Ugh.

House Now

Sometimes I wonder how we can live like we are, with the make-shift appliances/holes in the wall/lack of a floor.

This is the view from the corner where the sink used to be, in the old kitchen. The lower left hand of this picture is the under-floor cistern, which we need to cover up before insulating the house. Joys.

But then I remember this place will be GRAND when it is done. And it will be just as I want to be, which is worth tons of sweat and worry. Of course these pictures just show the downstairs, while the upstairs remains construction-free. Living room, spare bedroom, kitchenette, bedroom and bathroom.

This is the house at night. The large hole on the left will eventually be a patio door. Right now it is just a hole :)

Although I have to remind myself it will likely get worse before it gets better (we've had a very mild autumn so far...) since the snow it not far off and our exterior wall downstairs looks like this:

(there is no wall here at the moment)

Yet the important things are present: I have a wood stove to dry my laundry, hot water & a clawfoot tub to have nice long baths in. I have tons of food in the pantry (and otherwise on the property!), and a lovely drive to work in the mornings.

Some of the goodies I gathered from the property: the last of the tomatoes, potatoes, onions and zucchini. Cranberies from the field, sandcherries from the field and about five dozen apples from the orchard which aren't pictured.

This place is big and needs lots of work, but it is mine*.

*not really, it mostly belongs to the bank. I found this informative online mortgage calculator that says just how much faster the mortgage will be paid off if I apply more money every month. I just got a job offer and now know what I'll be applying my raise to - $500 more a month and I'm mortgage free at 9.8 years instead of 23.4 years.

Late Summer

Later today I'm going to post some progress photos from the on-going house construction. In the process of uploading those, I came across these older ones from about a month ago. The first shows my view out to the quiet country road (and the water beyond), littered with fowl:



My mom came down to help pull apart my pathetic-looking garden before the first frost. We had tons of tomatoes though, thanks to the plants my mother-in-law started in her greenhouse:

I spent a few evenings stewing tomatoes for the freezer once the tomatoes ripened:

The cooking was being done upstairs, since the downstairs was being pulled apart and repaired. The wooden base shows where the kitchen sink will eventually be, at this point we were waiting for the plumbers to arrive. My husband's rubber-booted feet are hanging down from the roof he was repairing that day:

Thanks to a super-productive few weeks (funny what a few frost warnings will do to waning motivation in the face of a torn apart house), this looks very different now.

Spirit Day

On Wednesday October 20th wear purple to commemorate the LGTB teen suicides. Celebrate spirit & help make it better.

happy birthday puppy

According to the SPCA records, our dog (adopted in January) was born mid-October 2009. Her birthday gift? I've started saving money for obedience training. We have had almost no trouble training her, so I think she would take to service-dog level training if we bothered. We'll see.

(Images taken by Jessie Dodington on a visit to our place this past spring.)

After one year, her ears and body have grown but her face hasn't much. Such a skinny rostrum attached to such giant ears. I call her bat-face :)

trombone to the heart

It is high time I re-watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

to blue

Step 1: Uniform dark hair...no more sunny streaks. Suck it, summer.

Step 2: Bleach for 60 minutes. Just the ends (I am a professional now - I need to be able to tuck that shit into a bun).

Step 3: Dark blue dye 60 minutes with heat.

Step 4: Contrast apparent with white DrugMonkey Scienceblogs T-shirt, practically a collectible item after the pepsi-collapse.

modesty

Someone sent me this link, bless their little heart. A parody of the Flight of the Concords guys.

La plus ça change...

I won't make a habit of quoting HuffPo, but now that I'm back at home/catching up with news: I saw this and thought (yet again) Anderson Cooper is awesome. I might watch daytime TV if he was a host (urrr...actually, no I wouldn't). This is a cause worthy of Mah Boo Anderson, veritable gay icon. Appropriate message as of late, since Dan Savage started the "It gets better" campaign a few weeks ago, spurred by the suicides of seven bullied teenagers this summer:

"In the last two weeks, we've learned of five more teenagers who were being bullied and took their own lives: Cody Barker, age seventeen, of Shiocton, Wisconsin; Asher Brown, age thirteen, of Houston, Texas; Seth Walsh, age thirteen, of Tehachapi, California; Tyler Clementi, age eighteen, the Rutgers University student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge; and Raymond Chase, age nineteen, a student in Providence, Rhode Island. Their deaths come after the suicides of Justin Aaberg, age fifteen, of Anoka, Minnesota, and Billy Lucas, age fifteen, of Greensburg, Indiana."

Thirty Hours to Impress

I will be in the same country as Jon Hamm for just over one day. This makes me equal parts happy and sad. Too bad I blew the power adapter while trying to dry my hair and have curlyawfulfrizz hair as a result. Dommage!

The View from here

At my work station at the Oceanography Institute:

beardie

Just FYI, while I'm stuck languishing in a tiny French coastal town populated by old people & small dogs...I would like to say that men with beards are 62.7% sexier than men without beards.

See?

That (especially) includes most indie bands/artists like Dan Mangan, or that dude from Iron and Wine. The french are too clean shaven for my tastes and also really short. Sigh.

To France!

I betcha they don't say "fucking adorabe" much.