Oven Evolution

It's good to be home even if it does mean a return to the delights of housekeeping. 

Color Me Frustrated

          When we moved here last summer, we were thrilled with how new the place felt.

Leafing Home

If two straight days of lying on my side painting baseboards, coupled with being scrunched on the stairs painting risers wasn’t enough, I did receive a reminder yesterday of why we need to sell our house – and soon.

Money Pit

Today it came close to 80 degrees, but still you can feel the change that’s waiting around the corner. It’s almost dark by dinner time and leaves are drifting down from the trees.

Lawn ornament

     Today I popped over to the house to see what shape the chrysanthemums I'd bought for the front pots were in. I decided they could make it a few more days and gave them some water. 
   But somehow I don't think the prospective buyers coming for the open house on Sunday are likely to pay them much attention. 
   Now we have a new ornament gracing our lawn. The septic guys are starting their magic tomorrow. Kinda wish they hadn't parked that behemoth right on top of our well, though.

Yes, you really can get there from here

     While we’re happily transplanted into the condo, the homestead on the other side of town is still on the market. There’s yet another open house scheduled for Sunday. Yes, like everyone else with a house for sale, we’ll make sure the grass is cut and the mums in the planters are watered, but before that we’ll first be checking the weather as obsessively as a prospective bride planning to trade vows in a pasture. Over the past couple of years the driveway has decided to form a puddle rivaling Lake Michigan with every rainstorm.

          Meanwhile, we also have another challenge – our road. As I may have mentioned before, when we bought our house over twenty years ago, we saw on the description that it sat on a private road. “Private road?” we thought with child-like naiveté, “How lovely!”

          It wasn’t until a few years later that the other shoe fell. A private road means our town is under no obligation, in fact has no intention, of repairing it. Since to create it, the developer originally slapped a layer of asphalt the thickness of pancake batter over what I suspect was a half-hearted sprinkling of pebbles, things have deteriorated over the years.

          Yes, with the frost heaves and thin spots, sensible travel on the road is limited to less than five miles per hour, but come on folks, the street is only three houses long. Plus, if you went any faster, you’d be headed right into the buttress of trees at the end.

          Our former neighbors (and sadly, maybe us, too) are looking into the cost of repairing it ourselves, but no one around here is pouring asphalt in the fall so it’ll likely have to wait until spring.

          Although the town does plow and sand us faithfully, maybe the snow season will begin in November and put down a glorious layer of the white stuff that will mask our problems until someone signs on the dotted line.

Quiet day at the condo

Our relentless pace has slowed down a bit.

Land management

Our move is complete.

          That is, as long as you don’t count the boxes filled with tools of his father and his father before him that My Guy is still hauling over from the house. And the many pictures we’ve left on the walls to brighten the now-empty rooms for buyers. Oh, and the shed and garage treasures still to be disposed of – anyone interested in a cross-buck for sawing wood, or perhaps a vinyl panel left over from building our outside shower?

          Our neighbor took the wheelbarrow and my hairdresser came over on Sunday for a big roll of tar paper for the roof of the mudroom he’s adding to his house. How serendipitous that I got my hair cut last week.  At this point, any conversation with us can be dangerous: “Really? You’re thinking about chickens? Well! We just happen to have a length of fencing that would be perfect!”

          Since we’ve only now put the house on the market, we’re wearing a path over the 1.8 mile stretch of Main Street between it and the condo. Sanity prevailed over thrift and we hired someone else to paint two rooms that were looking a bit battered, but we’re still bopping back and forth. I spent much of Sunday morning weeding, but with an acre and a half of land, the process had a teaspoon-and-ocean kind of feel to it. There’s an open house planned for next weekend, so that means back to the homestead for more yard work and touch up.

          Today I hope to get outside here and gain control of the flowerbeds surrounding our condo.

