OH! There you are...

Psst... winter. I am secretly in love with you. Well, not the blowing, freezing snot in your nose cold. Your snow... Your big wet heavy flakes, your light flakes that fall like fairies floating in the wind, your little balls of ice snow delivered to my house right from the lake.

I love the way we have a two foot tall snow path from the drive to the back door. Next year my love is thinking about snow blowing a curved path or a labyrinth, and why not have fun with snow that sticks around for months and months.

 

 

We are currently waiting for another round of snow at least six inches in just a few hours... it's like waiting for Santa here. They can never predict how much how fast it will fall here. The last storm was supposed to be 7 inches and it was 14 inches. We are all excited because Spring Break is next week and with three or more feet of fresh snow it looks like we will finally get out the snow shoes and get to hike out at the lake.

I think I'll put the kettle on and bake some muffins while I wait.

Winter? Where are you?

We have been waiting and waiting for you to come Winter. It hasn't snowed in a week and even then it was just a dusting. They came by this week and cleared the snow banks on the sides of the road and now the streets are about eight feet wider. They left the very interesting strata layer of snow and melt.

We have been struggling with Winter this year. It doesn't seem to want to get under the freezing mark and we are very short on snow. The kids got ice skates and are taking lessons and we are so lucky to have an outdoor rink just a block away from our house, however it has been closed most of the days since we got the skates. It's just to warm and the ice is wet, very wet. We have gotten in a couple of days though and the kids love it.

I tucked my knitting into my pocket before we went. I will knit a new hat for me this winter. Do you hear that WINTER? (Please I need time, because I frogged the one above.) It was slightly cold out so next time I need to bring gloves. Can you knit in gloves? I don't think I've ever tried.

Doesn't this bother you?

You would think that being Valentines Day I would have some mushy lovely thing. Well if you knew me you'd know I probably wouldn't.
Instead I'm going to show you some old plaster and how my love shows me "the love" everyday.

It was the begining of September that we finally got the 2x4 framing out of the new/original hallway to the front bedroom.

We've been living with these bare plaster walls. While I love the look of old plaster walls, it is not possible to save these. There are huge chunks missing.

Every time I walked by these I hated it. Plus they were crumbling. Pieces falling off every time you bump them with the laundry basket. But I avoid the upstairs for the most part of the day so it was not really on the top of my To DO List. Well this weekend I decided I had enough.

I pulled the rest of the five pieces of drywall off one little wall that was already sheet rocked badly. Really? Five pieces on a 3 ft by 9 foot area?
I would like to say that I can do projects like this all by myself but in typical "me" style it goes like this.

I pull off two sheets all by myself in my slippers no less. Then on the very top one balanced on my little ladder I try to pull off the last piece and almost fall off my ladder. This leads to me yelling, "HONEY!" "HELP, I almost fell off my ladder!"

My love trudged up the stairs. Usually he has no idea what I have been doing (He's been happily watching cartoons most likely with the kids!). This weekend he come up and says something like, "What are you doing?" "WHY?"

So this is where I explain to him how looking at these crumbling plaster walls was just making me feel all icky inside. That every time I walk by them I think about how long ago it was that we took down the wall and it is still not finished. What doesn't make me feel better is that this hallway is half green and half that salmon color that I absolutely can't stand. Seriously, the whole house was that color and this is the only little bit of it left! So I ask him, "Doesn't this bother you?"

"NO."

Being the wonderful partner of mine however, he holds up the drywall so I can put the screws in place, then we switch places and in less than 30 minutes we have most of the plaster drywalled over.  We ran out of the right thickness of drywall and will need to make a trip to the lumber yard.

In normal places we have lived that would just mean jumping in the car and picking up another piece but we live in the middle of the wilderness. (In a town in the middle of the wilderness, I mean it, the whole of Michigan considers the Upper Peninsula to be a vast wilderness.) The lumber yards aren't open on Sunday.  Or most of Saturday for that matter. So that means it will be another few months until we actually finish this project unless the priority is moved up to the top of the (imaginary) list and we manage to get up and out before noon on Saturday.

This is only one of the many reasons why I love my man. He can step into any mess that I have made and fix it up. He hardly ever complains about it and is always up for the task.

Love you HONEY!

Work in Progress

We have been working on these little map globes together and now have quite a lot of them.  Soon I hope to figure out how I am going to string them together for a garland over the windows.

I found these on pintrest.com and here I was so lucky that we found a great Atlas to cut up at the Goodwill.

{this moment}

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. Inspired by Soulemama

Studio organizing

I love pegboard! We finally got around to organizing the tools so we can find them, (we have at least two of everything!) and I realized how useful pegboard is! Perfect solution for my sewing studio. I can never find those little tools you need like seam rippers, or attachments for the sewing machines, or cutting tools. Now they are all right there within arms reach. Now if only I could find the time to use them. I am hoping that time becomes available very soon. My daughter has a dress all picked out for me to help her sew.

The blue box above was a wonderful find from a garage sale.  It's full of old buttons!   I found that 1/4" dowel rods cut into 2 1/2" pieces are the perfect length to poke through the peg board and then put a spool of thread on.  As you can see I ran out of dowels, but I love the look of them all laid out on the top that I am rethinking the dowel for some sort of little shelves.

Little Mobile

My kids got these little planes at the local bowling alley as prizes for the gaming area.  They are cute and fly really well, but when we brought home a stash of over 10 I had a thought.  Well a thought besides, "Great, I'll be taking all these destroyed planes out of the mouth of the dog."  What if we hung them in a grouping for a mobile.

A few months later with a new set of planes, my youngest and I got to work.  I did in fact remove several from the dogs mouth from the previous set. This was so easy to do, and would be really cool in a boys room by the window.  Ours are a corner of our studio.  We took some fishing line cut at various lengths, punched a little hole in the top of the plane and tied the line there and then I tied a knot around a white thumbtack and stuck in the ceiling.

The kitten is fascinated by it! Everyone in the family loves to walk by them and see them move.

Mid Winter

This has been keeping me warm.  Bread hot from the oven.  I have got to get a loaf started this morning.  What I am really wanting however is this:

Warm from summer please! Or blueberries picked along the shore, raspberries bought from a roadside kid. I guess since we hit mid winter I'm ready to move on.

We went to a midwinter festival this weekend.  It was really snowing too, but not cold at all. It was a very small corny event, which I'm sure all small town festivals of the sort are. Ours included a whipsled, kicksled races, a wife carrying contest, reindeer and arts and crafts booths.

But those peaches....