Spring Cleaning: better late than never, and maybe not even late

Spring in Montana, taken Thursdsay morning from the front porch. While still in my jammies.

I'm finally catching the spring-cleaning bug. Some years I remain immune, but this year, not so much. I thought perhaps I had escaped, since spring was finally in the air, but then it snowed several inches this week, so it feels like I'm getting a do-over for the beginning of the season.
 So far I have managed to clean out exactly one (of two) junk drawers in the kitchen, and I spent about ninety minutes organizing in my office at church. I do, however, have designs on considerably larger undertakings: the entire master bedroom, the garage, the front-room closet which is full-to-bursting with all kinds of amazing things.
The church rummage sale was a couple of weeks ago, and I'd managed to keep my new year's goal and put a thing a day in the rummage sale box. That helped, but there's still plenty to do. And plenty to pass on to someone who could use it more than we do. There is a new "giveaway" box in the bedroom. So far the hubs has made the only contributions.
Part of my hope for spring cleaning isn't just physical, but mental, too. I'm feeling a need for some new patterns of thought and organizing time. Not necessarily that much more structure, but new. And I'm hoping to get on top of some digital clutter, too. As I write this, my personal email account has 2,676 new emails in it, not counting the 23 which hotmail has identified as junk. The total number of emails in my inbox, which either have not been read or not been put in a folder, is 5,085 messages. Surely that's one or two emails more than I need.



Mother Nature's mixed-messages

A month in...

We're a month into 2012, and frankly it doesn't really feel like it to me. I think part of that feeling is due to the weather here - we've pretty muched missed winter so far, with above average temperatures and below average snow fall. I have grown unaccustomed to seeing brown lawn for most of January, and it's starting to be a little disconcerting. Snow is predicted for Thursday, but the weekend is supposed to be on the warm-ish side, so even if we do get a good few inches of snow, there's no guarantee it'll stick around for long.

I never did get around to posting my goals for 2012. Here they are:
1. Read at least 12 novels (one a month is the goal, but some months aren't as fiction-friendly as others. I had so much fun with this last year that it just might be a goal for life).
2. Read at least 12 non-fiction books (got to keep things balanced. And setting a goal makes it more likely to happen, I think).
3. Give away 366 things, one per day - remember, this is a leap year! I've got a big rubber maid bin as my current collection site, saving things for our annual church rummage sale. After that it'll be off to the Salvation Army or Goodwill. I'm keeping track of the items on a list on the box lid. I'm only 3 shy for January. Gotta get busy.
4. Write a handwritten letter, card or postcard for every day the USPS delivers mail, which was 24 days this month. I've still got 2 to write tonight, but there's hope... If you start getting prodigious quantities of mail from me, now you'll know why. If you'd like to get some mail from me, let me know in the comments... (This goal is a spin-off of the 52 weeks 52 letters challenge (which always seemed a bit of a weenie challenge to me) and is a result of the success I had sending a postcard every day for a month last fall).
5. Find a place for everything in our house. And then put everything in said place. This is related to goal #3. We've still got too much junk in our house. I still have too much junk in our house. And the Munchkin's growing stash doesn't make things any easier. If any of this year's goals prove bigger than my determination, it will be this one.
6. Get back in slightly better shape. I know, aim high, right? If I could lose 100 pounds between now New Year's Eve that'd be great. But that might be biting off more than I'd actually get around to chewing. So I'm going for 20 pounds or so, and some increased cardio endurance. My gym membership got re-upped this week, after a nearly year-long hiatus, which followed a 10-month-pregnancy-and-post-partum hiatus. It's time.
7. Knit something real. And I'm already on this one - I signed up for a "First Sweater" knitting class at a local yarn shop. At first I thought I'd tackle a husband-sized sweater, but then I found some great orange-purple-pink yard and decided to go with something for the Munchkin instead. I'd hoped to find a new friend or two among my fellow students, but I'm a good 10-15 years older than all four of them. If I'd been looking for Saturday night drinking (and knitting) buddies, I'd have been set.
8. More date nights. We're working on it.
9. Write something every day - if not a card, a blog post here or on the church blog, in my journal, something.

Now that I'm all the way to number nine, I'm feeling like I should come up with three more to get all the way to number 12 for 2012. But I won't.
There is, however, one more thing we're really hoping for - a second child. I miscarried again at Thanksgiving. It wasn't nearly as traumatic as the first time, but dashed hopes and dreams are never fun. There's more to say about that, but I'll save it for another day.

For now, I've got to go write a couple of postcards!!

A touch of summer

It seems winter has arrived to stay after all. We had some snow last Saturday, and though we didn't get any more snow until today, the grass stayed white all week. Another couple inches got added today, and I'm thinking we may not see the lawn til next spring. So much for planting the iris rhizomes or the last super-cheap perennials I picked up.
I'm not quite ready for winter. A couple more weeks of autumn would suit me just fine.
It's hard to believe this picture of one of G's sunflowers was taken only two and a half months ago. Ah, summer sunshine...

There are always sunflowers in our garden.

