I got my new office rug earlier this week, and it turns out it wasn’t just a frivolous “pretend my office is fancy and belongs to a bestseller” thing. It functions differently. The old rug had a pebbly texture that kept my chair from rolling smoothly, so it was difficult to position myself for optimum comfort while writing. The new rug lets my chair roll easily, so I can move around and get into place. Since it’s bigger, it means I don’t have to worry about rolling off the rug. It’s also more pleasant to walk to my desk. I didn’t realize how much the texture of the old rug bothered me until I got the new one.I wouldn’t say that my productivity has escalated since I got it, but it’s only been a couple of days, and on one of those days I had an appointment so I was out all afternoon. The true test will come next week. It’s funny what a big difference little things make.

My next project may be fixing up my front porch and finishing moving the front walk. I haven’t really used my front porch because I haven’t lived in a place that really had a front porch so I don’t think about it. The porch was mostly something that gave some shelter while I unlocked the door. But since I have an old house, I have a proper front porch, and I live in a very front porch neighborhood in a front porch town. I’ve pretty much gone on autopilot, thinking in terms of the back porch, so I’ve been using my deck for sitting outside. But the deck isn’t covered, so it’s not good in rain or when the sun’s at the wrong angle. It’s also up the stairs and through the house, which has affected my breakfast and lunch habits.

In my old house and in the apartment I had here before I got the house, I ate breakfast and lunch most days on my back porch/patio when the weather was decent. I haven’t been doing that much in this house because getting to the deck from the kitchen involves going up the stairs and through the house. In the old house and apartment, the back door was pretty much right at the kitchen.

But last night when I was walking to the park for a concert, I passed a Victorian house where a couple was eating dinner on their front porch, and I remembered that my next-door neighbors putting a dining table on their front porch was the reason I needed to get better blinds in the window that directly faces their porch. I came home and had the “duh” moment of realizing that I have a front porch that opens almost directly from the kitchen.

I currently have a couple of chairs and a small table there. The table’s just enough to set down a drink. But if I put a bistro table there, I could eat meals there. I need to finish moving the front walk because the new path takes it to the front door and the current path means you’d have to walk past the table. The front porch isn’t as private as the deck, but then the porch at the apartment wasn’t entirely private, as the yard was open to everyone in the building. Then again, I’ve frequently had conversations with neighbors over the fence from my deck, so it’s not as though I’d want to go out there without being properly dressed. There’s not a lot of traffic on my street, so most of the time it would be pretty private. And since it’s covered, I could be outside in the rain unless it’s really windy, and I could eat lunch there. The deck is a bit too sunny at lunchtime.

So I just need to find a table. Fortunately, we’re at the time of year when patio furniture is being put on clearance, so I might be able to find a deal. Then I need to finish the front walk, and I’ll be turning the area in front of where the table will go into a flowerbed, which will eventually offer more privacy. I need to divide a lot of my dayliles and hostas after this growing season, so the excess will go in that flowerbed. I may also put up a trellis and get something climbing. I suspect this is another one of those small changes that will make a big difference in day-to-day life.

Even before I get that table, I need to remember how much I enjoy sitting under a covered area when it’s raining. There’s something about having a cup of tea with rain falling just feet away. I can do that on my porch at any time and yet I haven’t.

I moved to the mountains of Virginia from Texas in large part to escape from the summer heat, and this week it seems to be coming after me because we’re getting hit with a heat wave. We might even make it to 100 degrees. They’ve been talking about this and warning us on the local weather forecast, and I was getting caught up in the hype, and then I realized that the heat wave is pretty much a normal July in Texas, and it won’t even be quite as bad because it’ll still be under 80 overnight. That was the part about Texas summers that got to me, that you could get up at 6 in the morning and it would already be about 83 degrees. At least we’ll be in the lower 70s overnight. The big difference in the mornings so far has been that I don’t need a sweater to sit on the deck to drink tea and read the newspaper in the morning.

One thing that is worse here is the humidity. I thought it was pretty humid in Texas, and on paper it didn’t seem to be that much worse here, but it feels a lot worse, so it feels hotter. I had a chance to ask the local TV meteorologist about that at a library talk, and she said it may be that the humid layer goes up higher in the atmosphere and there’s less wind during the summer here. It also feels like the direct sun is more intense. When it was about 85 in Texas in the summer, we’d consider that cool, and here I go indoors and close the blinds.

