day off, i love you.

i love having every other friday off. it is a treat. and it is so beautiful today. the doors and windows are wide open. this morning i made sauerkraut, which is currently fermenting away in my freshly scrubbed kitchen.

this daikon radish was too cute. i hope to grow some of these next year- they are handy in a lot of things.
i think you can grow them here.

looking good. this past year i have certainly caught the bug of filling up jars with stuffs. though i am glad the canning season is ova.

another hair cut

it was me! tee-hee.

this weekend is supposed to be really nice and i hope to get my bulbs planted and work some on my kitchen garden because very soon it is going to be inside time and i want to feel somewhat prepped and even a little ahead for next spring garden time. then i will/can let it go for winter and just focus on other things. but there is a bit more i want to get done until that point...
winter is coming. i can smell it out there. and if all this rain turns to snow, like it sure seems like it might, we are in for it.

mosaic

i worked on the stove in the toolshed this weekend. first i wire brushed and refinished the stove, then i started the mosaic.





now i need to grout it. it was a fun project, i want to go all the way up the wall behind it.

a long-hair no more

yesterday morning over coffee Niklas was somehow convinced to let us give him a haircut. the man needs to find a job and maybe shorter hair will help.
matty went first, in the wild chopping edward scissor hands method.

i took over with the, "well, i used to cut my own hair all the time" method.

asher came in clean-up with the, "look guys, my mom cuts my hair. let me do this".

lets just say, we are currently trying to track down the buzzers.
it's downright hot this weekend. we went and got wood with yorke yesterday at our buddies campground.
our stockpile is growing.

we have come so far.

these pictures are from this time of year four years ago. living in the bus. it sure looks cozy, but it was so cold in that bus. buses are not real well insulated.
i am thankful for our house! i still appreciate having running water on a daily basis. running water, and don't forget hot water, are so cool.



yesterday niklas cleaned both of the chimneys (toolshed and house) and put the ridge cap on the chicken coop. yeah! checking a few things off our, "get this crap done before winter, fools" list. i cleaned out the gutters (from bus life to having gutters- feels weird sometimes) and handed things and provided beer. he also caulked the collar around the toolshed chimney so it will actually keep rain from dribbling down onto the stove and making it look ancient and rusty when it is only a few years old. one of my next projects is to clean that stove up and mosaic the hearth. i am excited about that. i have four or five five-gallon buckets of tile scraps that i saved from when the house was being built.

everybody's working for the weekend

raw and dreary sunday + big fire in the woodstove means much futzing about the house with my spouse- something i love to do. i wrote in my garden journal and assessed the year and made remarks of what to try/change for next year. that was fun. i've been working in my beds and expect to have a lot of stuff prepped so i can just go ahead and plant next spring. also have ideas for a seed starting lean-to off of the back of the toolshed. Right now i need to start planting bulbs.

bread ready to go in the oven.

hubby clacks away in his nook.

i like to visit and say hello.

early a.m.

we moved our bed upstairs last night so we can start shutting off part of the house for winter. i love sleeping up under the eaves. it is so cozy. we were going to wait until we painted the trim to move stuff but since the weather has been so lovely when i get home from work i just want to be outside. we have all winter to paint indoors. you can see what the trim will look like in the above picture, that was my test area. it's called flower pot and it is the same color that is in the mud room. matty sanded down and re-finished the upstairs floor last month and it looks amazing. he loves to sand, that one does. we went to chattanooga for the weekend- a very couples get-away weekend type thing, something we have never done before. we hadn't been away together since we got married and we never had a honeymoon- so voila. we actually planned our trip, slept in a hotel room and not the back of the mini van and it was really fun. we drove down through Cherokee and the nantahayla (sp?) national forest- it was so beautiful- and of course hit up some yard sales. then we went to the aquarium and the art museum and cruised back sunday evening. and since i re-set the clock wrong when we moved stuff last night i am now up an hour earlier than i need to be and writing this rambly post. it is raining which is not my favorite type of weather when dealing with the preschoolers- stuck inside all day!!!!!!!! have a good day everyone.