Not quite treasure

It's snowing. It's been snowing. Since before I got up a little before 7:30 this morning. For the 5th of November - that's a lot of snow. Fortunately, it hasn't piled up too high yet; I'm not quite ready to hear the roar of the snow thrower...
One of the joys of the onset of winter, besides already drying out skin and hair, is the return of outerwear to my regular wardrobe. I can get by with my 18 year old Patagonia fleece for quite a while as the temperatures start to drop, and having grown up in Seattle, I can walk through a lot of rain before I would classify the weather as "wet" instead of "damp."
That said, I do not especially enjoy being cold, and so this evening on my way to worship I pulled my red down vest from the coat closet and put it on for the first time in months. And what to my pocket-seeking hands did appear? But a whole pile of junk that hasn't seen the light of day since the last time I wore the vest, last winter... including: a wad of Kleenex (not used, thank God), a starlight peppermint, a couple of peppermint wrappers, and one of those not-even-bite-sized Three Musketeers nuggets, which at this point could probably break a tooth. Not exactly buried treasure. Not even some spare change!
These spontaneous treasure hunts happen every year, and with just about every coat, jacket or vest I own (which I would have to admit are greater in number than one girl actually NEEDS). You'd think I'd manage to clean out my pockets before relegating the warm stuff to the back of the closet in the spring, but I never know the last time I wear something will be the last time I wear it for the season.
I remember something similar happening when I was growing up. As the oldest of two sisters, I was the one who handed things down, not the handee. The upside: lots of new clothes, including beautiful wool coats thanks to a Grandma who also did not enjoy being cold. The downside: I rarely cleaned out those pockets, either, at the end of winter, and when they became hand-me-downs, the ownership of pocket contents transferred to my younger sister along with the pockets. Maybe that's why I rarely find any money in my own coats winter to winter these days...

It's beginning to feel a lot like summer

Happy June!
(So, it turns out NaBloPoMo still isn't my thing - but hey, 13 posts out of 31 days isn't SO bad. It's a whole lot more than I'd written for quite a while.)
Here in the land of Unseen Endings, we had a wonderful week in Washington, inspired by my nephew's baptism on May 22nd. I thought about writing something the whole time we were gone, and each day had its own memories and stories to share. Perhaps I'll get to those sometime THIS month.

Today, though, is for sharing the work that's already been done in our yard.
On Monday, a very rainy day here in Bozeman, G, the Munchkin and I headed to a family-owned nursery here in town, to take advantage of the end of their sale on bare root shrubs (25% off!). One of the fantastic things, besides the price, about said shrubs is, obviously, that their roots are bare. This means the hole one must dig is not-so-big. We got four new shrubs planted in about an hour and a half this morning, with plenty of time for wandering to talk to a neighbor, pull out some weeds, and come back in the house to nurse a hungry baby.
The plants we put in the ground are: a Rose Tree of China, an Annabelle hydrangea (I'll be messing with soil acidity a few years from now if I want blue flowers instead of white), a Wedgewood Lilac and a miniature Cranberry bush. A couple of them are just starting to bud out. Of course it will be a few years before they are mature enough to be impressive, but just knowing their promise makes me glad. And being outside under a mostly blue sky in ratty old cargo pants and a long sleeved t-shirt added to the giddiness. There are parts of this state that are severely under water, and there's more rain coming here, but for now it feels just a little like summer might finally be here to stay for a while.

Ready for the Light

Happy Winter Solstice! I am looking forward to a little more sunshine, though with the Weather Channel forecasting a 100% chance of precipitation in Bozeman tomorrow, I may have to wait a day or two... I thought of this song by Dar Williams today. A good one for solstice.

Old Fashioned Warmth

It's cold in Bozeman. Really cold. I'm not sure our high made it above zero today. I know when I finally rolled out of bed this morning the news-folk said the windchill was lower than 40 degrees below zero. It's definitely cold enough to get one's attention. And it can get cold enough in our house to get my attention, too.

We bought our house in late winter earlier this year, and moved in March. For reasons that still escape me, we have two furnaces - one for upstairs and one for downstairs. While the control that offers is nice - we can heat just the space we're in a little more simply, especially with the gas fireplace in our family room/kitchen great room - it means that the bedrooms, all upstairs, stay a little chilly. We've got flannel sheets, a quilt and a big fluffy down comforter on the bed. But when the temp is barely 60 degrees in the room (58 if the man of the house gets sneaky), it's still a little chilly at first.

Enter one of the all time greatest inventions of all time: the hot water bottle (why do they still call them bottles? they're not, really). I had never seen one used for warmth in bed until I lived in Northern Ireland for a year. And then I wasn't just introduced to the concept with the standard red bottle (like the one in my lap right now), but red rubber bottles inside stuffed animal covers! Talk about snuggly! I've still got mine (Shaun the sheep from Wallace and Grommit), though it's a little bulky for keeping my feet warm under all the covers... Fill it up with water heated in the electric kettle (the small kitchen appliance I have refused to live without since my Irish sojourn) and winter nights aren't so bad.

I wonder how much energy Montanans would save if we all kept our tootsies toasty with a few cups of hot water?