The sad thing is that this is hitting for the July 4 weekend. I’d been thinking about walking to the park to go to the city parade, but it may be too uncomfortable. It is in the morning so it may not be too hot. My main activity may be going to an organ concert of patriotic music being held at the church. I can see the city fireworks from my house, so I can sit on the front porch for that, or maybe even lie in bed and watch through my bedroom window. I think I’m going to make barbecued chicken (cooked indoors, not grilling outside), and I’ve got raspberry pie from the berries in my yard. I may watch Hamilton again in the evening before the fireworks start. I’ll watch the Capitol Fourth and the fireworks from Mount Vernon on PBS on Friday night, so I’ll get my fill of fireworks.

I’m giving myself the day off on Friday, so no post then. I figure I need a holiday every so often. There are some things going on in town I want to go to, or I may be lazy and stay home in the air conditioning.

I’ve had a fascination with trains since I was a little kid — not to the point of things like memorizing timetables and routes or learning all the different kinds of locomotives, just “ooh, trains!” It may have had something to do with “The Little Engine That Could” or the trolley on Mr. Rogers, maybe the little train that went around the zoo. Anyway, there’s something thrilling about a train and rail travel. I like visiting Europe and being able to really take the train to get around, and I’ve traveled a bit by train on the East Coast, particularly around New York. I once took Amtrak from Denver to Dallas, which involved two overnight rides in a sleeper compartment, which was fun.

One thing I miss about Dallas is the rail system for getting around the metro area. I used to love being able to take the train to get places and bypassing the cars stuck in traffic. Where I live now, the city’s too small to have a rail system. It apparently once had a streetcar system, and you can still tell about where the stops were. Now we just have a bus in the form of a trolley. Our rail service now is Amtrak a few days a week — you can go east to D.C. and then on to New York and west to Chicago — and sightseeing trains. In one embarrassing incident, the sightseeing train had to rescue a stalled Amtrak train. They hitched the Amtrak train to the excursion train and finished the sightseeing route, hauling the Amtrak to the station. I haven’t yet taken the train from here, but if I ever make a trip to D.C. or maybe even New York, I’ll probably go that way.

There’s a railroad museum nearby, and they have a working mid-century steam engine that they occasionally use for the sightseeing excursions. I have found it to be elusive, though. They were supposedly running it when I visited on vacation before moving here, but when I went to the station to see it come in, it turned out that the steam engine was out of service that day. Then last fall they were running special excursions, and it should have come through the railway crossing that’s just a short walk from my house, but it seems they moved the boarding point away from the downtown station sometimes. Every time I walked down there at the right time, that was a day they were boarding elsewhere. If I didn’t bother to walk down there, that was when I’d hear the steam train whistle from my house. I did see it running one day when I was driving on a road that parallels the train tracks.

This summer, they were running steam train excursions from the downtown station for two weekends. They had an open house at the station, so I got to go see the engine up close. Then on Saturday morning I had an event at the church, not long after the morning departure, so I walked over there early to see the train leaving downtown and crossing the bridge over the street that leads out of downtown. I wasn’t the only one there. A whole crowd of rail fans had gathered at the park that used to be the turntable for turning engines around. Since I was dressed for the church event, I didn’t exactly blend in. I was wearing a dress, pastel cardigan, and pearls. The rail fans were all in cargo shorts and t-shirts from the rail museum (apparently this engine has an actual fan club. They were wearing shirts for this train. It was like wearing a Star Wars t-shirt to see a Star Wars movie).

But I finally got a close-up look at the train when it was running. It really was pretty.

This town was a big rail hub back in the day. It was a supply center for the Confederacy during the Civil War, so the Union blew up the tracks and the rail depot, but spared the town, so all the old architecture is surprisingly intact. The current passenger terminal dates from the early 1900s (the old one was destroyed when a train missed a curve and crashed into it) and is now a restaurant. The passenger waiting area is the bar/lounge area, and they’ve kept a lot of the charm. The restaurant part is in the now-enclosed old platform area, right next to the tracks. The current passenger platform is next to it. There’s also a restaurant in the old freight depot, but it doesn’t have the good view of the train tracks.

Even if I don’t get to see the steam engine often, I love when it’s running because I love the sound of the steam whistle, which I can hear from downtown. I think they run it through here every so often to give it a workout, even when they aren’t scheduling excursions.

This has turned out to be Raspberry Week.

