I Hope it Keeps Up...

Thoughts...

It's been FOREVER since I posted on here.  I had such grand plans of being a regular blog poster, and then, well, life got in the way, but i'll skip the actual details.  Since I last wrote, my garden has gone through a tumultuous season, dealing with torrential rain.  The only things that still remain are the cucumbers (which are just starting to sprout cukes) and the pumpkins (with no actual pumpkins yet) that didn't even intentionally plant but rather sprouted from my compost.  Also, the funniest thing?  In a totally random patch of weeds and such that I also spread some compost around in grows another pumpkin plant AND A TOMATO PLANT THAT I DID NOT PUT THERE.  So, my gardening plan for next year?  Spread a bunch of compost around my property and see what comes up.  Mother nature---you kill me.

Okay, so it's August and in only a few more weeks it will be September and then I will officially start wishing it was fall and time for apple picking and colorful foliage and fires in the fireplace and oh yeah when I get completely NUTS about baking and am in the kitchen every weekend experimenting with some new squash bread recipe.  In the summer I am completely and utterly uninterested in cooking anything, and I am embarrassed to admit that we have either ordered food or gone out to eat probably 5 out of 7 days a week.  Our health and our budget are suffering as a result, so i'm actually looking forward to the cooler days.  We've had a pretty cool summer until freaking August rolls around with its humidity and oppressive heat and OH MY GOD have you seen our electric bill because our AC is on 24/7?

So, here's what i've been thinking about lately, and i'm sure those few of you who are reading this will be thoroughly disgusted that I am thinking forward to November already, but that's how I operate, man.  So yeah, now that we have this house and much of the renovation is done and it's a pretty homey, cozy place to be, i'm thinking about inviting the in-laws et al (MIL, FIL, two BIL, Cousin, Aunt, and Aunt's Mom and my parents) for Thanksgiving.  I never had big family gatherings growing up, but now that I am married and have a large extended family, the idea of hosting a holiday at my house is both thrilling and terrifying.  It's not the cooking part that intimidates me because I know I can do it; it's the having more than two family members in this house for an extended period of time and making sure they have a good time and also making sure everyone doesn't GO INSANE.  Right now, the total number of people I would envision having here for T-Giving dinner is about 11.  Not all of them would stay in our house, but a good portion of them would.  I know that it will be stressful and overwhelming at times, but I LOVE the idea of having everyone here, and finally having that big family holiday dinner that I never had growing up.  What do you guys think?  Am I getting in over my head here, or should I go for it?  If any of you have ever hosted a holiday at your house, i'd love advice, thoughts, or feelings about the situation.  Right now i'm leaning towards YES, but I could be convinced otherwise.  Especially since I think I would have to start cleaning TOMORROW in order to get this place in shape to have my relatives here in time to eat turkey.

My first sprouting vegetable!!!

Man Caves---Not Just for Men Anymore

One of the things my husband (and !, admittedly) were excited about when we first moved into this house was the huge basement and all of the potential it held.  Right away he knew he wanted to make it into a useable room.  Not only would it be a great place to hang out, but it would mean that our house had four levels of livable space, which, for a 1,500 square foot house, is not too shabby.  Since we already had a home office and two guest rooms, the only logical remodeling plan was to make it a Man Cave.  My husband made a point of telling me that it shouldn't be a space JUST for him, but, in all honesty, I felt like it should be his space to do with what he wanted.  I would just visit every once in a while.

The first task was to clean out the basement.  Sounds easy enough, right?  Well, not only did it contain 50+ years worth of stuff my grandparents deemed worthy enough to keep for all that time, but it also hadn't been cleaned in that long.  The only time anyone ever went down there was to service the oil heater or use the old fridge for extra food that wouldn't fit in the kitchen fridge.   I can't even begin to imagine the types of spiders and bugs that must have been pretty pissed off once we started moving stuff around and getting rid of old boxes.  Luckily, most of them stayed hidden during that time.  We did find a unnerving amount of mice droppings, but I think those were from days past during the years when my grandfather didn't have cats.  We now have three, so any mouse that found its way into our house would be destined for a short existence.  Anyway, it was a BIG job.  Some of the things we had to deal with:  an old ping pong table, my mother's loom from the 60's and 70's, a bird cage, and more chairs than you can count.  We did manage to get rid of or find a place for everything, even despite it looking like this at the beginning (I can't believe i'm actually making this photo public):

