Home ownership... my style

Well, over the last month and a bit, i have grown up. Well, okay, so i spent last night playing with Legos in my basement, that doesn't mean i'm not grown up, it simply means i can appreciate the engineering potential locked into each little building block - see, that makes playing with Lego sound almost necessary and deeply philosophical. Hmm, maybe i should abandon nursing and go with making up baloney. Seems to be a fitting little job for me. But, like i was saying, i have grown up in the last while - learning how to manage a household (i'm not quite there yet believe me!), learning how to balance out living in a house with continuing to live your life and not let the house live your life for you, and other various and sundry accomplishments.

Currently, as i hunt and peck away, the house smells warm and homey - yes, my dear friends, C.P. and L.V.B. (you know who you are!!!), the house was almost up to 18 degrees tonight - heehee, but it quickly got turned down when i was busy like a bee in my little kitchen which i am learning is more and more unhandy for working in - no order or efficiency there at all!! Any carpenters out there with free time and good ideas? You are more than welcome to have a crack at things - there are times when i'd just like to take the hammer to things myself but that would of course not be very wise.

Creepily enough, my curtains keep wanting to open up on their own - a sign of the full moon approaching (not that i hold much credence with that idea!). My curtains, a gift of infinite value from the previous owners of my little abode, are quite the lovely things - they are brown vinyly flowered things in my "office" and blue vinyly flowered things in my bedroom - with four sections so that each night before retiring, i have to carefully pull all four sections together so that there are no ominous black slits in my windows through which the dark can creep in! What a chore! I long for the day when there are full and lovely updated curtains installed - hopefully tomorrow's shopping excursion would bring some remedies to my dilemmas.

Dilemmas, aah yes, seems my life has had it's share of insignificant to the world but significant to me dilemmas. Was i going to get the roof done on time? Do i need my chimney liner replaced? How do i prepare roses for the winter? How does one kill grubs in a lawn when they've been having a free-for-all all summer??!!! I have oil paint all throughout my little home - what a pain in the neck! When you are already signed up for an automatic withdrawal system for a bill - it's best not to pay it again yourself - it's much too much work getting money back from companies once they have it in their iron fists.

And the list goes on and on... little things can depending on the day become things that can itch and pain you until you are driven a little crazy. Fortunately, i have a great crew of people to whom i can vent and mooch ideas off of. I am so thankful for you all! But as i said earlier, learning not to let the house take over is a good thing. So taking time to call someone, bake something or write a card are just as important as picking out paint colours, ripping up carpet and pondering life in the bathroom of pinkness.

Singing in the rain - long overdue!

Waaayyyy back in September, an event of some significance took place. Nope, it wasn't the first day of fall or even Super Saturdays at Sears... but rather my 31st birthday and the renewal of an event which i hope would become a tradition in life! I was just reviewing the forecast/recorded weather for that weekend and it talked a lot about showers, rain, fog and wind. Hmmm... ideal camping weather, is it not? Perfect for setting up tents, unrolling sleeping bags and sleeping under the starry skies! Heehee... what a total opposite! I have a hard time believing that that was only a month ago! Wow, so much has happened since then!

To be honest, the weather all the way up to my birthday weekend was fantastic and the weather after my birthday weekend was great but somehow, the weather on those three days we picked to go out into the great yonder was stuffed full with rain and rain and more rain. It rained all early evening as we headed up to good old Port Burwell - sometimes so hard that Lauren, who was trailing us, was unable to see us and we (Laura and I) who were leading, were unable to see anything on the road in front of us at all. We kept saying to each other "it'll pass" or "it's probably not raining at the park" or "it'll dry up, the forecast said so" and other hopeful little statements. We paused for a break in Simcoe, to nourish our hungry bodies and buoy up our dampened spirits. A fateful choice, we decided to soldier on and see what happened... at the very least, we would pack up again and head home - that's the good thing about being only a short distance from Hamilton.

The rain played with our psyches the whole way there - stopping now and then starting again with a very great vengeance as if trying to wash us away! But at last there was the familiar park office of Port Burwell and some bemused park officers waiting to receive yet some more crazy campers. We sloshed ahead to our site and a mighty fine one it was. Large enough for a couple of semi-trailers, it would easily accomodate three wet girls. In a perfect break between rain storms, we quickly and efficiently erected our tent and did what we

thought was a commendable tarping job.

However, as we were just arranging ourselves in the tent for bed,

the heavens opened again and it became painfully clear as the puddles in the corners of our tent grew with each passing moment that we would be unable to pass the night in our little shelter. So in a flurry of sleeping bags, airmattresses(i like that better as one word) and flashlights, we betook ourselves to the shelter of Mom and Dad's van. We were so thankful we had it to shelter us otherwise we would have been up the campsite without a paddle!

We crammed ourselves into the van (thankfully also all the seats were out in the back!) on top of the air mattresses and played cards, tried to find ways not to breathe (three people in one van heats things up pretty quickly!) and shared a margarita in the rain! What memories!

I think maybe between the three of us, we may have managed 1.54 hours of broken sleep! Quite a feat to be sure.

Sweet dreams in the front seat!

All cozy in the back of the van!

The three intrepid rainconquerors!

Sleeping beauty wrapped in blankets!

Saturday morning dawned kinda cloudy and overcast but not raining thankfully! What would we do? Pack up and head home or stick it out? We came to the conclusion that if we tarped everything up well, that we would be able to stick it out so that is what we did. We took down our rather structurally unsound job of the previous eve and set ourselves the task of tarping the site with the end goal of making a job worthy of Dad's approval! (he is the master tarper in our family, our campsite is usually decorated in blue!)

