We haven’t had enough sun lately to keep the house up there warm — it was only about 65° inside yesterday — so Andy had to build a fire. (He likes it warm!)
He also had to clear two trees from our old driveway:
In the morning Andy and I had listened to The Holly and the Ivy while we opened our presents, then when he left I went back to my massive uncluttering job. I enjoyed doing it, and it was even better when I found three pictures that we thought we had lost. I took them years ago, when we still had an outside garden up on the land. We were standing outside it when a bean plant disappeared down a hole, in front of our very eyes. Andy grabbed a stake and went after the gopher, but he didn’t have any luck.
I still laugh every time I think of it. That was about the time we decided to give up on the outside garden and build a greenhouse instead. It wasn’t as pretty as the garden, but at least the animals didn’t reap all the rewards of our hard work.
Yes, it was a great day here. Hope yours was too.
December 26, 2014
Yesterday was a day of celebration for a friend on his fiftieth wedding anniversary and I got to meet some friends from way back when too. We had a grand lunch and then in the evening another friend with three of his nephews, little tykes landed up for a visit and some great fun at home. All in all a good day. Today was a little relaxed but with a bit of drama. Amazon sent me a telephone text message confirming that a parcel has been successfully delivered at my residence when it had not. I promptly got on to their website and informed them and an hour later a sheepish delivery man landed up apologising for the goof up and made the delivery.
Amazon is great. When we need to make a purchase we always check there first.
. . . and look how green all the trees were!
i can’t believe your decluttering is so “massive” . . . you don’t seem to be the type to accumulate a lot of stuff to me! i always have thought of you as a bit of a minimalist too!
we had a wonderful christmas . . . and surprising too. i’ll email you about it. xo 😀
I’m glad your Christmas was great — I’m looking forward to hearing about it. 🙂
I tend to accumulate books, audio and video cassettes (more in the past now that technology has moved on), DVDs, etc. and articles I don’t want to take the time to read but want to save for later. The books and other media are easy to pass on to someone else. The articles take more time to deal with. And finding years of old health care stuff was soul-satisfying. That took a long time because there was so much of it, and I needed to make sure any personal information was safely disposed of. From now on I’ll just save my records for two years.
Once I received a bill for something done four years before. I had proof that it had been paid and thought it was ridiculous to have to deal with it, but when I phoned the gal said no problem. The person who had been doing the billing had made a complete mess of it, so they were just sending out bills to everyone to see how people responded, just forget it. What a hoot!
Not “What a hoot!”. What a pain for everyone dealing with that. But there wasn’t anything they could do, but send the same could bills out again.
edit–send the same OLD bills…
I saw an asparagus in our garden disappear. I’ve only seen an actual gopher once that was on TOP of the ground. They are the only menace here & are destructive to the lawns. Between drought & gophers most people on our mesa here in town have gravel & rock yards. At our cabin at 10,400 ft. we get moles which eat the roots & destroys the plant.
With the drought it makes sense to get rid of lawns. Not to mention lawns take a lot of work. It makes me tired just to think of it. 🙂
a couple of questions on your pictures:
what are those two fan-like things on top of the stove?
what is a gropher? and why would they just pull a bean plant into their hidey hole, below ground?
other than that great pictures of real life besides the continuing saga of burnt-out trees a-falling down 🙂
my Christmas day interesting…still not sure I will do it that way again.
The two gadgets are ecofans. They push the air into the room rather than let it rise to the ceiling. They’re clever and help a lot.
Gophers live underground in tunnels, and they get their food from below.
According to Wikipedia:
“Gophers eat earthworms, grubs, plant roots, shrubs and other vegetables such as carrots, lettuce, radishes, and any other vegetables with juice. Some species are considered agricultural pests. The resulting destruction of plant life will then leave the area a stretch of denuded dirt.” Needless to say, gardeners don’t like them!
okay, thanks for the answers
We had a great day having lunch with friends. Lots of talking and eating.
I’m glad!
I’m glad it was a great day!!!! I’d love to have a greenhouse, but instead I have “garden boxes” – with protection from animals below, above, and on the sides. Do you still have a greenhouse?
We still have the shell of it. It was destroyed in the fire.
It was nice. This post has some pictures of it.
I looked at your greenhouse & garden there. Amazing.
Please explain this… You told me you are an Enneagram type 6. You didn’t believe your baby would survive the first year; you knew all that you spent & worked on “up there” might be destroyed by a forest fire…
How can you be Cheerful? You should be a pessimist, but you’ve worked on being cheerful since childhood. What did you do? I want to do that.
I need to add you had a healthy baby, not one that was sick & could die.
Guess what! I feel very Cheerful now because I’m getting lots done. That’s the protestant work ethic in me. I’m killing 2 birds with 1 stone. Feel good/ work done.
BHB,
I’ve always realized life is short. Andy and I don’t have that much time left, so I can worry about that or appreciate what I have now and make the most of it. And, yes, getting involved in things we care about is the way to go. Yay, work ethic! If that’s what it takes. I’m an artist at heart, and a lot of people wouldn’t call that real, productive work. I was labeled lazy as a kid, but it’s what works for me.
One of my favorite quotes is Thoreau’s,
I’ve spent a lot of time studying Psychosynthesis, the Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, NLP, etc. It’s my hobby, and a glorious one at that. Yay, finding what we love in life, whatever that turns out to be!