Once we cleaned out the space, it was time to start building the room.  We decided not to make the WHOLE basement the Man Cave because we did need some space for storage.  Prior to this renovation, all of our house projects had been done by contractors.  For this room, we enlisted the help of two of my husband's college friends who had experience with building rooms and everything that goes along with it.  The room was basically put up in two weekends, and then my husband did the finishing touches himself.  I WISH I had taken photos of the renovation process, because it really was quite amazing to see it come together, and to finally understand how much planning and detail goes into something like this.  It's hard to get a photo of the whole room from one angle, but I think you can see the difference between what it looked like before, and what it looked like now.  It's incredible to me that it's actually a space that I like to spend time in now, as opposed to a dark, damp place under the house where I never really liked to venture before.

Now we love to hang out down there and play darts (I am currently losing our tournament 10 games to 3), watch movies, and play video games.  We also have an awesome air hockey table given to us by some friends as a housewarming gift, and a wall of Led Zeppelin records in the guitar corner.  The only thing really missing now is a kegerator...

Irrigation Nation

Ever since we moved last spring, it has been my husband's raison d'etre to keep water away from the house.  Not that we have had any major water problems or serious leaks, but there has been evidence of old water stains on the concrete walls in the basement.  That is reason enough to worry that if water were to gather around the house at any given time, that it COULD leak into the basement and cause a lot more damage than we'd like.  And especially now that we have a brand new Man Cave built down there (to be detailed in a future post), complete with large flat screen TV and other expensive electronic equipment, there's even more reason to want to protect it from dampness.

As a result of this new landscaping obsession, our yard has quite a few unique elements to it, including a small trench that runs from the gutter in the backyard all the way into the front yard to another trench that flows down the hill.  It's not exceptionally attractive, but my husband has assured me that when he plants grass around the trenches, I won't even notice that it's there.  At first I was skeptical, especially since I didn't want our yard to look even more unkempt than it already does (although it has been much improved over the last few months).  However, he seems to have a gift for irrigation because we haven't had any leaks ANYWHERE, despite the substantial snowfall this winter and torrential rainfalls we've had this spring. There is still quite a bit of water that accumulates in puddles in the backyard when it rains a lot, but nothing that doesn't dry up after a day or two.   And the best part about it is that my husband is so dedicated to this endeavor that he will run out into the yard in the middle of a storm and dig in the dirt until he's satisfied that we will be protected from the flood.  Not only does it make him feel good that he's taking care of our house, I think he secretly loves being able to play in the mud and dirt without repercussions.

I'm so proud of his dedication to the house and this property.  Just don't get him started on grass seed.

See how my garden grows!!!

So it's been about a week and a half since I posted photos of the raised-bed garden I had recently planted.  The butter lettuce had sprouted, but that's about it.  Check it out now!

The snow peas took a sudden and commanding lead, and now the grape tomatoes on the right are even sprouting.  The other box, which is more in the shadows, does not seem to be doing quite as well, although one jalapeno plant seems to be coming up, and my cucumber mounds are suddenly showing signs of life.  The herb plots (oregano and basil), however, are not coming around.  There are some mystery sprouts in there, but I have a feeling those are as a result of some leftover seeds in the compost, so i'm curious to see what might come of those.  It's pretty exciting, actually.  Take a look:

I would LOVE IT If someone can identify those sprouts for me (they're definitely NOT the basil I planted because they are growing too close to the perimeter of the box).  Has anyone else who has previous experience with composting ever had mystery plants grow as a result of using the compost in your garden?  If so, what type of plants have you seen come up?  There are any number of seeded vegetable remnants that I threw in the compost bin and which could have survived and now found new life here.  Or, I suppose they could also have come from seeds or other tiny things that have drifted down from the trees above.  I don't know, but it's kind of thrilling.  Unless they're weeds, in which case I will feel pretty dumb for having gotten so excited about it.

So any gardeners who could shed some insight on the mystery sprouts, I welcome your comments!

I guess age really is just a number.

I don't know about any of you, but there are some mornings when I wake up next to my husband and think it's bizarre that i'm old enough to be married to someone.  Sometimes when I walk in a liquor store it still baffles me that I am legally allowed to buy as many bottles of alcohol as I want.  I am amazed that a bank found me responsible enough to loan me a significant amount of money.  And, the fact that two of my close friends are now qualified to operate on me if the need every arose is just mind-boggling.  Long story short:  Even though I am an almost-32-year-old adult, I still don't feel very grown up.

