WORKS IN PROGRESS . . .

The first fire of the season burns in the fireplace. A breezy Saturday afternoon turned into a ferocious windstorm last night. It removed my artificial decorative flowers from their pots on the woodshed, blew limbs from trees, and rearranged the furniture on the front porch. It also rained. This afternoon we have more of the same. I came with two loads of dirty laundry; I’ll return to town with three loads.

The good news is that the raspberry canes we planted yesterday stayed in the ground. I regretted not having better prepared the ground and that we had to plant in the rain but a friend gave us eight canes that needed to be set. Well – they’re getting plenty of moisture.

I regret now having put off some chores, thinking they could be done on warm October afternoons. I might be working in the cold to plant spring bulbs.

The garbanzos I initially picked – two one-gallon containers – resulted in 5 ½ cups of dry beans. It was a fairly labor-intensive project for what I got, but I did enjoy doing it. I cooked a cup yesterday and used them in baked ziti for supper. Very good! But this afternoon Farmer Kyle began to plow the fields, so that’s that with the gleaning. Kyle says he got good yield from the garbs, and he’ll plant the wheat as soon as he can.

Sometimes things just get out of hand – too many books and magazines, too many boxes, too many jars, too much fabric, etc., etc., for the available storage space. I mulled this over for several years before I suddenly saw solutions in the form of DIY cabinets. We assembled three at the town house, and last month Mike assembled one in Hallie’s room at the farmhouse.

The cabinet in Hallie’s room stores the clothing that she and Nick leave here as well as extra bedding, quilts, my sewing overflow, and a few over-sized books. I had to think about this unit for a while because it’s not great furniture, but it is reversible should another option come along. I guess I didn’t do it sooner because I liked the old table and the bentwood rocker that sat in this space. Well, the old table went to the vintage sewing room where it serves as an extension for my sewing table, and the bentwood rocker still looks cozy in the corner of Hallie’s room.

On the sun porch, Mike assembled a smaller ClosetMaid unit to meet the storage need for items cluttering the utility room. Canning supplies, disposable containers, odd jars, and my gardening gloves and pruners now have a home.

 It’s amazing how months of just kind of agonizing over these problems suddenly smoothed into solutions. KW