Our new house!

Here's the first photos of our soon-to-be home. There's still some final work being done, but overall you can get a good sense of it. I had no idea how hard it is to photograph a room until now. So, let's start the tour, shall we? The house is one of four at the end of a cul-de-sac, sort of tucked back behind some trees. Here we are out front. Please ignore my mom in the corner, she tried so hard not to get in the photos. I love the little stone wall on the left, I think I'm going to plant some kind of hanging flowers at the edge. D loves the brick, and we're thrilled we'll both get to park our cars in the garage.

Coming into the back yard, here's a little more than half the yard. You can see remnants of the previous garden, including an awesome asparagus patch. The dogs should love it (the yard, hopefully not the asparagus). Speaking of aspargus, left to itself it grows over 6 ft. tall. Here's the view from the kitchen door. I think there's about 9 acres of woods that can't be accessed for development, so we'll have all sorts of forest to explore :) C'mon inside now! Here's the front living room looking into the dining room. All the main rooms are laminate flooring. It looks pretty, but I hate to think of the dogs scrabbling around on it until we can get some rugs. If we step off to the left, we come into the den. I'm really pleased there's a fireplace, it was on my nice but not necessary list. It's big enough I think I might have to get some hearth hooks and see if I can do some cooking in it. You know I'm not kidding. Off to the right is the cut through to the kitchen. We're planning on extending the half wall into a breakfast bar some day. There's a kitchen door to the left out onto the deck. The kitchen is really exciting. It hadn't been updated in a long time, so the sellers completely renovated it, including a set-in sink and all new appliances. There wasn't a dishwasher originally, but they installed one (thank goodness!). And last but not least, the shower has this awesome multi-task seat for mornings when you're in a rush.

Waiting at the crossroads

In my quest to pack up as much as I can, I'm going through all my old stuff sorting it into keep-sell-donate piles. And I find myself spending quite a lot of time playing with all the things I've saved over the years. I still have my sticker album and spent a while looking through all the collected stickers from my childhood. I was amazed how many distinct memories the stickers brought up, and how oddly fun it is to peel them off their backing and stick them down somewhere. Can you still buy stickers? I may need to buy some more.

I also have my favorite kid book that I made my mom read me every single night. Over and over, until I had it memorized and knew if she tried to skip a page to shorten the agony of reading the same book yet again. I can still quote about the first two thirds of the book. Given that it's a progressive repeating book, that's saying a lot. I wonder if my parents still have it seared in their memories too. "Big. big brown. big brown bear. big brown bear blue bull. big brown bear blue bull beautiful baboon..."
I'm willing to bet money they do. Never did figure out why the baboon was dressed in a tutu and pointe shoes.

Wanna guess how long it took me to pack the box containing these items and the rest of that shelf? Good thing I have a month to go.

The first one

Check it out --I packed my first box to move to our new home! That's right, by this time next month we will be living in our own place. I know the month is going to pass in the blink of an eye, so I'm trying to casually do as much as possible ahead of time. Of course, looking around the house I'm amazed just how much stuff I use daily and can't box up. And again there's the question of where to put all these boxes, since boxed-up stuff takes up way more space than stuff on shelves. My winter clothes were an easy choice to pack, and it was a great feeling to write "basement" on the box. Finally we will have real storage space. I think we've spent more time planning the basement than we have about arranging all the other rooms combined.

More to come...

Garden Party!

Our garden is in full swing. I love going out early on Sat. mornings and trying to see how much we can get done before it gets too hot. No matter what we do that day, at the end of it we always look out over the garden and comment proudly how much better it looks now. We always seem to say it with a touch of wonder, like we didn't really expect a few hours of work to make such a difference. This is as much as I could fit in one photo frame, but it extends off to left more. The trees in the background are all different varieties of apple trees - great for well-rounded pies & sauces.The funny thing is, it's not my backyard! This at my friend's house. A few years ago I wished aloud about having a garden, and she said her's was bigger than she could easily do by herself. So we joined forces and have had a great time gardening together. This year a mutual friend joined us, and we all have fun working together. Our styles of gardening complement each other well, and we seem to all hit the "it's hot and I'm tired" point at the exact same time.

Doesn't the garden look nice? All the lush plants and promises of future harvest. Ironically, our very best-looking plant is our compostatoes. They rooted from some old potatoes we tossed in the compost pile and are doing so well we agreed not to turn the compost pile so the potatoes can keep growing. It's fun, more like a science experiment than gardening. No idea what variety of potato it is (I'm hoping garnet sweet potato!). It's heartening in a way to know our compost pile is doing well enough to support potato plants. Since it's open-air I always wonder if the veggie scraps are really turning into compost, or is it just a buffet for the local wildlife? The chipmunks are certainly out in force already. They love our strawberries, and we all got to sample the nearly ripe berries yesterday because the few red ones we saw had chipmunk bites taken out of them. They were warm from the sun, and a mouth-watering mix of future sweetness and not-quite-ripe tartness. If it's anything like last year we are going to have more strawberries than we can conceivably use, even split 3 ways.

