We have (mostly)* reliable internet again for the first time since March 23rd. Of course, now we have no hot water because there’s never a dull moment at Seraphin Station.**
Y’all, the backlog on email (esp. light setting reports, readings, and consultations), DMs/PMs on various platforms, and Etsy messages is freakin’ considerable. It’s about to storm, but I’m gonna get started on trying to prioritize all these messages in all these inboxes as soon as I get in from weather prep (protecting the more delicate and/or new plants and getting the chickens set up in case we get any flash flooding – there’s an advisory and we live on the edge of a swamp).
Let’s hope the internet still works after it rains again. (Storms are why it quit working last time.)
*This is still the worst ISP in North America and they still haven’t buried the DSL line, so it still gets damaged when a cow looks at it wrong and it still doesn’t like to work when it rains.
**Calling this an old farmhouse would be way too poetic and generous. It’s just an old house. And it’s not even that old – it’s not charming or quaint or anything like that. I’d say it was built in probably the early ’80s, apparently by someone who never cooked a meal for more than one person in their life, ’cause the kitchen just doesn’t make *any* sense.
The first owners had an active farm here for a while, including goats. At some point, perhaps in the twilight years of farm activity — I’m speculating — at least one goat would spend the night in the house when the weather was bad.
The next people who lived here had, over the course of about 10 years, at least 20 cats. And when we moved in, the carpet was original.
So we had to rip the carpet out before I could spend the night in the house. We lived on bare subfloor and throw rugs in most of the house for a good while. The living room/my office area is still bare subfloor with some area rugs on top.
My kitchen floor was several layers of peeling linoleum until last summer.
We laid down some fairly nice cork-backed laminate flooring in the hallway a couple of years ago, but we had to pull it up last year when we realized the hallway bathroom toilet was leaking *under the floor* and had soaked into the subfloor all the way out into the hallway. (I almost didn’t survive that one – it’s not a stretch to say I was about apoplectic.) We had to replace the toilet.
We just had to replace the kitchen sink faucet and some plumbing last week.
I don’t know how old the water heater is, but I know that resetting it is just a temporary fix, so it’s gonna need more fix than that. There’s also something wrong with the oven and I cannot currently bake in it because it just randomly decides 200 degrees is fine, it doesn’t need to stay 400 degrees, thank you very much.
So I often warn people that our house is an active construction site. But that’s just a polite way of saying that if we turn our backs on it for a second, it will be literally falling down around our ears. And our appliances are, for the most part, dinosaurs. And there are fields and fencing and pastures and garden areas and chicken runs and firebreaks and an orchard and an old grape arbor and a barn with an original roof, all of which need regular attention. Oh, and that shed that collapsed hurricane before last, I think it was? Yeah, you can’t just leave stuff like that just lying there lol
So please, please don’t take it personally when something happens and I don’t reply to your emails right away. Seraphin Station is a working farm, emphasis on the “working,” and in a way, we’re trying to “reclaim” our house just as much as we’re trying to get the farm going again.