dandelionbreath

Q & A

I’m sad that it seems that I will never win at NaNoWriMo, but November is a cursed month for me.  I know, I really need to pick up His Dark Materials!  Everyone I know who has read them has raved about those books.  Maybe over the holidays I will get around to reading some of these books.  Good luck writing!  Hope your NaNoWriMo book is going well!

Midsummer weekend

We got back from a week of vacation last Sunday, so my fella and I spent this weekend working on our home.  I made a list of projects of varying sizes, but we ended up working on a spur-of-the-moment project in our front yard.

Friday night my fella’s sister spent the night in our new guest room and spent Saturday picnicking and playing Frisbee and baseball in our personal playground, the city park across the street from our home.

Later that day, I repotted several of the houseplants that have been living on the kitchen windowsill.  That window seems to be the ideal spot for nurturing plants.  A teeny-tiny jade plant that I bought at Kroger has gotten so huge living in that window that it was about to tip over!  I repotted the jade plant, my corn plant, and a croton, and I purchased some new succulents to nurture on the kitchen window, including a Gollum’s fingers, one of my favorite succulents.

It poured buckets of rain the night before, and by Sunday morning, our front yard had sprouted a full-on fairy ring.  It was too good of an opportunity to pass.  I put on some bellydance garb and did a weird sort of dance in the middle of the fairy ring.  

We’ve been working so hard on fixing up the insides of our home that we hadn’t done anything to improve the appearance of our front yard.  On Sunday, we made a trip to Home Depot and bought red cement bricks to edge the sidewalk and the front garden area. 

I swept and cleaned off the front porch, rearranged my potted plants, and moved our bistro table and chairs from the back patio to the front porch.  My fella spent the scorching afternoon mowing the grass and hacking at the jungle in the backyard, and then we arranged the bricks the way we wanted them.

At Home Depot, we picked up some shrubs to plant in our flower bed.  We bought two sweet brooms, which were planted on either side of the sidewalk, six wintergreen and Japanese boxwoods, which were planted staggeringly across the back of the bed, and two junipers, which were planted in front of the boxwoods.

We picked up one of the cement garden statues we found in the jungle and moved it to the front garden.  It’s my favorite of the statues, a sort of Hindu-looking lady with a fabulous headpiece.  We placed her facing out so she can greet all our visitors.  Whatever you do, DON’T BLINK.

In the evening, my fella made an absolutely scrumptious blackberry cobber from scratch.  He even picked the blackberries himself, straight from our wild blackberry bushes in the backyard!  The edges make our front yard look SO much better, and I was so happy to spend some time in the dirt.

New house update

Whew, it has been an exhausting month.  I’m beginning to have nightmares where I am forced to paint the same room over and over again.  My fella and I pepper our conversations with the pros and cons of paint colors, like the endless debate of Lemongrass vs. Sugar Berry. 

We’ve done a lot of painting.  We’ve painted the living room and the hallway (Martha Stewart, “Dolphin”), one of the spare bedrooms (MS, “Aegean Blue”), the guest bathroom (MS, “Opal”), and the laundry room (“Coral”).  We have two rooms that are more or less finished: the guest bathroom and and the laundry room. 

In the guest bathroom, we’ve hung the shower curtain (from Target, a wedding gift) and placed succulents on the windowsill. 

The laundry room is the brightest room in the house, painted coral pink with bronze hooks to hold the mops and brooms.  We sacrificed a month of my salary and bought a washer and dryer from Sear’s scratch-and-dent outlet store.  We got a great deal - the washer is high efficiency and looks flawless, and the dryer only has a small dent. 

One of our extra bedrooms we painted blue, as it was originally going to be a dance space for me, until the cat urine stains on the carpet grossed me out.  The small table was a coffee table with chewed-up legs I found on the curb and painted blue.  The table is perfect for housing my collection of Fat Chance Belly Dance dvds, zills, and sword all in one spot.  I imagine that this room will also end up being the library, once we move in some bookshelves and unbox the books.

I bought an antique iron bed frame off my work’s listserv and we painted it over the weekend, using Rustoleum primer and white paint.  We set it up in the other spare bedroom and used the box spring and mattress my fella used to sleep on.

GatGenie setup.

A few weeks ago, we bought a used CatGenie on Craigslist.  My fella and I have four cats, and no good place to put a litter box.  But there is a space next to our toilet that turns out is perfect for a CatGenie.  We set up the CatGenie, replaced the cleaner cartridges, and bought a new box of pellets from Amazon.  A tube connects to the water and another drains out into the toilet.  It seems to be working really well, though none of our cats would go near it until I took away all the other litter boxes.   