I have semi-wild raspberries growing in my back yard. My neighbor across the street, who’s lived here about 30 years, says someone down the block planted raspberries years ago, and they spread around the area, thanks to birds. While my house was abandoned, they grew out of control in the yard. The person who bought the house at tax auction and restored it just mowed the back yard down before putting it on the market, and then the berry bushes sprang up last summer. I guess that makes them feral berries.

Apparently, they only produce berries the second year, so only a few bushes along the fence had survived the mowing. I got about 20 berries, total. This year, I have a huge thicket full of berries. They’re black raspberries, so they taste kind of like a sweeter blackberry with fewer seeds. Yesterday, I filled a container that 18 ounces of blueberries came in and most of a pint container. I baked a pie last night, and I still have most of that 18-ounce container, plus nearly a pint from this morning. There are more berries that I couldn’t get to because I wasn’t wearing the right clothes to get in there among all the thorns. I’ll have to put on jeans later today and give it another try. I’m thinking of making jam, though I did have some with my yogurt for breakfast.

After this growing season, I need to cut the bushes back (I found some instructions on how to deal with raspberries), and I plan to train them up on trellises to keep them under better control so I can get to the berries easier. I’ll also be evicting some of the bushes that are growing where I don’t want them, like in the campfire pit. They pop up all over the place, and it’s a constant battle to keep them from taking over the whole yard. On the other hand, these are very good berries. I think that pie was the most “from scratch” thing I’ve ever baked, since it used berries I picked and that I grew. Not that I had anything to do with the growing. I did nothing to tend them. I feel like I earned them just by picking them because my hands and wrists are all scratched up. I wear long sleeves to deal with them, but the berries are so delicate that I don’t think I could pick them while wearing gloves.

Now, an update to the blinds/curtains saga.

The blinds I got last week didn’t work. For one thing, they were not as “blackout” as advertised. I think they blocked less light than the lightly-lined curtains I was using. For another, they didn’t sit flush against the window frame. The bracket put them out about half an inch, so light came out from the sides and top. And then they just didn’t work. I couldn’t pull them down and they didn’t roll up. When I tried, the mechanism that was supposed to roll them up and down came out and then they just unfurled completely.

I did a little more research, and I found that the brackets of all the blinds like that stick out. You’ll only get close to complete blackout by putting them inside the window frame. I got the bright idea to mark the measurements on a strip of vinyl from trimming that blind so I could really get into the frame and see what size might work in the frame, and it looked like the next larger size of the blinds I got last year would have fit, though it would be very close. Close is good, though, since it gets closer to blackout. I hadn’t been able to measure that precisely using a yardstick or metal measuring tape because they don’t fit inside the frame.

And then I got an e-mail from Lowe’s with a coupon for 10% off an entire purchase, which made it seem like it was meant to be, so I got those blinds. Once I took the old blinds out, I found out that my original measurements had been accurate. The window frame is smaller at the top. But if I took the plastic end caps off the top and bottom of the blinds, they fit perfectly. And since they’re the same kind of blinds I already had, I just used the brackets that were already there.

It is a bit annoying that I spent so much time and money trying to work this out, and I could have just bought the next larger size to begin with, but I didn’t know then that there were plastic caps on the ends that could come out to make up that tiny bit of width.

It’s still not total blackout, as there’s a tiny sliver of light around the edges, but it’s better than it was, and this morning I actually managed to sleep almost to 7 a.m., when I’ve been waking up around 5:30, whether or not I was well-rested. I’ve also been able to open the blinds during the day and open the windows when the evenings have been cool since I don’t have to undo my elaborate light-blocking rigs. I’d tried balancing skinny boxes to fit around the edges, plus throwing the curtains over the rods holding the lace curtains. With these blinds, I don’t have to do anything. Maybe if I wanted to sleep in the middle of the afternoon or if I wanted to sleep late in the middle of summer I could go back to throwing the curtains over the rod, but for most of the time, the blinds alone are just fine.

Now I can turn to fixating on the windows in the rest of the house, but I’m going to take a break from all that until maybe next month. I have to deal with the raspberry explosion first. Then it looks like I’ll have a lot of ripe tomatoes soon, and I’ll have to deal with that. It would be nice if they’d ripen a few at a time so I can just have them in salads and don’t have to deal with them all at once. They do seem to be in various phases of development.

I have spent this week getting really sidetracked about curtains, blinds, and window treatments. I think some of it has to do with my brain loving to solve problems, and it won’t let go until I have a solution.

