December catch-up

Oops, didn’t mean to vanish. It’s been just busy here and Kevin seems to take his camera to work on the days I’m determined to post, and so I fell off the blogging wagon.

A summary of the last week and a half:

• Everyone in hats: it’s so warm when the furnace blows, but so bitter cold 5 minutes later. I can’t bear to turn it up (all of that money just goes straight into the SKY), and so we’ve been sporting layers and stylish hoods for the last month or so. I call the insulation people a few times a week, but apparently everyone in the Seattle area is as cold as we are and it’s the “busy season”, so we’re just breaking out the lap blankets and being patient.
  
• It REALLY snowed!
  
  We spent all Saturday watching it flurry and then it started snowing in earnest. A gorgeous twilight, though still not that bright snow blue that you see in New England. I read Robert Frost and played with mortgage calculators all night – a wonderful evening.
  
  Some pictures: a lacy tree in the front yard (don’t the pine trees just LOOM?)
  
  
  
  You could see the snow-laden branches over the driveway from my desk until the light became too dim:
  
  
  
  It was so fun to sit there and watch it accumulate while listening to all of the snow falling off the pines onto the roof.
  
  And an early shot of the backyard (ferns look so odd in the snow):
  
  
  
  
  
• Water heater drama: we’re stuck in the sixth circle of customer support hell. It’s a LONG story, but at this point I’m tempted to cancel the whole thing and start from scratch.
  
• Family room progress: the carpet is ordered, the couches get here next Wednesday, and the drywall is ALL UP. Hurrah! Now to tape, spackle with joint compound three times, prime, and paint before Kevin’s family arrives in 8 days… Perhaps this is why two scheduling-optimistic people shouldn’t manage the same project?
  We’re also looking at paint. (I have to wonder who’s job it is to name these colors? “Eiffel Tower”, “Stormy Weather”, “Tattered Sail”? Hmm...?)
  
  
  
  
  The (green) couch fabric sample looks different in almost every light, and we won’t have a carpet sample until next week. Very hard to choose!
  
• Kevin’s room progress: it’s (mostly) clean and put-away, and the new desk is all set up! AND, Kevin spent time in the crawl space, so the room is now also all CAT5e-wired for internet (with 4 connections for the room). Kevin’s thinking about paint and a little area rug for the floor, but those can wait until after the holidays. Pictures to follow. :-)
  
• Flat Stanley: my cousin sent me a “Flat Stanley” cutout – they’re reading the book in school and he chose me to escort the paper doll around for a few days and send back a letter about what we saw. It’s been so fun to think of things in the area that are worth showing, though the request for photos of Flat Stanley is hard – I haven’t printed paper copies of digital photos since 2000. ???
  
• Back yard progress. The whole time I was raking, I had “ but a crop is a crop / and who’s to say /where the harvest will stop?” stuck in my head. Thank you Mr. Walker, and thank you Robert Frost. Search for “Gathering Leaves”, for those who still have leaves in their yard or gutters… Those lines have always worked for me for snow, too, though perhaps the first ten lines of “Our Singing Strength” are better?
  

Tomorrow: hopefully a real post with more recent pictures?