My Time Away

I do have to say that during this time away from blogging I did accomplish some long overdue cleaning, decorating and purging. I mean this was no easy feat. I was given the ultimatum by my oldest daughter. Plus I knew it was time. I admit, I have a problem with hoarding. OK, I said it, it's out in the open, I'm "out of the closet" so to speak. I mean not like stacks of newspapers to the ceiling hoarding or houseful of cats hoarding, but the kind of hoarding where you look at something and say, "hmmm I might be able to use that later" hoarding. Ok I admit its not healthy, but there have been numerous times my kids come to me asking for such and such for a school project and I go to my “stuff” and produce it. But I have to say it did get out of hand. I had boxes and boxes of stuff and nowhere to put it anymore. (BTW we don’t have a garage or storage other than an already stuffed small shed. We also don’t have closet space to speak of as my home is an old barn with gambrel roof that we converted).


house in dire need of painting


My motivation was I was going to have a garage sale. My oldest DD and I decided that we'd have it at her house since she lives in a large complex of houses. I live on a dirt road, with no parking and neighbors who shoot trespassers. :) So we planned for weeks and seems like everytime we agreed on a weekend, something came up. That just gave me more time to go thru the shed and all my crafts, fabric and junk. So I had a ton of stuff. We were all set for this past weekend. We put up the signs around her neighborhood and got everything set up. Come Saturday morning, we were up early and by 8 am it was like already 100 plus hell degrees. So we sat and waited and waited and waited for the big crowds. HA HA the laughs on me. We might have had a dozen people all day. No one of a sane mind wanted to come out of their airconditioned abodes. So I might have made 40 bucks and 10 of that I owed my son for toys he sold! ARGH. So we packed everything up and split it between us to take to goodwill. I had to bring mine back home (a 1.5 hr drive one way). I've since taken it to a local hospice thrift and even got rid of more stuff via freecycle. I'm actually feeling pretty proud of myself. Plus we can actually walk into the shed now.

While we were having the garage "no-sale", a huge fire started in the hills that we could see in the distance (the Napa fire), and apparently there was a thunder storm with lightning and rain in some areas including where I live. Thankfully, no fires close to home, but we've had some aweful smoke since then. I woke up this morning to smelling smoke inside the house. There's no wind (which is a good thing for firefighters), but the smoke is just sitting there.

looking down at our neighbors property from my front yard

I was all alone for four days, and loving every minute of it. I got alot done and created some art too. Here's a peek. I still need to put on some finishing touches to a couple of them.
'Til then....