Monday, August 29, 2011

My How We Change

I know, I know, I've been AWOL. All I can tell you is that I've been disinclined to blog, disinclined to read blogs, busy with tedious 4-H bureaucracy, busy with canning and preserving and reading and getting ready for fairs, and wildly busy being outside in the garden.

That said, a couple of people in this house turned 10 a couple of weeks ago. Double digits! Look at them when we lived in another town in another year. A year when this duo were still but cute little two year olds. And gosh, how cute they were.

Funny thing is, they still ARE cute. Nice that, being blessed with cuteness...

Monday, August 15, 2011

Befores & Afters

I've been AWOL so long I can't seem to form a sentence I like.

Such is life in the summer.

But I'm posting to show you two befores and two afters, just for the heck of it. A sort of What I Did This Summer prequel (heck, if Star Wars can do it, I can do it).

First, the new downstairs bathroom. We left this room out of the renovation equation when we moved here because it wasn't too bad, but over the past 4 years things seemed to deteriorate. It didn't help when one neighbour laughed heartily while telling us how one of the previous owners' kids had dumped a 50lb sack of concrete INTO THE TOILET. Methinks it was the same kid who had a black bedroom and charred one of the ceiling beams with his lighter...

Anyhow, this summer one of MY kids turned into A Showering Queen King, so our tax refund went to help us turn this...
Into this...
It wasn't particularly hard, but it took a while and let me just say that it's a jolly good thing there are stores that rent jackhammers and stores that sell porcelain tile cutting drill bits.

Now all we have to do is keep the Showering Queen King from spending all his waking hours in here.

Next, the Lemon Arbor. Such are the wonders of the summer season that even though we've had the worst summer on record (I don't have any stats for you, only the opinion of every single person in town, which I think is far more official) there has been a lot of beautiful green action going on around here. Not a lot of ripened action, per se, (except the lemons, which have been prolific enough for me to make marmalade) but a lot of green action.