Farmer’s Market

I didn’t get to the Farmer’s Market all summer. There was just too much to do, and while it’s a fun place, it’s also a jumbled confusing place… and one that happens early on Saturdays, when I just want to take my time at home.

This past weekend we went, though, for one of the last markets of the year and because the Fall ones are always my favorites.

There will be time

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;

One year ago this evening, Sparks dropped the question on my plate, and I said yes. It was the very best decision of my life, if you can even call it a decision. From the beginning, it didn’t really seem like there was anything to decide.

Happy one-year anniversary of our engagement, my dearest, sweetest, handsomest, funniest, kindest, adventuresomest, consideratest, perceptivest, forgivingest, lovingest, cuddliest husband-and-Sparks. I love you more every day.

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Doll dresser jewelry box

The first jewelry box is done! Woop woop!

To sum up: about six weeks ago, crazed by the excitement of jewelry-making, I realized that I needed a storage system for my handiwork. Many jewelry boxes are filled with confusing compartments and special holders, which I wasn’t interested in. All I wanted was a series of shallow drawers… and lots of them.

There are very very few jewelry boxes designed like this, and most have only 2-3 drawers. Grrrr. I found an acrylic version that was structurally acceptable, but not attractive. So I sat down and thought. And then I thought of doll dressers.

I ended up buying a set of two pieces. One is this four-drawer chest, and another is a three-drawer chest with a small swivel mirror on top. I fixed up the one with the greater capacity first… I’ll tackle the other soon.

First, I used a slightly damp cloth to wipe years and years of black grime off of it. Then I used a fine-grit sandpaper to rough up the varnish (it was in such bad shape that it would probably have taken paint anyway, but you can’t be too careful), then wiped with a damp cloth again.

Next came three layers of paint: green on the insides of the drawers, and oyster white everywhere else.

On Saturday, I spent a couple of hours in my sewing room making tiny patchwork quilts to put inside the drawers, to protect the jewelry from knicks and bumps. I just a-d-o-r-e this combination of fabrics, almost none of which were from the same line. I usually like to buy a whole line of fabric, but when I do mix things up, I’m always delighted.

And there we go. I have a drawer each for hair accessories, pearl jewelry, silver jewelry, and my own handmade jewelry. When I finish the three-drawer chest, there will be a drawer for watches, and two drawers for vintage celluloid jewelry. Weehee!

It’s fun to make something and end up with exactly what you wanted!

Jack-o-lanterns 2009

It is the morning of November 1, and it is oddly early for me to be up on a Sunday morning because it’s the first day of Standard Time… and we have also had our first frost. For the first time this year, it’s below freezing out there. How about that for a happy confluence of events?

Sparks had another great jack-o-lantern, this year. Here you can see it in progress. Oh my, how many small boys were FASCINATED by it, last night! One or two forgot that they were there for candy.

And there is it beside mine. I was very happy with the leer I achieved… I think that it has its tongue sticking out, too. Not quite enough pumpkin guts to be a “barfing” pumpkin. We want to keep those pumpkin seeds, you know.

And the evening grows darker…

And darkest.

And now on to… the holiday season. The stores always take November 1 as open license to put up Christmas displays. I’ve got my decorations pretty well under control and so don’t need to buy many this year, but it is time to begin considering what everybody will get for Christmas. Oh dear indeed. It’s so tempting, after the success of the wedding crackers, to buy a bunch of novelties from Oriental Trading and give everybody a stocking stuffed with them…

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween, everyone! Hope it’s full of ghosts and goblins and tricks and treats!

Ganging agley

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Th need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow mortal!

(Poem by Robert Burns; eventual mouse-capture by Sparks and not Pudding, who made friends with the mousie)

Renovation news: October 27

There were two pieces of news when I went to the house this weekend. The first is that the metal roof has been delivered and is laying in the lawn:

Just laying on the lawn, mind you. Not being installed on any one of the sunny days we had last week. Just… laying… on… the… lawn.

The second is that we assembled the master bathroom’s sink cabinet, and set the sink and faucet on top of it just to see how it all looked. It is… zomgawesome. I’m so excited! Look at that HUUUUUUUGE SINK!

