Rowena has raised our banner.

We bought our first house!

Actually, it went down like this: I told my husband, “Come Hell or high water, I will buy a house before you get out of the Marine Corps.”

And he, being the intelligent man he is, said, “Okay.”

Yes, it really was that easy.

Erik’s return from Iraq comes just in time to sign all of the loan and closing paperwork. We’re scheduled to close in about two weeks–a week after Erik arrives and the day after deadline for issue 118.

Olga helps Uncle Robby (my middle brother) hang Christmas lights.

***

I’ll be posting mostly photos during the next few weeks. I hope you enjoy this beautiful season.

One of two jungle gyms impressive piles of boxes in the house (the other is in another room).

Our move is sneaking up on us at an alarming rate. Thankfully everything is going as planned so far. We only have about two weeks left here (schedule always subject to change, when dealing with the Marine Corps), but I really need to have the house empty by next weekend so I’ll have enough time to get the inside ship shape… and also enough time to resolve as-of-yet unrecognized impending disasters (like, the Marine Corps).

Today the children helped a great deal with picking out a few books (okay, a whole box full of books) to keep out and hopefully take with us to Oregon. We may have to go through them again and pare down some more, depending on which of our vehicles we drive out. Going through books has really been the hardest part of packing (for me, anyway). I love my books. Love.

Moving on.

Yesterday and Tuesday my friend Katie came over and we worked in the kitchen cooking and baking all day while the children played together. The idea is that if I have a ton of stuff prepared in the freezer, meals will be easier to prepare as more of my kitchen stuff gets packed up, and we won’t have to spend so much money dining out or ordering in. Oh, did I mention that my friend Katie actually did my grocery shopping for me? It so happens that I have EXCELLENT taste in friends, and it also happens that the one household chore that I despise more than any other (shopping) is her most favorite household chore. (And not only does she like it, but she also knows how to score the very best deals, and rounded out my slim-pickin’s pantry with enough food to last another two weeks for only $75–including beer.) But I digress…

We made angel food cake, roast chicken, corn bread, wheat bread, a massive batch of salmon patties, and two pie crusts (soon to be filled with pumpkin pie, made with pumpkin still frozen from Halloween). I also made and froze two huge (and if I say so my self, beautiful) pizzas, which will be for our moving party next week (date and attendees yet to be determined, Erik is in charge of that). I used Jackie Clay’s pizza dough recipe from our very own Backwoods Home Cooking (page 137). Yum!

At least we’ll have good eats during the move!

It’s funny, but even though I don’t consider myself a very good housekeeper, I always accomplish so much more on a day that I get down to cleaning. I know that my Dad will get what I’m trying to say. It’s like my brain has to be organized and put away before I can be really productive, and organizing my surroundings is the only way to do it. Today, for example, I did two loads of laundry (Olga matches and puts away all of her and Gavin’s socks and underwear), all the dishes (Olga puts away the silverware), scrubbed all the gunk from around the sink (gunk seems to build up very fast in this climate), cleaned out the refrigerator (Gavin ate most of the cheese and tomatoes before I could put them away again), vacuumed the main areas of the house (both children run around squealing … very funny), made two loaves of bread with my cooking helpers (wheat yeast bread and banana quick bread), and even attempted to remove some stains from the carpet (unsuccessful, as of yet).

And then after breakfast ….

Just kidding, but actually I got all that done by three in the afternoon, and then I swilled down another cup of coffee and played for the rest of the afternoon. And by play, I mean I dug all of the sewing machines out of the closet to fiddle with them. My old Viking and my Singer embroidery machine have been in the closet since we moved here, because my sewing desk is only comfortably big enough for two machines, and really, I can’t sew on four machines at once anyway… In the back of my mind I remembered that there was something wrong with my Viking since the last time I took it in for service, and hauling it out of the closet revealed all — it is caked — CAKED — with grease. I don’t know what kind of “oil” the technician used on my machine, but he certainly gobbed enough of it on there to keep it from rusting… and enough to attract every particle of fiber in the county to stick to the gears. So this evening I cleaned it out, then ran it hard for a while to heat up the oil and get it flowing. Now it’s running great, and all that is left to do is to change the light bulb, which blinks on and off.

This machine is great. My mom bought it at a thrift store for around $20, if I recall right. It was my very first sewing machine, and I used it to make a LOT of stuff in high school, including the first shirt I ever made for Erik, back when he was only 15. It’s a Viking 4700, probably built in the 70s, if the color scheme is any indication (dark brown, tan, orange). It’s a machine that would make any do-it-yourself kind of person proud: it’s so easy to open up to get at the guts that I’ll probably never take it to the shop again. The body and innards are all metal, so unless it gets hit by a truck, I doubt I’ll ever have to worry about replacing any parts (except for that light bulb). And the best thing of all about this machine, is that it makes such beautiful, consistent stitches. Even my newer Viking, which is my every day machine, can’t quite match up to this one. Because it’s mechanical, and not digital, I can fine-tune stitch length all I want and not worry about presets. Really the only drawback I can think of is that it’s difficult to sew slowly, so I use the hand wheel a lot more with this machine…

Oh, sorry… you all must think I’ve completely lost it to be oozing over an old sewing machine, but the truth is that I fell in love with it again today while I was tinkering with it. I did see a close cousin, the model 4500 for sale, which is only a slightly scaled down version of my machine. If I needed another machine, I’d definitely snag it.

