Yup another new toy

Photo 220 - April 30

My toys seem to fall into two categories - photography-related, or house-related. My latest new toy is house-related, and was actually a pretty good deal. My last canister vac lost a wheel, and I really don't want to be dragging it around and scratching my newly refinished floors. After a little bit of research, I found the Shark. It's really a pretty cool toy, and my first bagless vac. So far I can see all the hair it's sucking up, and its rubber wheels don't do any damage to my floors. It will be interesting to see how it performs in the long run.

I have a dresser!

Photo 219 - April 29

Five months later, and I have my dresser back! Most of my clothes are still downstairs, or out in the garage in the other dresser that I also use, but it is the first piece of furniture back in my bedroom, besides the bed. Jeff keeps telling me how much I've accomplished, and I still think I'm way behind. But it sure does look nice up against the blue wall, and on the refinished floor. I do see progress - just not as much as I'd like.

Fixing other people's mistakes

Photo 218 - April 28

My dad was a building inspector, and when we put down our offer on this house, he did a home inspection for us, so we had a general idea of what things would need to be fixed, and to be sure everything was sound. There were some minor things that needed to be fixed before we finalized everything, and he got a chuckle out of some of the "do-it-yourself" fixes that they did. His biggest laugh was probably the string of #10 cans that goes through our basement, connected by duct tape, which was their makeshift cold air returns. In our bedroom, they had decided that extra insulation was necessary, and put up 1" styrofoam on the south and east walls (not sure why you would need extra insulation on the south wall, but that's just me). In order to accommodate this, they had pulled the outlets out of the wall, and renailed them into the studs. After flipping just about every circuit in the box (of course the one I needed was the one that wasn't marked), I was able to turn off the power, remove the nails they had them attached with, and reposition them into the sockets. Notice the lovely job they did in making them fit. The drywall needs to be replaced, but since both outlets will be pretty hidden from view, that will be a project for another day. I am very excited to say that my door has trim! Well it has trim on the inside - the hallway trim is still a project in the works.

Frozen flowers & Game Night!

Photo 217 - April 27

The flowers coming up early are now being punished by late spring frost. So far, it doesn't look like mine have been damaged too much, but the tulips were pretty unhappy this morning to have been frozen as hard as they were.

I also received an invitation from Mike to come up to Belgium for "Game Night" tonight. I missed the last one because of the last night of bowling, and figured it wouldn't be a bad thing to take a Friday night away from painting to go hang out for a while. It was a good time, and I'm glad I went. The Battle of the Sexes game never ended - I think we did entirely too much talking and not enough playing.

After my walk

Photo 216 - April 26

Trinka and I try to take a walk every morning. I feel like I owe her a little bit of quality exercise, seeing as she gets to spend the rest of the day in the house waiting for me to come home. After we got home today I got to take a couple minutes to sit at the top of the walkway and enjoy my flowers. The wide angle lens gives it an interesting perspective.

Inside projects continue

Photo 215 - April 25

I had really ambitious thoughts today - thinking I could make some dinner, varnish my boards and start painting Kayla's room. But when I got into Kayla's room, the walls required tons more spackling than I realized they needed. I'm sure if I ask Kayla, her response will be that she didn't do all that damage...which to a point is probably correct. Hopefully all the dents and dings are now filled in. I will sand them down tomorrow and hopefully get to start painting. The woodwork is also on target for its third coat of varnish tomorrow, so Friday is looking promising for installing them in our bedroom. I'm seeing progress! And what a sweet sight it is.

Tired of close ups yet?

Photo 214 - April 24

I need to find some new subject matter soon. As much as I like playing with the macro, it doesn't make for diverse content. Hopefully something photoworthy (is that even a word?) will appear and I'll have something interesting to share. Either that, or it will be more house pictures. Besides the fact that I ran what feels like half of a tree into my finger last night while I was staining the bedroom baseboards, progress continues to be made. The first coat of varnish went on them tonight, so they should be ready to go into place on Friday. Furniture for the weekend? That is a very scary thought.

Looking for the perfect shot

Photo 213 - April 23

Still practicing my macro skills to get two more accompanying shots to my dandelion and dewdrop pictures. If I could get enough people to visit this blog, I could have a vote...but that's probably not going to happen, so I'll have to just make people look and give me their opinion. It's easy to see what my world revolves around nowadays...working on the house and taking pictures to use to decorate the house. At least I'm seeing progress!

And a big Happy Birthday to Laura today!

On to our bedroom

Photo 212 - April 22

Now that the living room is pretty much complete (except for wall decor), our bedroom has been the latest in my projects. This weekend I got the painting finished, cold air return in, register installed, door trim cut to fit and baseboards and quarter round cut as far as I can until the new closet doors are in. My resident expert was down this afternoon helping me (thanks, Jeff!), so I can press on and get this room done. I am holding out high hopes that maybe the rest of the bedroom furniture can find its way back in by the weekend.

Yup that's us

Photo 211 - April 21

This was a very thoughtful gift from James' friend, Becca. She gave it to us for Christmas a couple years ago, and right now I have it on the windowsill in the kitchen. There is a lot of creativity in her family, and I really love this gift. It even has different colors to interchange in case I don't like the green. I might have to change it up and see if I can relocate it to my new living room.

