Merrillee Whren's Blog, page 10

Our Remodeling Project—The Beginning

Here is a photo of a portion of my kitchen. As kitchen’s go, it isn’t horrible, but we are getting ready to remodel it. I haven’t had the shorter cabinets in a kitchen since our house in Massachusetts, where we lived from 1991-1993. So we are tearing out the soffits in order to install the taller 42 inch cabinets. I’d like to go darker with the cabinet color, too, and replace the Formica counter tops with granite. Below is a photo of wood and granite samples. 

We plan to eliminate the desk and put in more cabinets and storage because we never use the desk. Originally, we weren’t going to do anything with the tile floors, but as we lived here I discovered that the tile never seems to stay clean. I miss the wood floors I had in Florida. So the only thing we’ve picked out is new wood flooring.

We were getting nervous about the flooring because a number of installers weren’t keen on wood for the Arizona climate. The extremely dry weather during most of the year and then the two months of monsoons don’t necessarily make for a positive experience with wood floors. But we’ve had others who say it isn’t a problem. Who is right? I guess only time will tell because we’ve already ordered the floor.

We’ve had a parade of cabinet, flooring and granite people through our house giving us prices and advice. My head is swimming, and we still haven’t made a decision on the anything except the floor. I’m not looking forward to the mess, but the end product hopefully will be worth the disruption.

What do you think? Do you have any experience with remodeling?

 

Happy 4th of July

Happy birthday, USA. I’m so thankful to be an American. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday. I hope you enjoy these songs. I’m glad I was born an American child. Click the link and skip the commercial.

American Child by Phil Vassar

God Bless the USA by Lee Greenwood

How will you celebrate the 4th of July?

Which Would You Rather Drive?

This is my final post on our move. Although in the weeks to come, I’ll be sharing our remodeling project in our new house. The ups and downs. The joys and sorrows.

The question in the title of the blog has to do with the photos below. Here is the Penske rental truck we used to move all the smaller household items from Florida to Arizona. The bigger items like our office furniture, dining, living room and bedroom furniture were moved my a moving company. When it came time to start the trip, we had decided how we were going to drive. We had the truck and my husband’s Porsche, the car in the second photo. Which one would you choose? Which one do you suppose I chose?

 I chose to drive the truck. Do you wonder why? The Porsche has a standard transmission, and although I can drive a car with a manual transmission, I am not used to doing so on a regular basis. I knew we were going to have to drive through some big cities, and I didn’t want to be driving a car with a manual transmission in lots of traffic. After all, we’d been living on an island with relatively light traffic. So I drove the Penske truck nearly 2,000 miles. Once I got used to the mirrors, I didn’t mind driving it. The biggest shock was filling up the gas tank. Since my husband could drive his car faster, he was usually ahead of me. We kept track with cell phones and met each evening with my husband telling me which exit to use to find the hotel where we would be staying. During previous moves before the popularity of cell phones, we wouldn’t have been able to do that. How did we live without those cell phones?

Which one would you chose? Why?

Anatomy of a Move—Part 3

In my last post I promised some photos of things I decided to save rather than discard in the purge we did in our recent move. I got rid of my wedding dress, but I saved the top of my parents’ wedding cake.

My parents got married near the end of WWII. My dad was in the army at the time. It’s something I can display and remember them by.

I also saved my husband’s great grandfather’s pocket watch.

The following photo is just one of several plants I saved. Some I discarded or gave away, but I brought about eight of the many plants I had mostly because I wanted to save the pots.

 What kind of things would you hate to discard?

Anatomy of a Move Part 2

I’ve lived in eleven states—South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Tennessee, Ohio, Georgia, Massachusetts, Texas, Illinois, Florida and Arizona. So I am no stranger to moving. One part of the moving process is to go through belongings and decide whether they are worth moving. In all the moves I have made as an adult, I have done this—some moves better than others. I hate to get to the other end and wonder why I had moved a certain item. This latest move required a whole new line of thinking. I had to decide whether to move an item to Arizona, store it in Florida or get rid of it. The getting rid of things sometimes required a difficult decision. I had to get rid of a lot of writing related items. I gave away a lot of books and tossed copies of old manuscripts that had accumulated over the years.

Here is a photo of something I threw away—a stack of cover flats from all my books for Love Inspired except the last one, Montana Match. It was delivered to me electronically. Now there will be no cover flats to throw away in the future.

I didn’t throw them all away. I kept a copy of each one. At least I think I did. Hopefully, they are in a box in Florida because I haven’t come across them here. The same goes for the bookmarks I saved from each of my Love Inspired books. Here are some of the cover flats I saved. If they never show up, at least I have a photo of them.

Among the other things that I threw away was my wedding dress. It had yellowed, and I wondered why I had been moving it from place to place all these years just to take up space in the closet. In the next post, I’ll share some of the things I kept.

If you have ever moved, what things do you decide to get rid of?

Anatomy of a Move Part 1

When we moved to Florida in 2001, I thought it would be the last time I moved. We had all the things we enjoyed—a beautiful house, golf, tennis and the beach nearby. But one never knows what life may bring. Here is what prompted our sudden move from Florida to Arizona.

