My Resolutions - November Update

November!  Where has the year gone? It’s been a whirlwind of moving.. cleaning.. and moving.

1) Post 1 book review a month on my YA blog. 

I have posted 12 reviews. Not one per month, but I definitely have stepped up my pace of posting… so we will average out to one per month!

https://librarynut-booksforteens.blogspot.com/

2) Renovate the Master Bedroom & Bathroom. 

This is happening!!!!  

Walls are being torn out and ground has been broken!

17 years after we first said this needed to be done, it is finally going to be done!

3) Find good homes for the books  

They have all been homed outside of my house.

4) Go explore 2 new to me places  

1) Oregon - for a little adventure!

2) Turkey Run Park in Virginia.  It's on the way home from my Mom's house.  Beautiful park on the banks of the Potomac River!

3) Dallas, Texas. I went for a funeral, but stayed an extra day to explore.

5) 40 Bags in 40 Days Lenten Challenge

These were kitchen size garbage bags full of stuff, along with several BIG boxes. I've since gotten rid of much, much more.  But the Lenten Challenge was a HUGE success!

If you saw last weeks post, you know that we got rid of 100 boxes of shredding. JUST shredding. We cleaned out a LOT of stuff.

6) Get together with 1 friend each month  

I don't think I should have to write this down, but you know, it's been a weird couple of years. I want to make seeing people we love a priority. Doing this after 2 years of COVID Restrictions is going to make this an extra special challenge.

January - Jim & Kathy! We had a fire outside in the fire pit and got to catch up over a couple of hours!

February -  Joe, James, Dan

March - Crissy, Gloria

April - This was the month we had Covid, so we saw nobody and went nowhere.

May - Vince & Suzanne, Judy

June - Sharon

July - Crissy and her Mom

August - Esther and Tim            

September - All of my cousins.

October - Andrew & Cheryl

 

7) Another stamp in my National Park Passport

The Mission Trail in San Antonio!

OK, so that was back in January. I need to get another stamp.

8) Landscape Front Yard 

This has been on the list for several years now. I really want to get this checked off this year!

I don't think this will happen this year. With the renovations going on in the house, I want to wait until they are finished before I begin working on the yard. I don't want the contractors tearing up the new landscaping. 

9) Clean out the Garage

If you've read the blog for any length of time, you know that we bought this house 17 years ago from my in-laws. And you also know that they were borderline hoarders. We've made progress in the house, and while there is still clutter in the basement, I believe that we will have the last of it out by the end of this year. (See the 40 bags in 40 days challenge.) There is no longer any junk in our basement! 17 years later and we have finally cleaned out the house. Finally.

 But the garage is another story. 17 years, and we have not yet been able to park our cars in the garage because of the amount of stuff. Our goal is to be able to park a car in the garage by the end of the year. when we move back into the house next year.

One major advantage of having hired a trash hauler to finish cleaning out the house is that we now have the name of someone who is willing to come and clean out the garage next year.

10) Get the kayak out in the water once each month during May, June, July, August, September, and October.

Seriously, we have a kayak.  Why aren't we getting out in the water with the kayak more often? What is our excuse? The kids have moved out. We don't have to worry about finding a sitter or getting an extra kayak for them.

We didn't get it out at all. Something about clearing out tons and tons of stuff out of the house.

11) Get my Bike fixed and get out for some bike rides.

I bought my bike over 30 years ago. I rode it a lot before the kids got busy in high school. Now that everyone is out of the house, it is time to pull out some of the things I really used to love. The top of that list is riding my bike. In order to do that, I need to get the bike fixed. The tires are dry rotted, and I'm sure it's got a host of other issues going on.

Maybe now that the house is finally cleaned out, I can dig the bike out of the garage and get it fixed up!

12) Visit My Cousins in Texas (a trip postponed from 2020)

Done! We made it down over a long weekend in January! It was so good to see my cousins and my aunts and uncles!  I even posted a few pictures from the River Walk in San Antonio. It's been 10 years since I last got down here. I can't wait another 10 years to get back. Family is too important. And time is fleeting.

