Although we skipped our usual trek to the tree farm to cut our own tree and instead opted for a pre-cut one, we continued our tradition of the 12 days of Starbucks (and even stretched it to 13 14 15 days), and Abby joined in this year with her own little steamed milk. We had family visit us, and we visited family. We took both kids to the festival of lights – this time Abby actually even seemed to enjoy it, and Evelyn at least stayed awake for it. We hung mistletoe (“kissletoe”) and stood under it every chance we got.

Abby seranaded us for days with her rendition of Jingle Bells. We ate chestnuts. We drank eggnog. Evelyn seemed to enjoy her first Christmas, particularly the lights on our tree. Charles bought me another little baby bird to celebrate the addition of Evelyn to our family.

Charles also continued his tradition of buying me a garden gnome, although he insists that it was just a coincidence that he bought me a gnome last year as well, and that two years in a row does not a tradition make. While last year’s gnome (the white one below) certainly is unique, it is a gnome by name, so I think it counts. Maybe he’s just afraid that he has started something he doesn’t really want to finish. Or I guess more precisely something he’s afraid that I will never finish. My gnome count may be at three, but my “garden ornament” count is much (much) higher.

Maybe “Santa” will bring me another gnome next year. Three years in a row must make a tradition, right?

When we finally did buy the house, I mentioned this to Charles and he said “But we need the cupboard space”. He was right, and yet I still plotted the demise of those cupboards for four and a half years. I tried to figure out what we could store in the basement to lessen our kitchen storage needs, but most things that went down just came back up eventually. I tried to thin out our kitchen requirements entirely, but that too was unsuccessful. I’m pretty sure I investigated the idea of a pantry on the wall beside our bay window, but the space is not very deep so no standard pantry would fit. I finally resigned myself to waiting for whenever we fully remodel our kitchen (although functional, some parts of it ain’t pretty. Thankfully the yellow stove went away the day we moved in).

A few weeks ago, Charles mentioned a “crazy” idea he had about buying a pantry to put against the free wall and tearing down the hanging cupboards. I don’t think he had even finished his sentence before I jumped in with my response (“YES!”) and no more than an hour passed before I was online to see what I could find. The odd size of the space and the busy-ness of Christmas delayed the plan for a few weeks, but on New Years Eve we finally bought a pantry that (mostly) fit, and I woke up to banging on New Years Day as Charles hammered it together. By noon the pantry was up and secured to the wall and the cupboards were down.

And then there was LIGHT!

For the past two days, we’ve marvelled at why we didn’t do it earlier. Perhaps 2012 is the year of getting things done.

It took three or four weeks, working weekends and evenings, but we’ve truly enjoyed our fence for the past two years, so it was definitely worth the sweat and blood (yes there was blood – I was briefly banned from using a hammer).

The pictures below don’t fully capture the work, and definitely do not capture the length of our fence. But they do show some of the fruits of our labour.

(There was also the new laminate floor that Charles installed in our basement when I was about eight months pregnant. That change, however, was not initiated by us but was in response to one of our cats taking offense to the carpet that had previously covered it.)

Surprisingly, this year we decided to continue the “Tracy pregnant = start home improvements!” trend by building Abby a swingset. But, not just something that could be thrown up in a matter of a few hours. Noooooo. Little did I know when I agreed that a swingset would be a good idea, that monkey bars were also part of the package. And if you have swings and monkey bars, you need something to bridge the two – and not just a slide platform, but a little fort. With climbing wall. And sandbox. And all of this comes in two tidy cardboard packages, delivered to your door.

The instructions said it would take two people eight to ten hours to build the playset. And although I’m kind of 1.5 people right now, since we do have Abby to contend with Charles was pretty much left on his own for this one while I entertained the small child. And waved from the window occasionally. I also helped hold some pieces at one point.

Again, the pictures below do not seem to truly capture the work. At least this time there was no blood.

I would say that it probably did get finished within the sixteen to twenty hours quoted in the instructions, and with the exception of the sandbox (as we need to buy sand and figure out how to cover it so that the neighbourhood cats don’t use it as a large litter box) it has received the approval of Abby.

Wheeeeeeee.

Abby: “Ewww.”
Me: “Ugh, those are gross.”
Charles: “Cool.”

What is really scary is that they are just shells – which means that even bigger versions crawled out of them.

And are somewhere in our yard.

I sometimes think a little cabana would finish off the oasis effect nicely, but so far all we have is the shed that you can see in the picture below, which, although useful, isn’t really the same as a cabana. Although it is handy for when we want the pugs to run off some of their energy (“What’s behind the shed?!? Is there a squirrel behind the shed!?! GO GIT IT!!”)

(By the way, there’s almost never a squirrel behind the shed. But the pugs are ever hopeful.)

But while we sing the praises of our backyard all Summer, come Fall we’re humming a bit of a different tune. For a good six to eight weeks, that wonderful canopy rains down on our yard and covers it in an ocean of leaves. Sure, it’s very pretty to look at to start, but by the sixth week the raking, piling, and carting of leaves to the curb has worn out its welcome and we just want it to be over.

The pictures above were taken today. The pictures below were taken in the middle of October 2008 (the leaves fell a little early that year). The one on the left gives you a bit of a glimpse into how high our leaf piles get – and that’s only half the leaves, the other half are out of frame on the other side of our driveway. Please note that most of the trees still have their leaves at this point.

So, we clearly have a bit of a love/hate relationship with our trees. Beautiful shade all summer, weeks of back-breaking work in the Fall. Usually we try to split the work to save our backs (and sanity) but last year poor Charles had to rake all the leaves by himself, since Abby was just a few weeks old at the time and kind of attached to me 24/7. This year I figured that I could help a bit, but wasn’t sure how much we might be able to do with Abby around.

As it turns out, this year, I think we’re going to enjoy the fallen leaves a bit more.

Our house also came with an upright freezer, which was showing its age externally, but was still chugging along. It was always in our plans to get a new one, but it wasn’t high on the list since it still fulfilled the requirement of keeping things frozen. We finally got around to replacing it last week and pulled the old one out from the wall to defrost it before removal.

And found the original delivery tag still attached to the back. From 1981.

They really did make things to last back then.

For some reason, I cannot remember the name of the saw that we bought to finish off the fence – I keep wanting to call it a recirculating saw (perhaps because most of the fence was done with a circular saw?) or a retracting saw, or a reverberating saw – anything but a reciprocating saw (which is what it is).

I’m hoping that this will finally cement it in my head. And I hope that the reciprocating saw is the answer to our problem of how to trim down our massive fence posts to a reasonable height.

(Each post is 6″ thick and approximately 8.5′ tall)

]]> http://www.mayhaps.com/blog/2009/06/26/re-cip-ro-ca-ting/feed/ 0 http://www.mayhaps.com/blog/2009/05/30/how-to-make-your-husband-happy/ http://www.mayhaps.com/blog/2009/05/30/how-to-make-your-husband-happy/#comments Sat, 30 May 2009 00:36:00 +0000 Tracy http://tmayhaps.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/how-to-make-your-husband-happy Sometimes it takes something small to make someone happy. For Charles, it takes curtains (well, more accurately, window coverings). He dislikes having our house “open to the world”, even though we live on a fairly quiet street, and so as soon as the sun starts to set, the curtains/blinds are drawn (this is slightly at odds with my strong appreciation for natural light, so occasionally I will open up curtains/blinds shortly after he has opened them. But I digress.)

Many of the window coverings in our house are the ones that came with the house when we moved in two years ago. This is partly because we had so many expenses when we moved in – new furnace and A/C, new roof, half of the fence (with the other half starting this summer) – and partly because we just hadn’t picked a colour scheme for the rooms, so we didn’t have a base colour to start with. But when we got our new windows two weeks ago, we took down all of the window coverings and decided that it didn’t make sense to put them back up.

Which left us a bit exposed, even for my light-loving ways.

So, the very next day we did a shopping blitz and bought four curtain rods and two sets of curtains. That day we put up two curtain rods and quickly decided we didn’t like either set of curtains, so with one hour of available shopping time left, we ducked out again, returned two sets of curtains, and bought two more which promptly went up when we got home. The next day we hung the remaining two curtain rods and one set of curtains that we already owned. This still left us with one naked window upstairs, but since it was the nursery, we figured we still had a bit of time.

