Garden of Thought

Wow, what a year amiright? I was stuck in my old house until September with my hubby holed up in the new house because he wanted to isolate while he worked on it and on his online job. This was okay, actually, if frustrating for me as I fretted over the new house's yard getting overgrown and whined about not getting to see the spring or summer flowers so I still don't really know what this yard has in it. BUT I was with my daughter and son-in-law in the old house which also needed work, and got to be there for her through her Expectation, as we are expecting a wee one in just a couple weeks here.

In Sept my hubby decided to head back to our little condo in CA to continue his hermitage so I was finally able to move furniture in and be Home. For about a week. Then our state caught fire and I had to go back to the old house which had a functional climate system unlike the unfinished new one. A couple weeks later, I could finally return so I've really only been "Home" for 2 months though we bought the house over a year ago.

Got a lot of work done on it in that time, and there's more in progress (the saga of the bathroom floor, the epic tale of the woeful furnace ducting, the gripping tale of the bedroom ceiling...)

And now we find they may induce my daughter a little early (still very close to due though, so not preemie time) meaning I am lurching into Grand level life very soon indeed. Next weekend, if all goes as planned (or as planned as such things can be). Time to roll up my sleeves and help a clueless young couple figure out which way is up on a baby!

Hope all is well with everyone out there, I've barely been online so I feel like I've lost track of a lot of you, bless you all.

While cleaning garden storage cupboards at our new place, I peeled off the old yellowed labels the previous owners had left (i.e. "PLANT CHEMICALS" etc.)

There's one longer cupboard up above with two doors both of which just said "EQUIPMENT". Peeling it off I found it originally said "ALCHEMY EQUIPMENT". From the pegboard inside it appears it was where they kept their watering wands. Hahaha! Wave them around and the dirt transforms into plants!

Our house weirdly came with two furnaces (one at either end) so we are in the process of notching the foundation and connecting the two ducting networks to make only one furnace. Where the second was pulled out is the perfect spot for a small pantry instead SO I decided that would be the uber-bright snap of color spot since it is only seen when putting away or fetching groceries. This project took me sooo long to do... My own fault for so many colors, all needing multiple layers and touch-ups.
Starting off... random outlining mostly. My only concrete idea was one oversized flower in it.




Details sloooowly filling in:

Sellers just agreed to our repair list and our loan is ticking along through the credit union just fine so I got excited and ordered address labels (hey, they better not change anything now! I ordered, y'know, ADDRESS LABELS). Heh.

Yippy! I get to pick out new paint and carpet! Aaargh! I have to find new paint and carpet that I actually like! What's with all these weird muddy colors out there? Why is so much interior decorating stuff the color of baby food or dirt?

I spent the day dredging stuff out of our lean-to and greenhouse, spreading half-full bags of fertilizer and dirt and such here and there around the property just to get rid of them, yippy! I am the Dirt Fairy! Aargh, why in heaven's name did I save so many plastic pots? I threw some away, others I think I'll take to the local nursery and see if they want to repurpose them. But really - SO. MANY. POTS. If the zombie apocolypse starts this month and the zombies can be held off by putting pots on their heads, I have us covered.

And what do I do with the entire front end of a truck? I'll have to find out where large metal thingys go. Then there's the giant pile of brush and branches that will have to be chipped... dear me. God bless people who are moving, we need all the help we can get.

Found a house! (been looking for nearly two years now) and made an offer - and now it's accepted and now we're going "Yay! Oh no! Yay! Oh dear! Yay! Oooooh boy look at all the things we have to do! Yay! Aaaargh! Yay!....."

I love the house though the kitchen is a little smaller than I would like, now the inspection has to happen this next week and I have to pray they don't find any 'deal-breakers' in that. It's so wonderfully funky, a mid-century modern with hexagonal living room and a fireplace tower going up to a cupola in the middle of it, an angled courtyard with a little waterfall into a small koi pond, an outdoor fireplace, a pergola with wisteria over it... aaaaa! It's difficult to wait for all the details and papers to work their way through now.

So, while merrily whackity whacking away I managed to trip over a branch hidden in the tall grass (hence the whacking) and took a tumble. While the only thing I injured was my pride I found I'd somehow managed to decapitate my whacker. 0_o I tried reattaching its brain but it spun off again as soon as it was started up.

