Plans

Wow you guys.  I have been a horrible blogger.  Never even posted the second half of our big vacation!  Well, that will have to wait a bit longer, because right now I am at work waiting for queries to run and reports to download, and need to do something that won't add additional strain to my CPU: blogging!
I have a LOT of things in progress and just itching to get started at home.  Big and small, crafty and home-improvement-y, take a look:

Things I am currently actually in the middle of and plan to finish in the near future:
 - Crocheted shoes (which I made into boots) at the request of Mindy for Norah - just need to add buttons!  Think Paul will be willing to stop by JoAnn Fabrics on our way home this afternoon?
 UPDATE:  I finished Norah's boots!  See for yourself:

 - A gift for another soon-to-arrive baby, not saying what in case Kelly reads this :-)
 - Hang already-framed pictures in the living room

Projects I have mostly prepped for and am hoping to actually do in the not-too-distant future, like maybe during a few of my days off around Christmas:
 - Painting the vanity in the 2nd bathroom to cover up the hideous white-streaked-with-gold fake marble laimate
 - Painting the ceiling (blue) and walls (green) of the 2nd bedroom/future nursery
 - Painting the bookcase and side table that live in the 2nd bedroom
 - Using leftover paint samples to paint the canvas for some cheap coordinating art for the 2nd bedroom
 - Re-pot some houseplants that are in sore need of it and find a new spot for the peace lily, which is looking sad and hasn't bloomed in ages
 - Make some cool canned things to give away as Christmas presents
 - Bake various cookies (same purpose as previous bullet)
 - Get started on that knit onesie pattern I bought on Etsy

Other things I want to do soon, like before the holidays:
 - Decorate inside and out for the holidays
 - Purchase a living tree to be our Christmas tree for this and the next few years, until it gets too big.  This project also includes finding/creating an appropriately decorative pot for the tree to live in.  Maybe something big and square that I could cover to look like a Christmas present, so my tree would look like it is sitting on top of the biggest present under it?  That would be cool.

Other projects I have in mind but probably won't get to until next year (hopefully early next year!):
 - Make a tufted upholstered headboard for the 2nd bedroom
 - Re-upholster the diningroom chairs
 - Attempt the more-complicated re-upholstering of the awesome retro chair we got from Poppy.  It is currently covered with dark orange plasticy fake leather that is cracked and old-looking.  The color is actually perfect, but I want to go with something new and maybe slightly more modern-looking.
 - Finally sort through and get rid of a lot of the old junk in our basement to make way for inevitable future accumulation

What about you?  What non-every-day things are on your actual and hopeful to-do lists?

So Far

We're on vacation!

So far, our road trip has taken us from home, where we made salsa to use up veggies from the garden the day before we left:

 to Harriman, NY, where we hiked to the top of a mountain:

to NYC, where we visited some museums, Central Park, and Times Square:

to Boston, where we hiked the Freedom Trail all day and topped off our best day yet by meeting for dinner and drinks with Wes, Stephen, and Shaina:

Next we headed to Fort Ticonderoga, where we slept in a decent hotel for the first time, even though we checked out less than 12 hours after we checked in!  The Fort was great, but my favorite part was the King's Garden:

And today we arrived in Colchester, a suburb north of Burlington, near Lake Champlain.  The trip hear was cool, from Defiance Mountain overlooking Fort Ticonderoga, to some amazing views of the Vermont countryside with distant mountains and picture-perfect clouds:

We'll be here by Lake Champlain for our longest stretch yet, 3 nights, before heading to Montreal for 4 nights.  After that we'll spend one night somewhere along the way home.  For now, we're planning to take it very easy tomorrow and give our feet a much-needed rest by renting a canoe for the day and just drifting lazily around the lake.

Garden is planted!

Before we start in on the garden, observe my de-barked dog barking:


Isn't she cute?  She still only does it in that part of the yard, when I'm not too close by.  She was outside with me all day while I planted the rest of the garden, from about 10:00 AM until 3:00 or so, and she barked on and off for the first hour or so, then forgot about it for most of the day, then barked a few more times in the afternoon, then curled up in a ball and napped until I took her inside.

On to gardening!  It took me all day Saturday, but the garden is now completely planted.  Nothing left for me to do but water, weed, and wait...and maybe put up a fence if the bunnies get to be a nuisance.  And hopefully harvest, you know, eventually.

Speaking of harvesting, one of the tomatoes has two flowers, one of the pepper plants has a few fruits starting to form, and we are going to need to use some basil every week if we want to keep it from flowering! In the slide show you can see the lemon basil I planted already had flowers, so I cut all those off, and we'll wait a bit to harvest from that one.



In other news, this was the week of the mail-order shopping deliveries: we got the slipcovers we ordered from Bemz for our Ikea Tullsta chairs; I got the sandals I ordered: Teva Women's Mandalyn Ola Wedge Flip Flop, but I'm sending them back because they're too small; I got a replacement for my Nook because the page-turn button cracked on mine (it's a common problem), and I'm shipping the other one back; and I sold my copy of The Lost Symbol on Amazon now that I and everyone who wanted to borrow it is done. That was my first time ever selling anything on Amazon, and it was pretty great! I priced it the cheapest of the "like new" used copies, and it sold in less than 24 hours! I have the shipping label printed and it's boxed up and ready to ship, so tomorrow after work I will be stopping at the post office to ship the book and return my sandals, and at UPS to ship back my cracked Nook. Then there will be no more major purchases for us for a while!

Hopefully by next weekend there will be one or two sprouts from the seeds I planted too - wildflowers, lavender, hyssop, sunflowers, leeks, spinach, and pole beans. The only thing with no edible properties are the wildflowers, but if those come up (the seed packet is 2 years old) I will cut them and have fresh flowers inside all the time.

So chapter 1 of our gardening adventure is over...hopefully some interesting and encouraging growth will be visible over the next few weeks!

Juno Speaks

While I was gardening yesterday evening, I had Juno in her harness attached to our clothesline in the backyard so she could hang out outside with me.  I've been using this setup frequently since last Saturday, and she's getting used to it and obviously enjoys it -- she even figures out how to unwind herself pretty quickly if she gets her leash wrapped around a pole.  It's a good setup.

You should also know, if you don't already, that Juno is debarked.  She already was when we got her - the puppy mill that raised her and bred her must have done it to all their dogs that they weren't planning to sell.  It means they surgically cut her vocal cords, and many people consider it cruel.  Most dogs can still bark afterwards, just much more softly -- it sounds like a hoarse or whispered bark.  Juno has never made a peep, so we assumed she couldn't, and we've always wondered if her inability to bark was part of the reason for her extreme timidity.

Well, last night, Juno remembered how to bark.  She was on the opposite side of the yard from me, with her nose pointed challengingly towards the side yard and the street, barking like it was something she did every day.  I could hear her clearly from the garden, but it wasn't until I looked at her and saw her barking that I realized what it was.  She stopped when I said "Juno!  You're barking!" but she started up again a few minutes later, and again after Paul came out to hear for himself.

She was back to her usual silent self all evening, but this morning I clipped her to the clothesline again while I watered the tomatoes, and after a few minutes she went back to the same spot, pointed her nose in the same direction, and practiced barking some more!  This time I noticed that, while she's barking, her tail actually wags from side to side like a normal dog's -- something else we really haven't ever seen her do.  A few months ago when she met a friendly bulldog I thought I saw her tail wag one time, but since it stopped immediately I couldn't be sure.  So now all at once, it seems our little Juno has figured out how to wag her tail and bark.

Now that she's maybe starting to come out of her shell a bit, we will see more of the Juno we saw on Easter Sunday and I can get some more pictures like this one, where she isn't curled up into a sad and pathetic little ball!

I'm hoping to get a picture or video of her barking tomorrow evening or Saturday while I'm out planting the rest of our garden, so stay tuned for that, and for the next garden update I hope to post on Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon!

Gardening!

Yesterday and today, I planted our garden!

We plan to buy more plants this Tuesday to fill in the rest of the vast amount of space, but I bought what you see here on Friday evening with my mom and Han, and planted some Saturday morning and the rest Sunday afternoon.

Here's what we have so far:
4 tomatoes, all different varieties
1 Sweet golden bell pepper
1 Jalapeno pepper
2 chives: 1 plain, 1 garlic
1 Oriental cucumber that will have long, skinny fruit
1 yellow summer squash
1 zucchini, bush variety
6 basil: 3 sweet, 1 big-leaf, 1 Thai sweet, and 1 unknown from my indoor pot
2 cilantro, but the smaller one was eaten to the ground so maybe only 1 cilantro


We plan to get on Tuesday:
3 more basil to fill in that square
probably more cilantro
more herbs in general
4-6 more peppers including more bells in different colors and some chili peppers like the kind Paul uses in our green curry
4-8 more tomatoes to fill in that square and probably another square
1-2 pumpkin vines to take up space
a few varieties of beans

Paul's mom got us a rhubarb plant, so that will be cool next year (we will plant it now, but won't be able to harvest it until next year). If this year goes well, I also want to try asparagus next year, and maybe strawberries.

I also photographed the front of our house since the rosebushes are going crazy, the clematis has devoured our lamp post but isn't blooming yet, and you can see the Gladiolas Paul's mom gave me coming up around the base of the lamp post.

In the lower left are two Blue Rocket Lupin that my mom got as a gift and didn't have a place to plant - they look about identical to the day I planted them, but Mom tells me they will get big spikes of flowers eventually. I hope so!

I am so so excited about our garden, so hopefully that will motivate me to keep track of it on here so I can look back next year and have a record of what worked and what didn't! Any suggestions for what else to plant? Will you take some veggies from us if we have too much to handle in a few months?