Breckinridge Park! We met up with my cousins at the same outdoor pavilion where I had my 5th birthday party! That pavilion is just off to the right from this picture.

Second Trip to Texas in September for a family funeral. I got to spend time with cousins from as far away as Japan. We really need to find a way to get together that does not involve funerals. I think this will be one of my goals for next year.

Other Goals:

I’ve got a couple of other goals I would like to accomplish this year, but I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to get to them. If I do, I’ll be thrilled beyond words. If not? I’ll add them to the list of things I want to get to in 2023.

Goal #1

Get out to Kansas to visit Middle Child. 

Done! We went out earlier this year.

Goal #2

Get the large piles of brush out of the yard.

Done! The tree people are also taking out 3 dead trees!

Happy Halloween!

I think my most/least favorite Halloween memory was 1997. 

Our oldest son fell off of the jungle gym at preschool and suffered a compound fracture.  I received a call from the school staff as the ambulance was pulling away from the school. It was 4 days before Halloween.(Oct. 28)

It's funny the things you remember. I had a pot of ramen noodles boiling on the stove. I turned the burner off, grabbed the baby out of the crib, pulled my toddler out of his bed and took off for the hospital. (This was before cell phones.) I left a note pinned to the door for my husband along with a request for him to call his parents to see if they could meet us at the hospital. I had bought a huge pumpkin that morning, and had plans to carve it that afternoon with the kids. The pumpkin was still sitting in the back seat of the car.

Husband got home about 10 minutes after I left the house, and his parents were able to meet me in the waiting room at the hospital and take the kids home with them. (And my car. It had the car seats.) We found out that the kid was going to need surgery to reset the arm.

It was a very long night. He went back for surgery around 10 pm, and came out around midnight. He asked his father to spend the night with him, and I went home. Remember the ramen noodles? They were still on the stove, sitting in water.  They were next level awful looking. They went into the trash.

When he came home the following day, he had 2 pins in his arm around his elbow and a cast that took over most of his left arm, with a sling built into the cast.

Halloween day, I decided that we needed to keep things as normal as possible. So, I pulled the pumpkin out of the back of my car. The pumpkin that had been sitting there for 4 days. In the heat. In the back of my Honda Civic. While the toddler used it as a step stool to get into his car seat. The bottom was rotting.

So, I put the pumpkin on the grass, turned it over and scooped out the guts.  It turns out that if you do things this way - with rotting pumpkin - it is actually very easy to scoop things out. We decided to leave the entrails, if you will all over the ground and cut a very weird lopsided face into the side of the pumpkin and then put multiple tealights around the mess.  As the pumpkin continued to rot and fall apart in the heat of the tea lights, it made an especially gory mess.

The kid with the broken arm dressed up as a starving artist that year.  I had a beret (no comments about that - we weren't THAT far out of the 80's).  He wore sweat pants and a huge t-shirt that we were able to get the cast through.  We attached a piece of cardboard cut out and decorated to look like an artists' palette.  Voila!  1 starving artist costume!

I hope each and every one of you has a safe Halloween!

The Marathon - Home Improvement Addition

 If you’ve been around my blog for any length of time, you know that we bought our house from my in-laws. And they never moved their stuff out. We moved in, our stuff intermingled, and the long nightmare began. It’s been 17 years of cleaning and sorting. I’ve done cleaning challenges. I’ve gotten rid of 23 Things a Week for a couple of years. I’ve participated in the 40 bags in 40 days challenges. And still - there was always more stuff to clean and sort.

When we decided we needed to renovate the house. OK. With the black mold issues we kind of HAD to renovate the bathrooms. And because of the black mold - absolutely everything had to be out of the house.

We moved ourselves out of the house in July. We took what we had to live with us. We had to put the stuff we wanted to keep in storage. And then? There was everything else. For the next three months we slowly sifted through the everything else. 

