the sink in the main floor bathroom yesterday when I tidied up. It had been bouncing around the kitchen since I had taken the tree down, unable to find a permanent home. I picked it up and took it to the living room where I explained to Nick and his daughter after the first movie had finished that it had been purchased for a laugh because my girls had complained before the holidays that their dog needed a bath and I had given the lame excuse that I couldn't get him into the bathtub. I knew that later in the evening I was going to be asked by Nick to explain its arrival in our home anyway, as it was obvious to me by the way it had been moved from the bathroom and placed back in the kitchen that he hadn't noticed its presence in the house before today, and I wanted to cut off his interrogation at the pass before it had the chance to cause an argument in defence of an accusation of some wild conclusion Nick had swooped in on to proclaim as the truth.
He later managed to make up for my avoidance tactic, however, by coming upstairs and into the bedroom as I was folding some clean clothes he had dumped on the bed from the laundry basket I had left in the corner, and demanded to know 'how I had managed BYMYSELF' to maneuver the metal sliding doors on the double closet back onto their tracks. To which I replied that I had no idea they were off the tracks, and which I then proceeded to demonstrate how I had closed the three doors the way I wanted them because we both know how much I hate to look at the clothes in the closet with the doors open. Nick eyed me suspiciously as I completed my explanation but I chose to ignore his attempts at a visual engagement. Then he decided to simply leave the room without another word on the matter. Which suited me exceedingly well.
Thursday, 16 February 2017
Thursday, February 16, 2017
Feb. 16/2017
I had today off and we got more snow. We got a lot on Monday into Tuesday and a lot of stuff was closed all three days - Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. My youngest daughter who has her friend visiting from England for the week had all three days off as Dalhousie was shut down because of the storms. She works part-time and her regular day off is Friday.
Nick is downstairs banging things around and slamming whatever he can as usual. He seems to be more angry this week than he normally is. I guess it has been a trying week, a lot of things have gone wrong. Actually, mostly things that should have been looked after a long time ago and weren't, and now the consequences of that procrastination have reared their ugly heads.
The barn is filled with snow. And I mean inside. The new addition was never finished. Not even close. Nick didn't even re-seal the roof, when it became obvious by the amount of rain that dripped from the inside beams onto the horses and made quite good-sized puddles in their stalls, that a patch job would be required. Two summers have gone by now - the summer the new part was built and last summer. The tin of tar to seal the roof is even sitting up there. I guess it is too heavy to move up and down and I guess there is no harm in storing it up there.
Three of the stalls have snow coming in where there are spaces to the outside, where the new barn butts up against the old barn and also where the old barn is attached to the foaling stall and the chicken coop. These two spots were covered over with plexi-glass like stuff when we bought the place but it has since been broken. I know I nagged until we fixed it once about two years ago with some heavy plastic but the horses in those respective stalls pulled it down about a day after we put it up.
The fences are down in a couple of places. Well, actually about four that I know of. There are three spots in the stallion's pasture, one a clear break where he has gotten out every day since he first discovered he could. I even videoed him stepping over the fence and coming through the woods into the back yard by the house and making his way over past the barn where the mares are. Today he was pressed up against the barbed wire as far as he could bend it trying to reach Epona with his nose, one of our mares and the one who happens to be in heat at the moment. Mares are quite receptive to stallions when they are in heat and will seek them out almost as eagerly as the guys chase after the gals. I can't imagine what would have happened if we hadn't noticed he was on the lam as soon as he was out. Someone would have been tangled up in that barbed wire I am sure.
There are two more spots in the stallion's pasture on the same side as he already escapes that he can walk through if he finds them, the wood rails that are left standing are like toothpicks. There has been no maintenance done on our fences except to fix escape holes since we arrived here nearly four years ago.
