My Birthday.

Last week we celebrated my birthday.  I learned a few years ago that the best way to have a great birthday is to not have any expectations.  None.  Expect nothing.  Then you are totally surprised when someone says, "Happy Birthday!", or if you receive a gift it is so exciting because you didn't expect anything.

My day did not start off well.  I woke up with a cold.  A sit your bum on the couch all day cold, but I have the sweetest children.  They woke up and greeted me with birthday wishes, snuggled up on the couch with me, and made me hot tea.  That made my day all the more special even though I didn't feel well.  I got some of the most beautiful hand drawn birthday cards, and kept getting tucked in and handed items I needed throughout the day.

I did receive some beautiful gifts.  My father bought me the most perfect Dutch Oven.  I have never had one and had dreamed of having one some day.  I have such good ideas to fill it with stews, roasted foods, and even bread. I've always wanted to try the bread you bake in the dutch oven.

My love and the kids bought me the most lovely measuring scoops and some glass jars to store some of our kitchen staples in.  I love them also.  I'm pretty easy to please.  I love them so much I can not figure out exactly what I want to put in them. I have bags of oats that need stored properly, flour, and sugar.



I started knitting a new hat on my birthday for myself.  It really was the perfect way to spend the day.

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....

Garden planning

Garden planning, a photo by scatterville on Flickr.

What do you do when your expecting 8 more inches of snow on top of your already over two feet of snow?

Plan your garden.

We have a very small yard with the bulk of the back yard a large slope of rocks. This makes planning very tricky.

I was quite pleased that our initial planning involved almost everyone in the family.
So far we have two apple trees, a peach tree, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries. Then we have the 2 veggie beds with tomatoes, lettuce, peas, carrots, broccoli, and a few more.

This year will totally be a learning experience. I can not find anywhere true growing days. I have found 123 days but I believe most of these are with highs of 40. Not anywhere warm enough for tomatoes.

I will never forget the year we planted a huge tomato bed when we lived in the mountains of Wyoming. The locals chuckled, and I could not figure why. Then when I had the most beautiful green tomatoes about 3 to 4 inches across it snowed over a foot. It never stopped snowing for 9 months.

I'm going for very short season tomatoes started early, and then put in the wall of waters. We'll see how that goes.

{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

Brrr...{things to do to stay warm}

January is in full swing.  Around here that means lots of snow.  We feel we are finally getting the snow we were promised and are now wondering things like:

• how much snow is too much on the mudroom roof?
• how are we going to get the roof snow rake out of the shed that is snowed shut?

We are expecting another 8 inches tomorrow.  I love snow.  That's a good thing right?

My daughter surprised me this week by asking me how to knit again.  She has been watching me knit this scarf.
She loves the texture of it and the idea of making her own things since I take so long to knit around here.

I have taught her before last winter but she only did a few very small things.  This time a quick 10 minutes of showing and she was off.  She already has 18 inches done on her scarf and the great thing is she has something to do to keep busy when she is bored.

Snow and More Snow and new Fridge!

Yes!  More snow!  I love snow.  Not so much when it's brown and melting.  Totally in love with it when it's coming down.  Especially big fat snowflakes!  We got over 18 inches a few days ago and today we have gotten another four so far.

Unfortunately this means the snowmobilers are out in full force.  They are perfectly fine in the day, I know they love to play in snow as much as I do, but from midnight on?  Please, go to bed people!  Snowmobile in the morning!  Really?  You need to out on the trails this late?  For those of you who do not have snowmobiles in your area it sounds like a pack of motorcycles, or a pack of leaf blowers, only they don't move on from your neighborhood because the trail goes around town.  So they just drive around and around or so it sounds.  All night.  I mean it, all night!



Now for fun.  We got a new fridge yesterday!  It was really hard to pick out "the one!"  We are planning out our remodel this summer and we know we need to fit it in a small opening.  Less then 36 inches.  It will also be up against a wall which means the door won't fully open.  That meant that side by sides were out.  My love dislikes top freezers so we went this this one.  I had no idea online that this thing was so TALL!  Seriously.  My daughter and I had a conversation today with the door open.  "This thing is really big!"  "Yes it is!"  "Can we even reach the top shelf?" "Not really." "But the veggies are right in your face and pretty." "Yuck"

knitting and math

I may have hit upon something.  We homeschool and that involves me sitting with two boys for long periods of time to oversee their math. Our daughter is very self directed in math and often does it when she first wakes up in the morning.  Anyway, these long periods of me waiting for boys to finish math can be maddening! Really!  Today I broke out my knitting that I started yesterday and instead of just stewing silently, I knit.  So much better. From now on, math time will be knitting time.

You can find the pattern at Ravelry here:
http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/krtek

Snowshoes for the family

After trying snowboarding last week, and the adults being quite bruised up, we are switching gears to snowshoes. Much less falling down hopefully because I don't think my bum can handle more of that! Now we are just waiting patiently for more snow to fall so that we can go walking in the woods. It has been such a warm dry winter so far. We did manage a 2 foot snow last week but it all melted yesterday. Luckily here it is always snowing, so this morning we woke up to 2 inches. Not enough to snowshoe though.

New Paint

It's amazing how a new color can change a whole room's feeling. How you can go from loathing a room to suddenly feeling alive and inspired a day later in the same space. Our studio is quickly becoming this way. We hit upon the perfect color and I wanted to convey how in awe I am of how you can feel in a room.



More pictures to come!

This was the before color but it really looks better in the picture then it was. It was a ugly mustard color.

SNOW!

We finally got a good snow. We have been so warm and dry this winter that I am beginning to think they exaggerate being the 3rd snowiest place in the US! We did get a good one finally but the winds were howling at 50 mph so it was really thin in some places and big drifts in others. Here's nice drift outside our house.



The average snowfall here in Jan. is 65". We'll see how that goes.

New Years

Happy New Years! I hope everyone has a year full of love and joy!

Snowboarding

The day came. I fell and was very tired after just an hour. Then after a long lunch my love and I decided to give it another try.

Our class was attempting to go up the T-Bar. When your snowboarding you are supposed to put the bar between your legs and hold on to the pole and keep you balance on the board while it glides up the hill. Only since we were all learning how to get on it, the T-bar stopped every few seconds for the next boarder to climb on. We watched our classmates who would then lose their balance and fall and get off the lift.

I went first on the T-bar. (That is the lift in the picture above.) I was doing great and got pretty far up then the lift stopped and I went down. Somehow on the way down my ski pants got wrapped around the bolt on the bottom of the lift bar and as I went down I twisted around around and around as I was dragged up the hill. They shut off the lift fairly quickly but as someone came to help me up I explained that my pants were caught, it got a little awkward. How can a stranger help untwist in that area? Instead I suggested I get up and after a little figuring out, I had him undo my bindings so that I could get out of the board. It took a little while for me to unwind the pants from the lift and when I was free I went off to nurse my wounds. (mental ones, not physical) There were about 8 medics at the bottom of the lift. My love told me they were about to go up and help, they thought I was hurt since I was just laying on the hill.

That ended my snowboarding career. We told the kids the story later and they laughed hard. My oldest said, "You mean that was YOU being dragged up the hill? My class was watching that!" Great... good thing I don't get embarrassed easily. The other two did not see it and were really bummed. Our family has a great sense of humor and it has since been dubbed, Mom pulling a Sponge Bob. "I ripped my pants!"

{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