Summer Days

Last Wednesday, I found one of those cute downloadable lists that you see floating around the internet. This one was entitled " Summer Bucket List." Its still sitting here on my desk. Not a single thing written down. It gives me heart palpitations. Ron saw it sitting on my desk and said, " Lets sit down and brainstorm and come up with some fun things to do this summer!"
Neither one of us sat down and did it because we were painting. I don't know if we are just addicted to work or what, but I still can't think of anything to do except to do some from of work. I think I just like working best. I have a stack of library books to read, but they are still sitting in the place I put them after I got home. Unread. I am thinking of just taking them back so I don't have them sitting there shouting every time I walk by.

In the evenings after we get our work done outside we sit in the living room. I hook or bind rugs and Ron makes trees. He did his first show downtown in May. Its too hot right now to do any more shows but hopefully he will start up again in September. We both really enjoyed that show and look forward to doing it again. Here is a couple of trees he finished this weekend.

My pictures don't really do this one justice. It is a cascading tree down this piece of wood. The wood is a a bit of driftwood that our son Ben found on his last camping trip. Since Ben has been making knives, he has learned all of these incredible ways to make wood hard. This piece of wood was almost like paper and after Ben took it and put it into this thing he made. It turned this soft wood into something like hard wood, almost like petrified.

Ron's next  tree is one I think you would see on top of a granite mountain that has been hit over and over by lighting. Up in the Sierras when we have been hiking, we have seen trees like this.

Its a very pleasant thing that we do in the evenings. Its so hot right now, it is nice to have things to keep our hands busy.

As Ron always says, " Life is an experiment." So we continue experimenting, trying things that work and some that don't. All of it is good for learning and for growing. I hope you have a wonderful day.

~Kim~

“All my girlhood I always planned to do something big…something constructive. It’s queer what ambitious dreams a girl has when she is young. I thought I would sing before big audiences or paint lovely pictures or write a splendid book. I always had that feeling in me of wanting to do something worth while. And just think, Laura…now I am eighty and I have not painted nor written nor sung.”

“But you’ve done lots of things, Grandma. You’ve baked bread…and pieced quilts…and taken care of your children.”

Old Abbie Deal patted the young girl’s hand. “Well…well…out of the mouths of babes. That’s just it, Laura, I’ve only baked bread and pieced quilts and taken care of children. But some women have to, don’t they?...But I’ve dreamed dreams, Laura. All the time I was cooking and patching and washing, I dreamed dreams. And I think I dreamed them into the children…and the children are carrying them out...doing all the things I wanted to and couldn’t.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A Lantern in Her Hand

"---I think all mothers dream dreams into their children---I know I have and it is more exciting to see those dreams becoming realities in my own children's lives than it would have ever been in mine." K.

A Update

I told you I would be back to give you a little before and after picture. Its really hard to take a picture of an empty room and see any changes. Here is goes.

Before

After

Granite is white. It looks so clean and so much better. I will shampoo the carpets tomorrow and let it dry.
Then I will start moving the furniture in the loft and all of the books in here while we paint the loft. Its going to be a long process, but it feels so nice to get things cleaned and reorganized. It may be the most used area in the house. Its where the grand children want to go when they are here and then there are the boys friends. It has so much traffic. With four of us painting on Saturday it went pretty fast.

 I had to get the down stairs all cleaned and mopped and all of the laundry done today, because I just can't stand when my house is a mess with so much clutter upstairs. I wanted to tell you a cute story though.
When Kessie was here, we were sitting outside and like we always do we were talking about stars and planets. I was talking about Jupiter and Mars and the moon. Our two year old grand daughter was sitting in my lap listening to our conversation. She asked me, " Where is Jupatee?" ( Ju-pa-tee ) So now, the planet Jupiter will forever be known to me as Jupatee.

I hope you have a great week. Thank you so much for stopping by.

~Kim~

“I think that love is more like a light that you carry. At first childish happiness keeps it lighted and after that romance. Then motherhood lights it and then duty . . . and maybe after that sorrow. You wouldn't think that sorrow could be a light, would you, dearie? But it can. And then after that, service lights it. Yes. . . . I think that is what love is to a woman . . . a lantern in her hand.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A Lantern in Her Hand

I love Bess Streeter Aldrich.

Finally! Painting begins!

Today is the day. After months of trying to figure out what color of paint. Gypsum is the color I finally decided on and I hope it is the color in my mind. Here are the before pictures. This is William's old bedroom.

I never noticed how many angles these upstairs rooms have. Then I noticed that every room in the house has angles.

Here is the next part we will paint it is the part over the stairs.

The ceilings are about 15 feet. I rarely got on those shelves that you see that are so dusty now, because I shake so bad getting on them to clean them It takes me a bit of time to get over my fear of heights and I spend days psyching myself up. I just don't know who will paint this. Which means Ron.