The only other notable thing is that the two black locusts in the yard have dropped a bumper crop of locust pods this year, which I raked up. The locust trees are on my sh** list.

Family photographs

Oh, you’ll have to forgive my blog slump. The weather is just so bllaaahhhh and when I wake up in the morning it’s still blllleeehhh and by the time I get off work it’s already blllllech. Makes things difficult.

Something I have been accomplishing is to scan carousels of slides and envelopes of photo negatives with a slide scanner I’ve gotten my hands on. I’m perhaps halfway through my own family’s stash, and then I’ll start on Sparks’.

In 1980, my dad went to Japan. Looks like he made friends with a Little League team while he was there.

And took some arty, pictureque shots (which I’m sure abundant, in Japan).

Even some that manage to be terrifying while being arty and picturesque. That is one lush octopus.

I was too young to go along, at that time. You can see the chagrin in my face.

At home with Pudding

This weekend I scandalized Sparks by suggesting that Pudding doesn’t do much to earn her keep. He quickly pointed out that she spends hours every day guarding the property from skunks and raccoons, and how many skunks and raccoons have I seen in the house? NONE!

I wasn’t convinced that that was enough, given the copious amounts of litter she goes through, so I left her a list of chores for the day.

Dum de dum de dum… let’s see what’s on my chore list today. Put away folded laundry. Oh goody… they always do this to me. Look at that pile of jeans! It’s taller than I am!

And all of these shirts… I certainly can’t reach the hanging bar, and they know it.

I swear, sometimes I get so frustrated I just want to shout!

(sigh) A pussycat’s work is never done. Maybe if I shed on everything, they’ll have to wash it all again. Yeah. That sounds like a plan.

Renovation news, mid-October

Ah, the renovation. The renovation is really happening! There is tons of progress to report since my last post about it. Where to start…

IKEA cabinets are a good place to start. The shipment of 181 boxes had been sitting in the media room since last Thursday, so yesterday Sparks and I scooted over to the house early to start putting them together. There were ten upper cabinets and seven lower ones to put together, and by gum, we did them all yesterday.

You bet we’re proud of ourselves! Go us! The drawers and doors will happen later, but getting the frames together was critical because real progress is being made on the kitchen…

Is something miss here? Do you see it?

How about here? I’m talking about doors! The kitchen used to have four different doors, which made for precious little space for, you know, cabinets and appliances and all of that decadent stuff. We have had two of them closed off, to turn it into a functional space. The new electrical has been run, and as soon as the drywall is up, it will be cabinet-installing time.

In the great room, the big orange wall is no longer orange, but a nice warm shade of brown. There is still interest in the room, but it doesn’t scream SEVENTIES!!! the way it used to. It’s good.

The old drywall is gone in the master bathroom, too. A tall window will be installed in the center of the outside wall, to make the room nice and bright. When we decided to live in Sparks’ house, he was already doing renovations on it and asked me what I would really, really want to make the house more livable. I said that I wanted the master bathroom opened up into a single space (remember, it used to be three separate rooms…) and to have a window. Sparks delivers!

All of the offensive wallpaper and paint is gone from the house now. Here is one serene white bedroom,

And here is another.

It is starting to seem that our estimate of having this project done by the end of the year is just, I mean, juuuuust, feasible. We won’t be moved in, but we’ll be very close I think. My new estimate of the moving date is sometime around Valentine’s day. And then we can put my little gray house on the market, and get free of its mortgage… oh, that will be beautiful.

If you’re a naive romantic city dweller, I will say for your benefit that “getting away from my mortgage will be as beautiful as the nearly-tame deer that graze in the yard at the new house…”. Enjoy that thought. The country-dwellers are guffawing as a way of dealing with the horror of the situation. Nearly-tame deer are not cool.

Phew. Let’s talk about the weekend.

The Comcast box has been returned (stood in line for 15 minutes, oh well). There’s only one more part in the drama, and that is to see if they accept my payment of ~$60 instead of the ~$200 they claimed. If that goes well, the saga will be over. Well and truly.

Let’s have some nice pictures.

This weekend, I am following Sparks over to the renovation house, to begin putting together the IKEA cabinets. Though there were 181 boxes, some of them were just legs… some just hinges… some just pneumatic drawer stoppers. And then, of course, getting the drawers put together will be a completely leisurely process. What’s important to do is to get the frames put together so that the work crew can begin to install them, maybe as early as next week.

I will take pictures tomorrow when I’m there, I promise! Sparks says that the old linoleum and subfloor in the kitchen have been taken up, and that the two doors that are to be blocked up, have been. So exciting! I can hardly wait to see.

A story about Comcast

Bloggers are generally advised to tell the truth, but the “happy truth”.

Today I am not going to do that. I’m just going to tell you some truth, because it’s weighing on me. Let me explain… no, there is too much. Let me sum up.

In May, Sparks I decided that in order to economize, and because there are so many other cheaper, more appetizing forms of entertainment available, we would cancel my cable television.

On May 10, I called Comcast. After sitting on hold for a while, and after arguing about how yes I really did want to cancel my cable service for even longer, I got the representative to agree to cancel service. I also give them my new name and phone number, to update their records.

On May 11, on a miserable wet rainy day, I sacrified my lunch hour to return the digital box to the local Comcast office.

On June 20, a Comcast representative knocked on my door and told me that Comcast would be happy to provide me with cable AND internet for six months, at the same price I was currently paying for just internet. In a moment of ill-judgment, I took them up on the offer.

A few days later, a new box was installed. Woo hoo. Cable. Just in time to watch the big Jon & Kate divorce episode, too.

A week later I receive a contract from Comcast for a completely different and much more expensive offer. I post an angry tweet about it. ComcastBonnie, who watches Twitter for complaints about Comcast, offered to help. She got a Comcast representative to call me and explain that the thing to do was to not sign or return the contract, which was intended to snooker me into more expensive service than I had intended. By not returning the contract, I would continue to get my cable and internet a the low low price of $59.99 per month. I also gave them my new name and phone number again, because they weren’t entered into the system last time.

Everything went swimmingly until this billing cycle, when my Comcast bill arrives and says that I owe $54.74 for the digital starter package AND $42.95 for CHSI performance internet AND $17.60 in “partial month charges & credits” AND a $75 Early Termination Fee. Plus, you know, some franchise fees and PEG assessment fees and… anyway. The bottom line is that they wanted to charge me $140 more than I was expecting.

I tweed about it, and grumpily ignore ComcastBonnie’s tweetback. Instead, I email customer service. Twenty-four hours later I receive a form reply informing me that this issue CANNOT be dealt with on the internet, I must call Comcast to talk about it.

I drag my feet for a week, knowing the ordeal that is in store.

On Wednesday evening, I finally make the call. I am on the phone for an hour and fifteen minutes. During this time, the representative spends a very very long time trying to figure out what package I am supposed to be getting, and eventually discovers that Comcast is charging me these penalties because I never returned the contract for the $59.99 cable and internet deal. The deal I never received a contract for. The contract that was for something completely different, and that a Comcast representative explicitly assured me I did not need to sign and return.

We agree that I will drop all cable TV, without arguments, return my box, and go back to being charged $59.99 a month for only internet service. The representative now needs to transfer me to the cable service department to discontinue the cable. Oh–and my name and phone number still haven’t been changed. I give the information for the third time.

At this point, 1:15 into the conversation, the representative cuts me off.

Today, I am going to return the cable box. I have a horrid premonition that the office will be unable to cancel my service, so I call Comcast again. I navigate the menus again. I am put on hold again. I give them my new name and phone number for the fourth time.

The representative tries to snooker me into more complicated cable packages. I say No!

The representative tells me there will be a penalty for cancelling the cable I say NO NO NO NO NO!!!

The representative calmly informs me that I’m all set.

I will return the cable box to my local Comcast office today. It is raining, just like the last time. I am doing it on my lunch hour, just like the last time.

What’s different this time is that I am never again, in my life, signing up for any service provided by Comcast. I have encountered companies that were incompetent before–both Verizon and AT&T have continued sending me bills for $0 up to two years after I cancelled accounts with them, for example–but no company has committed such an egregious waste of my time and money. I’m offended. It isn’t right. And I want all of you to know about it.

