Much has been accomplished since I last was here. The big painting project I’d been planning for ages is done. I didn’t go for the purple I’d been looking at last year. Instead we chose a sedate taupe with an accent wall of dark blue that really shows off the white wood trim. It required packing away all the books and things on the wall–pretty close to moving out except we didn’t–spending about a week before and a week after to pile everything in the bedrooms and back. Four men filled the house for two long days with stepladders, paint buckets and rollers, lots of music (radio) and joking. Hubby and I spent those two days mainly staying out of the way, except for the afternoon I spent in the ophthalmologist’s office getting an eye looked after. It may have been the flurry of dusting door and window framing that caused one of my inner eyelids to puff up and droop down to cover part of my line of vision. I’d wake in the mornings with it glued shut. And boy was I a sight!  🙄  If you saw the old Charles Laughton version of Quasimodo in Hunchback of Notre Dame, well that was me for a few days! In the midst of all this, the old furnace in the basement had enough of the cold weather and decided to cut out too.

Now that almost everything is done and back in place, the eye all healed (nothing serious as it turned out–just a clogged oil duct in the inner eyelid), a new furnace with a humidifier added this time, it feels as if we’re living in a new house. Everything looks so clean and neat. It’s been exactly the prompt I’ve needed to get going on the massive clearing out of forty-some years of accumulation. Upstairs is practically done, and because the furnace installation mess had to be cleaned before I could do the laundry, that room is looking pretty good too. Next week it’s on to the storage room, my sewing room, and the electronic graveyard. I can just see myself wresting old computer monitors and hard drives and masses of cords and plugs from the hands of a Hubby who never met a piece of technology he didn’t want to hoard.  At the end, hopefully I will have met my goal of everything having its own place to be so that we can get to it when it’s needed, and if it isn’t likely to be needed, it should be pitched or donated.

Since it’s been so cold here, with temperatures locked into a deep freeze since Christmas, outside has looked pretty bleak. The roofs of just about every house in our neighborhood featured this look.  So it’s been a good time to hunker down and focus on inside pursuits.
In an effort to change the kitchen’s look on the cheap side, I scanned some prize show chicken pictures from one of my books and found some cheap black frames in in the local IKEA. Now it looks like this above the stove:

I would really have preferred a collection of those fancy ceramic chicken sculptures, but the ones I like best would have cost several hundred dollars. These work as a good enuf substitute and not counting the cost of the ink used in my printer, the total for the dozen frames (there are more on the other wall) came to less than $25, and works for me.

Sadly, a small tragedy took place as well. One afternoon I looked into the back yard during a brief foray of sunshine. Sitting there all puffed up was a small bunny. He looked so cold and lonely and forlorn, I started to worry about him being all alone and hungry. When I was preparing a salad later that day I decided to toss a piece of carrot near the entry under the porch  he’d dug through the snow and ice. Then I began to notice little brown rabbit pellets outside that hole so I felt happy at the evidence that he wasn’t starving after all, but I’d still toss little bits of veggies–I think he especially appreciated the turnip trimmings–from time to time. One evening this week as we were sitting down to supper, there was a loud thump outside the patio door and Hubby jumped up to see what had crashed into the house. Well, sad to say it was a big old owl. Less than hour before, I had donated a few bits of lettuce core and carrot trimmings and created a perfect lure for that owl’s supper! Kinda spoiled my appetite that night. I was pretty mad at that owl, but mostly I was mad at myself. I had no idea there was an owl lurking in the woods behind the house, but I grew up on a farm for goodness sakes! I should have known better. Now I have the blood of that poor little rabbit on my hands. The owl didn’t fare too well either. Hubby said he was dazed so badly he sat for a long time on the edge of the retainer wall. He wasn’t there in the morning, but the remains of the bunny were. As for me, I won’t soon forget that in nature, nature takes care of its own in its own way. It’s just best not to be born so low in the food chain as bunny rabbits.