The issue is my bedroom windows. While the actual windows—the glass in the metal frames—are a standard size, the window frames in the house that the windows are set into are not at all standard. They’re the kind you often see in old houses, with really thick woodwork framing the windows. When I was buying shades for the bedroom windows before I moved in, I found that the window frame was about half an inch too small for one size of shades. The smaller size would cover the glass part, and I figured that would work. What I hadn’t counted on was the fact that the lower window pane, the one that raises to open the window, sits out about 2 inches in front of the upper pane, which meant that while the shades covered the lower pane perfectly, there’s a big gap on the upper pane that lets a lot of light through from behind the blackout shades. From May through August, this is pretty important because the sun rises very early. It starts getting light before 5 a.m. around the summer solstice.

I put up some lace curtains and concentrated the gathers on the sides, which helped some, and then I resorted to a solution I used in my old house, throwing some lined curtains I had from my previous apartment over the curtain rods to help block light. I did this in the old house when they put a super-bright bulb in the street lamp right in front of my bedroom window. This solution has worked pretty well. The curtains block a lot of light but let enough in that I can let the sun wake me up. It doesn’t start getting too bright until the sun is more fully up. The problem is that throwing curtains over the rods holding the lace curtains is kind of tacky. The initial idea was to just put them up at night, but then I end up just leaving them there. I have to move them if I open the windows so that air can actually come in.

So I’ve been brainstorming ideas to solve this problem. Getting blinds cut to fit the window frame would be expensive, and I suspect there would still be light coming in around the edges. Another idea I had was to get roller blinds to fit up under the lace curtains. When rolled up they wouldn’t show, but I could pull them down at night. Then it occurred to me that I could just get larger curtain rods and hang the lined curtains over the lace curtains. I have tie backs to pull them aside during the day. It turned out that I’d bought the wrong size of curtain rod for one of the windows, so I already had the 3-inch deep one for one window, and I had an extra 2-inch deep one to put the lace curtain on. I just needed to buy one more 3-inch deep rod.

But then when I was buying that one, I saw that they had roller blinds that you can get cut to fit, so now I’m wondering it that might be a better idea. Put the lace curtains on the deeper rods, then fit roller blinds under the curtains to pull down at night. The room darkening ones aren’t that expensive, and I’m not sure I want total blackout. Between these and the blackout shades I already have, it should cut the light. Or maybe that’s a project for next summer. If I situate the rods for the lined curtains right, all I’d have to do is take out the smaller rods and move the lace curtains to the big ones. Then I found some other blinds you can adjust to fit yourself that aren’t that expensive and that I can get locally. So I ended up deciding to go that way and am just going to put up the deeper rods to use the lace curtains to cover the blind roller. I figured out that because the curtains are behind furniture, the curtains wouldn’t go back in place after I pulled them back, so I’d end up where I am now, with the curtains just hanging all the time. With blinds behind the lace curtains, I could at least see the lace and I might actually get around to raising the blinds occasionally.

I had to go through the process of planning to hang the curtains to come around to this conclusion, so the time spent thinking about how to hang the curtains wasn’t wasted. It merely consumed a lot of brain space.

But then during all this I started pondering the kitchen window, which is awkward because it’s behind the air fryer oven, so I don’t want curtains that hang down, but it’s on the front of the house, so I want some privacy. I have tall hedges along the street in front of the yard so you can’t see directly into my house, but you can kind of see into the kitchen from down the road. I currently have some faux stained glass privacy film on the lower part of the window, so you can’t see me from the neck down, but while researching various blinds options I found a really pretty valance that matches some placemats I already have. I’d have to replace the privacy film because it would clash, but the film I’ve got wasn’t great and I’ve been meaning to replace it. I found one that’s colorless, so it looks like etched glass. That would make the window look finished, leave me a spot to look out, but also block more from view outside.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about putting my last set of lace curtains on the front window because when I walk around town I love the look of lace curtains in the front windows. I’d been thinking of putting those curtains in the spare room but they’d be prettier in the front window. I wanted something on the spare room window because it’s right across from my neighbors’ front porch, where they spend a lot of time, and because of that same size issue there’s a slight gap around the edges of the miniblinds I have in that window. I do yoga in that room, and I feel like I’m giving the neighbors a lovely view when I do downward dog in front of that window. I don’t know how much they can actually see, and maybe you’d have to get close to the window to really see into that room (it’s on the second floor), but I feel self-conscious. That room will also be the guest room, so I want to give guests some privacy and block some light. But then the last set of lace curtains has different dimensions, and I don’t think it would fit in any of my windows. I may get a set of Roman shades like I have on my front door to go on that window, and I’ve found new lace curtains that would be pretty in my front room windows. The smaller curtain rods currently on the bedroom windows can go there.

