The answer is...No, but we’re
a lot closer than we were when we first began this wild ride and we do expect to spend our first winter in the house this year.
Currently, Charming is
installing flooring and things are looking much better. The flooring that we chose is an almost scary
match with the kitchen countertops. It
also goes well with the faux stone that we installed behind the wood
stove. The color of the flooring is
“Timberland Oak,” which is fancy talk for a dark brown, mottled look. We like it, but I’m reminded of my former
work supervisor who good-naturedly chided me because my favorite color choice
was either beige or brown, which translated to boring in her opinion. While it is true that I love, love, love
browns and beiges I think she would be extremely proud of me for venturing
outside of my color box by choosing colors like “Mesa Yellow” for my living
room, “Southern Peach” for my craft room, and “Oriental Ivory” (which is really
an icy mint color) for the master bedroom.
Choosing anything other than beige for room colors was a bit scary for
me, but I’m really happy with the color choices.
In addition to the progress
on the flooring, I’m happy to report that our garden is producing a bit better
than I had expected. Since we’ve had so
much rain this season, many of the gardens we’ve seen have been already been cleaned
off and put to sleep for the year. For
the past two weeks, I’ve been getting quite a bountiful harvest from the
garden. We’ve had a continual supply of
lettuce the entire summer. I sowed my second
planting a few weeks ago and it is coming in nicely. We have plenty of tomatoes and Candy Roaster
squash (dare I say, almost too many Candy Roasters) with a few Sugar Baby
watermelons, acorn squash, and cucumbers.
The deer feasted on our crop of green beans early in the season, but
luckily I still have plenty of green beans in the freezer from last year. We also planted corn, but something got into
it and knocked it all down. At first, we
thought that the culprits were our deer friends; however, when we saw that the
ears of corn had been shucked and eaten off the cob we realized that deer would
not be able to shuck the corn. That left
only one other animal that would totally knock down all the stalks, shuck the
corn, eat it and toss the bare cobs aside…a bear. A chat with our closest neighbor, who
verified sightings of a bear with two cubs at her place (the bear demolished
her honey bee hives), leads us to believe that we are most likely correct in
our assumption.