The fourth spot where a fence is down happened sometime this evening after it got dark around 5pm or so. Nick was plowing the driveway and I was shovelling out the stalls, and when I went out behind the barn to empty the manure from the wheelbarrow, I noticed that the three paint horses were in with the five Dutch Warm Bloods. Normally they are in adjoining pastures. I could really see only two of the paint horses, the two that were ours, and I immediately began to worry where the third one was because she is does not belong to us, but to a fellow who boards her with us. I went around to the pasture where she should have been but she wasn't there and so I went back through the barn to the pasture where they all had ended up. I didn't want a fight to break out and someone ending up getting kicked or bitten. Horses can be extremely nasty to each other as newcomers are forced to find their spot in the 'pecking order'. A stallion will defend his right to keep his ladies but the real fury belongs to the lead mare.
I got lucky and as I opened the barn door to go out to look again for the boarder's paint, she was timidly standing almost next to me. I clucked at her and called her name, and gave her the motion with my arm and hand that looks like 'please, go ahead, after you' and she came right into the safety of the barn quickly enough that I was able to get the door closed before anyone else could follow her inside. She walked ahead of me, making sounds that a horse makes when they are apprehensive about something, but she continued on and was brave and smart enough to find her own stall, even though she had never entered the barn from that door before. There are three doors, the front, the back and the one she usually comes in - the side door.
I grabbed her grain and dumped it into her feed dish to show her how pleased I was, and then I dumped the grain for the other two into their dishes and went to see if I could get them inside as smoothly as I had gotten Sage to safety. As I slid open the back door, the black and white paint Zack was close by and I called his name as he looked towards me. Of course it was the open barn door at suppertime that got him moving in my direction, and I could see that the third paint was right behind him. He scooted in, but I had to cut off one of the other horses who also liked the look of the open door and my quick movement caused the final paint to hesitate for a second, watching me. I gave her the 'go ahead' motion and nodded my head, calming and quietly encouraging her to keep coming. I was very relieved and very proud of myself to have them all in their stalls, eating contentedly. I went back outside to see where they had gone through the fence and then I began bringing in the remaining five horses. They were all around at the side door, peering in through the chain link door at the paints having their supper. I walked around to them from the outside and stood at the break in the fence and called the big guy and the boss, Invictus. I had his grain in a dish in my hands and this is the routine to bring them in. He comes first and gets his grain in his feeder ahead of the others, who follow him inside and then make their way to their own stalls. The doors are closed and latched and their suppers are served. They also get as much water as they want and a huge pile of hay.
Nick came in from his plowing just after I had closed Invictus into his stall and we finished the rest of the evening routine together.
Another one of life's unpleasant surprises arrived Tuesday morning while Nick was clearing the driveway after the first storm, and digging my car out so I could get to work. As I climbed into the car, he pulled up beside me in the tractor and started yelling at me in a furious rage. I was so astonished at his behavior it took me a few seconds to comprehend what he was saying. The huge chains that were on the back tires of the tractor had caught the foot ladder on the left side, it was all bent up, and somehow part of the door, the rubber trim or something, had also gotten caught and the entire glass door panel on that side was shattered and the pieces were scattered about on the cab floor.
He had previously told me that the Chris person had taken the tractor over to his brother's property next door to use it and had to take the chains off of the tires to drive it on the asphalt. He claims that when then the chains were re-installed that the clip that was used to hook them together onto the tire was small and dinky. He complained that the chains on the tire was now way to loose, and was flopping around. And was the fault of this Chris guy, who Nicks says said that I had given him permission to use the tractor whenever he wanted. When I asked how Chris got the key to the tractor that Nick always kept in his pocket from the time he got dressed in the morning until he went to bed each night, he replied 'we don't want to get into how that happened'.
Tonight after we came inside Nick went upstairs to shave. He flew into a rage because he couldn't find the extra cartridges for his razor. Of course he starts saying that he has had it with that prick, etc., etc. Lots of foul language. I had heard him banging things around upstairs and I came up to see what he was doing. The garbage can in the bathroom was upside down on the floor and the toilet seat and been slammed off of its hinges. He claimed that he had put the cartridges in the same drawer in the vanity as his hairbrush, but I looked around for them after he had gone downstairs and I found them under the sink. I told him I had tidied that bathroom up a few weeks ago, which was true, and that I had probably just put them somewhere. I did remember taking them out of the cardboard package they were fastened into.