See, curtain and blind obsession. I have managed to get work done in spite of all this, but mostly because I use curtain research as a reward for getting writing done. When I write for a certain amount of time, I’m allowed to get on Wayfair or Ikea and browse curtains. Having made all these decisions, my brain has finally let the subject go. I’m going to start with picking up the shades the next time I go out, and then putting those up and putting up the new curtain rods will be my weekend project. I’ll roll out the rest of the window projects over time.

I did something wild and crazy Friday night and went dancing. Not to a nightclub or anything like that, but to a contra dance in the church hall. This is kind of like square dancing, but in two long lines instead of squares. Think the Virginia Reel from PE class. This was, oddly, something I’d dreamed of doing for a while. A number of years ago, I read a book set in Scotland in which there was a community dance in a church hall with a local band, and they did reels and pattern dances. I thought that sounded like so much fun, but when I looked to see if there was anything like that in my area, the closest I could find was in another city in the metro area that would be about a 45-minute drive on the freeway.

I’d forgotten about that until someone in the choir announced that there would be a dance in the church hall on Friday night. A band that used to play in the area would be doing a one-night-only reunion for this. I also saw a notice in the town Facebook page, with someone trying to get together a group to go. So I said I’d go and forced myself out of the house on a Friday night. I figured at the very least I’d get to hear some good music. It was an Irish-style band, and I love Irish music. And it was in the hall of my church, which is perfect for this sort of thing (it looks kind of like the hall in a medieval castle), plus is a 5-minute drive.

It turned out to be a lot of fun. A big variety of people of all ages were there, and there were even men who came on their own. The dances are designed so that you dance with everyone along the way, but people even mixed up in choosing initial partners instead of sticking with people they came with. I’d done the English country style of dancing, like in Regency books, which is more sedate. The Appalachian style is a bit more energetic, and I realized how out of shape I was.

I do love to dance. Dancing seems to show up in a lot of my books. I took a tiny tots dance class as a very small child and did dance routines to my records in my room. I tried taking a real ballet class in elementary school but found it boring since it was just exercises, no dancing (my adult ballet teacher said that was a bad class because although the exercise part of it is important, each class should include some center work with choreography). I was in the ballroom dancing club in college and loved that but wasn’t able to find a good place to dance as an adult. The one time I had a date to go dancing, I found that everyone only danced with the person they came with, which meant there was no point in going to public dances without a partner. Some of the big science fiction conventions, especially those near the West Coast, have ballroom or contra dancing as part of them, and I’ve taken advantage of that.

I took adult ballet for about 10 years, until I had a knee issue and had to drop out and do physical therapy, and then the pandemic hit, and then they fired the teacher who taught the adult classes. They have a ballet studio that offers adult classes here, but I don’t know if I want to get back into that.

Now I know that some people in choir are part of the local social dance scene, so I can get clued in to the other events they do, and I may get to do it more often. It’s great exercise, plus a way to meet people and be part of a community.

So you can probably look forward to more dance scenes in my books.

As the weather continues to get warmer (though with a few cold snaps — we’ve got frost and freeze alerts for this weekend) and the ground wakes up, I keep finding more surprises in my yard.

One was bluebells. I’ve read about them in books about spring in England. I’ve seen pictures and thought they were so magical. It turns out there’s a native Virginia bluebell, and there’s a state park that has a bluebell festival, plus at the right time of year you can just go there to walk on trails to see them. That was Easter weekend this year, when I was too busy to deal with it. Then a couple of weeks ago I was in my backyard, spotted something blue, went farther up the hill, and saw that I had a little patch of bluebells. I need to see what I have to do to nurture them because I want to encourage them.

I also found some forget-me-nots in the front yard. I planted those. Last year, I put out some seeds on a bare patch in the front lawn, but nothing happened. This year, though, some came up. Some of the other things I planted last year also seem to be thriving. I moved in for real last year the day after Easter (that was when the furniture got moved in and I started sleeping in the house), and after the Easter service they encouraged people to take the flowers. I snagged a hydrangea and planted it. It seemed to stay alive last year but never bloomed, and now it’s got new growth this spring. The following week, they’d set the remaining Easter lilies out in front of the church with a “free” sign, so I took one and planted it. I thought it was dead, so I dug it up and threw it aside. It’s growing now and looks good. No bloom yet, but we’ll see what happens. I found a “balloon plant” on clearance at Lowes and kept it in the pot as a patio plant, but then I saw a lot of bushes of it around town, so I planted it in a flowerbed. I thought I’d waited too late for it to take root before winter, but it’s got new growth this spring. I really liked that plant, so I’m glad. My Realtor gave me some plants at closing, and the one she took a cutting of from her yard is doing well and spreading. It’s a ground cover called Creeping Jenny. She also gave me some creeping thyme, but I can’t find it so it must not have survived. I thought the mint she gave me died because I couldn’t find a trace of it, but I spotted a sprig yesterday.

