My former next-door neighbor sent us a very nice letter last week. She had stumbled upon this site and noticed this post from December. I never did find Christmas dishes on the clearance racks, but she had a beautiful set and offered it to us for free! She stopped by today, and I was sort [...]

It takes 2 1/2 – 3 hours to mow our lawn (as you can see here). Micah always gets the mowing done on his day off. Meanwhile, I take the edge trimmer along the fence and steps, trim the bushes and rip out some random weeds. The lawn bags fill up quickly. The town only [...]

The ceiling fan in William’s room was old and obnoxiously noisy. We had been meaning to replace it for a long time, but I was very picky about what I wanted. It’s a very small room, so it couldn’t be larger than 44 inches. I hate the multiple-lights-with-shades look (I had that issue in the [...]

My parents were married in 1964, at which time my mother received an old cookbook from her aunt. It was a copy of the Boston Cooking School cookbook, and she used it all the time when I was young. I always hoped she would give it to me, but knew it was sentimental. I was [...]

I was motivated to work today. I cleared another big plant on the left side of the house, then decided to bring a rake with me while the kids were playing in the back yard. They were having fun, so I kept going. A couple of hours later, I had cleared all of the weeds, [...]

We had some overgrown, half-dead shrubs in the back yard that needed to be cleared. All I had were some hedge clippers, but I managed to get them chopped down. I’ll worry about the stumps later. Micah broke the branches up while I ripped out weeds. The goal is to plant grass here and disburse [...]

I know this will seem trivial to people who have acres of land, but to me it seems like we have so much lawn to mow. It takes about 2 1/2 hours, and during much of the season it needs to be mowed once a week. I decided to take some photos today, even though [...]

The entryway: Move-in time, 2006: Entryway now: There’s no polite way to say this. Our cat urinated on the carpet runner. I don’t know what he was thinking, but seriously… on stairs? I pulled off the runner, which had been stapled down. The treads were in pretty good shape, with the exception of some scratches [...]

I’ll have a post with some real updates soon. In the meantime, here are some Fall photos. Today, we spent two more hours raking and leaf blowing. We filled five 30-gallon lawn bags. The lawn was covered again within a few hours.

Our apples may have been damaged from a few hail storms this year, but we still had fun apple picking in our own backyard. This is such a fun tradition for us! Here are some photos from today.