Busy Summer! in Muddling Through As Best I Can

It’s been a little while since my last post. I keep promising myself I’ll be more faithful about keeping up with it, but time seems to slip away without notice.
I’ve been working hard to clean up my property and renovate my homes. Building supplies are expensive and I’m determined to do this without accruing more debt, so it’s been slow going, but constant. I’m hoping by Christmas to be in my renovated home. As a reward for his help, I’m giving the old mobile home to my nephew and his wife. He’s much more of a handyman than I am, so his help has been invaluable.
Brian and his little family are doing well. He moved out and got his own place, so I am officially in empty nest mode.
We also finalized the custody case on granddaughter Raina. We reached a mediation agreement in June, and last week the judge signed the final orders so it is now set in stone.
The relief I feel over that is enormous. Even I didn’t realize the stress I had put myself under until it was over and she was placed in our custody for good.
In spite of the animosity (to put it mildly) I feel for her maternal grandmother, I insisted she be given fairly liberal visitation. She currently has Raina for the month of July and is in Minnesota so that Raina can meet her mother’s sister for the first time. I’m still trying to put my feelings aside and tell myself that this is what’s best for Raina....ugh. I hate having moral stances sometimes, but right is right and wrong is wrong.
I also took my first vacation since before my wife passed in 2012 in June. Some friends and I rented a large cabin in the Texas hill country for a few days. It was nice.
I’m currently working on an article for grieving parents for the local paper. They asked me a while back, and I declined at the time. It was brought up to me again recently they and asked me to reconsider, so I did.
Writing about it from a first person perspective is harder than I thought, because they want me to relate it to the stages of grief as it pertained to my family and I. A half dozen scrapped drafts later and I still haven’t come up with anything that seems adequate. Fortunately, there’s no specific date for it to be done, so I have some time yet.
At any rate, things are going well at the moment, I am feeling much less stress than in the last few years. Life seems to be approaching a semblance of normalcy, or as normal as it will get for us at any rate.
It’s time now for me to quit boring you folks and get to the mundane task of housecleaning this morning, so I’ll be seeing you soon.