He is going to town tomorrow to take his daughter's cat to the vet to have the stitches out where she had surgery to have a piece of a lump removed for a biopsy. The diagnosis is cancer. The cat was rolling around on the bed behind the computer where Nick was sitting as he told me this and I was scratching her head. Nick noticed that the spot were the biopsy was was red and on closer inspection, a little too red for a healthy wound. We put some antibiotic ointment on it but Nick was very upset because his daughter would know he hadn't checked the incision every day like he said he would. And there was no way it will be much better tomorrow than it is tonight.
I had today off and we got more snow. We got a lot on Monday into Tuesday and a lot of stuff was closed all three days - Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. My youngest daughter who has her friend visiting from England for the week had all three days off as Dalhousie was shut down because of the storms. She works part-time and her regular day off is Friday.
Nick is downstairs banging things around and slamming whatever he can as usual. He seems to be more angry this week than he normally is. I guess it has been a trying week, a lot of things have gone wrong. Actually, mostly things that should have been looked after a long time ago and weren't, and now the consequences of that procrastination have reared their ugly heads.
The barn is filled with snow. And I mean inside. The new addition was never finished. Not even close. Nick didn't even re-seal the roof, when it became obvious by the amount of rain that dripped from the inside beams onto the horses and made quite good-sized puddles in their stalls, that a patch job would be required. Two summers have gone by now - the summer the new part was built and last summer. The tin of tar to seal the roof is even sitting up there. I guess it is too heavy to move up and down and I guess there is no harm in storing it up there.
Three of the stalls have snow coming in where there are spaces to the outside, where the new barn butts up against the old barn and also where the old barn is attached to the foaling stall and the chicken coop. These two spots were covered over with plexi-glass like stuff when we bought the place but it has since been broken. I know I nagged until we fixed it once about two years ago with some heavy plastic but the horses in those respective stalls pulled it down about a day after we put it up.
The fences are down in a couple of places. Well, actually about four that I know of. There are three spots in the stallion's pasture, one a clear break where he has gotten out every day since he first discovered he could. I even videoed him stepping over the fence and coming through the woods into the back yard by the house and making his way over past the barn where the mares are. Today he was pressed up against the barbed wire as far as he could bend it trying to reach Epona with his nose, one of our mares and the one who happens to be in heat at the moment. Mares are quite receptive to stallions when they are in heat and will seek them out almost as eagerly as the guys chase after the gals. I can't imagine what would have happened if we hadn't noticed he was on the lam as soon as he was out. Someone would have been tangled up in that barbed wire I am sure.
There are two more spots in the stallion's pasture on the same side as he already escapes that he can walk through if he finds them, the wood rails that are left standing are like toothpicks. There has been no maintenance done on our fences except to fix escape holes since we arrived here nearly four years ago.
The fourth spot where a fence is down happened sometime this evening after it got dark around 5pm or so. Nick was plowing the driveway and I was shovelling out the stalls, and when I went out behind the barn to empty the manure from the wheelbarrow, I noticed that the three paint horses were in with the five Dutch Warm Bloods. Normally they are in adjoining pastures. I could really see only two of the paint horses, the two that were ours, and I immediately began to worry where the third one was because she is does not belong to us, but to a fellow who boards her with us. I went around to the pasture where she should have been but she wasn't there and so I went back through the barn to the pasture where they all had ended up. I didn't want a fight to break out and someone ending up getting kicked or bitten. Horses can be extremely nasty to each other as newcomers are forced to find their spot in the 'pecking order'. A stallion will defend his right to keep his ladies but the real fury belongs to the lead mare.
I got lucky and as I opened the barn door to go out to look again for the boarder's paint, she was timidly standing almost next to me. I clucked at her and called her name, and gave her the motion with my arm and hand that looks like 'please, go ahead, after you' and she came right into the safety of the barn quickly enough that I was able to get the door closed before anyone else could follow her inside. She walked ahead of me, making sounds that a horse makes when they are apprehensive about something, but she continued on and was brave and smart enough to find her own stall, even though she had never entered the barn from that door before. There are three doors, the front, the back and the one she usually comes in - the side door.
