It's beginning to taste a lot like Christmas

Mostly, Christmas to me is about food (and also the sacred nature of singing Christmas carols at church, which should never be tampered with, but we won't talk about that here). We've been celebrating with food even I wouldn't consider eating regularly during most of the year: caramel turtles, cheeseballs, hot buttered rum, a 3-pound summer sausage...

For our neighbors, I wanted to do something cute but easy, and I think these little baskets came together nicely:
Hot chocolate with smashed candy canes at the top, and marshmallows dipped in a simple syrup (sugar and hot water) mixed with a little peppermint extract then rolled in more smashed candy canes. Smashing the candy canes was fun. I used a paper bag after making a big mess on round 1.

For a number of other friends and family, I made turtles. I've always loved turtles, but they're a bit on the pricey side, so I used limit myself. NO MORE shall I suffer under the tyranny of expensive turtles! Using a recipe I found, I composed my shopping list, purchased obscene quantities of sugar, butter and chocolate, and went to work. My test batch was approved, though I opted to make some milk chocolate rather than all semi-sweet.
Test batch not included, I made 152 of the little reptilian confections. There were turtles EVERYWHERE, on the counters, cooling racks, fridge, freezer, nearly all flat surfaces in the kitchen.
It was a fun project, but boy were my hands ever sore after carmel-ing. They sort of cramped together like claws for a few days after.
And here's the finished product: packaged and ready (almost) for shipping!

For another of our little get-togethers, I improvised a cheese ball. We had a lot of cheddar lying around and some smashed pecans left over from turtles, so I added cream cheese and dry minced onion and some other stuff and presto!It made a yummy companion for the sausage.

Lastly, here's a nice shot of the tree, pre-Christmas morning destruction:

"Freezing butts."

Last night, the predicted overnight low was 9 degrees. NINE. Single digits are fairly unheard of in our pocket of the country, so we had to do some things to prepare. Tonight's not supposed to be much warmer, coming in at 12. We left our water trickling so our pipes didn't freeze (yay uninsulated crawl space!) and threw an extra blanket on the bed. Also, this:

which, if you can't tell, is our little laurel shrubs covered in paper grocery bags. And this is our pool, which was covered in a sheet of ice about an inch and a half thick. I have to go bust it up again.

Plants and things (laurels and camellias, mostly) are looking a little ragged, but I'm hopeful everything will survive. I'm looking forward to camellia blooms this spring, which won't happen if all the buds fall off.

Anyway, on to more Christmasy matters. We put lights on our tree last week and were told by our neighbors up the street that it looks awesome through our front window. It has about four ornaments on it right now...I have to finish decorating.

Here's that footed bowl with the pomegranates. They're deepening in color to a nice punchy red, and they look very festive. Isn't the bowl great?

The kissing ball (nod to sophomore year of college) is hung. I need to figure out how to get some mistletoe out of our oak trees so I can hang that, too. (In the background of this picture, please note the wreath hanging on the dining room wall. That was a clearance steal last year, for five measly dollars...marked down from 80. Who pays that for a wreath!?)

Lastly, continuing with the pomegranate decorations, I made this doorhanger that I saw in BHG. It's hanging on the closet in the dining room. Nice little shot of color.

I tried to get creative and improvise another hanging, but I'm not sure it took on quite the style I was hoping for. It kind of just looks like an orange wired to some tree branches. Oh well. Win some, lose some.

Christmas Edition

It was my own tradition, growing up, as soon as we returned from the big family Thanksgiving dinner, to decorate my room for Christmas. The past three years, I haven't really had Christmas, at least not in all its month-long crafty sparkly glory. Three years ago, we were getting married, plus there were finals and whatnot. Two years ago, I was working fulltime, which left little time for festivity, and I lived in a 400-sf house, which left little space. Last year, I was half living in my in-laws' house, and half moving, and we didn't put a tree up until two days before Christmas.