Is that an ex-Calvinette that i spy? Just look at those knots!

Just look at the angles on that - see it and be proud!

And we managed it too! We were so proud of ourselves and man, we had right to be since there was not one area of pooling or collapse throughout the entire next day and night! Wow! We knocked our socks off to be sure!

The word for the rest of the weekend was "damp" but there was still a lot of fun had. We taught Laura how to play Carcassonne and got her thoroughly addicted! Yah! We also played Word Thief - another great game! Sugar sandwiches were part of our food from last year and that good tradition was renewed again. We didn't eat much all day, just grazing and drinking lots of coffee!! Yum! Around 3pm, Lauren left us to our own devices and Laura and I betook ourselves to the beach. What else do you do on a rainy day!? It was so wet and windy - such a contrast with last years weather, it was hard to believe that it was the same weekend!

Aah, well, more memories right? We will probably never go to the beach when it was so wet again. Our saving grace was that it was warm. Had it been cold, we would have contracted pneumonia and would have been in hospital instead of in our tent! So we had more things to be thankful for again!

I was thankful also for great friends who stuck this weekend out with me! We had been looking forward to this for quite some time and to have to cancel at the last minute would have been difficult indeed. So thanks Laura and Lauren for creating yet more Port Burwell memories with me - site 118 again next year??

Last year at Port Burwell, on my birthday weekend, we went swimming!
This year, at Port Burwell, on my birthday weekend, we went to the beach!

And it was wet! I suppose this could be called swimming? This is the parking lot!

This is my foot - gotta wash your feet before bed! Yeah right!

Lauren was looking a mite wet!
The three drowned rats!

Moving day!

Green Meadow is the place to be! So goes the song that my friends were singing as they moved me into my new abode! And so it is. After a summer full of worrying about housing prices, offers, counter-offers, home inspections and other various and sundry concerns, i find myself now the owner of a home! At times, as previous posts have indicated, that is alternately a scary, cool, intimidating and wonderful thing. Sometimes all of those things and more in the space of a few minutes! I thought i'd just show a few pics from my dedicated moving crew - i apologize if any of my faithful laborers were missed in the pictures - if anyone has pictures from that day - i'd appreciate it if they could shoot them over this way! I want to thank everyone who so ably and willingly helped me on that day. My thanks come from the bottom of my heart!

Dad toiling away with his

poor nose stuffed up with

kleenex as his allergies

decided to act up big time!Perched on the front steps of my new abode - feel free to come and visit!
The moment of truth - does the key fit?? There's no going back now!

Carina and Laura toiled away to get my books put away on the shelves

and things look great! The Book of Praise is in its proper place thanks to the girls and all my other favorites are on display. It is such an odd thing not to be living exclusively in my bedroom, but rather to have an entire house through which to strew my belongings. It is also amazing just how many things you need to buy in the first few days - here's my list...

- a broom

- chair foot coverers for the hardwood floor

- a good set of screwdrivers

- toilet seats

- shelves

- mats for the front and back doors

- new locks

- a rake, shovel and other various garden implements

- etc, etc, etc.... the list goes on and on!

Mom working hard to pull up the carpets - lurking underneath was nice hardwood floor which with some hard work, should look great!

Brenda, Nicole, Carina and Helen toiled away in the kitchen, cleaning out the outdated cupboards and finding spaces for all of my stuff - apparently i have too much stuff according to them!
One of the first things we did in the house was to take down these lovely wall ornaments - i would look at them through the window whenever i drove by to and from work and vowed that that would be the first thing to go - they now rest temporarily and gingerly on my wall in the "70"s corner of the basement...
All of this stuff had accumulated in the old place - i didn't really think i had that much but apparently it is a lot more than i remembered or expected!

The old apartment, the cupboards as bare as Mother Hubbards!

The girls in the basement, surrounded by a sea of boxes - taking action and throwing things out - but wait, i might need that box from the hair dryer i purchased in 2002! At one point i heard lots of commotion down there and these two were hard at work bashing each other with foam and whatever else happened to be at hand!

Where do i begin?

Phew... what a month! It's hard to believe it's October already and yet as i sit here at my desk, it's easy to believe. The skies are clouded over but that changes every five minutes it seems. It can't seem to make up its mind whether to rain or be windy or sunny or cloudy so things are rather in upheaval out there! Kinda feels like my spirit today. In a state of upheaval.
Thinking...

Wishing...

Wondering...

Crying even...

Sometimes on overwhelm!

It seems the weather is matching me. Like it knows where i'm at today. Kinda mellow, kinda happy and relaxed drinking a nice comfy mug of hot chocolate, wrapped in a warm fuzzy sweater with my Dutch klompen slippers on my feet... knowing that most of my boxes have been unpacked in a sorta organized manner... but knowing how much work there still is to be done... that i almost feel guilty sitting here and pecking out the words to describe roiling, whirling, sometimes absent thoughts. The sun is out now and is warming up my little abode and making me feel hopeful again. Why do i let myself get so down! I worry and fret about things, sometimes not even aware that i am doing it, yet where does it get me? An ulcer, an unproductive day and no further ahead. I suppose i'm also sad about the Dutch family leaving again. We have had such a lovely time with them all and you always wish it could last! But we can't hang onto time, only the memories we made in that time and hope that we enjoyed that time to the fullest! I'll enclose a few pics of the lovely October skies which surrounded me yesterday! Enjoy!