I am now prepared for a river of snarky comments and, in my dreams, reparation from Comcast. No I do not want another cable box.

Remembrance of yarn shops past

Oh me, oh my. How it has gotten cold, and how quickly, and how wet and dark it is outside! It has been raining every morning, this week, which only makes it so much harder to get out of bed. I certainly need to resume yarny ramblings, and soon. I shall pick out an unfinished project and work on it.

Mountain Colors, Mountain Goat. My first yarn love.

I have been remembering, with almost painful nostalgia, the yarn shop of my hometown. It was a 19th-century rail depot, a charming building with a faux-thatched roof and unfinished wood interior. Wood floors, wood walls, tall tall wood ceilings. It was filled with weathered wood displays of the most delicious yarn you can imagine… they had a full line of Jamieson Shetland!!! THE FULL LINE!!! Also Cascade 220, especially the heathered colors, and Mountain Colors yarn, and every yarn, it seems, that was soft, toothsome, tweedy, fuzzy, and that came in rich but muted colors.

Jojoland Melody. An unrequited yarn love.

I needn’t say that it also had two working fireplaces, hot tea, and rocking chairs. I always want to imagine that there was a shop cat, but that wasn’t so.

That yarn shop is closed up now. Yarn shops must have a hard time of it in any case, and then the internet came along. It was in a peculiar part of town, and the staff… the staff could be intimidating if you know what I mean. The staff of so many yarn shops can be.

Rowan Felted Tweed. My yarn love on a pedestal.

I mourn the place, though. It had a lush atmosphere that no other yarn shop I’ve been to had. So many are in cold, impersonal store fronts… so many try to be cheerful with white and bright colors… so many carry so much yarn that, while beautiful in its own right, is of a completely different character.

So I am pulling yarn off my shelves, and squishing it, and smelling it, and remembering the big romantic projects that I bought it for in the first place, three, five, seven years ago. It is time to pick up the needles again.

Reynolds Whiskey. Soon to be a rekindled yarn love!

Sunday patchwork

Ah me, a whole week has gotten away from me again. We were smashed, after the IKEA trip, and on Thursday the 181 boxes from IKEA were delivered. The driver did find a way to park his semi outside of the house, but said he couldn’t get the dolly over the gravel end of the driveway… so the three of us carried the boxes, by hand, up the drive and into the house. In the rain. Oh well.

We are taking it easier, this weekend. For Sparks, that means going to the house and digging a drainage ditch, but to each his own… I am at home doing several dozen loads of laundry, mopping and vacuuming, dealing with the backlog of dirty dishes, doing some pre-emptive cooking for the week ahead, and in between handling some patchwork. (Pudding darling, stop sniffing that spilled pepper. You’re going to regret it.)

Seen above are a pile of ninepatches made from one layer cake of Gypsy Rose by Fig Tree Quilts, my very favoritest fabric designer ever. I am going to further complicate them by cutting them up and sewing them together again, I just need to take some time to think of how. Goodness… if you haven’t seen a line of Fig Tree Quilts fabric up close, you need to. Every single one is heart-stopping.

The project I am tip-toeing around right now are the doll furniture “jewelry boxes”. The furniture has been here for several days now, and I have acquired the paint for it. I’m just sitting around wondering (1) whether they need to be primed or even sanded, given their rough condition, and (2) where I will do any of this safely and without making a mess. You see? Real, vital questions. Also pictured is the stack of fabric that I’m going to make patchworked drawer-mats out of. The outsides of them will be painted “Oyster White” (I’ve always loved the name of that color) and the insides “Stonewedge Green” (you know… not at all like Wedgewood Stoneware green). Then the bottoms will have little teeny-patchwork mats to protect the jewelry. I had wanted to do half-hexagons, but I’m not sure that my piecing accuracy is up to the challenge, especially at the small scale I’d be working with. I’ll keep thinking on it.

Pudding on the other hand thinks about nothing these days except how to get another belly-rub out of daddy.

Monday blues & renovation news

Oh me oh my, what a weekend we had.

