Subtle Changes

Since becoming a house owner in 2012, I have worked on a lot of projects at my house. It's a lot more responsibility than condo living in Boston. Most of the projects involve painting walls, but I also had the wall to wall carpet upstairs replaced, had repairs made to the screen porch, installed central cooling, had the roof repaired where ice dams had caused damage and had heat tape installed so that ice dams can be prevented.  I have planted (and then moved and replanted in better spots in the yard) plants, vegetables, herbs, and flowers (including the previously non-existent spring bulbs).  I have relearned how to mow the lawn and learned how to use a snow blower!   

My next big repair is getting all of the windows on the house replaced. (Not one of them is well sealed, and none of the upper panes stay in place without the help of dowels. This problem was identified on the home inspection, but carpeting and air conditioning took priority. And then the roof pulled a whammy on me.)

There is one project that I had been bumping down in priority on my "Things To Do" list and that is window treatments. Based on my extensive watching of HGTV, I know what an impact they can have on a room, but I never made it a priority, neither in Boston, nor here, AS YET. (Friends can attest that in Boston, I had one room where the "curtains" consisted of a tension rod, a folded flat bed sheet, and those little clips for curtain rods.)

But I wanted to remedy that so this weekend, I bought some simple, neutral color curtain rods at BB+B and VOILA! HUGE improvement!! 

This photo shows the newly installed curtain rod on the left, while the old curtain rod carried over from what the previous owners had is on the right. While the old rod may have worked with their sheers, it just made my curtains look like they had been slapped up on the wall (they were, so I deserve that criticism). The new rod looks so much cleaner and installing them above the window frame makes the windows look bigger too.

Check out how the new rod improves the way the curtains over the slider look. My mom HATED these curtains because they were all puddled on the floor. (She mentioned it every time she came over for dinner.) Well, Mom, you can't complain any more!! (They *just* clear the floor.)

I honestly don't know why I waited so long to hang new rods, but I am glad that I had thought through what I wanted and didn't just buy something to have new rods. Even though I had seen this on TV many times, it still surprised me how much more sophisticated the living/dining room looked once I made this small change. Every time I go in there, I smile at the improvement.

Now I am going to get new rods and curtains for the rest of the house (definitely need new curtains in the guest room and office - the ones currently there are leftover from my bedroom growing up!). Hanging the new rods has been a great wintertime home improvement project.

On the Eve of Epiphany...

So here we are in 2015. ::looks around:: Seems okay thus far.  2014 left something to be desired for me, which is definitely reflected in my lack of blog entries for the year. My plan for 2015 is to get back into blogging so I am setting a personal goal of 30 posts for the year, a little over 2 posts a month. That isn't a lot. (Actually, it's a little lame, but the frequency of my posts for last year was so pathetic that 30 actually is a reach target.)

2014 in Review: 
On the downside, my health was pretty rotten. My friend MEM had made up this joke about me being her "Sickliest Friend" (which sounds like the title of a song written by either The Smiths or They Might Be Giants), because I kept getting colds, which turned out to be an allergic reaction to winter! But this year, starting just before Memorial Day, I came out with an (as yet) unidentified serious digestive ailment. It ruined my vacation planned in June and spoiled my summer. [I have had a string of tests with no conclusive results, although the big diseases have been ruled out, which is good.](Sorry if that was a bit of an over share. It does explain A LOT about last year though.)

On the upside, I made a new friend (which seems sort of silly to get excited about, but it's difficult making friends outside of work when you are over 35, single, and childless - this isn't just my opinion; it was in the New York Times), and not one, but two, new nephews joined my extended family. [Both boys are cute, but only one is smooshy. The other is a solid little nugget. Henceforth, he will be know as the "Nugget". I don't know what I will call the smooshy one yet; he is the younger brother of the "Sweetpea" so maybe he could be the "Sprout". Need to think on that.]

Big Purchase:
I bought a snow blower, which is new for me as a relatively new house owner. Back in Boston, the condo association handled the snow removal. My first year in Connecticut, I shoveled my own drive and walk. Then we had 4' of snow dumped on us in one storm; if I hadn't laughed about it, I would have cried. Last year, I hired a service plow my driveway and snow blow the walk, but I'd find myself waiting quite a while for them to get to my house and would end up shoveling a lot of the time anyway. So now I have an Ariens' snow blower for this year. I was given a demo by the man who delivered it, but probably should read the manual before the Alberta Clipper scheduled for tonight and tomorrow comes through.

Luckily, the snow we have had up until now hasn't really amounted to much. But it was still pretty to look at.

Sage Garden Advice

If you are looking for a low maintenance bang for your buck in your garden and need something that will thrive in full sun, then look no further than pineapple sage (Salvia elegans). I got mine at Home Depot in a herb sale in mid-July (when people are apparently not buying a lot of herbs). The plant started small, the same size as most other herbs, but has grown in my front yard to nearly five feet! And the leaves really do smell like pineapple, which is really nice when you walk past it or when there is a breeze. But the biggest payoff are the beautiful scarlet blooms, which started opening up about the same time as my chrysanthemums.

Pineapple sage bloom, detail

Pineapple sage with golden and silver sage

It's stunning. I am sorry that these photos don't do it the justice it deserves. And I love having something so dramatic in my yard this time of year now that the daisies and coneflowers are cut back for the winter. (That area of the yard looks so BARREN now.)