Decorating

Photo 210 - April 20

As part of my redecorating program, I'm hoping to replace some of the old stuff that has been hanging on the wall probably since we moved in. I've done some looking around, and so far, I haven't come up with anything I really like. So I've decided to practice my macro photography, and pick out some of the ones I like the best and use those as my artwork. I have a couple that I really like so far, and now I'm practicing to find a couple more.

Bleeding Heart

Photo 209 - April 19

When I was a little, the arrival of the bleeding hearts meant that many of them would be torn apart and stories would be told - something about rabbits, and slippers... Mine aren't quite open all the way yet, but still make a nice picture.

Cardinals

Photo 208 - April 18

I was very excited this morning to find the nest that had been built inside my clematis bush full of a bird, and even more excited when that bird turned out to be a momma cardinal. I had seen the male cardinal in the bush over the weekend, and found the empty nest yesterday, but today there was the momma, sitting on a couple of eggs. Unfortunately, but the time I got home from work, the nest had been raided and one of the eggs had been thrown to the ground and broken. One more egg is left, but I have a feeling that it will also end up on the ground. The same thing happened last year, but I never saw what birds had built the nest and didn't know what they were. A pair of robins ended up moving in after that, and laid their eggs and had their babies. I'm not sure who the culprit is that is raiding the nest - another animal that wants the eggs, or another bird that wants the nest. I just know I'm pretty sad to think that we won't have any cardinal babies.

Dewdrops

Photo 207 - April 17

The frost on the grass melted into the dewdrops on the grass...and wow - do they have something to show through the macro lens. I think as the summer goes on there will be a lot of close up pics on the blog.

Let there be light

Photo 206 - April 16

I love taking pictures in the dark - especially since I've had six months to practice with my camera and I have a better handle on the settings. I put my tripod base for my camera in a really safe place before I met Dale in Hawaii, and of course now I cannot find it, so using my tripod was a little bit of a challenge. But it seemed to work pretty well, and I didn't seem to have any camera shake. Now to get rid of the camera flare...one more project to work on.

Treasures

Photo 205 - April 15

Cleaning out your house does allow you to unearth all kinds of things you didn't know or remember you had. I almost threw this one away, but then thought that maybe I'd hold on to it until Dale gets home and see if he'd like it for his boat.

It's a dandelion

Photo 204 - April 14

I seriously dislike dandelions, and dig up every one I find in the lawn or my flower gardens. Until today, I didn't realize how interesting they really are. And the ants really like them, too. I'm not sure what exactly that ant is standing on. It kind of looks like he's floating above it.




And Dale asked me if I could put a yellow ribbon on his charter sign, since someone else will be using his slip while he's gone, and he'd like to give people a clue as to why he's not running charters this year. Hopefully this ribbon will weather well. If not, I have a big roll of ribbon, so replacements can be handled.

Yes, that's the sun

Photo 203 - April 13

Believe it or not, that is definitely the sun. This morning was pretty strange - heavy frost and heavy fog. I'm not sure I've seen that combination before, or definitely not in this volume. Trinka was actually wet when we came home from walking this morning.

Morning frost

Photo 202 - April 12

The temperature here has been pretty up and down. Just when you think that spring is coming, we get a little taste of the cold again. I'm seriously waiting for one more snowfall before the weather stays consistently warm. This morning we had a pretty good coating of frost on the grass. It's amazing how pretty the frost looks close up. It sure didn't look this nice when I was scraping it off of my windshield.

Updating our bedroom

Photo 201 - April 11

My house overhaul includes an update to our bedroom. Today my quilt arrived, to complement the pillow shams that showed up on the doorstep yesterday. I am very excited to put this into the bedroom. In my shopping, I found it hard to find something that wasn't some kind of polyester and snagged easily. So hopefully this cotton quilt will have a long life and wear well. I'm just as excited to repaint! Teal and aqua are some of my very favorite colors, and there are a lot of shades included in the quilt.

Wow! Trinka has lots of friends!

Photo 200 - April 10

I'm thinking that Trinka has been having more visitors than I have! We have been watching Zeeva for the last couple of days, while her family is out of town for the Easter holidays. She's a little bit more Trinka's size, and they play together pretty well most of the time. Zeeva isn't the least bit interested in Trinka's ball, but wants to chase after her while she's fetching it.

Tiny flowers

Photo 199 - April 9

Sometimes I am so very surprised to see what I see after taking pictures with my macro lens. This is one of my very favorite flowers. It has successfully spread throughout my tiered garden and into the gardens on the other side of the sidewalk. These little blue flowers look much brighter when not viewed so close up - and they are probably less than 1/4 inch across. And when the flowers fall off the plants, they look just like they are now - except they become little cut outs deposited wherever they land.

Happy Easter!

Photo 198 - April 8

After the stripping of the altar on Maundy Thursday and the blackness of Good Friday, I love the altar on Easter Sunday. It's hard to not realize that something special has happened...He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

And what is Easter without the traditional Easter egg hunt at Grandma's? Even though the kids are getting big, it was still way too much fun watching them run around looking. Even after Jesse scoped out 13 eggs prior to the actual hunt, by the time he had to find them, he had a total of one in his bag. Good thing he had a little help and they were all collected before the weather got too nasty.