I think with any job its the starting. There will be lots and lots of cleaning out. We have lived here now 15 years. Longer than I have ever lived in any house in my entire life. The boys are going to get their man cave.
I guess the lesson here is when you are the two youngest and you had to put up with the most from the older ones, you end up getting to have lots of room to yourselves.

Here are the painting things we had to buy. We haven't painted in 15 years either. So everything had to be new.

Hopefully I will get to show you after pictures sooner than later. Oh one more thing this made me laugh yesterday. I guess that now Bigfoots making themselves known. If the park service makes an announcement.

Anyway have a great Saturday,
~Kim~

“Looking backward through life, one can see the points of change like great locks through which one glides on a flood wave, so smoothly, on such irresistible power that one is hardly aware of any movement. But life is never the same again. One has gone through the lock and lives on a new level.”
― Mary O'Hara, Green Grass of Wyoming

 

Summer Days

 

I hope  you are having a great first week of June. Its hot here like it is in July or August. We have had triple degree temps every day and it should last until next week. The people next door have pigs. I think I worry about them more than the people who own them. I know I am out in the heat because I feel better when it is hot. I know weird right? I have been working in the flowerbeds this week. I have been getting my porch all summerfied. I know not a word, but I like it. Summerfied. That is things like putting floaty things in the swimming pool, washing porch cushions, cleaning tables and lawn chairs. Making new summer pillows. Then occasionally putting my feet in the water of the pool to check if it is warm enough for me.

 

It pretty much looks like this around here now. Or it will by the end of next week. One of the things I like to do on hot afternoons is listen to audio books. This week it has been Wind in the Willows.  One of my favorite readers on Librivox is a man named Adrian Praetzelis. I enjoy listening to a book called
John Muir-My First Summer in the Sierra. He talks about how summer starts in California in May and doesn't end until November. He said, as John Steinbeck did that people come to California expecting it to rain like the East Coast and they are shocked by the lack of rain. Yesterday I read this:

MONTH
 MAY 2016..............0.55 
 NORMAL MAY............0.18
 DEPARTURE FROM NRML...0.37  
 PERCENT OF NORMAL....305.6

 Can you see that for us we are above normal.

Have you been keeping up with the news? Its been a bad week for animals and people. When I was a kid, and since I spent the better part of my days with animals. I loved the day school was out because I would spend my hot summer days observing what was around me. One of the things that drove me crazy was me a country kid verses kids who visited that were city kids. No clue that a Momma cow with a calf would knock you to kingdom come if you tried to pet its calf. Nor that if you walk up on a horse from behind your head might be removed from your shoulders in a blink of an eye. My grandpa said once he saw a horse kick a chickens head off when the chicken walked behind it.

I think there needs to be classes somewhere about how to treat wild animals. Wild animals will eat you or hurt you. Having a cell phone in your hand is not protection from wild beasts. I don't understand the mentality anymore.

 Summer is here. School is out. I love it when school is out. Don't you? I hear refrains of Alice Cooper's School's out forever in my mind. I remember those days, when the biggest thing on my to do list was getting a better tan. When I was a kid, on the last day of school my birth Mom would have a celebration planned when I got off that school bus for the last time. She would have kept the car that day. In the days when we only had one car. (My Mom didn't have her own car until I was in fifth grade.) She would take us to Woolworth's. We could pick out puzzles, coloring books and then every other Saturday afternoon, we might borrow my Grandmother's car and we would go to visit the bookmobile.

 My favorite tree, was a very old fig tree. Its limbs were huge and every where in that tree were rooms. Only ones I could see. I think  there is something nice about summer and climbing a tree and sitting up above the ground. Smelling the hot, dusty smell of the leaves. The cool feel of the bark and the sound of the wind thorough the leaves and the murmur
that goes on from the other trees that aren't as popular. I do think trees grow better with attention.

I would read the Happy Hollisters. Did anyone out there read them besides me? They were written by someone named Jerry West, which I think was close to the same as Carolyn Keene and the Nancy Drew days. I still have my whole set. I still love them. The terrible bad kid named Joey Brill still sends shivers down my spine. But really he wasn't that bad as I go and read them again.

Summer. I love the days when life seems to slow down. When the sky is blue and I remember the things that make me happy about summer. Oh and my birth Mom, on the first day of school, she would sit on the end of the porch and cry because she would miss us so much when we were gone. The first eleven years of my life were perfect. I only hope that someday my kids will remember their summers like I remembered mine. I wish my grand kids, had dirt roads to roam, time to watch frogs snap bugs out of the air, frog tongues really are long. To never be in a hurry and time to imagine and dream and read books on the limbs of trees.

Happy June!

~Kim~

“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine