New Featherbed

So my sourdough bread baking efforts have met with failure...
I'll give it another go later this week.

Meanwhile, I went to IKEA and bought a new featherbed!
Here it is, in its cream-colored cover:

The closeup shows the decorative ties and little embroidered stars.
(I know, it still has creases from being in the package, but it's very cozy!)

Garage and House

A couple of weekends ago, Emily and I cleaned out my garage.
I bought an extra shelving unit from Lowe's and tidied everything up.
It's very satisfying to accomplish a major cleaning and organizing job like that!

With all the snow lately, there's a huge pile of plowed snow at the end of my road (which is a branch dead-ending in a fire gate). The neighborhood kids have discovered it and use it as a sledding hill/ snow fort, which is fine except when their shrieks wake me up before 9 am on a weekend morning.

Manuscript in preparation

Haagen-Daaz is Brain Food.
Really.
I got nearly 10 pages on my manuscript done today.
Thank you, Emily, for bringing me ice cream!!

Mortimer has been more of a hindrance than a help, though.
I had to put him back in his cage so he wouldn't slither all over my keyboard and chair and bookshelves.

October Snowfall

It snowed on the 20th and then overnight, and on the 21st I woke up to find a soft blanket of snow everywhere!
It melted off pretty quickly wherever there was sun, but when I came home from church at noon, my house front still looked like this.

Home Again!

I never feel I'm truly home until I've got all my bags out of the car and unpacked... at least, things out of the bags.
In this case, the sorting repository was the dining room table.

I had a LOT of post-Europe mail to open.
(Ethan helped me wield my dagger-shaped letter openers with glee, collecting all the plastic fake credit cards from the many unwanted offers I recieved.)

Here's my post-Europe Chocolate Lineup!!

Resolutions

This is my fridge on Weight-Watchers.

Notice the very full vegetable and fruit drawers, and the abundance of sugar-free, low-calorie drinks.
My get-in-shape-for-Timp goal includes both slimming down and exercising more.

A Day at Home

Even when I'm under the weather, a day at home has advantages.
A lovely view out my window:

Company, even if somewhat shy and retiring (that's my bathrobe he's curled up in):

Simple but yummy food: in this case, a cheese quesadilla with lots of hot sauce to clear out my stuffed sinuses, and topped with refried beans.

I myself am curled up on the couch, with the other half of the bathrobe over my feet, reading up on Archaic Greek art (and dreaming of visiting Athens this fall.)

More comparisons

Charlotte B had a long post-holiday reign in the dining room (and pretty much everywhere else in the house, too.)

But the beauty of a holiday weekend is that I have time to face energy-requiring projects (like taking down the Christmas tree.) It helped that I got my exercise in that day!

Something for Charlotte B

This is the kitchen of Charlotte B.





This is the kitchen of Charlotte A.


Charlotte A is generally too busy working to take time for things like Blogs.
But Charlotte B needs small, quiet projects that provide instant satisfaction. It prevents her from becoming Charlotte C (otherwise known as a puddle.)