Sunday, April 28, 2013

Shoulder Surgery, Long Spring and Green House

Well part way through February
 I came to the realization that my shoulder was not going to heal without help so we packed up and headed  for the cities to see my orthopedic surgeon.
 This visit started out with the customary pulling, twisting, wiggling, poking and lifting of the affected limb followed by a 45 minute MRI.
I was asked if I wanted to be sedated for this 
MRI procedure and I declined, god I can be a moron!
When you are my size that tube looks a little small, which happens to be a great understatement.
It felt like I was a fat pencil shoved into a giant pencil sharpener till I plugged up the hole making it impossible to sharpen my head however the machine kept trying for 45 minutes.
The next day I returned to the Doc's for the bad news,
badly torn rotator cuff needing not scope but open surgery, the date was set for March 7 and we headed back home to get things done before my long heal up time ahead.

This looked like a good time for the surgery, the temp was rising, snow was melting fast, road was in good shape although still covered in ice.

We also moved the tracked vehicles back to the storage building, I even thought about pulling the tracks
so the trucks would be ready for spring.

Then we built our new larger green house
Looking out the front door from our living room into green house

Inside the green house with glass windows in the lower corner so the cats can watch the birds and squirrels 

The snow had melted off the deck so installation went great.

Things were looking great as we headed  back down to the cities for surgery. It would be at least a week before I could travel again, so we were hoping for the best. Needless to say as soon as we left it started snowing.
I was lucky that Ian was still plowing for the carpenters working for Patrick. He offered to plow our driveway, clean snow off the greenhouse and feed the birds and one of the carpenter's, Cory , plowed the path down to the cabin with the 4 wheeler. Without their help we would have really been screwed.

We returned to heavy snow
View out our bathroom window
Snow 3 feet up the green house (inside look)
outside look

That's what we came home too after being gone 12 days but little did we know it would just be the start of a very snowy spring.
It would snow a few inches every other day for a week or so and then we had a warning of big snow coming,  so we moved our car and truck out to storage building and rumbled back to the house with the tracked truck .
The snow and wind was very heavy for the next two days, leaving us completely snowed in.We received a total of 18 new inches and saw drifts of 3 feet in many spots. There was no way Ian could plow that much wet heavy snow.
Before the snow slid off the roof and made kitchen window useless


No more view from the bath room window

Snow  5 feet up the green house wall

If  wasn't for  the tracks we would not be going anywhere!

A few photos of other cabins on the road




Finally the weather broke and things are getting back to a normal spring. 
   We now have the greenhouse up and running and the first if our flats planted. You are looking at 3 kinds of tomatoes, 2 different cukes, red peppers, Marigolds, zucchini, radishes and lettuce with more to come. 

Entering my 3rd week of  physical therapy with a sadist named Peter. Seeing improvement, but there is still a long way to go!