I grabbed her grain and dumped it into her feed dish to show her how pleased I was, and then I dumped the grain for the other two into their dishes and went to see if I could get them inside as smoothly as I had gotten Sage to safety. As I slid open the back door, the black and white paint Zack was close by and I called his name as he looked towards me. Of course it was the open barn door at suppertime that got him moving in my direction, and I could see that the third paint was right behind him. He scooted in, but I had to cut off one of the other horses who also liked the look of the open door and my quick movement caused the final paint to hesitate for a second, watching me. I gave her the 'go ahead' motion and nodded my head, calming and quietly encouraging her to keep coming. I was very relieved and very proud of myself to have them all in their stalls, eating contentedly. I went back outside to see where they had gone through the fence and then I began bringing in the remaining five horses. They were all around at the side door, peering in through the chain link door at the paints having their supper. I walked around to them from the outside and stood at the break in the fence and called the big guy and the boss, Invictus. I had his grain in a dish in my hands and this is the routine to bring them in. He comes first and gets his grain in his feeder ahead of the others, who follow him inside and then make their way to their own stalls. The doors are closed and latched and their suppers are served. They also get as much water as they want and a huge pile of hay.
Nick came in from his plowing just after I had closed Invictus into his stall and we finished the rest of the evening routine together.
Another one of life's unpleasant surprises arrived Tuesday morning while Nick was clearing the driveway after the first storm, and digging my car out so I could get to work. As I climbed into the car, he pulled up beside me in the tractor and started yelling at me in a furious rage. I was so astonished at his behavior it took me a few seconds to comprehend what he was saying. The huge chains that were on the back tires of the tractor had caught the foot ladder on the left side, it was all bent up, and somehow part of the door, the rubber trim or something, had also gotten caught and the entire glass door panel on that side was shattered and the pieces were scattered about on the cab floor.
He had previously told me that the Chris person had taken the tractor over to his brother's property next door to use it and had to take the chains off of the tires to drive it on the asphalt. He claims that when then the chains were re-installed that the clip that was used to hook them together onto the tire was small and dinky. He complained that the chains on the tire was now way to loose, and was flopping around. And was the fault of this Chris guy, who Nicks says said that I had given him permission to use the tractor whenever he wanted. When I asked how Chris got the key to the tractor that Nick always kept in his pocket from the time he got dressed in the morning until he went to bed each night, he replied 'we don't want to get into how that happened'.
Tonight after we came inside Nick went upstairs to shave. He flew into a rage because he couldn't find the extra cartridges for his razor. Of course he starts saying that he has had it with that prick, etc., etc. Lots of foul language. I had heard him banging things around upstairs and I came up to see what he was doing. The garbage can in the bathroom was upside down on the floor and the toilet seat and been slammed off of its hinges. He claimed that he had put the cartridges in the same drawer in the vanity as his hairbrush, but I looked around for them after he had gone downstairs and I found them under the sink. I told him I had tidied that bathroom up a few weeks ago, which was true, and that I had probably just put them somewhere. I did remember taking them out of the cardboard package they were fastened into.
He is going to town tomorrow to take his daughter's cat to the vet to have the stitches out where she had surgery to have a piece of a lump removed for a biopsy. The diagnosis is cancer. The cat was rolling around on the bed behind the computer where Nick was sitting as he told me this and I was scratching her head. Nick noticed that the spot were the biopsy was was red and on closer inspection, a little too red for a healthy wound. We put some antibiotic ointment on it but Nick was very upset because his daughter would know he hadn't checked the incision every day like he said he would. And there was no way it will be much better tomorrow than it is tonight.
Sunday, 12 February 2017
Sunday, Feb.12/2017
Feb.12/2017
The evening of the second day of my three day weekend that comes along in my work schedule every 28 days. I spent a good portion of the day outside taking pictures and videos, and topping up the chicken and duck and wild bird feeders ahead of a snow storm forecasted to begin around midnight tonight and last approximately 24 hours. Bringing lots of snow as well as high winds. I am happy to be off tomorrow and I am looking forward to being able to 'hunker down'. As long as the oil doesn't run out. I'm not sure how much is left and we don't have the money to buy any more. Nick brought a bunch of wood into the basement this afternoon but it needs to be split and it was all covered in snow which I expect will melt to make the wood wet. He worked out with weights after supper instead of doing anything with the wood. It is quiet downstairs at the moment so I am assuming Nick is on the computer.