Hold on to your hats, here come the...

Flying Bosoms! So many bellydance troupes have traditional-style names - Zafira, Mandara, Awalim, while more irreverent ones often reference hips - Wicked Hips, Heavy Hips. There are the few outlying names - Fat Chance Bellydance and Rockabelly are two that spring to mind. I do love our troupe name, and it suits our dance style well. We're happy, funloving, highly energetic and just sexy enough it's ok to watch with your grandma.We meet at least weekly for practice, and lately have begun performing at places around town. The most recent was for a fundraising event at a local bar to raise money for biking trails and such, hence the shirts. It's been a blast, and we were all surprised how easily we can throw together a choreography or pick some random songs and do stylized improv dance for 20 min. without a hitch. We'll be performing at a downtown festival later this summer (no, not *that* one) too!
Of course more performances means excuses to get more dance clothes and makeup. Any time I see a pretty bangle for pennies at the thrift store I pick it up. If only other costume pieces were as easy. I've been having fun with more makeup styles, and have some wicked eyelashes now.Here's a bright blue with black look, with white in the inner corners, and black coming down the outer edge. Doncha love my perfectly matching bindi? This was from our first performance in town. Here's another performance look, although again the colors are more subtle in the photo than real life. The colors went from black to blue to purple then pink. And unfortunately the glitter rhinestones on my eyelashes started to flake off from overuse, so they're not as sparkly as once was. I'm thinking I need an expanded color palette, maybe red and orange, to round out the colorwheel. I also want to get some ridiculously impractical false eyelashes, like the kind that have real feathers at the edges, like these. Oh yeah, tons of fun! I wonder what it feels like to blink with that much air resistance... I'll let you know!

River

I took a middle eastern drumming workshop this weekend with the drumming master River Guerguerian. I had my first drumming lesson with him back in 07 as part of bellydance camp. He's such an amazing person. He's been featured on NPR repeatedly during the week running up to the workshop & performance. In fact an NPR woman was there recording during our class. He had a very successful music career in New York playing percussion, then sold everything he owned and traveled the Himalayas for 5 years with just a backpack and musical instruments. His daughter was born there and he delivered her!He's a very cool cat, not earthy or crunchy, but you can see there's something special about him. He literally has musical energy flowing through his body all the time, and the energy comes through his fingers so naturally onto any surface without a second thought. He was standing there talking with the NPR woman about when he could meet her for an interview, yet as I walked around him I noticed his hands performing a riveting drumming on the water bottle he held. The sound reminded me of a babbling brook - mesmerizing, incomprehensibly complex yet natural.

I happened to have the same notebook with me for note-taking that I carried to my last class with him. Afterwards I compared notes, and they were almost identical. Nothing about music or rhythms, just comments about body alignment, breathing, and relaxing. Letting the drum strike be part of a circular movement of your hands. And the difference in the sound you can generate is amazing depending on if you're just thinking about hitting the drum vs. letting it be part of a larger almost meditative stance. Any time we were struggling with a complex rhythm he would intentionally take a deep breath, reminding us to do so as well, and the beat would just fall into place. He asked us once what the 4th toe on our left foot was doing, and as my attention slid away from my hands they relaxed into the music.

I know I will never be able to play like him, but I also know he will make me into the best drummer I can be. His encouragement is not that of wanting to please a teacher or show them how much you know, but rather that you want to be part of the energy he carries.

Puppies in the Spring

Now that the weather's brightening up, I'm spending more time outside with the dogs. I finally remembered to bring my camera with me, so here's a few new pics of the pups. Kayla just turned 6 months old - she's growing like a weed, so scrawny right now. I think she's using all her nutrition to grow fur instead of body mass. She's going to be even furrier than Katie. Egads, it's going to break my vacuum cleaner. At least I'll be able to continue knitting D. winter gear to match his Katie fur hat and scarf.

Windy loves the water, and if you ask her if she wants to go swimmin' she'll immediately tear off for the nearest watering hole. If it's not deep enough for honest swimming she enjoys just lounging. Do the strings of drool sheeting down take away from the overall image?

Kayla sometimes comes out with these expressions that make you look around the house to see what she's done. See what I mean? These looks also make me wonder what she's mixed with. We know half is Australian Shepherd, but really are curious about what the other half is.

Windy is sort of doofy, but her attention is unwavering when she sees something interesting. There were flocks of ducks migrating that sparked some deep rooted instinct in her. She'd trot along staring at them until they flew over the treeline. Kayla didn't know what Windy was looking at, but mimiced her anyway.