As I pull weeds, I’m finding that there are a lot of stepping stone paths through the yard that have been covered by grass and other vegetation. I’m trying to uncover all those to add some visual divisions, but some of the paths are in just the wrong place, the way my front walk is. I think some bushes have grown since those paths have gone in, particularly the lilac, which is going nuts right now. It’s almost intoxicating being near it, the scent is so strong. Now that I have a screen door up over my back door, I’ve been opening the door to get the lilac scent into the house.

Not all my discoveries are garden-related. I keep digging up odd things like silverware and even a potato masher. I just about have a full place setting, but I don’t intend to bring them into my kitchen. I may keep them as garden tools.

As I approach the one-year anniversary of living in this house (I closed on April 9, but the first night I spent here was on the 21st), I’m gradually coming to terms with some of its quirks and with some of the issues of having a house like this.

For one thing, I have a basement. This is the first time I’ve lived in a house with a basement since I was a kid living in Germany. There it was damp but cool. Here, it can get pretty humid, even when it’s hot. I learned last year that a dehumidifier is a good idea, especially during the times of year when it’s too warm for the heater but too cool for the air conditioner. Mine seems to pull about 3/4 of a gallon of water out of the air every other day or so, even when it’s not humid at all. This is essentially distilled water, so I’m using it to water plants. I can’t imagine what it will do when it actually gets humid, but by then I’ll be running the air conditioner. I learned during the past couple of summers that I have to adjust my idea of a good thermostat setting and can’t set it where I would have in Texas. Sometimes, I need to just put on a sweater and run the AC to get the humidity out so things don’t mildew.

The basement itself is kind of weird because it’s actually upstairs from my first floor. My house is built into the side of a hill. The front half of the downstairs is the ground floor, where the front door is. Then you go up a step into the basement, which is the back half of the downstairs and the part that’s mostly underground. It’s not a finished basement. The floor is concrete, and it looks like the walls were encapsulated and sprayed with foam insulation by the people who restored the house. I don’t know what it was like before. The utilities in there are new. They were still installing the connections for the laundry when I first looked at the house. Then the upstairs is the second story in front and the ground floor in back. The back door to the house is upstairs. This is the only house on the street like this. For the rest of them, they built them up on the hill, with retaining walls to hold in the hillside and stairs from the street level to the house. My neighbors’ ground floors are just about level with my upstairs.

I think there may once have been a back kitchen door, as well. When the house was restored/remodeled, they took out the wall that cut the downstairs room in half. There used to be a separate kitchen and living/dining room. The chimney for the coal or wood stove that was apparently used for cooking and heating is still there, though there’s nothing attached to it now, and they took out the wall that was there to open the space up, putting in a bar instead. There’s a bit of concrete slab on the side of the house by the kitchen that looks like a small porch, though there’s no door there. It’s behind the refrigerator, but there’s an electrical outlet that’s at the height for a refrigerator on the wall beside it, and the window for the kitchen is a different size from all the other windows in the house, without the wood framing that’s on all the other windows. My guess is that there used to be a back door behind where the fridge is now for bringing in coal or wood for the stove, the refrigerator went on the wall beside it, and there was a different window in a different place. The siding is relatively new (though not part of the remodel), so there’s no trace of the old door from the exterior, other than what looks like a side porch that has no door. The neighbors who saw the kitchen before the recent remodel said it was very different and it’s good that it’s totally new. That part of the house was gutted, so the kitchen is what you’d get with new construction. I’ve added an island because there was a lot of floor space that wasn’t very useful, and now I have more counter and storage space that I can reposition as needed because it’s on wheels. I’ve also bought a small chest freezer since, as a single person, I generally have to buy packages that are larger than I need at the moment, so I need to freeze a lot of stuff.

