Friday, January 6, 2017

I have been busy...


 



 

It seems as though I have had one project after another for months now.  Starting with the last, here is one of the few photos I have from Kyle and Melissa's December 17th wedding.  I was trying to be polite and stay out of the real photographers' way.  My bad.  I have almost no nice pics from the wedding.

The reception was at the Whiteface Lodge in Lake Placid which is a spectacular setting for a winter wedding. 

The view from our room.
I stressed way too much about the pew decorations.  My one job for the wedding was to make twenty of them.  I combed the internet for ideas and came up with these cedar swags with simple bows, pine cones and battery operated fairy lights.

Small church in the village of Lake Placid  
 While time consuming to make and needing to be done last minute to ensure freshness, the decorations were fairly easy once I got going.  My sister provided the cedar from her land and help me put them together. In my not so humble opinion, they were perfect!  Must do a post on them because there are few wintery pew decorations ideas on the net.

Other excuses for blog absence continuing in reverse:

1.Window and door replacement on the sun room. Messy, expensive, but worth it.
  
From lots of tall, thin windows with little cranks for opening and closing



to nice big windows with sliders on the side.
 If you are going to make a mess, you might as well tear out the living room windows and replace them, too, right? 
Only the owner finds new windows to be pretty.

2. New patio because the grass I put in after replacing the pool was just not working out for me.


3.  After weeks and weeks of watering new grass where the pool had been we ended up covering a good portion of the new grass with the patio and messing up another portion putting in said patio. What was I thinking?

Nice grass, but that fire pit looked silly without a patio.


4.  Some fun stuff happened, too.  The family vacation at Ocean City, Maryland was great. We managed to get five of the six kids together.   Google keeps turning my photos into gifs for me.  (Sandra, let me know if this plays as a gif here, please and thanks.)  Kyle was off in the waves when this photo (or series of photos if the blog posts this as a gif) was taken.  Melissa was the only one that could not attend.  Her Peace Corp stint was not enough volunteering apparently.  She promptly came home and joined Teach for America.  A good part of her summer was spent in prepping for that with sixteen-hour days. 

Kiefer, Jordan, Pep, Keegan, and Brian.
5.  Also had a special mother-daughter trip to the Eastern States Exposition with Keegan. No lions, tigers, or bears, but lots of horses, cows, and pigs.


 And veggies!


Let's see, there was also the adventure of helping Kyle and Melissa find an apartment in Manhattan and moving them into a fifth floor walk-up on one of the hottest days of the year while the annual so special it has a wikipedia page celebration takes place at the church directly across the street. 

This is the end of my list of cheap excuses for ignoring my blog.  Nah, actually I am feeling kinda good about not pushing myself to post to the blog regularly.  I will be here when I can, but I want it to be a pleasure not a chore.  There may well be more well-spaced blog posts, but I will be back to say hello and to share life and, hopefully, an occasional sewing project from time to time.