Shawna's Thoughts-Living

I feel like I’ve been living my life in a holding pattern for weeks.  When we were working to get everything moved out of the house, I found myself thinking how nice it would be to finally be out and not have to deal with our “stuff”.

Then we moved in with my in-laws for a week. It was wonderful to be in a home with food, other necessities and love, but we had the truck and trailer to prepare, a vehicle to sell, possessions to ship and still had to close on the property. We were busy, busy, busy and I found myself thinking how nice it would be to finally be on the road and not dealing with the tedious details of relocating.

Finally the day came when it was time to hit the road. The days were long, but God protected us and we didn’t have any major issues, a true blessing, indeed. However, as the week wore on I found myself thinking how nice it would be to finally be in Alaska and off the road.

We’ve been in Alaska for 11 days and are currently living with my wonderful niece, her husband and 3 cute kiddos. We’ve been to town to get supplies, pick up the load of our outdoor manly supplies (insert grunting noise), buy a car and open a checking account. We’ve also been fixing up the rental house.

The downstairs consists of a kitchen that is getting a complete overhaul, living room, bathroom and 2 bedrooms. (There used to be third bedroom, but a wall was removed to enlarge the living room.) There is an arctic entryway, a small enclosure with four doors; one to the outside, one to the greenhouse, one to the upstairs and one to the living room. Upstairs there are two bedrooms (one master, one dressing room for me) a bathroom, office, tinker room for David and a big room for exercise, watching TV and hanging out. All of it needs to be painted and the floors all need to be repaired and/or cleaned. (Hardwood downstairs, plywood upstairs)

While David’s been working on major renovation projects downstairs, I’ve been working on getting a portion of the upstairs ready to paint. First I vacuumed the floors and part of the walls. Then I had to remove decals, stickers and a room full of glow-in-the dark stars, comets, and planets. A blow dryer on low heat worked well on the celestial work of art, but not so much on stickers and decals that had been there for years, so taking the advice of a good friend, I used a mixture of fabric softener and water, soaked the decals and then was able to peel or scrub them off of the walls. Once I was finally finished with that messy project, I began patching holes. I patched, and patched and patched. There were thousands of little holes from thumbtacks and nails as well as bigger holes from kids living life to the fullest.  

The past few days I’ve worked on painting primer on the walls and ceiling of the big room. It has a lot of character that I love, but makes it tricky to paint. There are also two little red circles that keep appearing through the primer. It’s like the wall is bleeding. Spooky…

As I’ve worked on the house, I’ve found myself thinking how nice it will be to finally live in the house and be settled in Alaska.

Have you noticed that seems to have become a pattern in my thinking? However, each time I’ve thought “how nice it will be when…” another thought gently blows across my narrow mind and reminds me that I don’t need to think about “when”, rather I need to focus on “now”. Right now, THIS is the life I’m living. I need to focus on the blessings and appreciate my life instead of waiting for the ideal situation that I’ve conjured up in my head.

So today, I get to do laundry. Yes! Clean socks and underwear are on the way!! And, because I have to do laundry, I can sit in the quiet loft and type out my thoughts for this blog, and that will satisfy a certain gentleman in Kansas who went to the trouble of figuring out to how locate my blog only to discover that I hadn’t written anything new in awhile. This afternoon I will head over to the house to add more primer to the walls and hopefully, stifle the bleeding in the wall. All of this, I get to do, while surrounded by a forest of trees, white capped mountains and crisp, fresh air.

I love my life…right now.