Oh, the holidays!

The holidays rolled through here like a giant snowball headed off a mountainside. It takes a minute to get the big boy started but once it gets going, then gains momentum, no one can get out of it's way. And it's always this time of year that I start thinking about how next year "It's all going to be different." Next year, I will have everything become a magical, winter wonderland. I will have my upstairs transformed into Christmas world with decorated trees in every corner. I will have a return of my weird, homemade Santa dummy who stands behind the door to scare the bejebus out of people entering Christmas world not expecting to have Santa get the jump on them. And speaking of tricks. I do believe we need more Christmas pranks. I'm going to work on that too. And then I want to extend a light show out into the Fuzzy Border area of our farm so that we can all go walking in a winter wonderland. And my family is getting a handmade gift! And I want to start working more toward world peace. How's that for a big dream?  I love Christmas and that is a big statement for me as I use to hate it. Can you believe that I actually hated Christmas? Why...you may ask yourself.. why would anyone hate Christmas? Well I think that attitude has it's root in my teen years when my mother gave me a Monopoly game. I knew it was all over when I tore into that package and came up with a board game. My mother could create Christmas magic like nobody's business and she gave me Monopoly and the magic was dead to me. And when I got a house and family of my own, I tried but feel that I miserably failed my children in the magic department. My grandmother Stevens started in September getting her Christmas program organized. And Mom would shop for gifts and put them in lay away and be ready to wow us all on Christmas morning and all I did was worry about spending too much money.  How dumb is that? I could have been pranking and making homemade crafts with those kids and now they are grown. Two years ago, I made a weird santa with a milk jug, a cut out magazine face and Goodwill red clothes...a cheap thrill Santa. And when the kids came around the door and saw him looking over their shoulder....Christmas mayhem! Ok, as long as there is life there is hope so a plan is now being hatched. Christmas 2010 is going to rock their world. Hide and watch!

Snow Days

It has snowed. Just days away from Christmas and we have snow on the ground...not a lot.... just enough to set the mood for the holidays. And speaking of setting the mood, you know how people set things out to decorate for the holidays? I set out a collection of figurines on the window sill. There was a group of 2 snowman figurines which went with three ceramic buildings, a group of 3 campfire figurines and a figurine of 2 kids dragging home a Christmas tree. Then my husband decided he had to open the window to adjust the antenna wire.  He put everything back in the window. Days later I noticed something was different. When I looked closer, I found the above pictured scene. A boy and girl sit by a campfire with their pet dog. They appear to be in a reflective mood.  The campfire burns before them. And across the flames appear another boy and girl with their old friend Frosty. They are dragging him on a sled to the flames. Frosty looks like he is trying to resist certain diseaster! This scene, created inadvertantly by my husband, gives Christmas decor a whole new meaning.

It snowed Monday. I woke to a snowy whitewash covering everything. It melted by midday but served as a reminder that winter is marching our way. Today the wind blew snow sideways. Wind scares me more than almost anything Mother Nature can send our way...though I'm not a big fan of fire either. A tree branch blew across my path as I headed down 14th street to the Nichol house. It was one of those Wizard of Oz moments. Two huge trees across the street from the Lincoln building were making a deep cracking - crunching sound. I was clearing ice off the steps at the front of the building. The wind was in my face and I kept hearing this sound that I at first thought was something clanging in the wind. So I stopped sweeping just to figure out what I was hearing. I have a hard time describing the sound correctly. Imagine an ice cube that cracks in your glass. Now record the sound and alter the sound to go real deep. I really expected that at any moment the tree would explode! And here's the weird thing, after all the cold and ice and blowing tree parts, as I was walking back into the building, I found myself grinning about it all and thinking "Not interested in living in Florida!"

p.s. back to Wizard of Oz moments..... I saw a huge, beautiful rainbow this morning.... it has been a weird day!

Nichol Street Experience - flue work

This week I re-hung the entry foyer door at the Nichol Street house. At some point in time, someone had taken it down for some reason that is beyond me. There must have been 50 nails, screws, staples, curtain hangers, and thumb tacks attached to the door.Weather stripping bits and pieces clung to the edges. I scraped them off. Now the door will need to be scraped, sanded, primed and painted.