When is that supposed to happen?  Getting married was definitely a step in that direction, as was moving to a real house with a yard and no one living above or below us, but yet most days I still feel stuck at around age 19.  And seriously, if you spend an extended amount of time with me and my husband, i'm not sure we act much older than that most of the time. When I was younger, I thought there would be this magical moment when I would feel grown up and I wouldn't want to do the things I liked to do when I was a kid.   But yet here I am, playing more video games than I ever did growing up, and sometimes I still feel the urge to break out the legos (but seriously, legos are awesome and if I ever get tired of them somebody please put me out of my misery).

Also, since I spent a lot of my childhood growing up in this very house there are so many aspects of it that take me back to when I was a wee one.  For example, the fireplace hearth is where my best friend of nearly 29 years and I used to perform song and dance routines for my grandparents.  One of our first performances was "Like a Virgin", which at the time had absolutely no meaning to us, although my grandmother had to suppress her horror at some of the lyrics that were coming out of our mouths.  The first level of the house that currently functions as my home office was known as "The Playroom" for a long time, and I have fond memories of watching The Price is Right on my days off from school while laying on the uncomfortable plastic green flowered sofa that lived down here for so long.

I think maybe i'm ruminating about this lately because my 32nd birthday is coming up in a few weeks and i'm freaking out about it more than I expected.  Turning 30 was not a big deal at all, but for some reason the thought of being 32 is causing me to contemplate my life a bit more, NOT because i'm not where I want to be, but because I see things changing so rapidly all around me and yet I don't feel much different.  Sometimes I still get that momentary instinct to pick up the phone and call my grandmother, even though she's been gone for over three years and I am now living in her house.  Isn't that weird?  You'd think I would have processed by now.  Does this happen to anyone else?  Is there a point at which your brain catches up with the rest of your life?

I want to be able to make an entire salad without leaving my yard

I've always had this fantasy of being able to walk outside of my house and just pick the necessary ingredients for making a completely fresh, organic salad.  It is a very Martha Stewart-esque thing to want to do, I know, but something about it just screams self-reliance, and I love that.  In fact, even before we moved to this house I remember talking about starting my own veggie garden.  I had grandiose plans of building one of those big walk-in gardens that has a door and is surrounded by chicken wire to keep out hungry creatures.  I imagined the walkways covered in stones that I had dug out of the ground myself, and high-growing vines of every sort of bean and tomato you can imagine.  I even started composting in a self-made compost bin, which I contributed and tended to on a regular basis. Composting turned out to be a super-easy process and had the added benefit of reducing our trash output and making me feel uber-environmentally conscious.  By the time spring rolled around we had an entire trash bin worth of smelly, rich garden nutrients; however, the whole walk-in garden turned out to be way, WAY more than I could take on this season, so here's what we have instead:

Not very glamourous, I know, but I figured it made sense to start out on a smaller scale in case it turned out to be a spectacular failure.  I planted butter lettuce, snow peas, grape tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, cucumbers, basil, and oregano, which are all fairly easy to grow (supposedly).  Plus, the seed packages said "Guaranteed to Grow!"  So if nothing ends up happening, I think I have a pretty solid lawsuit on my hands.  But alas!  Evidence of life!

The beginnings of butter lettuce!

So far, so good. I plan to build a wire covering to keep the critters out once things start growing more abundantly.  I'll keep posting photos of emerging sprouts because that kind of thing excites me, and I hope it excites whoever is reading this.  I think this is probably the first attempt at growing vegetables that has ever occurred on this property.  The only living-off-the-land my grandma ever did was pick dandelion leaves from the front yard to put in my grandpa's salad.  I only ever tasted it once, and my young, impressionable taste buds did NOT like it at all.  Dandelion leaves, although very edible, are incredibly bitter and taste very much like, well, dirt, if memory serves.  There is also an urban legend in my family that when my great-grandmother lived with my grandparents (way before I was born), she used to catch rabbits on the property and make rabbit stew.  For an old Italian woman, this is not a big deal.  For me, it was the stuff of nightmares.  Although i'm still not sure if that one is true, I inevitably feel a lot of sympathy for those little bun-buns.  But if they ever try to get into my new garden, all bets are off.

