The Thursday Doors is a weekly challenge at Dan Antion’s siteNo Facility for people who love doors and architecture to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos, drawings, or other images or stories from around the world. If you’d like to join us, simply create your own Thursday Doors post and then share a link to your post in the comments in Dan’s post.
I have two doors in this post. One is the door of the windmill and the other is the door of the Berry-go-round in the kids’ area in the Tulip Farm. The rest of the photos are the tulips that I wanted to share with you.
We had a family outing to visit the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival on Sunday, April 23. This was my first time being there. I had been looking forward to this trip for quite a few years. I missed it one year because the weather was cold, and the flowers were not blooming.
Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm is 40 acres of land with over 100 varieties of tulips, a windmill, and a view of Mt. Hood on a clear day. The owners have been growing tulips since 1974. The farm has expanded beyond the beautiful tulips and added a gift shop, food, and family-friendly fun in the kids’ area, train rides, and pony rides. Visitors can purchase fresh-cut flowers and potted tulips, or tulip bulbs for fall planting.
Two days prior to the trip, my daughter checked the Daily Field Report. She reminded me to wear boots because the field was muddy. I was glad she thought of reminding me. Wearing my rain boots made me walk freely in the soft mud. We didn’t see Mt Hood because it was cloudy, but at least it wasn’t raining.
We spent almost two hours walking and taking photos of the tulips and admiring the stream trucks. After a light lunch, we took our granddaughters on rides in the kids’ area.
We all had a wonderful and fun day. I hope you liked my selection of the tulips I shared.
I’m so excited that Yvette Prior invited me for an interview on her Priorhouse blog. Yvette and I met and followed each other in this blogging community many years ago. She is enthusiastic and friendly. When I was formatting my debut publication, Song of Heartstring: Poems of Gratitude and Beatitude, she kindly offered to look at my manuscript and gave me valuable input. We helped each other to spread the word about each other’s books. She read my latest book, The Winding Road, and wanted to interview me, not only about this book but also about other aspects of my life.
I invite you to head over to the Priorhouse to read about this interview. While you’re there, check out her book Lady by the River: Stories of Perseverance, which is an anthology with Yvette as the author and compiler. This is a valuable self-help book with stories contributed by nine authors.
Today’s Priorhouse Interview features MIRIAM HURDLE
MIRIAM: Hi Yvette, thank you for inviting me to share my book with your readers. I also hope to get to know your readers as they find out a little more about me.
Hello everyone. I am Miriam Hurdle. I grew up in Hong Kong where I finished college and worked for several years before coming to the United States for my graduate studies. After my schooling, I worked two years as a rehabilitation counselor, then went into education, taught for 14 years, and was in administration for 10 before retirement. In my retired life, I enjoy volunteer counseling, reading, writing, blogging, gardening, photographing, and traveling. I’m married to Lynton and we have one married daughter. My older granddaughter, Autumn, was born on September 28, 2017, and my younger granddaughter, Nora, was born on March 22, 2020.
PRIOR: Congrats on your blessed grandchildren – and for those readers who already follow Miriam’s blog, you know how cute they are!
MIRIAM’S MEMOIR: THE WINDING ROAD
PRIOR:Many readers might already know about Miriam’s memoir, The Winding Road. I ordered a paperback copy of the book to read because I wanted to pass it along to a widow friend who lost her spouse to cancer in 2022. However, my second cousin’s wife, Nancy, was recently diagnosed with skin cancer and so I am going to gift her a copy of the book too. I think she will be encouraged by Miriam’s journey.
Can you tell us a little about The Winding Road?
MIRIAM: I would love to share about my book, The Winding Road, Journey of Survival.
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It is a memoir of my cancer journey between 2008 and 2009. Four of my close relatives had cancer, and three died from it. Cancer affects a lot more people than we realize. What I had was something terrible, but it is also a common disease. Yet my cancer experience had several layers of impossibilities, which further complicated the disease itself. Each circumstance pushed and expanded my limit of patience, faith, trust, and gratitude.
My healing journey taught me to let down my guard, show my vulnerability, and accept my being rather than doing.
I hope you had a wonderful day today, whether you celebrated Easter or enjoyed your relaxing day!
I went to my daughter’s church yesterday when they had a pancake breakfast and an egg hunt for the children. The breakfast was well attended. The helpers laid hundreds of eggs on the playground and grass area. After children’s story time, they dashed outside with their own baskets. There was plenty for every kid.
Nora picked up an egg, shook it, and opened it. If she didn’t like the content, she put it back on the grass. On the other hand, Autumn went for quantity and worried about the content later.