Our original plan was to spend about 5 ½ months in Arizona near our granddaughters and the rest of the time in Florida.  I came out to Arizona in April 2012 when our second granddaughter was born and knew I didn’t want to be so far away for the whole year and knew with two kids that my daughter wouldn’t be making the trip to Florida as often. Going between Jacksonville and Tucson is an all-day affair even on an airplane. So I started looking for houses during the five weeks I was here last year and found one. I convinced my reluctant husband that we should do this. So we took the plunge. We came out here last November. My husband flew with his mother, and I drove my SUV loaded with household items and most importantly my computer. We enjoyed the winter in Arizona and especially enjoyed seeing our daughter’s family on a regular basis. My mother-in-law who was living with us because of poor health passed away right before Christmas, but she enjoyed so much the time she had with her great granddaughters. She taught the older one to play Crazy-Eights, and they had play tea parties. It was a delight to see them together. When the time neared for us to return to Florida, we decided that we should put our house up for sale and move into the Florida house that my mother-in-law had lived in for nearly 25 years. We figured we would have six months to a year or more before the house sold because nothing had been selling in our neighborhood. Houses had been for sale for a year or more. So in early April we told a realtor friend who lived down the street that when we got back to Florida at the beginning of May, we were going to fix up our house to put it on the market. She said she had clients coming that weekend and asked if she could show our house because she was sure they would like it. We were hesitant because the yard was neglected and the refrigerator was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor because we had pulled it out to turn off the line to the ice maker. Also all the door frames were marred because my mother-in-law had banged them up with her walker. But our realtor friend said she would explain. She showed the house. The people made an offer very near our asking price and wanted to take possession May 29. We didn’t want to pass up the chance to sell it, but there was one problem. My mother-in-law’s house had long-term renters in it. We couldn’t move into the house. So we took this as a sign that we should move to Arizona permanently. We intend to stay in Arizona as long as my daughter lives here. Her job could take her elsewhere, as she is the breadwinner in the family. Her husband is a stay-at-home dad. If they move, we will then decide what we want to do—stay in Arizona, go back to Florida or split time. We left behind a storage unit full of furniture for the house in Florida. That made packing twice as hard because we had to decided what to move to AZ and what to leave behind. We managed to leave behind a couple of boxes with things that were supposed to come out here, and we brought with us some stuff that was supposed to remain in Florida. But it was nothing too important for either place. We will come back to the island at some point, even if it is only for a vacation. We were glad to miss the tropical storm last week.

So here we are in Arizona along with the cacti and the mountains.

Part 2 in the “Anatomy of a Move” will be up sometime later in the week. Have you ever had to make a sudden move?

 

Happy Mother’s Day

People all over the United States are remembering their mothers today. My mother passed away nearly thirty years ago. Her death was sudden and unexpected, and I think about her often. She brought stories into my life as she read children’s novels to my brothers and me each night before we went to bed. One of my favorites was Old Bones the Wonder Horse. I used that book as the story my heroine read to the little girls in my book, Montana Match. I’m sorry that my mother never lived to see one of my published books.

I will also be remembering my mother-in-law this Mother’s Day. She passed away just before Christmas last year. During the years that I worked to get published, she was a great encourager. I would like to share a poem that my younger daughter wrote about her grandmother.

Whether you knew Mary as sister, mother, aunt, Gram or friend

It certainly didn’t matter as her love knew no end

There are so many stories and loving memories to be shared

It will never be a wonder of just how much she cared

From bridge, to poker, to rummy of any kind

There wasn’t a card game that Mary wouldn’t find

Always the life of the party

A laugh so fun and hearty

The love and light of her sons, granddaughters and family

She loved us all so lavishly

Mary will never be forgotten, just like her Irish roots

Now, reunited in heaven, May you Rest in Peace, Goots

Whether your mother is still with you or gone, what memories do you have about her? How will you celebrate Mother’s Day?

 

Surprise in the Desert

We have all heard the expression, “You can’t judge a book by it’s cover.” But we often do it anyway. If that weren’t true, the people who market books wouldn’t spend so much time trying to come up with just the right cover. God judges people by what is in their hearts. 

1 Samuel 16:7 says, “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.’”

When I was taking photos on my daily walk, I saw this cactus. It looked prickly and not very pretty. I didn’t take a picture of it until a few days later when I saw this.

Sometimes the most beautiful things can come from the least expected places. Where have you found something beautiful that you weren’t expecting?

 

Cacti on Parade

For the past few weeks I’ve been taking my camera on the walks I take. Each day I’ve been snapping a few photos of the cacti and flowers I see. I’ve tried to identify as many as possible. They are a testimony to God’s creation. He can take something prickly and often times not so pretty and create flowers of incredible beauty. Enjoy the show.

 

If you click on the photos, you can view a larger image and some of them have captions that give you the name of the cactus.

What do you think? Do these blooms deserve the title “Rose of the Desert?”

Desert Wild Flowers

Spring is a time for flowers, especially wildflowers. You can see them popping up along the roadside and fence lines. Here are some photos I have taken on my daily walks. I’m not sure what all of these flowers are, but I’m trying my best to identify them by using a couple of books on wildflowers. The process has been slow.

 The two photos below, I believe, are pictures of desert chicory.

 

These yellow flowers seem to be everywhere and may be paperdaisies.

 These may be wild heliotrope. 

 The pinkish flower below is probably Parry beardtongue.

  Here is a cholla—the prickly looking plant. I’ll have some photos in another blog when they bloom. The orange flowers are apricot mallow.

These are desert lupine.

This might be a desert primrose. It is amazing how many yellow flowers there are.

The pink flowers below are wild hyacinth.

These yellow flowers a found along the roadside are desert marigolds.

I have photos of numerous other wildflowers, but I wasn’t able to identify them. Have you ever tried to identify wildflowers? How successful were you?