We looked at three houses today.  I fell in love with the second of the three.

We are looking for a ranch style house (one floor), with a full basement, and an attached two-car garage.  We would like a master bedroom suite and two or possibly three additional bedrooms, with at least two full bathrooms.  It would be nice if the basement is finished, but that isn’t required.  We are looking at houses in a range of size from 1500-2400 square feet. We hope to find a house with a much smaller lawn, to limit the mowing.

The house I liked today has a master bed room at one end of a hall, and the other two bedrooms were on the opposite side of the house.  It’s very sunny.  The basement is not completely finished, but it has a full bath.  It would make an exceptional quilting studio, as long as I could do the stairs.  The back yard is tiny, and the landscaping is phenomenal!  There’s a pocket lawn surrounded by a mulched area with an amazing assortment of trees.  My mother would have loved this house!  I hope we will have the chance to bid on it.

This branch in the office is the only place that was damaged on the first floor.  There are at least three more branches in the attic.

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This was no little tree.  The tree service is working on it now, so that we can get the roof covered.  What you can’t see is the star magnolia that has been obliterated by the tree.

We have a fourteen-foot stake-bed truck that we inherited when our company closed.  It has a snow plow,  which has been very necessary this year with a minimum of 14″ of snow in the past month.  Unfortunately, the plow wouldn’t lift.   My surgery got in the way, or we would have had it repaired early in the month.  I finally pushed DH into the work necessary to make it possible to drive to the repair shop.  They discovered it wasn’t the plow motor that was the problem, but a very expensive computer part in the truck.  <sigh>  We brought it home, and DH spent an afternoon moving snow.  When he came in he told me that we will need to make another appointment to have a brake line repaired.  It’s always something.  We have a drive that is more than 240 feet to the garage.  We can’t do without it.  The good thing is, when we sell the house, we will have a truck with a recently repaired snow plow to sell, too!  🙂

My great-great-grand nephew Henry, who is about seven months old, had open-heart surgery on Friday, and has come through it like a champ!  He was in pain last night, which upset the entire family, but the docs have worked out his pain meds, and he’s doing much better, today.

Today,  DH took me to see “Monuments Men,” which was a very interesting movie.  I didn’t realize that we were able to prevent the theft of so much artwork, and return a great deal of it to the previous owners.  My understanding is that there are still thousands of paintings lost, but many of them, including those by Picasso, were burned, and others were taken by the Russians, so we won’t ever have a clear picture of what might yet be found.

I am healing nicely from my hernia surgery.  I’m going to return to exercise on Monday, which will be just three weeks and two days after the surgery.  The doc said I could do the footwork of the cardio session, but nothing that might pull on my stitches.  I need to get back to exercise or I’ll be a puddle very shortly!

I need to think of something spectacular to do for DH for Valentine’s Day!  He has been an amazing nurse, and good companion, seeing me through the past three weeks.  He deserves special recognition.

And, I’m ready for Spring.  My mind is full of cold frames, and seeds and plant catalogs.  I don’t need another month of snow, thank you very much.  Everyone….THINK POSITIVE!

EVERYONE has chores.  Sometimes I make lists of what needs to be done to encourage myself to get through them.  There are days I don’t do any chores, and days when I regret I didn’t do my chores! I’m adjusting to being retired, and have learned that having goals helps me to keep to a healthy schedule.

Having said that, I can tell you that I have finally put away the Halloween decorations, and re-organized those for Thanksgiving.  I think there might be another box of Thanksgiving decorations in the basement, but I’m happy with what is already out.

This Fall I made table runners from my batik stash.  The colors were warm golds and reds and tans.  I made one for each of my sisters and one for myself.  I have a lovely little mum, a grapevine pumpkin and a Tiffany-style lamp sitting on mine. I am trying to enjoy it as thoroughly as possible, because I’ll have to pack it up at the end of the week. (And I don’t have one made for Christmas!)

Can you hear me making lists of chores in my head???

Our family has an amazing number of birthdays spread out over September and October!

Dear Husband and I were invited to celebrate our birthdays with My-Sister-The-Nurse and her children and grandchildren.  It was wonderful to be wrapped up in that big group of people, from newborn to almost eighty years old.  We had a lovely meal, and watched the most brazen squirrel steal the ornamental corn on the table just outside the sliding glass doors.  I love being with my extended family.

This weekend, just two weeks later, My-Sister-The-Nurse, and DH and I drove down to visit with Frankie, and her husband and daughters.  It was My-Niece-The-Artist’s birthday on Saturday, and DH’s birthday is this coming Saturday, so we were celebrating, once more.

