Thankfully, leaf season is pretty well over for this year. The only thing we’re still playing with is the tree in front of our garage. It hasn’t completely changed yet. It didn’t even start turning until the beginning of November. The rest of them are all done. Yay.
I’m embarrassed to say we’ve had our new windows for 10 months now and I’ve yet to clean them. Literally, the fancy way they tip in so you can clean top and bottom, inside and out, was the reason we chose these windows.
So I ended up way out of my comfort zone this summer when my friend invited me to go kayaking with her and a few other ladies at the lake where we all have campers. The very thought of me doing that seemed absurd to me. Of course, I had to decline the invitation.
Just like everyone else in Northeastern Ohio, we got caught up in the storms a few weeks ago. Dave and I and our Beagle Boy Cletus went downstairs and waited out the storm watching DVR because, of course, the cable was out. We kept tabs on the storm’s progress on our phones and when it had pretty well played itself out, we went back to bed.
Dave and I ran into a little car trouble lately. We affectionately refer to our 2010 Ford Escape as the “Jitney” because we had a Jeep for about 10 years. It took like eight of those years to get out of the habit of referring to every vehicle in the driveway as the truck, because mostly they were.
I saw the telltale scraps of grass and straw on the back porch, along with a feather. Oh no, not another nest! But then I didn’t see anything else for a few days, so I assumed the birds had found a better location.
Since Dave and I moved to this house 27 years ago, we’ve tried to replace any trees that we took down or that came down on their own. I don’t want to mow around a forest, but we don’t want to desecrate the land, either.
So I was in the upstairs bathroom, which is kind of under construction at the moment. There is a slight leak in the roof that the roofer has heretofore been unable to fix because of the weather. Nobody told Mother Nature it’s spring and we need to be sunny and 75 right now.
I did the best I could to use my time off between jobs wisely; I tried to get to all those things that there just never seems to be enough time to do. Of course, I didn’t get to all of them, but I did knock one big one off the list — I painted the living room.
So I found myself between jobs — I always thought that was a euphemism for unemployed and planning to stay that way. But no, I was literally between jobs. I no longer worked at my former position and had a week off before my new one started. I would rather have had time off in July so Dave and I would have a full 9 nine days at our camper, but hey, time off is time off — even in February.
The new floor in the kitchen came out so good we decided to do the hallway, too. This meant the shoe closet had to be emptied. We haven’t kept shoes in the closet since the days when our beloved Dukie spent long hours napping in there, but still kept the name. Everything had to come out, clothes included, but to go where?
Our house has almost literally been turned inside out lately. Since the plumber came and made a lot of our dreams come true, we’ve had our utility room as empty as we could get it. Cupboards that were supposed to be mounted on the walls, but never got that far, now sit on the back porch. They’re joined by nearly everything else we had stashed in hidey-holes. I haven’t been able to find anything in months.