Hellooooooooooooooo!

It's astonishing to realize that we are now closer to Thanksgiving and the holidays than we are to the summer sun and the world in bloom. The truth is, I've been so busy I've hardly had time to look up much less to sit down and write. When school started, I wasn't ready AT ALL! I felt like summer had only lasted two weeks and I was neither finished with the work the yard/garden needed nor caught up on the rest required to go back into a world full of spiteful politics, malicious backstabbing, disingenuous declarations and rampant disregard. I speak, of course, of high school; although the current state of the country is clearly a reflection of that most hormonal and uncertain of times... Apparently, it is not only the nation's teenagers that need a good slap upside the head!...        But let's get back to me, shall we?  :-) My mom went in for surgery on her hand last winter and after having been released from what was basically an outpatient procedure, she went home and got a staff infection they had to admit her to the hospital and put her in isolation on an IV antibiotic drip to cure. It was a really scary time for me. She had lost her mom before she turned 40 and I was NOT prepared to lose her before turning 50 (which I will not do until Dec. 2009 for the record!). She will probably never have all the energy she used to and I am AT LAST able to keep pace with her while window shopping but I don't think we're going to lose her any time soon and that's good enough for me. A few months into her recovery, she decided it was time to put her condo up for sale. She's been talking about that on and off for a few years but she wants to travel, the economy isn't going to get better any time soon and she just didn't want to have to worry about money any longer. So we sorted through (my brother, sister in-law and I) and packed up over 30 years of family history, farmed a lot of it out, painted and cleaned the condo and then moved her into a friend's house where we all think she will be very happy for an indefinite period of time. The condo closed on the 30th of Sept. which brought to a close the months of work that goes into a change/move of that nature. Among the pieces that came to me were two steamer trunks that my grandfather (Mom's dad) purchased in 1929 to take Grandma to Norway with. They looked AWFUL!!! It took weeks for me to strip them (my GOD that stuff is toxic), sand them, prime them, paint them (the leather and metal bindings got different types of black paint and the brass carpet-style tacks and mounting edges I did in a liquid gold leaf) put vintage hotel stickers on them and then seal them so we can move them into the living room to use the large one as an end-table and the short one (they have the same footprint but are different heights) as a coffee table in the living room we're turning into a library.  Whilst doing that "little project" I was also using a couple pallets of cinder block we had sitting over by our shed to build a retaining wall around a raised garden bed that sits in the back corner of our lot, overlooked by the deck and our great-room windows. It's only about 16-18" high (the blocks are about 6 X 12 X 6) which is two blocks and a capstone high; and the wall is in a semi-circle roughly 15' long. But I had to dig out some of the lawn and level the earth to do it and I had to cart the blocks from one side of the house around the front and to the backside on the other end of the lot, about 4-5 blocks at a time because neither my yellow wagon nor I were up to carrying any more than that in one trip. Those suckers are heavy!!! I also painted the door to our pantry with green chalkboard paint because it's easier to make a list ON the pantry of what I'm out of INSIDE of it (let's face it, you really only keep track of what your out of WHEN it runs out!) then to try to keep and maintain a list on paper somewhere I may or may not remember it.  Along with all of that was the usual maintenance of house, lawn and garden which I added to by yanking out a bunch of the rosebushes and restructuring the beds to suit my taste rather than the taste of the gal who planted all of it (it's neither her house nor her yard anymore and if she wanted to keep the roses she should have just taken them) much to the chagrin of my neighbor who was very close to the former owners and spent a lot of time gardening with them. THERE WERE 40 ROSE BUSHES... 40!!!!!I'm just NOT that girl! So, in one of the beds, I used the very, very, very old "Old Blue" wheelbarrow as a planter and it really looks rather quaint! Oh, and in August I had my 30th high school reunion and reconnected with some VERY old and dear friends I've known since grade school who are both fairly local to where Hubby and I live. Which turned out to be a good thing cause I ended up needing oral surgery the beginning of September and I was able to ask one of them to drive me to and fro. I'm in the process of planning a dinner party so that Lynn and I can satisfy Dave's desire to ask Kelly on a "date" (Lynn and I don't think they're very well suited to each other but I told her I'm PERFECTLY happy to invite everyone over and then "watch the floor show"!) as they are both single and he is clearly "Looking"!It's funny that so much time has passed but it feels like virtually no time at all. Dave was really good to me after a couple of nasty breakups in my past and at one time we decided we would get married if we were both still single in our 40's. NO... I'm in love with my husband and Dave respects that. And Lynn, well she's one of my favorite people on the planet and always has been. She's just good people. I'm lucky to have both of them back in my life. Luna is fat and happy although I'm not sure his IQ will EVER get beyond 1 or 2 digits! I still think about Molly daily... and sometimes I cry. But my kids are all in the ground together (did I tell you I lost HRH Penelope?) and I'm making the stone for it myself so I can say what I want to to honor and remember them... I've created what I refer to as "The Bird Sanctuary" in the back yard and  bird watching soothes and calms me even though Blue Jay's screams are the finger nails on chalkboard of the bird world and I have crows tapping on the skylights in both upstairs bathrooms... I will be, over the course of a year or so, adding other types of bird feeders than what I have now (and I am SO thankful for "it won't sprout into more things that need weeding" bird food) as well as bird houses and even squirrel feeders so that they don't have to hang upside down by their feet from the limbs of the butterfly bush in an effort to steal the peanuts out of the birds feed stations... and maybe, I'm ready to make myself available to adopt another bird into the house as well. The garbage needs to go out and I have to get to the post-office so I have to get my ass in gear here..... My heart and my love to you all and congrats on becoming a "chin mom" Katmac, it is a wholehearted commitment to life in a small, very soft, furry body. ;-)  Janine