Crap

As if putting every blessed thing we own into a box, and then cleaning every blessed space where those things sat isn’t enough fun, we’ve had visitors to the back yard today. 

Free at last

Day one out from under contractor misery. 

Laura Ingalls Wilder has nothing on us

Remember that chapter in On The Banks of Plum Creek?  

"A cloud was over the sun. It was not like any cloud they had ever seen before. It was a cloud of something like snowflakes, but they were larger than snowflakes, and thin and glittering. Light shone through each flickering particle."  

Well. . .

Emptying the Basement

    

      In spite of a monsoon weekend, our tag sale went off without a hitch. Miraculously, the morning was chilly but dry – a good thing since we had cleverly positioned several things on the lawn to lure shoppers farther in to our garage.

Begging for Boxes

We have a tag sale on Saturday, and of course the weatherman is tossing around predictions of four straight days of rain beginning guess when.

Hoover Horror

Sorry – I didn’t mean to drop off the edge of the blog world. My absence is due more to mundanity and inertia than a madcap social life.

At the starting block

Sunday’s the big day when we turn our shivering backs on the north and gladly opt for two 12-hour days in the car.

Channeling Sisyphus

       All we needed for true realization that our Florida days have ended was a glance out of the window. If we ever had grass in our yard, you'd never know it, thanks to the six-inch layer of leaves out there. 

Today we played beat the clock – or, more accurately, the rain.With a forecast of showers by noon and a yard untouched by a rake since fall began, we were on a mission. 

 

          One year, when My Guy was laid up with a broken leg, I attempted to make a dent on my own but we ended up hiring a landscape crew. It was magical. They descended on our yard with blowers galore and struck with surgical precision. Not one leaf remained entwined in a bush, and all acorns disappeared as though they had never fallen. It was all achieved in one afternoon.

          Today we worked on the “Well, it’s better than it was” premise. 

       

           Mamie was useful as a depth gauge for a while

        

 

  But soon decided she’d rather serve as a supervisor. 

With several yardfuls still in the trees there wasn’t much point in perfection; it’s only a matter of days before we start all over again. 

Gult, defiance, and weather control

          In one day, my laundry went from shorts to jeans, and evenings of walking the dog in tee shirts and sandals faded to a distant memory. I woke up Sunday morning to a chilly bedroom in a chilly house. Fall had arrived but our heat hadn’t. I still have a knee-jerk reaction to the first round of cool weather, telling myself to dig out my socks and sweatshirts and get on with it. The house was 62 degrees but I hadn’t turned on the heat yet because our storm windows weren’t down, thus resulting in all that oil-burner coziness leaking outside.

On the plus side, I was driven to make a really good batch of impromptu minestrone and onion/dill bread.

          All those years of watching pennies make me feel really guilty if I move the thermostat past 64. This year, however, I declare to the world that like Scarlett, “I’ll never go hungry cold again!” I am no longer going to shiver under a lap blanket while watching TV, or sit on one hand to warm it while the other holds the book I’m reading. At this point in my life, I deserve to be comfortable in my own home.

Another factor is that we have a house sitter coming while we’re away for a couple of days, and while I might be willing to shuffle around in fleece, I won’t ask that of someone else. For all I know, she’s that delicate species, an apartment dweller, who lives in a blissfully steady 72 degrees year-round..

And of course, after four hours yesterday of scraping the window tracks where sadistic bugs build small empires for their cocoons, then washing storms and screens, and finally battening everything down, today it’s in the 70s. It’s the same phenomenon that occurs in the spring when I pack away all my sweaters and boots and nature piles on a last-minute snowstorm. I’m beginning to believe that I possess the power to control the climate – even if it is in the opposite direction.  

Morning signs

How did your day begin?

Livestock and Projects

      I glanced over the kitchen sink last night and saw movement below the window.

An ounce of prevention

When my kids were younger, I came home from running an errand one day and went upstairs to where an unusual amount of noise was emanating from my bedroom.