I don’t post many of my own photographs on this blog as I’m just not that good at it and not at all interested in getting better, but the whole point of today’s post is the fact that yesterday was the deadline I had set for getting our patio cleared off. So did I fail? It sure looks like it! But there’s a plan for everything that needs to go, and those plans were made by EOB yesterday, so I’m counting it as a win. Everything should be gone by the end of the week. A mason is coming this morning to give us an estimate for repairing the area where the patio had to be excavated to repair the sewer pipe. I plan to post photos throughout the summer to document how this cluttered space gets turned into an oasis of order and beauty.
I wrote
How well I remember the morning that the tree crew arrived to do some work on our 75-foot oak tree at our house back in Virginia. Gideon was little, and I was home with him. I hadn’t planned on going anywhere that day, so I had on my grungy “at-home” outfit, an old t-shirt dress that was frayed around the edges. It was easy to pop on. I think I had taken a shower but hadn’t done anything to my hair, a sure recipe for the Wild Woman of Borneo look. (No disrespect intended to the real women of Borneo!)
Christmas is less than a week away, a fact that prompts me to think about gift-giving. What a very fraught subject! I’d be more than willing to just forget about the whole process myself, being content with good food, decorations, socializing with friends and family, and special outings. But I can’t be a complete Scrooge, can I? So here are some ways that I enter into the spirit of the season without putting myself through the wringer or giving items that may not be used or appreciated:
What did we do in the kitchen? The floor was the first step, locking us in to certain future choices.
Another insight today from my latest podcast fave, “
Jim and I have now been married for 25 years! Is that even possible? We had sort of planned to do something fun last evening—maybe go downtown to the Denver Art Museum and then go out to eat at our favorite restaurant on the 16th Street Mall (we’ve been there once), the Paramount Cafe. But Jim had a meeting that went long, and he’d been working all day on the kitchen . . . so we’ll do it this weekend. But we ended up doing something we really enjoyed, even though it may sound pretty boring: we figured out what we want to do with the dining nook in our new kitchen. 
This may sound like a very first-world issue. If you’re a refugee, your signature color is whatever happens to be on the clothes and blankets you manage to find. You don’t have the problem of wedding out your closet. You don’t have a closet, or a house surrounding it. As I said recently about some small problem or the other connected with our move, “I don’t have to worry about getting to the well and back again without somebody shooting me, so I don’t have anything to complain about.” On closing day, that pretty horrible time, I reminded myself, “This day isn’t going to end with anyone diseased or dead. The worst than can happen is that we’ll have to pay that $100 penalty if we don’t do the closing today.”