Cats in their travel crate

We hit our destination a little early so we spent an hour hanging out in the parking lot of the Kwik Trip, a convenience store/truck stop 4.1 miles from the new home.  At 12:30 we drove to the property and met our realtor for the walk through.  When we got here we found that the seller, a world-class hoarder, was still here clearing his possessions from the house, the barn, the garage, and the yard.  Uh oh!  Needless to say, the closing took 3 hours while I waited in the car with the pets and the air conditioning (and the litter box), and Cory and the real estate team negotiated the deal to get the place cleaned up – and pronto.  “Pronto” turned out not to be a literal term as it has been 16 days, 4 dumpsters, countless trailers, trucks, and burn piles and he is still here.  Thankfully, he is almost finished.  I wonder when he will start forwarding his mail.

Despite that little bump in the road, we moved in that day (like we had any other choice).  This house is 99% perfect!  It has everything we wanted: room for horses, chickens, goats, and a garden, a barn, more garages than we hoped for (4!), enough rooms so that Cory and I can each have a home office and we can still have a separate guest room, central air conditioning, an alternative source of heat in case we lose power in the winter (my requirement) and a “tornado room”!  We didn’t realize that the tornado room was going to get used so quickly…

On our third night in the house, we went to dinner at the Kwik Trip (it has a small restaurant) at 9:30 p.m.  Not exactly where a holistic health coach prefers to eat but we were several days away from having appliances and we were hungry.  Fortunately, Kwik Trip (K.T.’s as we now call it) had the weather channel on and we learned that there were severe thunderstorms heading our way.  We decided that since part of the garage was cleaned out, we would park the Rav in the garage since “large hail” was in the forecast.  The 4.1 mile drive home was uneventful.  We were tired from a day of unpacking and appliance shopping.  Since there is no garage door opener on the detached garage, Cory got out to open the door so I could drive the car in.  When he opened the door to the Rav, it was like someone breathed hot air into the car.  It was nearly ten o’clock at night and the air was as hot and humid as breath.  HHHHHHHHH – yuck!  I drove into the garage and got out of the Rav.  In the amount of time it took for Cory to get out of the car and me to get the car into the garage (10 seconds?), the storm hit – and hard!

Half an Oak Tree Down

Before we got out of the garage a HUGE oak tree in the yard was knocked down and dirt and debris (did I mention that the previous owner was a hoarder and had piles of stuff everywhere) had become projectiles!  We decided we would sprint to the house (maybe 100 feet), grab the pets, and get to the tornado room.  Ready…1…2…3…GO!  Run, run, run, run, run, FACEPLANT!  Yes, just like in the movies, the couple running for their lives and the girl falls, the guy picks her up by the shirt, and they keep running without skipping a beat.  In my defense, I was wearing sandals, and running on a boardwalk that had some loose boards.

We spent the next three hours hunkered down in the basement with the pets, without power, or knowledge of which box our flashlights were still packed in.  We watched the sky light up and listened to the wind and thunder while sitting on trash bags full of clothes, blankets, and towels that hadn’t been unpacked yet.

Beyond that excitement, our life here has been relatively peaceful.  Wrens promptly moved into our bird house.  The hummingbirds readily accepted our feeder.  The dozen or so feral barn cats are not complaining about the food.  The dog kennel is up although Zerbit, our 9-year-old Brittany mix, is slightly offended by it.  And the deer have made a few appearances in our pasture.  We’re working hard to get the barn and pasture ready for the horses to arrive by the end of the month.

In the meantime we are enjoying fresh blackberries from the yard, breakfast on the deck and nights of reading books about apple trees, native birds, and hobby farming.