While I was at work on Friday Nick sent a nasty text to me about having arrived at the event horizon and as such 'being done' with the Chris person stealing from him or receiving from me what he has estimated to be around sixty thousand dollars. He claims thirty-eight thousand of that to be tools, supplements, vitamins, wood, hay, etc.
Nick and I also had arguments yesterday and today about the fact that we will be running out of hay in about two months' time because the supply we had purchased and stored to last until the new hay is ready early this summer has been dwindling as a result of theft. I don't feel he is giving the calves enough to eat and he says that there is no way we can give them anymore. He says we can't get any more hay from anyone . no one in the area has any extra for sale. We haven't finished paying for what we did get. I told him I wasn't paying for hay this year as I had the past three years and he kept telling me 'he had it covered'. Well as it turned out, having it covered meant that the fellow we got the hay from agreed to let us make payments on the hay instead of us paying for it all at once when we received it. Which still meant I have had to pay for it - well, most of it. Nick says he paid a thousand towards the hay, and I have paid two thousand towards it. When I ask him how much more we owe he always says he isn't sure exactly but that the guy we got it from is keeping track. Past years it has cost thirty-five hundred so by my estimate we should be nearly paid up but stay tuned to see what the final answer is.
I bought some paint at the hardware store today so I can start fixing this place up room by room to put it on the market so I can get back the money I put in as the down payment, and I can move past this disaster. It was supposed to be so much more.
The evening of the second day of my three day weekend that comes along in my work schedule every 28 days. I spent a good portion of the day outside taking pictures and videos, and topping up the chicken and duck and wild bird feeders ahead of a snow storm forecasted to begin around midnight tonight and last approximately 24 hours. Bringing lots of snow as well as high winds. I am happy to be off tomorrow and I am looking forward to being able to 'hunker down'. As long as the oil doesn't run out. I'm not sure how much is left and we don't have the money to buy any more. Nick brought a bunch of wood into the basement this afternoon but it needs to be split and it was all covered in snow which I expect will melt to make the wood wet. He worked out with weights after supper instead of doing anything with the wood. It is quiet downstairs at the moment so I am assuming Nick is on the computer.
While I was at work on Friday Nick sent a nasty text to me about having arrived at the event horizon and as such 'being done' with the Chris person stealing from him or receiving from me what he has estimated to be around sixty thousand dollars. He claims thirty-eight thousand of that to be tools, supplements, vitamins, wood, hay, etc.
Nick and I also had arguments yesterday and today about the fact that we will be running out of hay in about two months' time because the supply we had purchased and stored to last until the new hay is ready early this summer has been dwindling as a result of theft. I don't feel he is giving the calves enough to eat and he says that there is no way we can give them anymore. He says we can't get any more hay from anyone . no one in the area has any extra for sale. We haven't finished paying for what we did get. I told him I wasn't paying for hay this year as I had the past three years and he kept telling me 'he had it covered'. Well as it turned out, having it covered meant that the fellow we got the hay from agreed to let us make payments on the hay instead of us paying for it all at once when we received it. Which still meant I have had to pay for it - well, most of it. Nick says he paid a thousand towards the hay, and I have paid two thousand towards it. When I ask him how much more we owe he always says he isn't sure exactly but that the guy we got it from is keeping track. Past years it has cost thirty-five hundred so by my estimate we should be nearly paid up but stay tuned to see what the final answer is.
I bought some paint at the hardware store today so I can start fixing this place up room by room to put it on the market so I can get back the money I put in as the down payment, and I can move past this disaster. It was supposed to be so much more.