The paper.  OMG. The paper. All told, we’ve taken over 100 boxes to shredding events around Central Maryland. That doesn’t count the boxes we’ve taken to the Paper Recycling Boxes around town.

We donated to the Habitat ReStore.

We recycled - a lot.

At the end, we hired a junk hauler who came and took the rest away.

Our house is finally empty.  FINALLY.

I suspect that we have many paper loving insects in our house that are slowly starving to death.

Seriously. 17 years. It’s been 17 years that we’ve been in that house and 17 years that I’ve been cleaning it out. And now? It’s finished. I feel like I’ve completed the worlds strangest and slowest marathon.

Teen Top Ten List

 I just published this list from the Young Adult Library Services Association on my YA Book Blog  here: https://librarynut-booksforteens.blogspot.com/2022/10/teen-top-ten-list.html.

If you're interested in a list of books nominated and voted on by teens for 2022, I encourage you to click on the link and head over to my other blog.  I'm trying to stay out of trouble, so I'm not going to copy and paste the entire post here, lest I get flagged by The Google for plagiarism.  ;) 

Enjoy!

Make Your Own Fascinator!

 I originally published this post on 5/21/2018. I had made my very own Fascinator to wear to work on the day of the Royal Wedding. While Fascinators aren't exactly high fashion in the United States, they are a LOT of fun to make and wear!  And with Halloween quickly coming, I thought someone might like to make something like this to wear as part of their Halloween costume!

I made a Fascinator on Thursday to wear to work on Saturday in celebration of the Preakness - oh, and the Royal Wedding.  It was actually very easy to make!

I used the pages of an old book that was falling apart to make a large paper flower.  Since I used a Dr. Seuss book, I used bright purple berries to make the centers of the flowers.  I hot glued the flower petals together.

I bought a spool of tulle and a found a spool of sparkly rhinestones in the endless crap supply in my basement, and a headband from the grocery store.  I scrounged some floral wire up at work, and the next thing you know, I had a fascinator.

I looped the tulle into 8 very big figure 8's, and then tied it in the center with the floral wire.  I did the same thing with the blingy tape, and wired it onto the tulle with the same floral wire that I wrapped around the tulle bow. 

I then hot glued the paper flower into the middle of the bow.  I wrapped the wire from the flower around the headband and Voila!  It's a fascinator! 

Oh, the feathers!  I forgot them!  We had a stash of feathers at work that someone brought in for craft projects.  I brought 3 of them home to use for my project. 

Note: Don't you love how I didn't bother to link any directions on how to make that flower in the middle? I know I cut petals from the book. I know they were rounded on one end and a square triangle on the other.  Honestly, what was I thinking when I wrote these directions?  I didn't have a Cricut at the time, but I seem to remember cutting out the petals that looked something like this: https://sweetredpoppy.com/how-to-make-large-paper-flowers/ and then took some poetic license with the shape of the flowers and the size of the petals to make a flower that would look decent on my head.  Seriously, why didn't I post the link or the pattern?  What was I thinking?  

Squirrels

So here’s a serious question. 

Squirrels. Here in the Mid-Atlantic are usually light brown or gray. 

This little guy above is what I think of as a typical Mid-Atlantic squirrel. I took this picture in Sunday morning. 

But we recently moved out, and we are living close to a major river and environmental area.

But do you know what I’ve been seeing running around here lately? 

Black squirrels. The last time I saw black squirrels was when we were in Niagara Falls. 

And now, they’re running around Central Maryland? 

Is this a thing anyone else has noticed?

The picture below is one of the squirrels from around Niagara Falls. 

 

Random Pictures

 A dump of my photos from September! Enjoy!

Hermie

Look who I found on my morning walk!

View from the spillway. 

So much fungi!

It feels like a Cathedral. 

Random Legos found in the library floor. 

I checked out a ukulele! Bonus, I’ve been working on playing it!