Finished?

Wow, today is the official start of fall and it is also the first official day that our beloved house is on the market. What happened between that photo of delicious strawberries in early jun and now? Lots! Nate is moving on to a new job in Groton, CT and Fionna and I will be following along shortly. We spent the summer finishing things up around the house after taking a break of sorts (if you call taking care of Fionna a break). Nate finished the windows in the dining room and I finally made curtains!

Nate also painted and put new engineered floor in what used to be the sport-themed gues bedroom office. Its still a guest bedroom and office, but its a little less sport themed and a little less blue.

The master bath was mostly finished, but we put the finishing touches on and Nate built an awesome built-in storage unit for our towels and sheets. This room is awesome, it is a superb combination of modern conveniences and victorian charm. I will miss it. It sucks, because this was one of the last rooms we did, and I feel like we didn't get a lot of time to enjoy the two person shower and heated travertine floors. Oh well, in the next house, I am insisting on a similar level of deluxe master bath.

We painted the front entryway from dark red, to a lighter more neutral light beige, and de-cluttered and did all those stupid things you have to do to make your house sale-able.

Looking back over the last almost 4 years, we've done a lot to this house and it in turn gave us a great place to live. I can say at least for myself, that as many changes as we made to the house, living here changed me too. We learned so much and made so many great memories here. This house has been around for 130 years, some people were born here, many people lived here, some people died here. My only hope is that who ever lives here next is good to the house and makes it a home. It was our first home and we lived here.

...Now I just have to figure out what to do with the headstones in the basement....

The end? Or just the beginning of the next chapter....

Fruit

We are in full strawberry season here. Here's our current daily haul from the patch. It's more than we can eat, which means crisps and freezing galore for the next couple of weeks! Eating these as you pick them straight from the patch makes you a believer in B. Kingsolver's arguments. It's worth waiting for these to be in season locally, the difference between these and the red tasteless things from South America you get in February is just huge. The early's are producing now, the ever-blooming are still flowering (I think, they're pretty mixed together these days). We probably have another two weeks of the early's left, so it's lots of strawberries on cereal!
Our patch has continued to expand itself this year. It has completely taken over the front garden and has made it all the way around the apple and has even made it into the side garden by the neighbors driveway. I guess the strawberries and hops will fight it out. All of that jungle low greenery around the privet and hosta is all strawberry plants. At some point we'll have to draw the line at their expansion and probably this year we have to do the "kill the mothers" thing. Strawberries supposedly have a three year cycle, and this is year two, so we're supposed to dig the older plants (mothers) and leave the new offspring (daughters). Speaking of the apple tree, I have apples!
I've thinned the apples out so that there's no more than two apples per cluster and trying to keep on top of the aphids. The espalier tree's haven't started producing yet, but I'm hoping they two will be producing next year.

Spring is Here?

It snowed on my very first Mother's day! Admittedly, it was not a lot of snow, but still! May 10th and there's snow? Fortunately, we've also has some great weather thrown in there so spring did sprung, but then it kind of took a break for a few days. All of our tulips have come and mostly gone, they were beautiful. Last fall Nate and I planted tons (100's?) of tulips bulbs - fancy ones from Breck's and regular, but still colorful ones from Lowe's. A lot of them came up and our front and side gardens looked awesome

Check out the cool green tulips!

Fionna is crawling around like crazy - she really gets around. She's very adept at pulling herself into a standing position and a few weeks ago she started clapping her hands. She loves the dogs and wants to climb up on them. Let's just say that they don't like it as much as she does, but they are being very good and they tolerate a lot of abuse. Here she is eating an Easter card from Memere - she loves eating paper!

Pulling herself up on the windowsill is fun, but it really tires her out!

The Tax Man Cometh

Well, here it is, already March and I'm feeling myself begin to thaw from winter. After Christmas, Nate and I were able to get our stuff together enough to purchase a small vacation house up in Keene, NY. Its a small A-frame, just enough for us and the dogs to enjoy the High Peaks and rent it out for others to enjoy when we are not there.

It was completely stressful trying to get everything together for closing, but now that its done, I think we can both say that its so great to own a place up there. We got to XC ski in Mount Van Hoevenberg (http://www.whiteface.com/activities/xc.php), which was quite enjoyable, and just this past weekend I took the dogs to hike a trail around Marcy Field. We are looking forward to spring and doing some hiking and maybe doing some landscaping projects up there.

On another note, I did our taxes last weekend. Ouch. Turns out Fionna wasn't as big of a deduction as I had hoped and who knew that there was no Border Collie deduction? Either way, a large bill is looming in our future. So the impetus is to save money before April 15th. I'm from Worcester, MA where "frugal" (read: cheap) is pretty much a birth right so I think we can do this. Plus frugal living is green living which is something I try to do anyway, but this puts my money where my mouth is.

1) We disconnected DirecTV. This was hard for me, since I love TV, but its close to $100/mo. and Fionna doesn't need to watch it anyway. Internet TV from here on out. Luckily for me, Nate is really good at getting all that kind of stuff up and running.

2) We're not using our dryer. Yes folks - we bought a drying rack and as we speak it is set up by the fire quietly drying our clothes. I'm not sure how much money this will actually save, but I hear that the dryer is one of the largest energy hogs in the home. We shall see, I suppose.

3) Our "heat" is set at 57. Good-bye 60! See above - we're using our wood stove (mix of wood and envi blocks). Cold? Put on a sweater, grab a dog or a cat. At least we're moving out of heating season!

4) Smarter grocery shopping. We're pretty smart about grocery shopping as it is. And some things I will not sacrifice - eating meat from our local farm, buying local whenever I can (dairy, eggs, CSA veggies) that can be more expensive, but I would much rather give my money to other NYS businesses that employ people from NY and pay taxes in NY. For other things though - store brands (store brand cereal can save you almost $2.00 a box), eight o'clock coffee beans (it was good enough in grad school), no more soda, and coupons if I can use them. Even the dogs may not be getting the top shelf dog food anymore. I guess everyone has to sacrifice.

We already carpool (with the Jetta TDI which gets pretty awesome gas milage (38-40 mpg), and pretty much everything Fionna owns is from craigslist, but I'm sure we'll find other ways to save money so when the tax man cometh - we will be ready.