So, you see, I have three years of backlogged cheer, plus a WHOLE HOUSE I get to decorate this year. After Thanksgiving dinner, I kept with tradition and headed for the nearest coniferous tree in sight, a small potted Austrian pine I put on the front porch for this express purpose.It's on the left in this picture. Please also note the wreath, (functional) icicle lights, and garland which I made myself with a whole lot of clippings from the mountains (more on that shortly).

Friday, I lost no time diving into the holidays. After making a huge mess in the guest room with lights and assorted decorations, I slowly began carting things downstairs (to the sounds of the holidays on my "xmas mix" playlist wafting through the house, naturally).

I swapped out the centerpiece on the dining room table (still need pillar candles for those holders) and the porcelain balls on the teak console for this SWEET silver footed bowl with a scalloped rim and little snowflake cutouts that I nabbed at Collector's Market last year. I will be filling it with either pomegranates or clove-stuffed oranges and posting a picture soon. In the background, you can see the red and white tablecloth Mom got me a few years ago!The glass bowl got relocated to the coffee table and filled with these mercury glass balls from Anthropologie (a few years ago...been hanging on to 'em).The mantel got decked with a great fake garland (Michaels clearance, last year) and it looks way more awesome than the picture.Then I got into the crafty side of fun...wreath-making. Never done it before, but I clipped a bunch of holly and cedar branches off the trees in back and made two wreaths Friday and three today. I hung one on the bathroom door (below), the coat closet, and one on my office door. I have a few others I'm still undecided on where to place. They smell great!

Today, I informed Todd that this is my favorite time of year because it involves many of my favorite things: bad food, candy canes, decorating, presents, and rigging. It's likely that many of my old roommates will chuckle at this, given my inclination to install hooks and other creative storage devices in our houses. Anyway, I rigged the garland (see below) on mug hooks. The garland was strung from clippings gathered yesterday on our Christmas tree-picking expedition.
and here's the garland. I added cranberries after I took the picture.Speaking of....This is a picture of me with the tree. (For those wondering, yes, I wear that hat in public, and yes, people do tend to stare at me. Say what you will, but I stay nice and warm.) You buy a permit for $5, then head for the hills where you can cut down a tree. We went with our neighbors up the street, Wayne and Cody, and cut down our trees. It's a little on the sparse side, but they all were. I'm hoping once it's decorated, it'll look more filled out. The shape is perfect, though.I think that's enough Christmas cheer for one post. Stay tuned though, there's way more to come!

Satisfaction.

Today, I did something that's been needing to be done for about 10 months. Gathering my newfound confidence in electrical work, I installed a porch light...

Cute, huh? (We love it. Makes such a difference.) Now it's not pitch black when you walk up to our door at night. Here's one more, from farther back.

That one also features the icicle lights that we put up yesterday, which need to be taken down. Worked two days ago, didn't work once they're up. Naturally.

This evening, we worked on painting more trim and getting rid of that dingy mauve-y color. We painted the bookcases in between the living room and dining room, which allowed me the opportunity to take out the contents and stack it all over the dining room table.

I also painted the inside of the front door, which I didn't take a picture of. It was white, just the primed steel, and I wanted it to match the trim. I don't think it would look that different in a picture, but it does in person.

Todd painted the door to the upstairs in the dining room, so now all we have left is one strip of baseboard (and probably another coat on the bookcases) and the dining room will be...semi-done. Minus crown molding, chair rail, a painted ceiling and a new light fixture, but still, steps in the right direction.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, HOUSE!

It's been one year today since we closed on the house. If you'd like to see how far we've come in this past year, I can refer you here for the outside and here for the inside...yikes, we did have quite a vision. It was ....yikes. And COLD. No heat until mid-December.

Anyway, cheers! Here's to a great, productive year, and many more to come!

Yay for cute wallpaper!