We drove down  on Friday,  getting in around 2:00 EST.  We sat quietly for a bit, not quite snoozing, until Frankie arrived and we had the chance to chat. Dinner at home, and we all called it a day early to be ready for a full Saturday.

We had a lovely breakfast that was sorta like a  “You Pick Two…..or Three or Five” before heading off for a tour at the Kokomo Opalescent Glass factory.  This factory is the oldest art glass factory in the United States.  They supply Tiffany with glass, and their glass is in the Smithsonian and the White House.   The tour was fabulous.  We saw molten glass moved by men from the furnace to a roller, where sheets of glass were created.  A glass artist was working on blowing a small bowl, and we saw most of that process.  We walked through a HUGE room of stored sheets of glass in every color, and of course, it reminded me of a quilter’s stash.  The end of the tour brought us to the area where artists were making items for sale in the gift shop.  One of the women gave a demonstration of bead making, and we each carried away a piece of the glass we saw being made at the start of the tour.  It was just fascinating!  I brought home two hand-blown teardrop-shaped ornaments for our Christmas tree.

We went to dinner at an Irish pub to celebrate birthdays, and visited with friends who came to see our artist.  We got to spend some time with our artist’s sister, too, which was very nice.  I spent a lot of time holding Mickey, their very old grey and white tiger cat, who needed to be kept warm.   I really appreciated getting my cat fix, since we have been pet-less for some years now.

Sunday morning we were treated to a fabulous breakfast before it was time for us to head home.  Frankie makes the best egg casseroles.  Her hubby put together Michigan peaches and blueberries, and strawberries for us, and there was an amazing variety of bread: rye, wheat, cinnamon, cobblestones, apple cider donuts, and on, and on.  We could have rolled home! lol

I’m not getting across to you that it was really the time with family that was so wonderful.  Yes, the tour was interesting, and yes the meals are always fabulous, but the time spent with our family was just the best!  It was really difficult to say goodbye.

Thank you, dear sister, for a wonderful visit!  Your home is lovely, and you are an amazing hostess. Big Hugsssssssssss to you.  Take good care of yourself, hmm?

I hate to say it, but we’re not kids any more. <sigh>  At least that’s true of our innards.  We’ve known for years that there is a growing list of things we can no longer eat in terms of fast food.  I love K-F-C Extra Krispy chicken!  Every two years or so I hunt down one of their shops and get several chicken breasts and bring them home with coleslaw and a biscuit.  Once I’ve eaten them, I know why I don’t do it regularly.  My body just thinks it’s a bad idea nevermind what my tongue is saying.  Gyros are on that list, too, and a lot of other things.

We are also at the point where we COULD order one meal and share it.  We both like the same things, and frequently when we have gone out to eat, I have thought, “I wish I’d ordered that…” when I hear what  DH chooses.  We could just as easily order two meals with the intent of taking half of each home with us, so we didn’t have to cook the next day either.

I’m aware that we need to be eating “dinner” earlier in the day, and need to change my cooking habits.  We also need more protein earlier in the day, which seems more difficult to accomplish.  I’ve suggested to DH that we consider making our evening meal either vegetarian or soup.   We might want to swap the wok with the crockpot.

Lots of choices to consider, decisions to make.  Whatever we do we need to have more vegetables, and fewer carbs in our diet.

I saw a recipe for butternut squash-apple-bacon soup in one of the magazines I’ve read in the past three or four weeks.  I really want to try that soup, but can’t find the recipe I planned to use.  So, today I spent some time searching for an acceptable alternative.

I had no idea how popular this soup must be!  I found one that had been designed to start a Thanksgiving celebration, filled with seasonings, lots of carrots and onion, apple, curry, and apple cider.  I had everything but the cider, or I might have tried it today.  This chef had roasted cubes of squash to give the soup a deeper flavor.

Since I couldn’t do that soup, I looked at another, and it had fresh sage (I still have some until the freeze), but the squash was cooked in the broth, rather than being roasted.  This soup was simpler to prepare.

When I don’t have apple cider, I think I’ll make Emeril Lagasse’s Butternut Squash soup.  It has the apple and bacon and butternut squash, plus  half an onion and some leek.   The only ingredient I might not have on hand every day was the leek, and I could always adjust to a little more onion.

THIS will be the fall we’ll try Butternut Squash-Apple-Bacon soup!  And I think it just might be this week.