I like making things!
We were sorting out empty totes to put on the sidewalk for free, as we had way too many to store, and lo and behold, there sitting at the bottom of the pile was the missing tote.
But, (there is that word again!) the bag with the homemade tree ornaments wasn't in it. Now that is a mystery for sure!
But here are some of the things that I am so happy to have found.
Merry Christmas everyone and a happy and healthy New Year!
XXXXX
I don't know why photos of Christmas trees never look as nice as they do in reality, but it really is pretty. I have a tree skirt for it, but I can't get down to put it around. The presents will sit there when I get round to buying them and wrap them! The floor had been damaged at some point in its history. The previous owners had it completely carpeted, and they discovered it when they removed the carpets. They did a temporary repair to it, but at some point in the future, we will get it done properly.
The house came with a stove, fridge, and dishwasher, and albeit older ones, they match well and are good brands. The stove is a Kitchen Aid. The dual front burner switch needed to be replaced, as the burner(s) would only heat up on high and the indicator light was permanently on. I have managed without it up until now, but decided it was worth paying to get it fixed, so I used Chat GPT to diagnose the problem and check out local appliance repair people. It did a great job and recommended an excellent repairman. My stove is now fully functional, and he even took the oven door off to tighten up the handle.
My knitted nativity scene now has a star! I bought it for the Christmas tree, but it was top-heavy, so I sat it behind the nativity scene.
I dug out some of the Christmas Santa's this year and scattered them around. This is just three of them.
That poor baker's cabinet has been resurrected. It sat in our shop for 15 years, as my husband had given it to his son many years ago. He didn't have room for it, so he put it in storage for a few years, then he moved it to us to store for him. It was in sad shape. When we were in the moving process, it was either restore it or throw it out. I did my best with it, and it now sits proudly in our dining room. It is a pretty piece of furniture but I don't think it would take another move, so, this is it's last home. As long as it holds up, it will stay there.
Christmas decorating is done for this year, now onto gift buying!
Finally, I have started on Christmas! In the moving process, downsizing was my main concern. In the heat of July and August, Christmas was the farthest thing from my mind. I had a lot of stuff stored in our workshop, and I went through that and culled a lot of it, and sent it to auction. I kept what I wanted.
In the house, however, I had Christmas stuff stored that I definitely wanted to keep. It was clearly marked keep and where it was to be put when we got here.
Having sorted through all the Christmas stuff I have here in the past few days, there is at least one tote missing. It had lots of handmade things in it, made by both my mother-in-law over the years and myself over the 20 years we have been married.
It is nowhere to be found! Did it get left behind in the house or in the moving man? Who knows? I hope whoever has them enjoys them and they make their Christmas as special as they did ours. Thankfully, the nativity and Santa made it here so they are now out on display.
In the culling process I let my Christmas trees go. I wanted a new one and saw this one on a flash sale at Walmart. It is white and artificial, but it is lovely. Never had a white one before and I have been doing Christmas for 60 years now!
I put it up this morning and got the ornaments we have ready to put on it but I have to go and buy some lights for it. They went missing too!
But, here it is in all it's naked glory! I need to titivate it a bit but I am really happy with it and it cost a wopping $24. I do so love a bargain!
Being close to everything is great. Unfortunately, that means we are closer to people. And it is cold and flu season, and yes, I caught a really bad cold, and then my poor husband caught it from me. This was inevitable as we are 'joined at the hip.'
So I have spent a lot of time resting and watching TV. Today I am feeling a bit better, so I caught up with some chores and cooking.
We postponed our Thanksgiving meal until Sunday; hopefully my husband will be well enough by then to enjoy it. If not, we will postpone to the following weekend.
Here is the dresser we bought for a TV table.
Such an improvement. Very happy with how it fits right in.
I am at that time of year again when I need some Christmas enthusiasm. I am like this every year and then I usually find some inspiration from somewhere. So far it isn't happening!
Maybe it is because we have the house almost sorted now and I want a break. I don't want to mess it up by getting all the Christmas stuff out.