On Friday night we went out to eat at an Indian restaurant and half on purpose, half accidentally, ordered some very spicy stuff. We enjoyed it (and took antacids when we got home). Sparks, who has spent some time in Nepal, ate with his hands and enjoyed himself enormously. Then, we settled in to watch The Fellowship of the Ring, which turned out to be about an hour longer than we were expecting. We slept like the dead that night.

(here, have a look at some lovely fall-ish pictures!)

On Saturday, dearly beloved, we took off to IKEA. The nearest one is about a 2.5 hour drive from where we live, and involves heavier urban traffic than we like. We got there in single pieces, though, and had a good lunch of Swedish meatballs to prepare ourselves for buying… the WHOLE kitchen and three WHOLE bathrooms. Well, not quite. Just the cabinets. Still, it’s such a complicated process… even though we had the whole kitchen meticulously planned out in IKEA’s software, with lists of part numbers and everything, we were still given a stubby pencil and a form and ordered to fill it out by hand. Then there was the mysterious tangle of home delivery, shipments, pallets, picking, and the additional complication of bathroom items that were variously pick-it-up-yourself, have-it-picked-from-storage, and thrown-onto-the-kitchen-pallet-for-delivery. Ah me. Suffice it to say that sometime in the next two weeks, 181 boxes will be dropped off at the house. Eek.

With all of that figured out, and a couple of soft drinks and ibuprofen tablets in us, we set out for the “fun” part of the IKEA shopping, and indeed we found some fun stuff. Sparks found the track lighting to end all track lighting, I found a brown-black wooden toilet seat to match the master bathroom’s cabinets, and we both found the coolest gin & tonic glasses ever. It was fine.

On the way home, we stopped at one of the precious-few German restaurants in the area, where Oktoberfest was still underway. There was a live yodeler, and I am going to end by getting four meals out of my single order of shnitzel.

When we finally got home, we fell into bed and slept for ten hours.

Sunday was an antidote to all of that exhausting excitement. We both stayed home all day. I did five loads of laundry, cooked a nice dinner, and sewed miles and miles of patchwork seams. Sparks listened to the Browns game in the garage (he likes being out there, it must be a guy thing), fixed the vacuum cleaner, and pruned the trees. In the evening, we got into our pajamas and watched The Two Towers, which Friday’s experience had taught us would be entirely too long. It was, and we slept like the dead again.

And now it’s Monday. No IKEA excitement and no lovely patchwork… just cold fluorescent lights, silence, bad coffee, and existential angst. Ah well. We play hard on the weekends.

October first

It is October first. That, to me, means it is really-and-truly Autumn now, no more excuses. It feels odd, this year… last winter was so long and cold and dark, and the summer wasn’t very hot. Maybe for the first time in my life, I’m not embracing the cooler weather.

I am trying to make the best of it though. Have a look at that mosaic! Aren’t the colors just edible? It makes me want to make petits fours and ice them in pinks and yellows and oranges and browns. Yum yum. Or maybe… make a quilt in those colors? Or knit striped socks?

I have become a mad baking fool, much to bread-lover Sparks’ delight. There were the cinnamon rolls, and then there was chocolate pumpkin cake (just a chocolate cake mix, with the eggs and oil replaced by pumpkin puree). Then there was pumpkin bread to take to a friend’s house. Then Yorkshire puddings, because we’ve been watching the Hairy Bikers Food Tour of Britain and had to try them… and last night, homemade whole-wheat English muffins, because we’ve also been watching The Victorian Kitchen, and I had to try those. That wonderful cinnamon roll recipe gave me courage to go on with yeast-risen things, and indeed, for the first time in my life the dough is coming out right for me. Odd. Makes me want to try pretzels again soon…

The first day of October here is chill and wet. The rain is pelting down, prompting me to trade my pretty pewter flats for my William Morris-patterned Wellingtons. The house, today, needs the heat running all day, instead of only for a morning warm-up. I even turned on the seat heat in my car on the way home for lunch. Yes, indeed, the summer is very much over.

Do you feel that Autumn came too fast, this year? What are you doing to make the best of it?

Doll furniture for jewelry boxes

*ssqqquueeeeeeee* I just won an AWESOME eBay auction for these two pieces of doll furniture:

Aren’t they ADORABLE? Of course they’re dirty and dark now. I’m going to spruce them up, though, and use them as jewelry boxes. I think I will paint the outsides off-white, and the insides and knobs sage-green, and then I will make patchwork liners out of red- and blue- and green-on-white fabric, all quilted and plush, to cushion the contents.

