Finally.. PICTURES!

Well here they are… finally… as promised.

After a week, things have changed so much that most of the snow is gone, the ice on the lake is starting to seriously melt, but I dream of putting my canoe in here even more than usual.


When I get the chance… and have the ambition... this is what my spinning is looking like. With a nice fire and a clean house – you would think that I would be spinning my heart out, but I still can’t bring myself to do much of anything. When this is done, it will be a shawl for my mother for her birthday which was, yes WAS... in January. She keeps bugging me and saying that she hasn’t seen any patterns to pick from yet. Oops!

Here is another picture of my new home.. well temporary new home. I wish that I could keep the lake!

From the Northwoods

Well…. We are finally moved (for the moment) and settled. Moving day was, of course, on the coldest days on record since 1996 (also a year that we moved… I sense a tradition here). Luckily, because we moved into an already furnished cottage, we only needed to bring one week’s worth of clothes to get us started. So, on Sunday, February 4th, we set out a week’s worth of food and water for our two cats, watered the plants, and gave the hamster a smorgasbord of food and water before piling into our cars and making the 31/2 trek up north to our new home.

My first two days at the new school were cancelled because of the bitter cold. Wind chills were in the –60s… and it turned out that my daughters’ old school was also closed on these days. So.. I had to wait for my first day of work a little longer than I had planned, but it was nice to be able to cuddle up as a family and spend some much needed time together.

Now, we are a month into our new lives, and things are going pretty well. My new job, after a few initial bumps and bruises, is going well. It is a lot easier for me to manage and I’m finding that I am much less stressed. The girls are settling into their new schools and trying to make new friends. They are still pretty attached to the “old” friends, and each weekend when we make the return journey to our “old” home, they fill their time with visiting and hanging out with them.

We’ve started looking for houses, and we have decided that we might choose to build. This was huge for me because I had vowed NEVER to build a home, but instead to purchase what someone else had gone through headaches and stress to build, but we aren’t finding the kind of house that we would like. So, building seems like a good option. There is plenty of land available and we have found some plans that we like.

Knitting and Spinning…

I had thought that my nights would be filled with knitting and spinning now that I don’t have to run around with the girls so much. I envisioned piles of homemade knitted goodness tossed about my feet. I anticipated being inspired by the nature around me to create something beautiful myself, but… um. Well, umm… that hasn’t happened. I look at my spinning wheel and it begs me to sit down and work on my mother’s shawl, but my body just wants to rest. I’m asleep so early each night and up with the sun each morning (which is NOT typical of me) that by the end of the day I don’t have the ambition.

I finally started spinning this past Friday, but it was pathetically uneven, and I gave it up after an hour.

Now, I have a raging sinus infection and we came “cottage home” a day early this weekend, so the thought of spinning in front of the fire without moving much is pretty appealing.

Pictures to come!

Darlene… if you are reading this, please leave me a comment! And say hello to everyone at Monroe. I miss all of you!