DrMrNin calls this ‘bumpkinish’. I call it energy efficient.

Once again it’s a windy day here in the bay. A perfect day blow dry my washing in the fresh northerly wind. I grew up with a washing line back in England and having one here now in my own back garden makes our house feel that little bit more like a home. Plus it’s a lot cheaper and better for my clothes than throwing them in the tumble drier xx

Is that a word? Probably not. But back to the point- LOOK WHAT WE DID! Of course, that’s a ‘we’ in the Royal Sense as it’s all the work of The Good Doctor really. Isn’t he clever? It’s nice to think that if every grocery store in the whole wide world stopped selling food, we would still be able to eat. I like that xx

This past weekend a friend of ours came up to visit from Southern California. We spent most of Saturday helping him clear out a storage locker that he’s been wasting money on for the past couple of years, and piled everything into a truck and drove it all up to our house. We’re now going to store the remainder of his stuff in our shed for the next six months in exchange for some of his unwanted furniture, hurrah! A great deal all round, I feel. We’ve now acquired amongst other things an armchair and a set of bookcases which means that I can finally start making up the front room of the house which up to now has been used for our own storage. By default all of this rearranging actually forces us to sort the rest of the house out too and it’s all excellent timing as my parents are coming back for another visit in three weeks, this time with my middle sister in tow as well. So that’s my target to work towards. I have big plans for a house transformation. Hopefully.

Oh yes, DrG also let me play with his Lumix camera DAN. GER. OUS. It’s the Panasonic sister of the Leica D-Lux 4 that I’ve been lusting after since its announcement last February, yet I also want to at some point upgrade my dSLR.  Yes, I used the Lumix to take the photo above. Yes I liked it and yes, I imagine I would like the D-Lux 4 even more. So now the question is, do I break down and divert my hard-saved savings towards aquiring the pocket-sized Leica, or do I keep on saving up and aim toward getting the Canon 5D Mk II/Nikon D700? Hmmmm…..

What better way to indulge in healthy eating than to eat what we’ve grown ourselves. This year ‘we’ (i.e. DrMrNin) planted a selection of kitchen herbs, squash, cucumbers, beans and tomatoes. All organic of course. These past few weeks we have been overrun with squash. It’s going to be the tomatoes coming in next. All six plants of them. I’d better start getting my freezer empty…

If ever there was a job position that required owning a lot of stuff as a prerequisite, I would be the ideal candidate to apply. I have an amazing talent for accumulating things and I mean *anything* from grocery bags, to hairbands, to craft supplies, pens, books and coats. Really, if you thought my dolly collection was bad (19 Cabbage Patch Kids, 22 Blythes, 4 Moofs, 2 Pippas, Peteena and a Wonderfrog….plus a couple of others, and counting) that’s really nothing compared to my clothes and shoes collection. And bags too now that we come to mention it. This also has probably a lot to do with why it’s also taking such a long time to unpack (but I am also taking things deliberately slowly). Tonight’s project: my shoes.

Remember last year’s ongoing saga of Project Bedroom that I wrote about here, here and here? Well it never did get finished entirely, but then I emigrated and the problem more or less sorted itself out. But all my stuff followed with me so some might argue that there is the potential for disaster to strike all over again. However, I AM DETERMINED NOT TO LET THAT HAPPEN as now that I have a house throughout which to spread my things instead of just one room, there is space for everything… we even have spare capacity and I very much like having it this way. So no, the ‘trouble ahead’ does not refer to the potential for a version of Project Bedroom to explode over the entire house.  It relates to the fact that in the process of trying to arrange my most prized footwear on a special rack where they can be displayed in their full prettinesss (temporary location, I might add, this whole room is very much a WIP), I realised that I am missing at least a couple of rather special pairs of shoes. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

No box shall remain unturned until they can be reunited with their friends. And the outcome of this? Bedroom Carnage (but only temporary – see previous paragraph).

There seems to be quite a lot of interest in what the nursery is going to look like, and if I’m perfectly honest with you I have to admit that we really haven’t given it a lot of thought. Up until last night that is, after I had read the comments. Until now, the only thing we had really taken into consideration was which room should be for the baby, and really that was only spurned on by the fact that we were getting a guest bed delivered, so it was pretty much an artifact of the whole which room should be the guest room decision.

But a quick glance at the calendar yesterday evening revealed that I’m rapidly approaching the seven month mark, and recent news that a good friend’s sister just gave birth five weeks early has now sent me into a bit of a blind panic upon the sudden realisation that potentially in a few short weeks our lives are about to become very different and that we’re going to have to start buying stuff. (Congrats to ArcticScot’s sister, by the way! Excellent news!)

So last night I started looking at furniture. And we made a baby registry too as some super sweet lovely friends of ours are going to be throwing us a baby shower in a couple of weeks, squee. But back to the nursery. All I know so far is that I would like something traditional with proper wooden furniture; a sturdy crib that’s not going to keel over when the baby is a toddler and starts jumping around when it wakes up in the morning. And possibly one of those cribs that converts in later years into a proper bed which will make it more of an investment (headboards are so expensive, we learned the other day). The room is by no means huge (9 ft x 11 ft; but it’s the exact same layout as the guest bedroom which happily fits a queensize bed) and it has a nice big window and a built in closet and is perfectly adequate for a little person to live in with a couple of pieces of carefully chosen furniture. This is sort of how I have it envisioned in my head right now (using the nifty virtual planner feature over at the Baby’s Dream website):

Now all we have to do is find some furniture to go in it.

*****

By the way, our furnace is now fixed, hurrah! Turns out it was down to a history of poor maintenance and so needed to be rewired and given a good cleaning. Not really anything we could have done ourselves so out came the chequebook and bye bye more money. We were kind of hoping that it would be completely broken so we could claim a whole new (and more energy-efficient) one on the Home Warranty, but at the end of the day, an old heating system that works is better than no heating at all.