Worked on a couple of projects in the past few days. A few night ago, we decided to paint the trim in the dining room. Someone who lived in this house at some point had an unfortunate affection for the color mauve, as evidenced by the color of our coat closet, and the trim in the dining room was sort of tinted muave.
The color's just subtle enough to not be horrible, until you compare it to the fresh paint (new is left, old is right). I still have to paint the bookcases, but that won't take too long. Contrary to what you might believe about a nice coat of paint freshening things up, we stepped back and realized everything else in the room now looks WORSE than it did before, by comparison. Luckily, painting the ceiling and adding quarter round (aka base shoe) around the floor should help with that. And replacing the light fixture, which evokes such words as gaudy, grotesque, tacky, abominable...

Yesterday, I started ripping down wallpaper in the kitchen. Here is a before: Sorry it's dark, that was kind of the problem to begin with. That, and it looked like a bruise. Anyway, in typical fashion, there are/were at least three, if not four, layers of wallpaper on our kitchen walls. The top layer, the red, is vinyl, so that ripped off easily and left a paper backing that steamed off, no problem. Underneath...Cute vintage wallpaper! Well, some of us think so. Todd walked in and said he thought I was taking down all the wallpaper. In his words: "You took down one layer, found something creepy, then quit." It reminds him of what was upstairs, but I like it and he said he'd try to get used to it. What a guy. Here's a closer shot:It's not the greatest stuff in the world, but it's a lot better than the red. I'll post a pic when the whole kitchen is un-papered.

Oh, one other thing. In the past few weeks, I have successfully fixed two lamps. One (the nickel lamp) I replaced the switch on and the other, my desk lamp, (which I don't have a picture of) required a replacement socket and some other assorted finagling. My first attempt with my desk lamp resulted in a tripped circuit. All in good fun. I would say that these two successes and also the light fixture I replaced qualifies me for most electrical jobs. HA.

Playing with knives

This is what it looks like our our dining room window. The street sweeper actually came earlier that day. Talk about a thankless job.

It's officially fall here in Southern Oregon. Most of the trees' leaves have started changing color, late afternoons are chilly and nights even chillier, my office is crowded with potted plants that will be spending the winter indoors and we fired up the fireplace last night for the first time while we watched the Ducks wipe the floor with USC.

This afternoon I began work on fixing my office window. You might remember that it is falling apart...the glazing is cracked and old and the panes are dangerously close to just falling out. Naturally, I used a few how-tos from This Old House, located here and somewhere else I can't find. I scraped old paint and knocked off dry putty for an hour and a half or so, then cut myself with the very sharp knife I was using. I had it coming, though, and I've gotten pretty good at reacting quickly and calmly to accidental self-inflicted injury. Anyway, after that, the light was starting to fade and I was feeling pretty irritated, so I called it a day. Hopefully Trevor will be able to come and work on it sometime this week, while the weather's still sunny.

Last night, I worked on building a shoe rack for our "laundry room" (in theory it should be, but since we are still minus one washer and dryer, it gets quotes). I think it came out rather well, and it will definitely provide some much-needed relief from the shoe pileup. Cost: $7, not counting 2 hours labor.And another view...

Having Trevor's giant fancy new chop saw making it all but impossible to walk around the laundry room: not really priceless, but I'm glad he lead me borrow it.

Shrubs, electricity and free boxsprings

Boy, do we have a lot to talk about. I'll just list it off with pictures...easier that way.

1. We (Todd, along with help from Dad McD) planted our laurel "hedge" out front. He measured, strung the line, dug the holes and planted our little shrubbies. They look tiny now, but in a few years, they will be four or five feet tall. They'll grow as high as we want them to.

2. This is my stupid heirloom tomato. Running about two months behind schedule. I am mostly mad because it actually did get around to making an actual tomato, but I don't think it will ripen. Not enough bright sun during the day anymore.

3. Here is a before:

and after, or midway:

picture of where I'm patching the hole in the wall where the light switch for the bathroom used to be. It's right outside of the bathroom, and it's just an empty box. Or was, before I started the first round of probably three applications of spackle.