The hole in the wall was created by my fella.  Because the CatGenie is located in our master bathroom and because we don’t usually allow the cats in our bedroom at night, we decided to install a cat flap between our bathroom and the kitchen so the cats can use the CatGenie even when we don’t want them in our room.  My father-in-law is building us a frame for the cat flap, and we plan to install a lockable door in the bathroom side so that when a person is using the bathroom, they can keep the cats out.  In the meantime, I get out of the shower in the mornings and see little kitty faces staring at me through that hole. 

Downed mailbox. :(

Last Friday, I came home from work and had a mailbox.  On Saturday, I went out to check the mail, and I couldn’t find my mailbox.  The post was the only thing that remained of the beautiful, expensive mailbox we had just put up only a few weeks before.  The mailbox I eventually found in our neighbor’s drainage ditch, dinged and scratched.  The arm of the mailbox was in our front yard.  My fella was able to put the mailbox back together, fortunately, but the next time it gets hit, I’m afraid it will be a goner.

Plants on the kitchen windowsill.

Magnetic poetry.

We got up early Friday morning, watched the royal wedding, and bought a house. 

Ever since then, we’ve been busily scrambling to fix it up a bit before we move all our furniture this weekend.  I believe we’ve been to Hope Depot every day since we signed the mortgage papers.  There are so many things that needed to be done!  

Like the mailbox: We didn’t realize until Saturday that we didn’t have one.  Apparently the previous owners took the mailbox down, and if they left it at the house, it’s hidden in the jungle currently overtaking the backyard.  So we had to buy a new post and mailbox and numbers.  

And the painting!  The living room was painted bright orange, and one of the bedrooms was painted a strange shade of olive green.  We’ve been priming the walls of the two rooms all week long, and it’s taken two coats and four gallons of primer to cover up the orange and green paint.  We’ve picked out paint colors and we’re going to start painting the walls decent colors tonight.

There’s other things we’ve had to do to fix up our house, like installing blinds on all ten windows, and replacing the copper pipes stolen out of the attic, and replacing the missing striker plates on three doors, and changing the toilet seats.  Every time we visit Hope Depot, we pick up another pack of light bulbs to fill up the empty sockets.  

Working on our home is so rewarding.  Every night we walk to the end of the driveway to admire all the changes we’ve made: The new blinds in the windows, the new mailbox, the potted cactus my father-in-law brought us sitting on the porch.  Our house is already beginning to feel like our home.

Each morning as I walk to work, I realize how lucky I am to work at such a beautiful place.  Every day, I get out of my car and walk across a bridge over a railroad, where honeysuckle blooms.  I walk past a small grassy knoll with shade trees and benches, a koi pond, a river birch grove dotted with periwinkle and daffodils, fragrant fringe trees, and a row of redwoods.  Confederate jasmine grows around the library where I work and fills the air with the most wonderful scent in the world.  When my fella and I buy our house of dreams, I’ll have jasmine growing everywhere.

Our cat Liz has adopted new kitten Peter Pan and thinks she’s his mother.  Here she is trying to give him a bath, but he would much rather play. 

We’re signing the papers to buy our house next Tuesday and I am in a frenzy of excitement.  By next week, we’ll be homeowners!  I’m already starting to pack up our things, but there is lots to do before we move in.  We’ve got to fix the AC unit first of all, since it’s already starting to get very warm during the day.  We need to paint - especially the living room, which is currently a bright orange.  And we need to steam clean the carpets - we noticed on our last visit that one bedroom is covered in urine stains.  And I can’t wait to hit up the nurseries - there are so many things I want to plant! 

I’m 24 today.  My fella woke me up with a cup of tea and some kisses.  Peter graciously attacked my toes for me to get me out of bed.  My whole family called me on the phone to wish me a happy birthday.  The repo people brought me a copy of Archer’s Goon. My fella gave me my birthday presents weeks ago, the most beautiful opal and topaz earrings to match my Valentine’s Day necklace.  His sister also gave me my birthday present early, an adorable flower pot in the shape of a teacup.    

Tonight, we’re meeting his parents and sister’s family at Longhorn, and we’re going to show them my birthday house.  Saturday, we’re turning in our passport applications, and I’m going to bellydance workshops with Lisa Zahiya at Floorspace.  Sunday, we’re eating lunch with my family at Los Charros and giving them the new house tour.  I get to see my new house twice this weekend!  I miss it so much even though I haven’t even begun to live there yet.   

Oh wow - I read this post and started drooling.  Blueberry mint lemonade!  Raspberry and peach popsicles!  These drinks sound amazing and spring-timeish, the perfect sort of drink to sip on while laying in a hammock in a garden.  Once we’re moved in and we’ve fixed up the house and backyard a bit, I want to have a house-warming party and serve blueberry mint lemonade.