Two Foxes

Annie is home for Spring Break!! To greet her, Lee Ann positioned her life sized fox in the hallway with a cheery welcome message.

The fox was a winter project for Lee Ann. She started with a clothing display frame from the Tack Trunk, formed a body around it, dressed the creature in hunt attire (boots and all) and finally sewed the head. He turned out to be a striking fellow, and I think Annie has finally met her match.

Driving Back The Wilderness

This stump-dotted landscape once was a jungle of honeysuckle. Through the fall and winter, armed with a pruning saw, I massacred the bushes and piled the brush, and yesterday Lee Ann and I hauled 11 pickup loads to the compost lot. Voila.

I have grass seeded most of this area, and am spading up a little square of it near the old swingset for a vegetable garden.

The Good News Is...

I had a day off Monday, so I went to the tower house to put a heater in the basement so the pipes won't freeze this winter (I decided running the furnace there all winter is too costly).

• The good news is, I found a nifty radiator-like heater at Home Depot for $39.
• The bad news is, when I got to the Tower House I saw that the guy who has been (intermittently) cutting up my downed tree still doesn't have the driveway cleared.
• The good news is, I can drive through the front yard and around to the side of the house to park - so I did that, parked, and put in the heater.
• The bad news is, when I got back in the red truck to leave, I got it stuck in the yard. We had had a deluge of rain the last few days which turned the soil under the grass to jello.
• The good news is, I had shingles and carpet scraps to stick under the truck drive tires to gain traction.
• The bad news is, the shingles and carpet scraps didn't do a darn bit of good and encouraged me to keep trying, which dug the tires in deeper.
• The good news is, I have another truck at the Tower House - my old white truck - and some nylon rope which I could use to pull the red truck out of the mud.
• The bad news is, the ropes snapped rather than pulling the red truck free.
• The good news is, I found a couple of very stout tow straps to replace the ropes.
• The bad news is, pulling with the tow straps didn't do a darn bit of good and encouraged me to keep trying, which dug the tires of the white truck into the mud.
• The good news is...well, there isn't any good news at this point.
• The bad news is, I have two stuck trucks, I am soaking wet and splattered with mud, I have TWO STUCK TRUCKS, Lee Ann is at work, and it's getting dark.
• The good news is, I am a AAA member, and have a cell phone, so I called for road service.
• The bad news is, when the wrecker arrived, the driver took one look and said he couldn't get his truck close enough (without getting stuck himself) for his cable to reach either truck - and AAA disallowed the call since being stuck in the middle of your own yard is not a road service situation.
• The good news is, the driver called his friends, who (four of them total) got both trucks unstuck and they only wanted $20 a head for their help.

Reflections...

Here is our glamorous pier mirror, the latest in our string of recent antique purchases, hanging in the ballroom. That about does in our furniture budget for this year, and the house still looks half empty.

Beautiful Weather!

We are in the middle of Indian Summer here, and it has been wonderful. We are approaching our color peak, and are enjoying the confluence of warm, dry weather and dazzling leaves while it lasts.

New Antique

We went kind of crazy in the past week and bought some nice antique furniture for our still-half-empty house. This first piece is a jelly cupboard that we picked up at the Tri-State Antique Show in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. [The jelly cupboard is in the "keeping room" off the kitchen, which is in transition with the leather couch gone to OSU and the TV relocated to the garret.] The next is a cherry dresser from a dealer at the annual Lebanon antique show [now in the pink bedroom with the canopy bed] and the last is a mahogany table from another dealer at that same Lebanon show [placed strategically in the entry hall]. It sure looks different around here.

New Microwave

My big job this weekend was to install the above-the-range microwave. This has been pending for some time, but it forced my hand that Annie is taking our countertop microwave to college.

We had a recirculating vent hood (top picture) in place, left over from some previous kitchen incarnation and not a match for any of the current appliances. First step was to remove this, then put in a receptacle for the microwave plug. Then I had to build a little filler box for the space between the microwave and soffit, and when that was done I was able to hang the microwave itself.

I thought our old microwave was an okay size, but holy cow - compared to that the new one is the size of an aircraft hangar inside.