Sometimes I can't believe it's the same house

A little back-story to the photos below.  The Christmas 1978 photo was taken when my Norwegian grandparents (on the right) first came to America to visit little ol' me (in the highchair).  It was the first time they had met my Italian-American grandparents so i'm not sure my mom even got a chance to eat since she was probably translating the whole time.  Oh yeah, did I not mention that I have a very interesting familial background?  Sicilian-born grandma and Italian-American grandpa on my dad's side; viking ancestors on my mom's.  Pretty much polar opposite cultural personalities, but they all got along famously, i'm told. 

The first photo shows the dining room as it used to look, and the new photo is how it looks now, which is clearly NOT like a dining room.  You can see that the wall has been taken out to open up the kitchen to the rest of the room, which is now the living area. That breakfront holding all the china is now, sadly, in our garage holding about 100 old LPs that didn't sell at last summer's tag sale. We just couldn't find room for it, and no one has shown any interest in trying to haul it away, even if we paid them to do it.  We have still not put up any curtains, and i'm not sure that will happen any time in the near future since I have absolutely NO idea what window treatments I want.  I may not decide for another few decades.  We'll see. 

Also, that cuckoo clock is non-functioning, but was brought to me all the way from Norway, where it has been residing in my family's summer cottage for as long as I can remember. My Norwegian grandfather passed away in 2006 (only a week after my Italian grandma died) and it is one of the things I requested that reminds me of him and of the time I spent in Norway when I was younger. 

So even though the only people still living from that photo are me and my mom, I am constantly reminded of them and their place in my life. I like looking back and remembering how things used to be, and seeing how they have evolved and merged effortlessly with how things are now. It gives me peace to know that nothing is truly final. Especially my mom's perm. Yikes.

Changes

One of the strangest things about moving into this house was changing it so drastically.  For most people, when you move into a new house and you start renovating and making it the home you've always dreamed about, it's incredibly exciting and fun to see the transformations take place.  For me, it was difficult trying to reconcile all the emotions I was feeling.  This house was my second home as a child, and everything in it was a comfort to me.  But things moved so quickly. My grandpa died in December 2007, and by February 2008, we were already starting the renovations, even before we'd actually moved up to Connecticut.  My parents live about 15 minutes from here, and they were nice enough to start working with the contractors and helping stuff get done before we had even relocated.  My husband and I made a few trips up during February and March, but most of that time was spent going through my grandparents' things and deciding what to throw out, what to donate, and what to keep.  It was a thoroughly exhausting, sad, and strange experience.  I felt like I was eavesdropping on parts of their life they had never meant to be seen, and likewise betraying their memory by throwing out things that had no place there anymore.  Like, how was I to know whether that art book about Renoir was important to my grandmother or not?  Maybe she saved up a lot of money to buy it; maybe it held some sentimental significance that I would never know about.  Every decision felt so FINAL, and I guess I think that's what the toughest part was.  Not only had I lost them, but now I had to let go of things that were a part of their lives in order to make room for our life, which in a way, was just starting.  It also made me think more about our possessions and all the things we thought were SO important but which, when we were gone, would just be more stuff for someone to go through and decide what was worth saving.  Needless to say, it depressed me.  A LOT.  But then, after a while, when the trash bags and the boxes started disappearing from the house, and I realized that I wasn't sitting up nights, guilt-ridden and missing every item I had gotten rid of, I started to look at it another way.  My grandparents lived a purposeful life, and every item in it had significance to them when they were ALIVE.  Some of those things held nostalgia and memories for me, but most of them didn't.  And, most importantly, my grandparents always talked about how much they wanted me to live in this house and keep it in the family.  It made them happy to know that someday I would have a life in this place that they built from the ground up and cherished so much.  And, I don't think they expected me to keep it exactly as they had it; that would have been completely unrealistic.  So instead of thinking that they would have been unhappy that I decided to donate the bedroom curtains to charity, I think that they would be so proud and amazed to see what we have done with the place.  Plus, there are items (big and small) all around the house that are relics of their life, even if i'm the only one who knows their significance.  In fact, I hung photos of my grandma and grandpa in our new kitchen, since that is the place that I spent the most time with them when I was a child.  It's where my grandma taught me how to cook, and where I would sit with them on Sundays and dig into a bottomless bowl of pasta.  Now, I can honestly say that this kitchen is my DREAM kitchen, one I never thought i'd have. It's open to the rest of the living room/dining room area, and it is bright and airy and functional and welcoming to everyone who visits.  I know if my grandma could see it she would be utterly shocked by the difference, and, maybe even a little jealous that she hadn't changed it sooner.