When I began work on this house back in January of 2009, the man from the gas company told me that he would go ahead and turn on the gas since no one was living in the house but in the event that it ever has to be lit again, we would need a cover over the opening to the pilot light on the gas water heater. Furthermore, the exhaust pipe from the water heater would need to be hooked up correctly. It was just a smaller pipe laying in a bigger pipe. So we had gas heat last winter. Over the summer, Phil had the gas turned off to save money. As the weather got cooler, I couldn't help but remind Phil that we needed to get the water heater situation covered. I figured this was his job since I have no idea about any of this and he's the guy. The weather continued to cool down. Then one afternoon, just as I was leaving the house around 4pm, Philip showed up with some flue pipes. He was heading to the basement to fix the flue. Getting the flue fixed was one of those pivotal points in this construction project. We will need heat soon when we start the painting. And heat's needed for the joint compound to dry. Things were looking good. I went home to start dinner. Around 7 pm I called Phil to see how much longer he would be. He was at the hardware store. "I needed a part. I have everything together so I will just let you hook it all up tomorrow." He offered. I was furious! Thanks a lot. I guess if I want a job done, I will have to do it myself!
Another part of me knows that if I don't get this together, it will be another month before he makes it back over here. I could wait it out but I want to be finished with this place!
The next morning, I took a few tools and the 4inch to 3inch conversion pipe to the basement and began tinkering with the flue system. I had no idea what I was doing except that Phil told me that I would need to cut the 3inch pipe to fit into the 4inch pipe just so. I crammed the new pipe into the hole in the wall and discovered that the pipe in the wall was only an illusion as it crumbled into a pile of rust on the floor. I scraped out the rust in the hole and tried my best to wedge the new pipe into the hole. Long story short, the crumbled up pipe in the included pictures is that new pipe. Anyway, 2 days, 3 new pieces of flue pipe, 2 hack sawed chunks of old galvanized pipe and 3 trips to the hardware store, the flue pipes were assembled and in place. A job that Phil said should have taken "15 minutes."
Now for the pilot light cover. The original cover had disappeared a long time ago so all I knew to do was make a new cover. As I looked into the pilot light area, I noticed a pile of papers crammed in around the burn area. So I pulled the papers out and threw them in a pile on the floor. A woman's face caught my eye. She had pretty blue eyes and blond hair all arranged in a nice, up swept, going to the prom - hairdo. A man was standing behind her with his private part laying on her head, in that pretty pile of hair, like some kind of fancy Easter bonnet. The woman looked off into the distance as if she had something heavy on her mind. I laughed. "For goodness sakes" I said to myself. "Nothing seems to be working right today." I fixed the cover then scraped up the mess - Easter bonnet and all and threw it in the trash. I promise.
I am almost finished with the spackling. I have the entry foyer and the kitchen to finish. I will probably have to do a bit more in the dining room as that too is a long story. It feels like I am in the home stretch. I won't say too much as it is always more than I figure on.

A walk through the garden

I am not that good with modern technology. I am trying to download or upload a 3 minute video I took of my garden. I believe this was made in September. The garden was grown in celebration of my son - Harrison's wedding in July to Brittany Barnett. By September there was a battle of weeds to be fought. They were the victor and I was the vanquished. So as you take the tour, please note that though there are weeds here and there, flowers also flourished. I will also admit that when I planned the garden, I underestimated the boom factor of flowers. I play garden like a child plays house. I put the zinnia too close to the path and didn't allow for the boom factor and by September, the zinnias have hidden the path. I find that gardening is a learning / evolutionary process. And it doesn't hurt to have a little patience.

P.S. Due to technical difficulties, I am so far unable to upload or download my video. Check back later.

Update: the video I have is 182 MB and this is apparently larger than allowed by Blogger. I will try to figure another way and hopefully without signing up for a you tube account.

Another Update: I was able to post the walk through my garden on my facebook page. My friends can watch it there.