Thursday, 9 February 2017
Thursday, Feb.9/2017
Feb.9/2017
Well, good morning! And that is sarcastic by the way. I woke up early (for me). Actually I always wake up around 5:30 am which has been my lifelong time to start my day, but for the past couple of years I have not gotten out of bed until much later. This morning I decided to put some time in writing and went downstairs to heat my bean bag to place around my neck. I find it does help to relieve the tension which translates to pain and is severely affecting my quality of life. I have many sources of tension at present.
But back to the immediate source. Nick heard me up as I put the dogs out while I waited for the microwave to do its thing. I was just settled comfortably back in bed with my housecoat on and pillow all around, quite pleased I was doing something other than sleeping, and he suddenly opens the door - so suddenly he startles me. Like I am doing something sneaky or private. He asks if I saw the Chris person after work last night. Of course I didn't, as I never have and never will, considering I have no idea who this person is he talks about all the time. So I felt compelled to explain that I was late getting home from work because it got busy the last hour or so and as I was off today, I stayed after close to tidy everything up and leave notes for the staff about current situations or items on order, as I always do when I am not in myself the next day. For some reason Nick doesn't or pretends he doesn't remember this and also doesn't know my schedule yet. Which has been the same four-week rotation for almost three years. I was also late because I delivered a loaf of bread and some acetaminophen to a customer I have become good friends with and I have offered to drop off things she may need on my way home at night because she has mobility challenges as a result of a fall. I have offered this to a lot of the elderly customers who live close to the store and who worry about getting around, especially in the winter.
Then Nick wails that he has no diesel fuel for the tractor and no gas for the generator. I suspect he has put the gas we keep for the generator in his car. Which is fine, I have been caught without enough gas to get to work when I have been too rushed to stop on the way or pressed for time unexpectedly because of bad weather. And I do like to keep our containers of fuel topped up as any organised individual would. He also says we are out of dog food, which I could have picked up last night on my way home as I practically drive right by the grocery store. So I gave him my debit card so he can go to the country gas station a few miles down the road and get the fuel as well as a small bag of food for the dogs. I will get a large economy-sized bag tomorrow night after work. I surrender my debit card all too often these days.
I am not usually a housecoat person or a slipper person. I don't have those flannel pajama pants to lounge around in. I am in the habit of getting dressed when I am up, almost always to go out to the barn. I don't own any slippers. I have a pair of deck shoes or loafers, that my daughter left in the closet after she bought herself a new pair one Christmas. They don't have that stupid fuzzy look that most slippers have. I will often wear two pairs of socks rather than resort to shoes in the house. I find sporting shoes in the house promotes unacceptable footwear behaviour from others. Slippers morph into sneakers which somehow change into boots from the barn.
I can write another chapter on how I interpret the behaviour of refusing to remove boots at the door and my philosophy around that, but my current point about housecoats and slippers is the lack of heat in our home. It is a large farmhouse which was once used as a bed and breakfast, with five bedrooms and two living rooms, one of which is at one end of the house and which has a ceiling the full two stories high. It is a lovely room highlighted by a floor to ceiling stone fireplace that takes up most of one wall. There is a second fireplace in the smaller living room which is off the hallway leading to the great room and which shares the same chimney.
There is a wood-burning furnace as well as an oil-burning one and with 60+ acres of uncleared land the plan from the beginning was to burn wood as our main source of heat. This is the fourth winter we have not had half enough wood to last until spring. Have I mentioned that before? I hate being cold and being cold in my house aggravates the tension and pain in my shoulders and neck. I can happily spend hours outside in the barn all bundled up but my hands and nose are cold below 22C (about 74F I think) and I get uncomfortable and irritable if the temperature drops below this. The first winter we had trouble getting wood that was seasoned/dry enough to burn well. Apparently we were lucky to get the wood we did get because there wasn't much around for sale. I forget if we left it too late or what happened but we didn't have enough and what we did have didn't heat as well as it should have. But at that point I was warm and fuzzy about Nick and the farm, and the wood thing was just an early hiccup then. We used the oil in the tank and ordered more and were unpleasantly surprised how quickly that ran out and how expensive an adequate supply of oil actually was. In the spans of days we were out of oil - we don't like automatic deliveries - we tried the electric heat and although the reality of the price of that could be avoided for several weeks, it was just as grim when the bill did arrive.