Nora wore her birthday party hat. She turned three two and a half weeks ago
Mercy and Will had an Easter egg hunt for the girls yearly, but they had a project in their backyard. I volunteered to cook lunch, and the girls could have an egg hunt at my house.
It has been raining off and on since we moved into our new home three months ago. The backyard is wet and muddy. I decided to have the egg hunt inside the house. I hid the eggs inside drawers, under the couch cushions, in the pantry, and in the bathroom on Friday night. After hiding the eggs, I wanted to remind myself where I hid them. The first time I went around, three eggs were short on my counting. Finally, all the eggs were counted after going around three times. I took pictures of all the places with hidden eggs!
As soon as Mercy, Will, and the girls walked into our house around noon today, the girls wanted to look for the eggs. Nora and Autumn each found one egg before we even started lunch. But they volunteered to hide them again.
The girls could hardly sit still to have lunch. They were done eating long before we were halfway done. They wanted their Razzleberries pie dessert. So, they waited patiently at the table. I’m a slow eater and didn’t want them to wait for me. I gave them instructions so that they could get started. Lynton followed Nora, and I followed Autumn in case they couldn’t open some drawers. Mercy followed them to take photos. They announced, “I found one,” “I found one,” with excitement. Mercy found my paper to keep track of the eggs. We helped to count the eggs the girls found. They didn’t want to stop even when we told them they found all the eggs.
Autumn tried out her newfound treasure
Nora put the necklace on Mommy
The girls shared the chocolate eggs with Mommy and Daddy
Before they got ready to go home, Nora put some eggs back into the drawers and places. She wanted to hunt for the eggs again!
Mercy sent me a text after they got home to let me know she was happy that we live close to each other and can easily get together! I’m thankful that we can easily do things with each other.
My daughter Mercy and her husband had an early Valentine’s Day celebration on Sunday. It was a Superbowl Sunday. My husband, Lynton, wanted to stay home to watch the Superbowl. I babysit my granddaughters by myself while Mercy and Will went on a dinner date. They stayed out until 11:30 pm. Mercy appreciated that we now live so close to them.
We moved into our new home in Beaverton, Oregon on January 10 this year. Our belongings are still in storage in California. Lynton’s niece is getting married in February. We want to attend the wedding. So we killed two birds with one stone, go to California to attend her wedding, and move our stuff to our new home on the same trip.
Have you talked with someone in an empty building? The voice echoes. When Lynton spoke to me from another room, I only heard muffled sounds. Nine out of ten times, he had to repeat to me.
It seems like I had a lot of free time living in an empty house, yet it was overwhelming with the projects we wanted to do with the house. It’s about making the house we feel at home. There’s a hardwood floor downstairs. The former owner seemed to prefer black color. The floor had stained the darkest brown. After several appointments with the flooring technicians, we went with the option of sanding off the dark stain and applying several layers of refinishing. It took several weeks from start to finish. During the sanding period, Lynton wore earplugs to reduce the head-pounding noise from the heavy-duty sanding machine. I stayed away from the house by running errands. The fume from the refinishing was terrible. I didn’t leave the house soon enough, and it burned my eyes. It scared me to see my dark red eye. It took two and a half days of applying eye drops to get rid of the red eye. We had the hardwood floor done in three phases. Lynton worked on his projects in the garage during the refinishing. I simply went to Mercy’s house for several hours. It’s finally done three days ago.
Talking about black, all the outlets and plugs for the entire house have black plates and yellowish switches. It’s a personal taste, but it’s not ours. Lynton stumbled upon an electrician who is a retired electrical engineer. We hired him to change all the switches and plates to white. There are 42 downstairs and 48 upstairs, and probably 10 in the garage. I’ve never seen 100 outlets and switches in any homes. Mr. Song did a great job changing them plus fixing any electrical problems.
The former owners had the interior painted ivory white before listing the house. Everything black or dark brown doesn’t blend in. The dark brown baseboard in our new home is not our preference. We just have to change them to white. The flooring technician could install the baseboard for us, but he didn’t have time to purchase them. We wanted to have the baseboards ready for him to install. Last week, Lynton and I went to the store to buy the baseboards. They are 8 feet long. Longer than our cars. We didn’t want to rent a truck for that purpose. He brought a handheld battery-operated saw to cut them into 5.5 feet and 2.5 feet to fit them in one car. While Lynton was cutting the baseboards in the parking lot, a police car was patrolling. He parked his car one aisle away and faced us with the headlights on a high beam. He stayed there until we finished cutting and loaded everything into our cars. The bright lights were a big help. I wished to thank him but didn’t. By the time we loaded the final pieces into the two cars, it rained. Mission accomplished in time.