Happy Halloween ya'll

I was in the fourth grade, on the school bus, heading home. Birdie Hensley, a fellow classmate, was looking at a monster movie magazine in the seat beside me. I tried hard not to look. Sort of like driving past a horrible car crash. You know you don't want to see but you can't not look. I guess she noticed my reluctance and kept shoving the magazine toward me. She finally said "You're afraid to look!" Yes, she nailed the truth on the head but I said "I'm not afraid, I'm just not that interested in monsters." And so she set that monster magazine right in my lap. I sat petrified - as if the very paper this stuff was printed on was eating the flesh from my legs!

There was the wolf man who I always thought was a dumb idea for a horror figure. A guy changing into a wild dog...please. And same goes for vampires. A man changing into a bat? Vampires suck! Two colossal mistakes for monsters. I'm just not a fan of the changing forms concept for horror....which I guess is basically the whole premise behind horror. And, oh yeah, that creature from the black lagoon. He just looks like a guy in a rubber suit to me. Yet, all those guys gave me (4th grade Sarah) the creeps! But the creepiest one of all was the mummy. Something about that character, coming back from the dead and all. And me growing up in the south -confused about religion and knowing that coming back from the dead was, according to a lot of reliable adults that I knew, possible. Of course this was all before I understood the concept of spiritual versus physical death. The idea of walking mummies scared me!

So that afternoon after the fateful bus ride, I was walking back from feeding the pigs in the back holler. Suddenly I got that weird feeling one gets when they think someone is watching them. I kept looking over my shoulder, with flashbacks to that magazine in my lap, and walking a little faster. I was so sure that I had seen something. Was it a mummy? Wasn't there something white back there? Was that a sound? Like a moan? Was it a mummy moan?

I ran to the house as fast as I could. Mom was there and she could fend off any of those ugly creeps! I felt better just being around her.

Anyways, I lay in bed the other night thinking about that day. Why did those stupid books trigger such fear in me? My rational mind knew they were just actors in costumes but that irrational mind of mine forgot all that and ran with the fear.Why?

As I lay there in the dark thinking "why" something else occurred to me. The vampire could turn into a bat and fly to any known spot. And the werewolf could run as fast as a wolf, so he could get about pretty fast too. Yet the mummy would take a step and (long pause) take another step. Take a step (long pause) take another step. On and on. I could have walked quickly from the pig pen to the wood shed, sat down, knit an afghan for my grandmother, finished off my Christmas card list and then walked over the back porch to compose a 3 act opera. Mummy would just be getting over the rise of the hill. Mummies move slow. I guess it's the being dead a long time that slows 'em down. And in the movies, these guys are actually catching flesh and blood people. How slow does one healthy human being have to be to get caught by a mummy?

I lay in bed laughing about this! Then it occurred to me that maybe that mummy from my childhood is still after me. Maybe he has been walking that one step, (long pause) another step (long pause) for over 45 years and several states. Maybe as I am laying here in bed having a good laugh about dumb, slow mummies, he has made it all the way from North Carolina - because mummies never quit and he is right at my window right now. And for an instant, I could have sworn that I heard something..............

Hang Ten - again

Hello Blog Fans! Well here we are at the top of the stairway. For the longest time, I contemplated just how to get up high enough to finish off the ceilings at the top of the stairs. As fate would have it, when the need became necessary, a way to do it developed. Let me bring you up to date on the Nichol Street Experience (my art project for 2009), all the upstairs rooms are ready to paint. I will be doing a final check before the painting begins but right now, that part is ready. The entire stairwell will be ready to paint in two more working days. I framed in the back door and cleaned up the wall around the door. I learned that I am not good at installing panelling. This is OK news to me because I've got enough to do. I had planned to put panelling over the rough wall around the back door area but it just wasn't working. Trust me, when I get finished with the house I will do a before and after blog feature. Anyway, Barnaby has been coming by to help me with some of the work. One day he went to Taco Bell for lunch. When he returned and saw me up on the ladder in the stairwell he almost lost it! "Mom, what are you doing?" I explained that the ladder isn't going anywhere and that I just think of surfing videos. He says "They land in water."