Well, good morning! And that is sarcastic by the way. I woke up early (for me). Actually I always wake up around 5:30 am which has been my lifelong time to start my day, but for the past couple of years I have not gotten out of bed until much later. This morning I decided to put some time in writing and went downstairs to heat my bean bag to place around my neck. I find it does help to relieve the tension which translates to pain and is severely affecting my quality of life. I have many sources of tension at present.
But back to the immediate source. Nick heard me up as I put the dogs out while I waited for the microwave to do its thing. I was just settled comfortably back in bed with my housecoat on and pillow all around, quite pleased I was doing something other than sleeping, and he suddenly opens the door - so suddenly he startles me. Like I am doing something sneaky or private. He asks if I saw the Chris person after work last night. Of course I didn't, as I never have and never will, considering I have no idea who this person is he talks about all the time. So I felt compelled to explain that I was late getting home from work because it got busy the last hour or so and as I was off today, I stayed after close to tidy everything up and leave notes for the staff about current situations or items on order, as I always do when I am not in myself the next day. For some reason Nick doesn't or pretends he doesn't remember this and also doesn't know my schedule yet. Which has been the same four-week rotation for almost three years. I was also late because I delivered a loaf of bread and some acetaminophen to a customer I have become good friends with and I have offered to drop off things she may need on my way home at night because she has mobility challenges as a result of a fall. I have offered this to a lot of the elderly customers who live close to the store and who worry about getting around, especially in the winter.
Then Nick wails that he has no diesel fuel for the tractor and no gas for the generator. I suspect he has put the gas we keep for the generator in his car. Which is fine, I have been caught without enough gas to get to work when I have been too rushed to stop on the way or pressed for time unexpectedly because of bad weather. And I do like to keep our containers of fuel topped up as any organised individual would. He also says we are out of dog food, which I could have picked up last night on my way home as I practically drive right by the grocery store. So I gave him my debit card so he can go to the country gas station a few miles down the road and get the fuel as well as a small bag of food for the dogs. I will get a large economy-sized bag tomorrow night after work. I surrender my debit card all too often these days.
I am not usually a housecoat person or a slipper person. I don't have those flannel pajama pants to lounge around in. I am in the habit of getting dressed when I am up, almost always to go out to the barn. I don't own any slippers. I have a pair of deck shoes or loafers, that my daughter left in the closet after she bought herself a new pair one Christmas. They don't have that stupid fuzzy look that most slippers have. I will often wear two pairs of socks rather than resort to shoes in the house. I find sporting shoes in the house promotes unacceptable footwear behaviour from others. Slippers morph into sneakers which somehow change into boots from the barn.
I can write another chapter on how I interpret the behaviour of refusing to remove boots at the door and my philosophy around that, but my current point about housecoats and slippers is the lack of heat in our home. It is a large farmhouse which was once used as a bed and breakfast, with five bedrooms and two living rooms, one of which is at one end of the house and which has a ceiling the full two stories high. It is a lovely room highlighted by a floor to ceiling stone fireplace that takes up most of one wall. There is a second fireplace in the smaller living room which is off the hallway leading to the great room and which shares the same chimney.
There is a wood-burning furnace as well as an oil-burning one and with 60+ acres of uncleared land the plan from the beginning was to burn wood as our main source of heat. This is the fourth winter we have not had half enough wood to last until spring. Have I mentioned that before? I hate being cold and being cold in my house aggravates the tension and pain in my shoulders and neck. I can happily spend hours outside in the barn all bundled up but my hands and nose are cold below 22C (about 74F I think) and I get uncomfortable and irritable if the temperature drops below this. The first winter we had trouble getting wood that was seasoned/dry enough to burn well. Apparently we were lucky to get the wood we did get because there wasn't much around for sale. I forget if we left it too late or what happened but we didn't have enough and what we did have didn't heat as well as it should have. But at that point I was warm and fuzzy about Nick and the farm, and the wood thing was just an early hiccup then. We used the oil in the tank and ordered more and were unpleasantly surprised how quickly that ran out and how expensive an adequate supply of oil actually was. In the spans of days we were out of oil - we don't like automatic deliveries - we tried the electric heat and although the reality of the price of that could be avoided for several weeks, it was just as grim when the bill did arrive.