The living room isn’t of much use as a living room. It was definitely built before the age of television. I guess it would have worked as a kind of sitting room/parlor, and they might have put a kitchen table where I have the kitchen island, so they didn’t need to use the front room as a dining room. I have the chaise lounge that wouldn’t fit through the door of any other room in there, and that’s where I put the dining room. I use one of the upstairs rooms as a living room. It’s designated as a bedroom in the floor plan that went with the listing, but I don’t think it’s been used as a bedroom for a long time. The door to the room has been removed, there’s no clothes rail in the closet, and there’s a sliding glass door to the deck. I don’t know if the deck is original to the house or if it was added later, and I don’t know if there was always an exterior door in that room. It’s a little odd having the living room on a different floor from the kitchen, but I’m getting used to it. I put my old microwave (there’s one built into the kitchen) in the spare room so I can reheat tea or even make microwave popcorn without going downstairs. I love that living room and looking out at the yard from my seat on the sofa. It’s snug, but it works for me.

I’d thought the lack of closet space would be a problem, but it seems to be working out okay. Most of my tops are knits, so I can fold them instead of hang them, and I’ve turned a bookcase into a wardrobe with fabric bins that fit on the shelves. Since I am who I am, that bookcase does have some books on it, as well.

I think I’m eventually going to get different blinds for my bedroom windows. The window frames are a slightly odd size, so one size of blind was about half an inch too big. I thought I could make the smaller size work, since it covers the glass part of the window, but since it has to hang over the lower part of the window that you can raise and lower, it leaves a gap on the sides on the upper part of the window, and in the summer when it starts getting light around 5 in the morning, that’s annoying. I may go with something that fits over the window rather than inside the window, and I have some ideas. For now, I have some lined curtains that I can throw over the curtain rods that hold the lace curtains, and that deals with the worst of the light.

I had to get used to not having a landline phone. There isn’t even a phone jack. There’s a connection box from Bell Atlantic on the outside of the house, but it doesn’t lead to anything in the house (I think the phone jack must have been in the part of the kitchen that was gutted and remodeled, probably one of those old phones that hung on the wall). So I joined the 21st century and just use my cell phone. My old cordless phone system with two handsets connects to the cell phone via Bluetooth, and my house is small enough that my cell phone is always in range, so now I have handsets up and downstairs that ring when I get a call and I don’t have to find the cell phone or run up or down the stairs to answer. I have fiber optic Internet, so I have my phone set to run over the wi-fi so I don’t have to deal with cellular reception at home.

It took me a while to get my office the way I wanted it. I found a small desk that’s on wheels and that can raise and lower, but I found that I couldn’t get it to lower enough to be comfortable, and the keyboard drawer that was at the right level didn’t pull out enough to put my laptop on it. I also needed more desk space than it offered, so I found another desk that’s pretty much like a hospital tray table. I can lower it enough to type comfortably, and it raises if I ever want to do the standing desk thing. The other desk works as a “desk” for other work, and the keyboard shelf is good for keeping my planner and reference notebooks handy. I found a gaming chair that has good lumbar support that I can adjust, so now I can sit comfortably at my desk to type.

A lot of the windows don’t have screens, but I found some that you can slot in from the inside, and they work pretty well. I’ve got one of those magic mesh things for the door that leads to the deck, so I can go in and out with my hands full.

There’s still some fine-tuning to do to get the house exactly the way I want it, and I have a lot of work to do in the yard, but I’m getting closer to ideal in my cozy little cottage full of quirks. One thing I find amusing is that my house pretty much looks like what you get when a child draws a picture of a house. It’s got the pointy roof, two windows upstairs, two windows and a door downstairs, and a chimney sticking out of the middle of the roof. It’s like I was drawing pictures of my future home when I was a child drawing pictures of houses.

As of yesterday, I’ve owned my house for a year. The first year was focused on getting the house set up and in order, and now I’m turning my attention to the yard.

According to the neighbors, the man who used to own the house before abandoning it had landscaped the lawn extensively. Then it was left to run wild for years. The people I bought it from, who’d restored the house, mostly just mowed down the lawn before putting it on the market. It went wild with weeds in the summer, but now that I’ve cleared out a lot of the weeds and am seeing what it’s really like in the spring, I’m getting a lot of surprises.