Last year, I started planting both golden (Salvia officinalis ‘Aurea’) and purple (Salvia officinalis ‘Purpurascens’) sage as a border around my front walkway. I had gotten the idea from the kitchen gardens at Kew Palace, which I thought were even more amazing than the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew (probably because the kitchen gardens were more achievable at home than the rest of the place). I hadn't realized that the pineapple sage was going to get so big until I got home and read about it, but I really think it is a nice addition to the walk up to the front door. (And planting it allowed me to pull out this really awful shrub that grew over the walk and was full of aphids and that I just HATED.)

I really hope it survives the winter.  It's so hard to know with herbs in New England. The fact that it will get sun all winter has got to help. Next year, I think that I am going to get a couple more and plant them in the front circle with the echinacea and daisies so that part of the yard will also look nice next fall. Even if they don't make it through the winter, I think something like this is worth replacing.

Casual Observation: The Whole Package?

I will be honest, I am a complete sucker for cute packaging, and I have been totally known to buy products I didn't need simply because they came in a cute container. (Mints or candy in vintage-looking metal boxes tend to be the most appealing. Especially while standing in the checkout line at Trader Joe's.)

But I am also a committed recycler and environmentalist so when I recently opened up a new container of a product I actually do need, I was horrified to see the following (shown here both with and without a penny so you can get an ideal of the scale you are seeing):

That huge wad of cotton is needed to fill up the bottle because the actual pills don't even cover the whole bottom of the bottle, let alone fill the bottle to the top.  Additionally, there is the wasted cardboard box, which is slightly more than twice the size of the actual bottle it is holding (presumably to accommodate the security device?).

So who is the guilty culprit? Well, I hate to admit it because I love this product, but the guilty party is:

Now I am all for getting 60 pills for the price of 45 (especially during the late summer and autumn), but I would love even more for these guys to come up with some product packaging that would make more sense size-wise for what they are selling. If they don't want to sell the pills in a pop-through wrapper, why not try selling them in a smaller tube bottle, like the one used on the product below?

image from drugstore.com

The good thing is that I can (and will) put the plastic bottle and cardboard out for collection in the recycling bucket, but wouldn't it be better if someone at the company was thinking proactively and could come up with a more environmental way to sell this product? They spend loads on advertising; why not spend some on reinventing the packaging for long term impact?

It would make me an even bigger fan than I already am.

Hard at Work

Sometimes it is really fun to work at a family business. (I currently work with my dad, my sisters, two of my aunts, and one brother in law.)

Not "Nana".

A true story: yesterday: Sister B popped into my office with my 2.5 year old nephew, Codename: Sweetpea. 

He saw a picture of Queen Elizabeth II that I keep at my desk as inspiration for getting through tough times with class and a stiff upper lip, pointed to it, and said "Nana". It was hilarious. I thought Sister B was going to bust a gut. 




Fortunately,  Sweetpea didn't point to the picture of good old Winston Churchill and call him "Grandpa".

Casual Observation: Music Collections

Yes, you read correctly: 17,003 items in the music category

As far as I am concerned, the one real drawback to having your entire music collection in MP3 format on your computer rather than cd or vinyl is that when you meet someone new and go to hang out at their home, you can't peruse their music collection. And based on the music you find there (or that you don't find there), make a decision about whether you and the other person were meant to be friends. (Or whatever.)  Because despite the advice I gave to a friend long ago, you might not need to have identical music collections to be an ideal pairing, but having similar musical taste will at least make long car trips with that other person bearable.

I totally associate music collections with going back to school, college in particular. Perhaps it was because I had two heavy huge cases of cds that I just HAD to have with me every year. God forbid I left something at home. When my brother had to carry one of them up to the furthest reaches of the third floor of my dormitory sophomore year, I knew that I was going to be on my own for junior and senior year, which I was. And junior year, I lived at the far end of the fourth floor. It wasn't pretty.

There was so much music sharing going on in college. Even though I had a huge music collection and went through the college student rite of passage known as the Columbia House CD Club (what a mistake), I definitely was introduced to a lot of new music through friends from classical music and show tunes to alternative rockers to ska, ska, and more ska senior year.

And, of course, there was the ever classic mix tape, which now in the 21st century is known as a "playlist" and is shared on websites. (Remember handwriting all of the songs on the liner and patiently lining up the tape with the track so you had just the right amount of filler between the songs? I used to also make collages for the covers of the mix tapes.) If you ever want to clearly understand what the mix tape means to my generation, I highly recommend watching The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It pretty much says it all.

I have been taking my old mix tapes (both ones I made and ones made for me, which I saved in a very large Tupperware in my basement along with the cds I just couldn't get rid of when I left Boston) and been turning the track lists into playlists. This has meant buying songs on line that I haven't thought of in YEARS. It's actually been pretty cool. And, it's gotten me putting together new playlists. (I actually just put together a new/old one together for JR, which I burned to an MP3 disc, but I still need to mail it. It seemed appropriate to make her something concrete, as she has been the custodian of my vinyl for the last 2.5 years.)

Hmmmm, vinyl.... Remember how you had to flip the record over to hear the other side?

"Man is in the forest."*

You are clearly a native New Englander when you see a fawn in your yard, and instead of thinking it is so cute and loving the little Bambi-ness of it, you yell and chase it out of the yard because of the ticks. AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! (And the eating of the flowers. And the vegetable patch.)

Seriously, Lyme disease is no joke. My doctor even said that Connecticut is known for two things: allergies and Lyme disease. And I already have the first one.

Don't be fooled; this little guy is just WAITING to pounce!

* Walt Disney's Bambi