We are past Advent, but the tree is still up in all her glory. Now I've got the flu, so I'll think about it tomorrow... meanwhile it's so pretty, it's making this extended couch visit more tolerable. My poor old fake Christmas trees are truly flagging. The one in the living room is shedding as if it's a live tree, but it's not. I have three more in the barn doing the same thing, and there's still another one that I believe has to go bye-bye as well. It's like 10-feet tall and as big around as a Grizzly, simply gorgeous. It's too bad it takes two people all day just to get it put together, and that's even before the lights go on it. So if you're looking, there will be four or five trees at the curb at Rockmart Road one of these days. Feel free to haul them off at your leisure.
I thought we were done with house projects for awhile, but then there was a box-and-a-half of flooring left from the last one (the re-do on our rotten nursery floor). If you give a mouse a cookie, she's gonna have to get a glass of milk... While debating when we were going to drive all the way to Newnan to take that stuff back, I thought long and hard about my sweet art studio. It's no bigger than a minute, painted sugary pink and full of art supplies and goodies. Ken fixed that joyous space up for me soon after we moved here. He found old trim in the barn, added some beadboard to it and finished the room. It's the perfect place to draw, paint, dream. It gets cold in there, so there's a little heater he put in there. He also installed an air conditioner for when it heats up in the summer. Each of the grandkids have their own sets of watercolors and I keep scads of pencils and paper just for them. It's a magic place. What it doesn't have is a decent floor. It's just old plywood that I painted over, well, at least some of it. There are patches of bare wood and one of the corners of the room has never been fully trimmed out.
So instead of driving all the way to Newnan to take flooring back, we drove all the way to Newnan to buy some more, since apparently the room is way bigger than I ever knew. We made a day of it, meeting up with our youth-pastor-son Jesse and his wife and kids. After picking up the flooring, we played pickleball out in the freezing cold, hugged on grandkids and ate hamburgers at Red Robin. I had no clue I could actually still hit any kind of ball, but maybe we're onto something. It only took me a week to recover...
I dreaded clearing all those supplies out of that room, but we took the weekend to do it. I have no clue what some of this stuff is, but I declare now to the world that half of it is not going back in there. I paid a professional organizer to sort and fix that place up a couple of years ago. We threw about half of it away. She made it so nice and neat, so much so that I couldn't find anything. But now I have to behave like Marie Kondo and get shed of much of that detritus. There's still two truckloads of insanity in there. Yes, I thought I was going to love scrapbooking, that 15 minutes, but alas, it's been mouldering in there for 10 years and I haven't made a thing. And those beautiful stained glass supplies! What are these appendages for? I don't even know where to begin. I painted the wall where it attaches to the house (it was still the original white) and trimmed out the big window. After staring at it for a sick weekend, I believe I have to also trim all the little windows that surround the room, after I rise from the dead. Papa started laying flooring today and will hopefully have it finished soon.
It might not be the best thing in the world for me to have idle time on my hands. Today, from my sick couch, I stared at our gorgeous wavy-glassed windows in the living room and dreamt about paying some brothers to take the storm windows down and un-stick all my windows, clean them, and re-install the storms. Then when spring finally comes (oh, pray it comes soon), I can open them all up and sing "Oklahoma!" to the top of my lungs.
There's a reason God invented Christmas in the middle of winter...
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