Under a Blue Moon

Saturday

Day started out by taking the Beau out for a walk. Here he is, wondering why I have stopped to take his picture:

We are strolling down Memory Lane (Seriously. That’s the name of my street.).

Then it’s onto The Project. We decide it’s time to reroof the covered bridge. Entire shingles are missing and we’re sure it’s a haven for wasps and bats. So our plan is to tear off the existing roof. Buy new roofing material (kind of a trial run for the type of roofing we want to do on our house in the upcoming few months). And by ‘we’ I was hoping that meant Rick would be doing the work while I stood by the ready with the phone in my hand to call 911 should he fall off a ladder or be attacked by a swarm of anything.

It actually turned out that I was there pulling out nails, going down into the pond (thankfully dry at the moment) with the wheel barrow to pick up debris (not as easy as it sounds – I had berry bushes to fight with and at one point was so totally captured by them I couldn’t move my leg – it was like a scene out of Jumanji).

Highlight of the day was when Rick was taking down the ceiling panels and as he got to the last one he let out a yelp. There was a large skeleton staring him right in the face. Something, a raccoon or maybe an opposum, had crawled up in to the rafters and died a million years ago. Then as he is pulling up shingles there was a little lizard that was keeping him company and kept popping up, just inches away from his face. Lot of yelping coming out of my husband today.

So the roof is off and next weekend will be spent reroofing. Then at some point we will have to paint. We have done so much work on the inside of our house and not much to the outside. Including the awful tan color it is painted. I’m envisioning something in a pale, creamy yellow with creamy white trim. Just like with the roofing material, we can practice on the covered bridge.

Ahem….

Just sayin’…….

(pumpkins are in!)

Fall Gardening

The above picture is of my auxillary garden shed. It’s a two foot wide wooden church with an old glass doorknob (from our previous home) for a finial. It lives on the deck and it houses my clippers, trowels and hand weeder. That way I don’t have to walk all the way to the other side of the house for tools when I’m gardening on the deck. I was going to get an old mailbox and just plunk it in the rose bed but my friend saw the church and thought I needed it. My husband is sure it is going to be a haven for spiders, which is actually okay by me – the only concession I make is not to leave my garden gloves in it.

Now is the time I start thinking longingly of dahlias, ornamental kale, pansies and other fall flowering plants. My Summer pots are starting to look leggy and spent and I want to move away from the pinks, blues and pale yellows of Summer and start over with rich purples and reds and the silvery grey of dusty miller or lamb’s ear.

So far I’ve just seen pansies and violas in the nurseries. And it wasn’t until I got my little six-pack of violas home that I realized I was still in Summer mode as far as the colors go.

Violas always remind me of my husband’s grandmother, whose name was Viola. She spent the last year of her life living with my mother in law. A week after she passed away a viola popped up right in the middle of the driveway, in a crack in the pavement. Just her way of dropping in to say hello, I suppose.

Bibliothèque

Picture found in antique store ~ written on back: Josephine Walker taken by her father in their library

When I was a child my very favorite past time was reading. I can remember the first time I read Tom Sawyer – I stayed up way past my bedtime just enthralled. I remember overhearing my mother telling my father it was okay that I was up that late because I was reading. Obviously a very good thing.

I have lots of favorites from back then, all depending on how old I was. A theme that tended to run through the books I liked were children that were self sufficient and able to take care of themselves. Baby Island, The Box Car Children, The Chronicles of Narnia.

I also loved books about magic, where a child suddenly came to possess a magical power. Magic in the Alley, Half Magic and a couple who’s names I can quite remember but the stories I do ~ one about a magic silver acorn that allows the main character to go into a land that is a mirror image of his own or another about a young, self-conscious young girl that has to spend the summer with her relatives and has to get glasses to boot – only the glasses make her wishes come true (some with near disasterous results, like turning her cousin into a squirrel).

I have memories of Summer days starting out by going out back and picking a bowl of cherries and then laying the the hammock for hours eating and reading Nancy Drew books. Each day I swore I could never eat another cherry again but the next day I would be up on our old ladder, picking another bowl.

I still have the very first book I can remember getting as a gift. Raggedy Ann Stories. Now SHE was self-sufficient; always getting into some kind of trouble like falling into a paint can or having birds steal her hair for their nests. She was forever having to have her head restuffed or an eye sewn back on. Pretty gruesome, actually. She never stopped smiling though.

Musings

I wonder where artist and creative sorts get their ideas from ~ are they coming up with them on their own or are they influenced or inspired by other’s work? And if they are influenced at what point is it inspiration vs. stealing?

I struggle with this because while I am a fairly handy person I’m not a very imaginative one. I will see something, whether it be a decorating style, a beautifully set table or a crafty type thing, and that’s my starting point. It’s not like a creative lightbulb goes off in my head and an idea is born.

For example ~ I saw on the Cath Kidston website an adorable needle holder. Not wanting to spend $33 (shipping is a little dear from the UK) I bought $32 worth of materials to make my own instead (this is TOTALLY justifiable because I bought new pinking sheers and I have enough material to make 10 of them if I wanted to).

(work in progress – still need to stitch it all together)

Granted mine is a bit different since I used buttons, beads and sequins rather than all felt but is this an homage or plagerism? Obviously I’m not planning on selling them – just want to make the one little one for myself.

I find myself doing the same thing with posts without even realizing it. I visit probably 20 different blogs a day and something will lodge itself in the far reaches of my brain and I’ll do a post and realize that a photo I took is similar to another I’ve seen or I’ll a use a phrase that I’ve read elsewhere.

Sigh. I just wish I was as creative as the rest of you.

Decor

Ikea lamp shade $18.

We have been in our house for a little over five years now. We bought it from the original builder/owner who kept it in pristine shape. 1976 shape. Harvest gold linoleum, dark brown appliances, wallpaper on every wallpaperable surface.

We have done a lot of updating over the past five years. We gutted and redid all of the bathrooms, redid all the flooring. We swapped out all the interior doors and put up crown moulding and new baseboards. Fresh paint every where. We just are in the finishing stages of our new kitchen. One thing we just could not agree on was a new light fixture for the entry way. The original fixture was almost charming in it’s ugliness – it was a wood and smoked glass monstrousity. I spied the above crystal lamp shade at Ikea and decided my handy husband could rig up a temporary fixture for us that would certainly be more attractive than what was there.

Of course temporary, at our house, can sometimes mean ‘until it falls apart or we move, which ever comes first.’

And lest you think I’m kidding about the harvest gold here’s a before and after of our kitchen. Please note that the before was taken before we moved in so all decorating is courtesy of the previous owner (I feel compelled to point that out).

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