Merry Christmas!

Autumn came and went and winter is fully upon us. It's quite beautiful outside, this Christmas Eve. It's been kind of gray and snowing for days, but today the sun is out and everything outside is sparkly-white. The trees are covered with frost and all my birdhouses have roofs of snow. There's a bunny trail (which Arianna and I think is adorable) that goes from under the crabapple tree to the camping trailer.

I finished my cards and newsletter yesterday. The newsletter has been done for days, but I have been having major printer problems. Sometimes it just doesn't print write--like every fifth line or so will be highlighted or crooked. For about a month, everything I printed came out crooked. There'd be a one inch margin on the left at the top and by the time it got to the bottom the margin was about two inches. Every time I handed a report to an attorney or social worker I felt like I had to apologize. And then it started working fine. Until I went to print my holiday letter. I finally bought a cheap one just to get them done and out. It will also be good to have a back-up printer in case I keep having problems.

Last night I finished wrapping all the gifts. We're going to spend tonight at my parents house because we didn't even bother to put up a tree in the non-living room. Arianna was kind of bummed about it, so we joked that we should go spend the night at Grandma and Grandpa's so we could muster up some holiday spirit. Plus, we don't even have a couch or real chairs in the living room right now so the option is to sit in kitchen chairs or on the floor (which is usually pretty cold). When I mentioned it, Mom took it seriously and convinced us to come. It's going to be fun, I think. We're bringing "Meet Me in St. Louis", my favorite holiday movie and my mom has "White Christmas", which I've never seen, and we'll probably have to watch "A Christmas Story". We're bringing some games, too. I'm going to make bruschetta and mom is making pork or venison chops.

Christmas morning everyone else is coming around 10. I love Christmas at my parents. We all wear flannel pajamas the whole day and make it a leisurely day. We open gifts in the morning, with a snack/breakfast between the kids opening gifts and the adults starting, then play games, eat dinner, and play more games.

I'm a little sad, however, because this is the first year "Santa" won't be coming to our house. The kids have known for a long time that there's no Santa, but up until last year they still left out Pepsi and Doritos (instead of milk and cookies) on the Santa plate and special Santa glass and Santa still brought books and games for them. This year, though, they've left it all behind.

This is a picture from 2005 of the kids with their cousins:


Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Summer

It finally feels like summer here, although we get a little rain almost every day. My daughter said it's like we live in Seattle. Not that we've ever been there, but we've heard that they get a lot of rain. Yesterday we sat outside for quite a while. Arianna read while I went through my hundreds of emails and worked on class reunion stuff. This is our makeshift desk (you can see my computer in the background--it's covered with stickers). The peonies are from my garden and I don't remember what the little purple flowers are called, but they smell heavenly.



I took some pictures of other flowers in the yard. Unfortunately, my little garden is looking pretty bad because I've been so busy with the house and stuff that I haven't had much time to devote to it. But some flowers have come up in spite of that! I'm terrible at remembering the names of flowers and plants, but I'll take a stab at it.

Stargazer Lily



I think this is a strawflower. I love the color.

Graduation

The house is still in basically the same shape, but we had a to take a break because.....dun dun dun dunnnnn...

My son Kendrick graduated from high school! To be honest, there were many times I thought he wouldn't make it. Not because he's not smart enough, but because he just didn't care. He's always done really well in the subjects he cares about, but not in the ones he doesn't. He's had to repeat a few math and science classes over the years. But, with caring teachers and a mom who didn't stop pushing, he made it. On May 31, he donned cap and gown and walked across the stage with his 71 classmates to accept his diploma.

The proud graduate


Kendrick and his proud Mom


Kendrick and Arianna (the sister)


A Family Photo


His open house was a week later, at his grandparents house (because of the aforementioned remodeling chaos at our house). It was nice. I made waay too much food, of course! Nothing fancy, just hot bbq pork sandwiches, veggies and dip, tuna salad, orange salad, chips, m&m's, and cake. And a root beer keg.