The photos below were taken during the renovation process, and then after.  And yes, every time I walk into this kitchen and see those black galaxy granite countertops, I drool.  In the bottom photo, please take note of my 20-something-year-old grandmother in the upper right hand corner.

Animal Control

One of the things we were really excited about when we first moved into the house was that our cats would have a LOT more space to run around in.  Our three-bedroom apartment back in Northern Virginia was pretty spacious compared to others in the area, but there was still limited places for them to lurk around in since they are indoor cats.  We weren't even sure they had ever been exposed to stairs or hardwood floors before, so we were pretty excited to see what was going to happen. (Have you ever seen a cat try to take off running at full speed on a hardwood floor?  HILARIOUS.) Once they got over the 6-hour car ride up to Connecticut and then the horror of familiarizing themselves with completely new surroundings, they seemed to realize that they had been given an amazing gift. Unlimited places to hide, windows everywhere, and new, forbidden surfaces upon which to sit. Including the new granite kitchen countertops.  FAIL. 

Anyway, their new found freedom resulted in a new sense of, well, entitlement.  They also seemed to develop an appetite that rivals my husband's in an Arby's.  We tried to come up with a routine for them so that we wouldn't be feeding them randomly whenever their bowls were empty.  If we did this, then not only would each of our cats weigh 25 pounds, but we would be poor.  However, even though we feed them the equivalent of a can of wet food and a handful of dry food each (as well as deli meat scraps whenever we make sandwiches), this is NEVER enough for them.  And, they have also learned that by being as annoying as possible at any given moment will usually result in them getting food in order to shut them up.  Our youngest, and least dominant cat, Jackson, has taken on the role of whiny little bastard who meows at our door at 4:30 in the morning, which subsequently wakes up the dog who immediately decides she needs to go out and pee.  Which means that we are awake at an ungodly hour, catering to four domesticated animals who clearly think they own this house.  We have tried to figure out ways of preventing this, but closing them in the guest room only results in Jackson clawing at the door for hours on end, which is even more annoying than his incessant meowing, and also lessens the value of our house at the same time.  If for some reason Jackson decides to abort his mission, our other cats, Grant or Dottie, will find some equally grating way to get our attention. I suspect they have secret late-night meetings to discuss new guerilla tactics for Operation Annoy the Humans.  But as much as those furry jerks drive us crazy, we also can't imagine this house without them.  And to be honest, this house without animals would be unnatural.

My grandpa was an animal lover.  During his adulthood, he had two dogs, four cats, a parrot, and numerous cockatiels.  Plus, he fed the wild animals around the house, sometimes by hand. This included, but was not limited to: deer, raccoons (see photographic evidence, below), wild turkeys, foxes, squirrels, and most frighteningly, skunks, which I do NOT recommend to anyone unless you are trying to find a way to keep your spouse and everyone else away from you for an extended period of time. This house was like the McDonald's drive-thru of the animal kingdom. (are you impressed that I made two fast-food references in one post?  I am.)  We have not kept up the wild animal feeding that my grandpa practiced until the last day he spent in this house, but our pets are definitely parts of our family, just like his were.  And perhaps it's just good practice for if we actually have kids.  Maybe if that happens we'll actually miss the 4:30 AM wake-up call.

I know, so far this page is really green.

Green was my grandmother's favorite color.  When we moved into this house in April last year, our first priority was to get rid of as much green as we could.  And let me tell you, that was no small task, considering every single room in this house had some hue of green in it. All of the livingroom furniture was green, and sat upon a dull green shag-esque carpet that had likely been there since the house was built in 1958.  All of the bathroom fixtures in the master bath were green, the exterior was (and still is green), the trees around the property were green....you get my drift.  The irony?  My grandmother HATED the outdoors in her older age.  She preferred a soft chair and a good book to a cool breeze and chirping birds.   But yet everything in her house reflected a lush, nature-like hue that was a bit overwhelming if you weren't used to it.  Although I spent so much time here as a child that the green house felt comfortable to me, and I didn't give it much thought.  That is until it became MY house and I decided I didn't want a speck of green in it.  I will gradually be posting before and after photos so you can see how much it's changed in the past year. 

But I somehow feel it's appropriate that this blog is green.  That's how my grandma would have liked it, anyway.