House finished, Surgery gone wrong, Wild Bach parties, and seed planting
March
Well, well , well. Let's see...so we left off with quite a few hitches in our wagon.
When I returned from a much-needed escape to Costa Rica, I learned the house would not be done after all, even after a month of finding more and more mold, and pipe leaks, a small attic fire, and renovations coming to a close, the rain had still not stopped and everything was behind schedule. Gavin was still severely injured in his shoulder and was slowed down a bit, but it seemed like it was kind of healing as well.
I took my bags back to our friends house and dreamed of getting all my things out that were trapped in mold purgatory. Since we didn't know how bad it was all going to be we had just left everything and taken maybe a weeks worth of stuff with us and when they came to see how much mold there was, all of our belongings got moved into a sealed room. I never imagined I would be needing any of that stuff in a month for wedding prep, for life, clothes, teaching, or for taking a tropical vacation.
But, after one more week we were finally able to start getting things over to the house, taking them out of the sealed area, and setting up and cleaning to move in and teach again, hooray!!!
Meantime on the hillside at the wedding site ...
Gavin and his buddies went up for a bachelor party weekend, the theme was chainsaws. The guys took down some dead trees, chopped them up and turned them into cute little woodland fairy log seats for the ceremony. They did an amazing job with several already dead trees and made them into little seat stumps!
2 weeks later I took a bunch of girls up there for an Aja style Bachelorette party, (see AjaLeeMusic Instagram reel here) a few days in the mountains digging soil, planting about 10 pounds of native wild seeds and bulbs all carefully researched for the area and season. We donned our overalls, rakes, shovels and about 4 lengths of hose (later to be turned into 5, maybe around 400-500 feet?) to try and water a couple of acres of what I hoped to be a giant expanse of wildflowers for the wedding (and next music video!)
We went up 2 weeks before this to try and do planting number one and we got about 5 feet of snow. Ya know, the perfect gardening weather! Dug down about 4 feet of ice and snow, lay the seeds down, cover with pine needles, and shovel all the snow back on, Perfect!
We actually broke a shovel there was so much snow.
Our boots filled with cold water and ice melted from all the "springtime gardening", our fingers all pink and cold, we did what we could and hoped for it to melt before the next trip up.
But the following week when we went up with a bunch of my gals, the snow had melted in all bt the darkest shade spots, the sun was hot, and the ground was thawed so we could place the ever famous "Gopher Baskets" (remember the Idyllwild Garden President in part 1?) into the actual ground to keep the vermin from eating all of my delicious and expensive bulbs. Ps Here is where i got the bulbs and the seeds both amazing places with super high quality and ready to plant fresh stuff!)
We decided since Gavin was already down and resting his shoulder it was a great time to do a 2 for one and schedule his vasectomy, you know one of those things on your todo list that no one wants to actually get done;)
It was great timing, get it done while he had to rest anyways. Except it wasn't, the surgery went wrong and his surgeon cannot "explain" why, but it would be a month and still going of constant pain and more time off work. Is there a yelp for bad surgeries?
Back to the house which was awesome not only to get all my stuff and clothes but also now we had a new bath and bedroom, giant big window, and new plumbing. Thanks to a visit from a student, friend and bunny specialist (thanks Evia!!) she was no longer sick and I took straight to getting my poor garden back on track. (fast forward to end of March and the roses and passion fruit along with everything else is flourishing like never before!!)
We had also gotten a call from some neighbors up on the mountain, where I have been looking at buying parcels of land for a couple of years, who had heard of us and contacted us to see if we wanted to buy their lot! We will meet them in early June, which means the wedding might even turn into a tour of our new dreamland! We'll see, if its meant to be, but just saying that would be really fun.
The RSVPS for our "small, simple, offgrid" turned out to be way more than we thought, I never dreamed so much family would fly out, we thought we would just do another ceremony in Michigan and a reception in England, and wow, so touched by all my loved ones coming all the way to the west coast and up to the Mountains nonetheless!
Our wonderful officiator had a family emergency and we were back on the search for another with my dad as back up back up, and now that the house was done Gavin could go back to catching up on all his didgeridoo orders!! (Youtube and instagram Didgeridude Didgeridoos).
I'll stop here and make part 4 for April-May, spoiler alert things get a lot worse and then a lot better.
Love you all, keep on shinin'!
-A
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