Present To Self

  I decided that since we are travelling so much this fall, that I had better get a start on Christmas shopping.  One year we went on a cruise right before Thanksgiving, and I swore I would never do that again.  Never say never.  We have all sorts of places to go before the holidays and I wouldn't miss any of them.  But, it is going to require some planning, and so I have started prowling my favorite stores, and investigating on the web.  Boxes are already arriving at our house, pretty much daily, and I'm sure our mailman is wondering what's going on here. 

 

Of course, once I start looking around, I manage to find all sorts of things that would be just perfect for ME!  I confess that this happens every year.  I see all sorts of wonderful things that I didn't know were out there, and I buy myself a "treat".  I have been looking to replace my hand mixer for a while now.  A small dilemma, since the one that we have is still working after 46 years.  It was a wedding gift, and a testimony to the Sunbeam Company that manufactured it.  I had looked in the stores at the new ones there on the shelf, and found that they are all pretty big and clunky, and wasn't happy to commit the extra shelf space.  And, there is a certain amount of Yankee Guilt in giving up something that still works and does the job.

 

But, then I saw this model, with a nifty little stand that will sit very nicely on my lazy Susan under my cabinet, and not roll around and tangle its cord with the other appliances that reside there.  Had to have it.  I found one online for a very reasonable price and my other favorite thing-Free Postage!  Present for ME!  Oddly, it too is a Sunbeam....Hope it lasts 46 years!

That Took Long Enough To Figure Out!

We have lived in our home thirty-seven years now.  When we moved in everything worked, plumbing, electricity, water, which was what we needed at the time, what with four kiddies aged 5 and under.  The person who did the decorating before we got there really had a liking for bright colors (shiny orange and red on some of the woodwork), and big loud wallpaper patterns.  Job one was getting the black and white striped sanitas off the walls in the front hall, and on from there.

We worked our way through the house, up and down, in and out, until it looks pretty civilized, and we enjoy living here.  Unfortunately, there are several rooms looking like they should be done over, but as I get older, it seems more daunting, and I am reluctant to look too closely at the flaws. 

There are several corners which have been ignored--the interior of the upstairs bathroom closet, the back stairway (whose woodwork remains an unfortunate beach cabana blue) and the dark red linoleum tiles in the downstairs bathroom closet.  All these places have doors that close...

One area that we always lamented was our front porch.  It had been enclosed before we got the house, with 18 windows wrapping around from the north side, across the front, and all the way down the south side of the house.  They were painted shut for years, a good air lock for cold winters, but making an oven-like space in the summers.  MT chipped out a few windows each year so that we could ventilate out there, but the porch's flat roof always leaked, and the paint on the ceiling was peeling away in little squares.

A couple of summers back, MT decided it would be the year of the porch.  Actually, years of the porch.  He rebuilt all the windows, with sash weights so that now they open, and easily, I might add.  He has made screens for most of the windows, and spent countless hours tracking down leaks and tarring the roof, so that when he scraped and painted, it would stay nice.  He replaced the old light fixture with a new lighted ceiling fan, and painted up the wicker furniture that we had brought down from the ancestral home more years ago than I like to think about.  Finally, we don't feel like we are walking our visitors through the garage when they come to our house.

We've always enjoyed eating dinner out on our little back deck in the summers, but this year due to weather conditions, there were many mosquitoes.  We were getting chewed up out there, and one night we decided to eat on the front porch.  We put the overhead fan on, and brought out a couple of candles, and suddenly have a new favorite sitting place.  Just goes to show--there's always something new in your life, even if you've been in the same old place for many years...