Okay, downstairs has the hardwood floor. Upstairs has carpet. The carpet in the primary room is in decent condition but the other two rooms were well-used by the owners’ kids. Replacing the carpet seems to be straightforward. It took the least amount of effort to choose the style and shades and order. The installation will be on February 14, our Valentine’s gift.
The major remodeling is the kitchen. I did the preliminary measurement and sketched a layout, then picked a style between our old kitchen and Mercy’s current kitchen. I used a store’s Design Your Own Kitchen to program my kitchen. After the sketch was done, I sat down with a kitchen specialist to design our kitchen. It was time-consuming, but we’ll get the cabinet style, countertops, and sinks exactly what we want. It’ll take 10 weeks for the cabinets to arrive before the demolition and installation.
We took a 20-year span to do the remodeling for our old house, one project at a time. We now took 5 weeks to make our new home look familiar to what we used to have. But doing major home improvement projects in an empty house is so much easier.
On a personal note, our granddaughters visited us several times. They asked why they ate lunch in our office! We don’t have tables and chairs yet, but the office has a built-in desk. We’ve been doing everything in our office.
Eating their favorite lunch – Mac & Cheese
Building the racetrack with Grandpa
Mercy takes Autumn and Nora to the Beaverton City Library, which is 2.5 miles from our house. I meet them there for their Storytime. The girls go to the Oregon Gymnastics Academy, which is 5 miles away. The Emler Swim School, where they take swimming lessons, is 4.2 miles away. I went with Mercy and the girls to two children’s concerts. It’s wonderful to be so convenient for me to attend their activities and do things with them.
Art project after Storytime
Nora tried to decide on the books she wanted to check out
Photo time after a children’s concert
Mercy and I did our painting together last Saturday, just the two of us. We watched the demonstration on YouTube first, then followed the instructions to do the painting. It was a treat for us to do this mother-daughter project. It’s also a treat for Mercy to have a fun time without the distraction of the kids.
As I mentioned in the last post that our new home was originally a custom home. We love the layout. Our neighbor told us that two owners ago, the wife had cancer and passed away. The husband and wife gave up on the maintenance of the house. The husband of the last owners worked for Nike. I had never seen so many Nike shoe boxes in one’s garage and Nike sweatshirts in one’s closet. He and his wife were relocated by his company. I imagine they didn’t have a sense of belonging in this house. So it went for maintenance. We love this house and are happy that our agent negotiated a reduction of the selling price. We don’t mind making this home ours, even though I was overwhelmed with all the home improvement projects.
After we move our things to this home from California, we can gradually settle in and relax. I look very much forward to it and will have more time to visit you and your blogs!
We sold our home in Southern California. The escrow closed on December 7th. We drove one car with a small trailer carrying our important belongings and some essential items and left Orange County, California at 6:30 am on that day to beat the Downtown Lost Angeles traffic. People seem to get on the road earlier and earlier to get to work. At 6:30 am, traffic was bumper to bumper for at least 30 miles. I remember getting on the road around 6:00 am to be at work by 8:00 am. It seems people these days must start at 5:00 am or earlier if they work in the Los Angeles area. We took two days to reach my daughter Mercy’s home in Portland, Oregon.
We left California at 63°F and arrived in Portland, Oregon at 42°F. I bundled up the first few days. Eventually, my body got used to the cold. The weather got freezing the last few days. It was 21°F on Thursday, December 22nd and we woke up with snow on the ground on Friday. The grandkids had fun playing sleds. Lynton joined the kids sliding down the hills. The snow is melting this Saturday morning. We may not have a white Christmas tomorrow.
My daughter’s backyard
After we arrived in Portland, we started going to the home showings. We visited four homes and fell in love with one. By December 13th, we made an offer on one house. The escrow will be closed on January 10th. The home was built in the early 1990s and it was a custom home. The kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities are original. We got a break from the sales price to do the upgrades. It will be lovely when the improvements are done.
Our new home is about 18 to 20 minutes from Mercy’s home. The gym, nature parks, shopping, and our basic needs are within a 10 to 15 minutes drive.
We’ll move into our new home upon closing escrow. Lynton’s niece is getting married in February. So we’ll wait until February to return to California, attend Lynton’s niece’s wedding, then rent a moving truck to bring the rest of our belongings.
The Showers of Blessings 