4. Most recent accomplishment: replacing a light fixture! I did this just a few minutes ago. Who knew electrical work was so exciting (at least according to these sketchy instructions)? After seeing these instructions, I enlisted the help of my trusty Sunset "You Can Wire" book. Sounds cheesy, but it's an incredible book. I do not trust suspect Chinese instructions around voltage.

Found a super-cheap schoolhouse light and decided to swap it for the ugly brass-and-glass deal that was up there. I'm not suggesting it's gorgeous, or possibly even permanent, but it's an improvement. More importantly, look at me!! I can do electrical work! (Sorry for the blurry picture; the camera said it was blurry but I thought it was lying.)

5. Nabbed a free boxspring from craigslist for the twin bed upstairs. It's like a real bed now!

You can try this nifty trick I picked up somewhere...if you don't have a dust ruffle (like this bed). Fitted sheet over the boxspring, and voila! finished look. Or at least a lot better than the gaudy floral patterns all boxsprings seem to come with.

6. Lastly, here are some shots of upstairs. We've made a lot of progress scraping up the glued-down carpet pad (boy would I like to have a chat with the moron who had that idea), though the floor looks pretty much as gnarly as the green carpet did. After water and fabric softener made almost no dent in the glue, we busted out the Wagner Power Steamer. Worked like a charm, steaming the gross glue and pad right off the floor. There's one patch on the landing where we haven't finished yet, but the rest of the floor is "clean."

Downstairs, looking up....
Upstairs, looking down to the halfway landing...
Looking at the upstairs landing, outside Todd's office

Upstairs landing from the guest room.

So, I think that's pretty much it. Oh, well, I will leave you with one other picture of an amazing hike we took a few weeks ago.

This afternoon finds me very unhappy at the weather, my heirloom tomato plant, and a certain elusive disgusting brown spider in the mudroom who should do the whole world a favor and just die.

First, the weather. It is over 100 degrees. Today, in case you missed the memo, is the first day of fall. It feels suspiciously like California fall. Speaking of, there are hot, gusty winds that distinctly resemble the Santa Anas (the much-maligned winds known best for turning Southern California into a barbecue every year). These winds blow me to my next point: the heirloom tomato plant.

Frankly, I've been disappointed. Only now, late-ish September, does it have three small green tomatoes. I've just been hoping they ripen before the first frost. But I'm really mad at this plant because this afternoon, I had to go outside in the inferno to put stand it back up again. Then it blew over a second time and the pot broke into multiple pieces. So now I have a half-busted pot, held together by a bungee cord, stuffed inside another pot, and bungeed to the fence so it can't blow over again. All this took about 45 minutes at midday, after which I was dripping and ready to run over the stupid tomato with my car.

Honestly, I can't wait for the first frost. My gardening efforts this summer have been minimally rewarding, and the plants that aren't infested with budworms bent on eating everything colorful have some kind of weird leaf fungus. Next summer, I'm not growing any petunias, because I found out that the budworms come from moths that lay eggs. So they can fly to my baskets. They also eat geranium buds, but I love geraniums, so I'm going to have to come up with another solution -- screens or something. I tried poisoning them, but they don't like the bait. Rotten bugs.

I don't think I really need to say anything further about that spider, other than, I will stomp on you with much glee when I see you next, so watch your back or beat it.

Anyway, here's the picture of the headboad I was working on the last time I posted.

It turned out really cool, except for the part about the spray paint off-gassing and us waking up at 2:30 am with headaches and having to spend the rest of the night in the guest room. Avoiding stepping on pliers and nails sticking out of the floor in the stairway on the way upstairs was the most fun, especially since I didn't have my glasses.

After that, the headboard spent a few more days in the garage to de-fume. We moved it back in last week. I also have to post a picture of the crafty thing I did to one of our duvet covers...coming soon!