For one thing, there are a lot of bulbs that didn’t get a chance to bloom last year because they were mowed down just as they were coming up. This year, the yard is full of tulips and daffodils. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of blooms. Part of that may be because the greenery was cut down last year. I’ve learned that bulbs essentially “recharge” after blooming by using the greenery as fuel, so you’re not supposed to cut back the leaves after the blooms fade. The bulbs got their cycles messed up last year by having the greenery mowed down as soon as it came up. The bulbs also need to be divided because they’ve been allowed to just grow and spread, so they’re in huge, tight clumps. After the greenery dies off, I’ll have to dig up some and move them around.

Then there was the field of something from bulbs. The greenery came up, and it looked kind of like grass, but thicker and more tubular, and when I pulled up some of it along with a weed I was digging up, I could see that it was bulbs, not roots, but I wasn’t sure what it would be. Last Sunday, it bloomed, and I had a field of these white flowers, which my phone identified as Star of Bethlehem. There are other clumps of these all around the yard. I also have fields of wild violets. I had some daylilies last year, but it looks like I’ll have even more this year.

I’ve figured out what the leaves of the worst weeds, the ones with sticker burrs, look like, so I’m trying to dig them all up before they go to seed and produce the stickers. That alone makes the lawn look a lot better. Aside from that, my main project this spring is to move my front walk, which is in the wrong place for my traffic pattern — as I discovered when I was shoveling a walk in the snow and realized it was nowhere near the actual walk. Moving the walkway will create a flower bed. I hope to gradually turn the whole yard into a cottage garden, but that may happen a patch at a time.

Fortunately, I’m in a thinking phase of work, and I’ve found that pulling weeds is almost as good as taking a shower for encouraging creativity.

This is my crazy week for choir, so I’ve decided to consider it something of a spring break. I can work, but I’m not holding myself to any quotas or expectations.

I had a choir rehearsal last night, getting home at 9:30. Then I have to sing for services on Thursday night, Friday mid-day, Saturday night, and Sunday morning.

There are a couple of pieces we’re singing that aren’t getting much rehearsal since the choir does them every year, but either I’ve never sung them before or I’m singing a new part this year, so I have to put in some practice on my own to learn them. One is the Hallelujah Chorus. I could sing the soprano part from memory without rehearsal, but I’m having to learn the alto part. Fortunately, this was a very popular piece for all those “cellphone choirs” from early in the pandemic, so there are a lot of rehearsal videos out there that focus on each part. There are a couple of spots with tricky rhythms, but otherwise, I think I can do this one. The first run past the tricky parts last night I got lost, but then I realized that the way the choir was arranged meant all the former sopranos now singing alto were together and all the “real” altos were together (because of another piece with a first and second alto split), so I couldn’t count on just following the people around me. The next time we went past that part I made myself stay focused and keep counting, and I got through it okay, and the others around me seemed to key off me.

The other piece is for the Saturday night Easter Vigil service. It’s going to be a smaller choir, since it wasn’t mandatory. I signed up because I’ve never seen this service before and thought it would be interesting to see. It’s a 16th century piece, in Latin, a capella, and really fast. We got a run-through last night and will rehearse it again on Saturday. It’s one they apparently do just about every year, so I’m diving in the deep end here while a lot of others have it memorized. I’m going to have to put in some extra work to keep up with it. It’s not a Latin text I’ve sung before in other settings, so I need to get used to the words while I’m also learning the notes. I’ve got a recording, but I haven’t found one that isolates the alto part, and the recording goes at performance tempo. I’ll have to sit at the piano to work on this one.

Meanwhile, Saturday is Fiber Fest at the Frontier Culture Museum, so that will be a busy day. It’s a fun festival with sheepdog demonstrations, shearing, other fiber arts stuff, and vendors to shop at. I may let myself buy some good yarn for knitting. I’ll be picking up some material for books, I’m sure. I’ll eventually get around to spring in Rydding Village, so there will be shearing.

Since Friday morning will be kind of crazy, I’m giving myself the day off and won’t be posting then. Even if I wrote a post, I’d probably forget to post it in the frenzy of getting myself together and heading to the church in time to rehearse before the noon service. I’m just declaring that whole day a holiday and will be spending the afternoon doing some cooking to have handy for the weekend. The idea will be to have breakfast and dinner food ready to just heat up during the weekend. I can heat breakfast before heading out on Easter morning, then heat lunch when I get home, and then I can collapse.

I moved the day after Easter last year, so I spent the day getting the house ready and then getting my apartment ready for the movers (though Easter was much later last year, so I’m not at the year anniversary). This will sort of be my second Easter in this house. I wasn’t technically living here then, but I had lunch here and spent most of the day here. It’ll be nice to be able to just relax this year.