Not a lot of people showed up, but most of the most important ones did. The only thing that marred the day were the millions of mosquitoes. It looked like it might rain all day, but it held off until just after the party ended and we were cleaning up.

Kendrick made a haul on gifts (money), too. He's planning to get a car and laptop, both of which he'll need for school next year.

I'm definitely going to be more prepared in two years when Arianna graduates!

Kendrick with his cake (sunflowers were his class flower)

Remodeling A-Go-Go

The plaster is off the walls, the ceiling has been raised and braced, and I have a new door! This picture shows the new beam running across the ceiling and the lathe walls. I don't know when we're going to have time to put the drywall on. My brother and dad work full time, I have a crazy schedule, and we have the next four weekends completely tied up with commitments. I guess I'll get used to living with it like this.

In the meantime, I also got a new door, with lots of windows. The kids and I decided to paint both outside doors a color called "Appletini". My mom is going to think we're crazy! It's sort of the color of Granny Smith Apples. I love it.

Here's the new door:
It lets in so much more light! It's beautiful. The room is going to be so nice when it's finally finished.

And the remodeling officially begins

I am remodeling my living room --mostly out of necessity, because the ceiling is slowly sinking and, if it isn't fixed, the second floor will become the first floor. Okay, that may be a little dramatic, but the ceiling is falling tiny bit by tiny bit. What I have to do is jack the ceiling up and put in an additional support beam.

My parents came over Friday night to get started. We took down the false ceiling, which was easy, then started tearing down the plaster and lathe ceiling above it. That wasn't so easy. Plaster is heavy! Like cement. And the dust it kicks up is unbelievable! The worst part is, both my son and I have a lot of allergies and sensitive noses, so neither of us could be in the room for long without having to step out and catch our breath. My daughter doesn't have that problem, so she ended up doing a lot of the clean-up while mom and dad tore down the plaster.

Saturday morning, mom and dad were back bright and early to take down the rest of the ceiling and my brother came to help a little later. The house was built in 1947 and some work was done on it before I moved in in 1997. I had new siding and a new roof put on immediately and about four years ago, I hired a contractor to completely remodel the bathroom put new windows in throughout the house. After tearing out the ceiling, we discovered why the ceiling was sagging. The original builders were idiots and the contractor I hired was too. The floor joyces are running the wrong way, so the original builders cut into them in several places for electrical wiring, plumbing pipes, and heating vents. If they'd put them the other way, they wouldn't have had to cut into them at all, which you're not supposed to do.

The contractor, seeing that the floor was sinking, raised the bathroom floor to be level, but didn't tell me that my floor was slowly sinking. So now, if we brace the middle of the room, the bathroom floor may also raise. My brother thinks we can unscrew the false braces the contractor put in, raise the floor, then reattach the bathroom ones.

I found out that one of my light switches is running off the original wiring, which is scary.

When we got the ceiling taken down, we decided to take the plaster off the walls, too, because I'll also need additional supports running from floor to ceiling. I'm happy about that, because I'd wanted to take down the ugly paneling that was in there over the plaster, but knew it would be a mess. We started on that, but didn't finish. The kids and I will work on it this week and we'll get back at it full force next weekend. In the meantime, my house is looking like a disaster site! I just keep thinking how nice it will be when it's all done.


These two pictures are taken underneath the bathroom. The lighter boards are the ones the contractor put in to raise the floor in the bathroom. Also shows where they've been cut into for plumbing.




























This one shows the old wiring and all the places they made holes in the joyces for it.

Spring

It finally feels like spring here in the north country. Last night, I was working on Kendrick's graduation announcements and I could hear the spring peepers outside and I realized it's the first time I've heard them this year. This morning when we went outside to drive to school, there were two bunnies in the yard nibbling grass. They didn't even hop away when I started the car and drove away. They looked young, so I think there may be a nest nearby. A couple of years ago, I discovered a rabbit nest with new baby bunnies in our yard, so we tried to protect them until they were big enough to take care of themselves. We usually saw mama bunny in the mornings taking care of them.

There are buds on the trees and the air smells like spring. You know that smell I'm talking about? Like everything is fresh and new.