The result is I just got a brand new shiny weed whacker out of the box (woo!) and managed to get it assembled and running. Bonus that it can take attachments and I also got a chainsaw-on-a-stick attachment for it to abbreviate said branches into firewood. This little cloud definitely had a silver lining!

Carpet! What a nice morning, hot tea in a cup and the rhythmic banging and shuffling of workmen downstairs finishing up with the new carpet there. I'm delighted to have that done, though it does mean lots of crawling around on the floor for me later as I have to reattach all the baseboards once they're finished and then get all the furniture back in place. It really makes me realize how bad the old carpet was, that's for sure! Aaaaaah.

Church! My goodbye party at my "old" church went well (so weird to think of it as the "old" church now), only half as many people as said they would come actually showed up so we had WAY too much food but otherwise a good time had by all. Lots of dancing and dress-up and eating too much. Thankfully you can freeze both hummus and curry perfectly well, no need to make dinners for a while. I'm really enjoying being able to use my Sundays to visit other churches, it's been a lot of fun and there's so many great people out there in the world.

Costumes! I finished working on a set of hair falls to go with my purple and coral costume and just in time as my first performance for this piece is tomorrow. I'm in with a troupe that dances at rest-homes, it'll be a good dry-run for an actual dance show coming up in April that I'm signed up for. I got a gorgeous skirt to go with it that has yellow chiffon panels over a tropical orange underlayer so the result is coral but it flares out if I spin. Goes well with the coral-and-purple hydrangea hip-scarf. Yay. Just have to go find coral nail-polish for my toes this afternoon.

Crocuses! Looking forward to spring already, they have arrived along with the snowdrops, so pretty.

It's the end of the year, wow!

My house-fixing projects are still poking along now that Christmas is past. New vinyl flooring is coming in for two bathrooms next week so I'm taking the opportunity to replace the old toilet in one of them, it's from the 60s so it's a water hog plus the lid broke years ago and I've had a decorative tray over the top instead, can't really put the house on the market next year with that still there. ("And here we have a complimentary silver tray with jumping fish embossed around the edge, it's so hip!")

The vinyl installation guys will pull the old one for me, bless them, so I just have to figure how to wrestle a new one into place. I've looked up info online for how to do that kind of thing but am not sure I'm strong enough so I may have to find help for this one. Once it's in place I just need to swap out towel racks (I want to take my nice ones with me) and that room will be done.

Hope everyone had a good holiday, happy new year to all!

Hubby is home for the long Labor Day weekend plus a couple extra days on either side of it, nice to have him around at least for a bit. Too bad I have so many things that need fixing on the house before the rains come back that he's kind of just having to be a drive-by handyman. I am so grateful for every bit of it, though - he even went up and cleaned all the needles off the roof yesterday and didn't seem to mind while I would have been a bit freaked out running around up there.

Today is Fix the Leaky Outdoor Faucet day, which will be a great disappointment to the little patch of green plants around it in this summer heat. I potted a volunteer Rose of Sharon and was pleased to find it was a survivor of one that died last year so it's a different color than my surviving shrub.

Also, my Italian plums are definitely ripening up like mad. Got my spiced plums put up, taking a huge metal bowl of them to church this morning for folks to take some home. Yum! I felt very picturesque picking plums in the sunrise, gathering them into my grandmother's old calico apron over my church dress.

One of those miraculous amazing old gentle men from my church came and helped me install the boards for my front steps because I was concerned I'd get them crooked and someone would trip. They look fabulous! And golly he was fast - I'm still carefully tap-tap-tapping away at the nails to tack down one end of the boards and there he is with over half of his side done already. I am SO grateful!

Also, "I did the thing!" and pat myself on the back, which was performing a solo dance up in Ilwaco and it went beautifully. My daughter filmed it on her phone - not perfect, of course, but I'm surprisingly pleased with it. She got me to put it onto facebook (I rarely use fb) so she could share it. The Lavender Festival folks even transformed a tool shed into an amazing dressing room for the dancers and all the quaint outbuildings were decorated with beads, drapes, persian rugs, etc.