All of this just highlighted the fact that our kitchen window had been bare since we had moved in two years ago. We bought fabric months ago, and put up the curtain rod a few weeks ago, but I had never gotten around to actually sewing the curtains and so the window remained uncovered and the neighbours, if they chose, could see into our kitchen. And this bugged Charles.

So last weekend I finally sewed the curtains for the kitchen, and Charles has been happy ever since. Who knew that something so small could bring such happiness?

Of course, there are some things that I just won’t do to make him happy – like name our child (should it be a girl) Raindrop. Not even as a middle name.

Today seems to be my day of defeat. I also had to admit defeat at the food store (a.k.a the grocery store) tonight.

I dislike shopping carts. I used to hate them completely, but realized that they do come in handy when you need to pick up one of those water jugs that weigh 40-someodd pounds. But outside of these extreme situations, I avoid shopping carts like the plague and only use handbaskets*. Which is why Charles had to start going food shopping with me (to prevent me from lugging around 40-someodd pounds of random items. I’ve been known to stick a case of pop under each arm and still carry a full handbasket of items. Yes, I’m stubborn). But tonight, I only had to pick up a few small items for a potluck tomorrow, so I stopped at the food store after work and confidently grabbed a handbasket.

Which turned into a bit of a mistake. True, I ended up picking up a few things on top of the items that I needed for the potluck. But they were things like bread. And broccoli. Things that weigh next to nothing. And yet as I walked towards the cash with my not even full handbasket, I felt as if I had two cases of pop and an overflowing handbasket. It felt …. kind of heavy. And it kind of stretched my (pregnant) belly a bit. And that is not a pleasant feeling. I don’t know if I have just grown weak with my forced dependance on shopping carts, or if perhaps the random items did add up to more than the sum of their parts. But whatever the case, it is with great sorrow that I have come to the conclusion that I can (should) no longer use handbaskets (at least for the next four months).

Clearly I must just carry things in my arms.

And if there are too many things to carry in my arms, I will … use … a shopping cart. There. I said it.

* I will use those little wheely “hand” baskets if available – same maneuverability as the handbaskets, but able to hold heavier things!

]]> http://www.mayhaps.com/blog/2009/05/20/i-theenk-i-need-a-beegger-sponge/feed/ 0 http://www.mayhaps.com/blog/2009/05/10/the-joys-of-home-ownership-2/ http://www.mayhaps.com/blog/2009/05/10/the-joys-of-home-ownership-2/#comments Sun, 10 May 2009 22:07:00 +0000 Tracy http://tmayhaps.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/the-joys-of-home-ownership The first morning that I stepped in it, I thought “Ugh! That is gross!”, but I cleaned it up and thought that was the end of it.

The second morning that I stepped in it, I thought “Ugh! That is gross!” but I cleaned it up and thought that must be the end of it.

The third morning that I stepped in it, I thought “Ugh! WTF??” but I finally realized that it was water, not cat pee and that was actually a bit of a relief – I figured that Charles and I could handle fixing a leak in the pipes for our basement sink (attempting to determine why the cats would pee on the floor would have been much more difficult).

The fourth time (I missed stepping in it!) I finally remembered to tell Charles that we have a leak in the pipes for our basement sink. Except that it wasn’t our sink (that would be too easy). Instead, it is coming from our very ancient water softener.

And that, my friends, is a bit more expensive.

So for two days, I have resisted looking up the cost of a new water softener. We cannot get by without a water softener (our water is waaaaay too hard^*) and I’m not really sure that fixing our current one would be cost-effective, if it can even be done given its age. But with new windows arriving on Friday, and a new fence hopefully arriving soon-ish (I really, really, reeeeaaaaally want our fence) and a baby arriving in September … well, having to shell out for a new water softener is a little hard to take. So instead, I clean up the small puddle (it is a very small puddle) that appears on the basement floor and I cross my fingers that one day it won’t be a lake.

^{* I’ve always heard that Waterloo has very hard water, but never actually remember the number. This helped me out (bolding mine)”… the Regional Municipality of Waterloo has some of the highest levels of hard water (defined as containing large amounts of calcium and magnesium) in the country… Anything over 10.5 grains per gallon (180 mg/L) is considered to be extremely high and is labelled in the fifth category as “very hard”: the estimated average level of water hardness in the Waterloo Region is 22 grains per gallon (376 mg/L), more than twice the level necessary to be included in the top category.” Fun.}