Life on the Vine

I was trying to figure out what to name this post and settled on "Three Exciting Deliveries".  It seemed fitting.  We've had the delivery of the house.  The delivery of our household items from Italy.  And the 'delivery' of another heeler.  I guess you can even say we've recently celebrated the delivery of yours truly!  It's been a busy couple months.  So now to the blog post. I recently celebrated my birthday, and I have firmly arrived in middle life.  At 45 I am exactly halfway through my 40s and halfway towards my 50s. The morning of my birthday Tom and I sat at our newly-acquired dining room table drinking coffee and sketching out plans for our garage and courtyard.  As we were talking, Tom asked me if I "felt" old, wondering if my increasing age was bothering me.  I told him that "I'm old" are words he will probably never hear me say.  At least not for another twenty or thirty years.  I might cop to "I'm getting older...

On May 16, with less than three weeks left in Italy, we FINALLY closed escrow on the house we'll be putting on the property we've owned for 12 years in southeastern Arizona.  Securing and closing on the financing was a yearlong process and it took FOUR notarized signings before we finally closed the deal.  YAY! Back in 2013, after it became painfully clear that we had no reasonable funding options to build the house we had worked with an architect to design, we began work with Cavco on doing a manufactured house.  We settled on a Santa Fe style home and we've fortunately been able to make some personalized changes to the floor plan.  It's something they've stopped doing because of the high production demand but fortunately our house made it in under the wire.     On our property, in the years before we moved to Italy, we laid some ground work.  We pulled in electric, put in the septic tank, dug the well, cut in the road, and had the construction site ...

I'm going to make this rather quick 'cause I've got to take our 'old man' Bear to the Vet this morning but I wanted to catch you up on a few things and also ask for some help. I just got back Tuesday from a 10 day vacation in Michigan.  It was a great trip.  I'll definitely be sharing some photos.  I got to spend some time with my sister-in-law Nancy and her mom Phyllis and then I linked up with my family.  I got to see my brother and his clan (wife, sister-in-law, nephew, and mother-in-law), my mom and her boyfriend, and my aunt and her husband.  Tom wasn't able to go with me because of work so I was flying solo the whole trip.  My mother's family is originally from Michigan but moved to Florida when my mom was a teenager.  This was only my second trip to Michigan and 20 years span between the two visits.  My maternal great grandfather was a lighthouse keeper in Michigan and we got to visit one of the lighthouses he worked in.  That was pr...

Today is officially the first day of Summer but it's been summer in southern Arizona for about four weeks.  Highs this week were around 106 and 108 degrees.  If I start complaining about the heat Tom reminds me that I have a car with a good A/C; I work in a comfortable office indoors, and I don't work outside.  So, honestly, the heat doesn't bother me too much, especially during the work week.  It is impacting my walks though that I usually like to take on my lunch break. It has really dried up here but this Spring I took more pictures of the flowering cactus and other interesting plants I came across.  I'm thinking ahead to the property and what I might want to plant so I find myself noticing plants and flowers more than usual.  I thought I'd finally take some time and download the photos from my iPhone and camera and share them on my blog. I hadn't seen or noticed a flowering prickly pear on any of my previous visits to Arizona.  The flowers re...