Tomorrow, if all goes to plan, we will be purchasing a beautiful oak dresser that we will put in the living room to put the big TV on. We let our other one go when we moved and have the TV currently sitting on two bedside tables. This actually looks okay, as we have a nice little table sitting between them, and it kind of resembles a unit, but it was only meant to be temporary.
This era of furniture may not be to everyone's taste, but we love it, and it complements everything else in our home.
The cost is very reasonable but as we don't have a means to pick it up we have to hire 2 guys and their truck to pick it up and carry it into the house for us, bumping up the price. But we are still very happy.
This will be the last thing we buy for the house for a while. It is finally beginning to feel like home.
Although, after looking at the existing picture, I think a new doggy mattress is in order, the camo just doesn't go in this house lol.
It has been 9+ weeks since the move. It has been a very stressful time but we can now see a light at the end of the tunnel.
The actual move was disastrous. We did not choose wisely when it came to movers and a lot of furniture got scratched or damaged and some things never even made it here. We went for cheap rather than quality, our own fault.
But we have gotten past that now.
We needed a couple of bookshelves to replace our old ones, which we had discarded before the move.
I found a set on FB Marketplace that I could get in the back of our vehicle so I went and bought them. The problem was they were from a smoking home so we had to leave them in the garage for several weeks to keep cleaning and polishing them to get rid of the smoky smell. Then we bought them inside but, alas, we had too many books for them.
I had been keeping a lookout on Market place to see if I could find a similar set to go with them. Nothing was showing up until Sunday night when an identical bookshelf came on sale. And very reasonably priced. I messaged straight away and asked if they were from a smoke free home.....and they were. I went first thing Monday morning to get them.
I couldn't believe my luck! What are the odds of finding two identical bookshelves in the same city?
I am happy!
We are still here. Moving has been very stressful. But we are very slowly getting unpacked and set up.
Will post more soon, just wanted to let you know we are still in the land of the living.
Hope all is good in your worlds.
XXXXX
Haven't had time to post lately. We are in process of selling our property, buying another house, clearing out 20 years of clutter because we are downsizing and all in the heat of summer.
I will be back at some point!
My husband had another neuro crisis and is back in the hospital. Recovery is slow this time but he is improving.
No news on the property sale yet.
I read my Blogger every day to keep up with everyone. I do it on my PC. For some reason or another, I can not comment. It drives me nuts. I can comment on my phone but where we live we do not get good service, so unless we are out, our phones are not much use.
So please know I think about you all and feel it when things go wrong for you.
When we go out I am the driver so not able to use the phone and we do not go out that often anyway so time to post comments is really limited.
The fault is with Google on my PC, when I try to comment it tells me to sign into my Google account. Which is very annoying as I am signed into it! It just goes round in a loop and keeps telling me to sign in. And when I go to sign in, it tells me I am already signed in. aarrgghh!!!
The excitement this week was our wedding anniversary. We drove 90+ miles to get some good battered cod and on the way back we took a tour of The Fantastic Caverns. It is a huge cavern system that you can only tour in one of their Jeep and trailer thingies. There are only 4 caverns in the world that are big enough to do this type of tour so we are lucky to live reasonably close to one of them. My husband got to ride shotgun and I am right behind him.
We are enjoying the current milder weather, it is lovely to see evrything outside spring into life.
Take care everyone. XXXXX
In my last post I mentioned the folding pet stairs we bought for our dog Maggie to be able to get in and out of our vehicle. We got them from Amazon. The brand is Petruna.
I also picked up the two tires on the rims yesterday complete with inner tubes, so hopefully they will stay up now. I hope to have them put back on either today or early next week. We really need to mulch the fallen leaves.
Still very warm here and today is very windy. It is warmer than it should be for this time of the year. It is going to cool down a bit for a few days then warm back up into nicer, more moderate temperatures. The daffodils have come up and I noticed the flowers coming out on the forsythia bushes this morning. Spring has arrived!
Have a great weekend everyone. XXXXX
We are having some really nice weather right now. Such a change from the long winter cold we had. I believe we will still have a few cold days to come but not many.