Wednesday, Feb.8/2017
Feb.8/2017
Alas, since my last entry I have been from the lowest valley in the depths of despair and then lifted over the highest cloud to the tip of heaven. Only to be dropped from the peak of this emotional storm onto the cold, dark and empty land I now call home.
I have always loved Christmas and the spirit of giving that seems to engulf most of us during the month of December. I knew my daughters would be spending the holidays with their father and this was not the first time I had spent Christmas without them. As well, my work schedule was such that I wouldn't get home until after 6pm on Christmas eve and although I had Christmas day off I had to work holiday hours 12-5 the following day, Boxing day. So I would have very little time to actually spend with the girls and after helping with the chores in the barn when I got home Christmas eve and in the morning and evening Christmas day, it seemed almost pointless to drag them out to the farm for such little quality time.
I was not prepared for how sad and depressed I was that day although I rationalized up and down and inside and out how much more practical it was to have our own little Christmas in January when the girls had returned and I had a three day weekend to enjoy their company.
Nick is Jewish and does not celebrate the holidays at all, he doesn't participate in any Hanukkah stuff either. He will sometimes buy something small for his son and daughter who live nearby but he has never bought anything for me or for my daughters in the seven years we have been together. In spite of the fact that I am very generous towards his kids, and my mother even includes his children on her list each year although she has never met them nor ever received a thank you from either of them.
I actually thought I would enjoy Christmas more with some of the hustle and bustle and pressure relieved by postponing it. I had decided I probably wouldn't bother with a tree. However, though, as it turned out, my daughters were rather let down by the dismal non-attempt their father made at the holiday and I ended up picking up the pieces to put together a grand celebration for the three of us. It seemed all the more special because the day itself was a gift we gave to each other.
Then as January swept in the winter weather, the nights were cold and the days seemed so dark even though technically, I guess, they are starting to get longer. But more hours of daylight certainly did not add up to less days of grey.
Alas, since my last entry I have been from the lowest valley in the depths of despair and then lifted over the highest cloud to the tip of heaven. Only to be dropped from the peak of this emotional storm onto the cold, dark and empty land I now call home.
I have always loved Christmas and the spirit of giving that seems to engulf most of us during the month of December. I knew my daughters would be spending the holidays with their father and this was not the first time I had spent Christmas without them. As well, my work schedule was such that I wouldn't get home until after 6pm on Christmas eve and although I had Christmas day off I had to work holiday hours 12-5 the following day, Boxing day. So I would have very little time to actually spend with the girls and after helping with the chores in the barn when I got home Christmas eve and in the morning and evening Christmas day, it seemed almost pointless to drag them out to the farm for such little quality time.
I was not prepared for how sad and depressed I was that day although I rationalized up and down and inside and out how much more practical it was to have our own little Christmas in January when the girls had returned and I had a three day weekend to enjoy their company.
Nick is Jewish and does not celebrate the holidays at all, he doesn't participate in any Hanukkah stuff either. He will sometimes buy something small for his son and daughter who live nearby but he has never bought anything for me or for my daughters in the seven years we have been together. In spite of the fact that I am very generous towards his kids, and my mother even includes his children on her list each year although she has never met them nor ever received a thank you from either of them.
I actually thought I would enjoy Christmas more with some of the hustle and bustle and pressure relieved by postponing it. I had decided I probably wouldn't bother with a tree. However, though, as it turned out, my daughters were rather let down by the dismal non-attempt their father made at the holiday and I ended up picking up the pieces to put together a grand celebration for the three of us. It seemed all the more special because the day itself was a gift we gave to each other.
Then as January swept in the winter weather, the nights were cold and the days seemed so dark even though technically, I guess, they are starting to get longer. But more hours of daylight certainly did not add up to less days of grey.
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