On Friday, the children and I started some seeds in improvised pots (gallon milk jugs, apple juice bottles, and miscellaneous other containers destined for the trash and recycling bins). The weather has been mild and wet, so I’m just keeping them outside on the deck.

On Monday the littles and I spent all day helping our friend get ready for a baby due next month. We’re all very excited to have a new baby “in the family.” My kids already think of her daughter as their little sister. We ended up staying all day, and got to admire her beautiful seedings and garden. She’s got a major jump on me. I don’t know how she gets so much done with a one year old and a tummy. You can see her tray of seedlings on the table above.

Yesterday I went out to check on our seedlings, and discovered, to my utter amazement, that most of them had already sprouted — in only four days! Here are our sunflower sprouts, which we’ll plant all along our fence.

And here they are today!

(I posted several times about his socks here, here, here, here, and here.)

Daddy, I will shame you into washing your socks if I have to.

Step One: Fill the sink with hot water.

Step Two: Add a little dish soap when the sink is almost full, so it doesn’t get too sudsy.

Step Three: Add socks, and allow to sink into water on their own.

Step Four: Gently swish and squeeze socks as needed to remove dirt. Usually just soaking is enough, unless you’ve been running around in the mud with just your socks on. (And if that’s the case, then I don’t want to know about it, because it will just make me crazy.)

Step Five: Gently squeeze out the socks, drain the sink, and refill with same temperature water.

Step Six: Allow socks to briefly soak in rinse water, swish gently to remove detergent.

Step Seven: Gently squeeze out as much water as you can. You can roll the socks up in a towel and stand on it for a few seconds to get a lot of water out.

Step Eight: Reshape and lay flat on a towel to dry.

(PS, these are the leftover yarn baby socks I mentioned in yesterday’s post.)

Every January I try to tidy up and organize my sewing/knitting/crafting room/office. It’s not easy to cram so many hobbies, a sewing business, and a my BHM job into such a modest (10′ x 10′) room and still keep it clean, clutter-free, and easy to use. Since we’ve only been in this house since August, this is my first overhaul, and as this is the first time I’ve had a real indoor room (and not the garage) to myself, it has been very exciting. Above is the desk I built last fall. I still love it! The best part is it doesn’t bounce when I sew fast, like my last table did. But I’m not sure what I’ll do if I acquire too many more books or magazines. The bookcases are at full capacity.

I have a lot of things in this room that are very special to me. The tree hanging on the wall is a wool needlepoint that came from a thrift store. Some of the stitches have been eaten away by moths, and the frame is roughly made. My sewing machine is a Husqvarna Viking model 500 Computer. I also have an older Viking in the closet. My serger is a recent addition: a Husqvarna Viking Huskylock 936. What a workhorse! My old serger is in the closet, while I decide it’s fate. I also have a Singer Futura embroidery machine in the closet, along with a Superba knitting machine.

So back to organizing my room. This year I’ve done it. I’ve done such a good job, in fact, that this is now my favorite room in the house.
And believe it or not, things are not quite packed to the gills. Check out that new storage unit! Okay, to be honest, I saw that Cosy had one, and I thought it would be perfect for me, too!

Above is a bit of a breakdown of my current supplies. I haven’t bought fabric in a long long time. Not since several months before we moved here, at least. And believe me, I still have plenty of material to work with. The plastic bins in the left column are unfinished projects that I’m trying to work through this week. The plastic bins along the bottom are where I keep my notions, interfacing, hardware, lace, etcetera.

The very best part of this room is the light. Even on a gloomy, almost raining day like today, the light pours through the big window and fills me with a sense of serenity. I guess my little girl can feel it, too.

Now the tree is up and decorated, and so beautiful. Olga put most of the ornaments up herself. I was a little worried that Gavin would take too much interest in the tree and try to pull it over, or yank the lights off, but so far he only admires and points at it. Thank goodness! Even so, I make it a point to not allow Olga to rearrange the ornaments while he’s in the room. I don’t want him to get any ideas. A couple years ago I knit stockings for all of us, so we put them up, too. You can see Erik’s stocking above. The rest are a bit simpler, but they’ve all got a name or initial stitched on somehow.

It’s so much fun watching the kids. I know Gavin doesn’t really get what’s going on yet, but he’s enjoying things anyway. This year Olga is really getting into it. She’s even learning some Christmas carols, though she doesn’t differentiate between them and regular songs, unless she knows the words Santa, reindeer, or Christmas are somewhere in the lyrics.

Erik will most likely be deployed for Christmas next year, so we’re going to try our very best to take lots of pictures this year for the kids.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, joined by a couple of Marines Erik works with. It was my most successful dinner party by far. All of the dishes looked pretty and tasted delicious. I don’t have the best track record, so I’m wonderfully proud of myself for pulling this off. At the last minute I threw together an experiment. I took two jars of carrots that I canned up a few weeks ago, threw them in a skillet with a few peeled purple pearl onions (I first boiled the onions for three minutes, then peeled them), and sauteed them together for a few minutes in olive oil. Then I added a tablespoon of butter and a couple tablespoons of brown sugar, and kept shuffling them around on low until everything was dissolved and the veggies were nice and shiny. That was it! It took about six minutes total, and it was delicious! If you start with fresh carrots it probably would take a few more minutes.