Had a lot of hospital and doctors appointments between us but other than a scare when I had to go back for a repeat mammogram, all is good. The first mammogram had an 'artifact', their word, but it was perfectly clear on the second one.
We try to keep as busy as we can with our limited mobility, and having the aide come in has been a great help for us.
Our dog Maggie turns 10 this year and she has always been a very strong athletic dog. She is an American bulldog. We noticed, however, on our last trip out with her that she was having difficulty jumping into the vehicle. We purchased some fold-up steps for her made specifically for dogs and vehicles. She was a little hesitant at first but with a few treats as bribes she is getting the idea.
We got some help to take off a couple of wheels from my riding mower and our little pull-along trailer and we will be taking them in to get new tyres and/or inner tubes put in them. Mowing season will soon be upon us.
After we get these ones done we have a couple of other tyres to have tubes put in on the bigger riding mower. They do manage to stay up a while though unlike the ones we will be taking in tomorrow. They are as flat as pancakes!
That's about all our news for now.
Hope all is good in your lives. XXXXX
We had a big snowstorm and now we have a good 8-10" of snow on everything. It will not begin to go away until the weekend because the temperatures are frigid. Tonight it will be -9F, that is -23C. Brrrr! Even with the heating on full blast there is a chill in the air.
We have a parcel out for delivery by USPS but our mailbox is at the end of our driveway which is 1/3 mile long. I will have to venture out when it is delivered. But at 5.34pm it is still saying out for delivery and the current temperature is 8F or -15C. If it gets much colder I will not go out tonight.
Our vehicle is parked under the lean-to, which is away from the house so I have to wade through the snow to get to it. It is not crucial to get it tonight. It is too far for an old lady to walk so I go to the mailbox in the car.
The past month has been strange, for sure. First of all, this winter has been very, very cold, and we were snowed and iced in for a week or more.
We had to go to the VA hospital twice for appointments, both days it was freezing.
Some not-so-good news, the central apnea my husband has is getting worse. There is talk of tracheotomy tubes. My husband is vehemently against that, so we have to wait and see how it goes before making any decisions. He might qualify for an implant that makes him breathe but further tests are required to see if he does.
The breathing problems are taking a toll on his heart, and he now has heart block on top of all his other heart problems.
My health is not doing so well either and my right hip is giving me a lot of problems, but I am putting off seeing the doctor. I can't face another surgery right now.
Now for the good news. VA is providing an aide to come in for 10 hours a week to help with bathing and chores. The guy has been a godsend, and it helps lighten my load.
Overall, life is what we would expect of two folks our age, so we are grateful to still be around to enjoy it.
Santa arrived in England very early January, although he was late to the party the great grandsons loved him.
Hope everyone is doing OK and it warms up a little soon.XXXXX
We are forecast to have a nasty winter storm with lots of icing! That's the worst thing because it downs power lines. We just managed to get the tractors moved so we can park the car underneath so it doesn't get covered in ice and snow. One last trip up to get the mail around 5pm (our postman doesn't deliver until late in the day) and then it will be time to hunker down.
I hope we do not lose power because we haven't been able to bring much wood up from the woodshed and we don't have a big stack anyway. Our ability to cut and split wood is no longer viable.
We have enough for about a day up by the house.
The power supply is fully charged, so we should be able to run my husband's bipap machine for a day or two.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn't turn out as bad as they say. The car had already started to ice as it was parked just outside. Now, it is underneath the lean-to, and the icing has been cleaned off the front and back windows.
We have flashlights and candles and the gas grill we can use to cook on outside if necessary. Today I made a big pot of beans with smoked sausage and veggies and lots of cajun seasoning. I will cook a big batch of rice and we can eat that over the next few days. I can heat that on the side burner of the grill if I have to.
Yesterday I got all of Christmas put away, that was a bonus.
addendum:
We decided to bring up a bit more wood, now we can have a fire for a couple of days if need be. Hopefully, we will not lose power and can continue to run the heating.
Hope everyone will be able to keep safe and warm.
XXXXX