Oh my. The urge to stuff all of my Samantha doll’s clothes and things into them is pretty strong, but these are definitely for jewelry. It’s badly in need of good organization.

By the way… it has been almost a year since Samantha was discontinued, and it still stings every time I remember. Though, as my mother once noted, I hardly played with her, she was the grand toy of my childhood–she was my Red Rider BB Gun, if you will. My mother and my aunt sewed all of her clothes for me, and I bought even more from the company in the early 2000s. I don’t have any of her accessories, but I do have almost all of her clothes. I am, in fact, going to include her on my upcoming Bedtime Stories for Everyone book report on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess.

Oh my. I get so unreasonable over dolly things. I can’t tell you what a relief it is that I won this auction…

The final harvest

I made the long, long journey to the back yard this evening to collect the last of the produce, since we are getting into frosty territory later this week. It looks so pretty on the counter:

One sweet pepper, a handful of hot ones, two cherry tomatoes, and oh… that eggplant. It is the size of a pool ball and let me tell you, it is a cosmic joke. It is the first and only eggplant of the season, and it’s come on too late to get to a decent size. Oh well, at least the plants lived, this year.

I will be out there in a day or two to clip a big bunch of sage and a big bunch of mums, to hang and let dry. Dried sage is a must for cornbread stuffing at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

It is 66 in the house right now. I have set the thermostat to click on the furnace at 62. Will it click on tonight?

Farmer’s Market quilt top

I still do patchwork. I promise. Things just got a little sidetracked… and also, I am in the middle of so very many tantalizing projects, that very few things get finished…

But today this did get finished. It is a small quilt, a lap quilt probably, made of bits of Farmer’s Market by Sandi Henderson. Some time ago when I posted about all of the lovely bright scraps sitting around my sewing room, a commenter told me to treasure my Farmer’s Market and use every last scrap. And that, dear commenter, is what spurred me on.

It is alternating ninepatches and snowballs, set on the diagonal. Easy as pie really, and the least trouble I’ve ever had figuring out how a diagonal quilt is supposed to go together. Sewing the fabric was, of course, a complete pleasure. I have to say, there is really something to be said for making small quilts… not only do they cut out and sew together faster, but I have a fighting chance of quilting this on my home machine. Oooh, did I just say that? How scary.

Renovation news, September

Let’s see, let’s see. It’s been an awfully long time since I updated you on the renovation.

July was a wash, between the wedding and the post-wedding recovery.

In August, Sparks re-plumbed parts of the bathrooms and kitchen, I took down all remaining wallpaper in the house, I painted the last of the un-white bedrooms, and I pulled up the rest of the carpet in the house. Sparks began to drywall the guest bathroom. He also began to run after contractors and remodellers, which is a difficult process, as you know if you’ve ever done it.

We left for our honeymoon with a new metal roof ordered and scheduled to arrive in October, one remodeller’s promise that he could fill in the kitchen doors and install the master bathroom’s window, and another crew of remodellers in possession of 22 gallons of paint plus instructions to tear up all of the carpet underlayment in the whole house (we tried ourselves, but it was too rotten a job.)

At this point, the underlayment is all torn up and the painting is about half finished. A couple of areas of water damage have been attended to–we needed a little new insulation and drywall in one of the bedrooms, and some new flooring in front of the big sliders. There is, as you see, no more Big Orange Wall. It is primed, and ready to be painted its real color.

We are poised to make an IKEA run for the bathroom cabinets, and since the first remodeller went AWOL, we are considering hiring the crew that tore up the underlayment and is doing the painting, to do the rest of the work. Unfortunately, they have to be constantly dropped in on, or they misbehave… so Sparks is stopping by there every day to make sure they tape things off and cover things with tarps before they paint, don’t smoke in the house, take care of toilets they stop up, etc. Honestly. It’s upsetting to have strange people in YOUR house, even when your house is empty and uninhabited.

With any luck we’ll get into the satisfying re-assembly phase very soon. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!