Snow

We had our first snowstorm. We’ve had snow before, but this is the first time it had to be moved. That’s how we measure it – does it have to be move or will it melt. 🙂

In the southeastern part of the state, we only received about 2-3″, but up north they tallied up almost a foot.

Individual homeowners who had to move it most likely weren’t too happy, but the ski resorts were probably quite content.

Skiers, snowmobilers, and snowshoers, were probably all smiling this weekend.

One ugly side effect of the storm was power outages. At one point, over 60,000 homes were without power, and there are still 5,300 out as of this morning. NH is 80%+ covered in trees. Lovely to look at, but when they get covered in heavy wet snow, they come down.

Our power stayed on. Thank you, Steve our power pole, for standing strong. Thank you also to the strong folks in my family who moved the snow while I stayed inside off the ice.

We did have one tree go down but not on anything so that was the plus side. The Craftsman battery operated saw will go out manned by a younger member of my family, and she’ll make quick work of dividing it so it can be removed.

Don’t know what to get the gardener in your life for Christmas? I would highly recommend Craftsman lithium battery tools. Slap that battery in and off you go to do your job. Best investment in tools we ever made, and I have a wall of them. 🙂

The rest of the week’s weather is pretty quiet with temps hitting 50 so the snow will melt.

So, until next time, may your health be good, your weather sunny, and someone who loves you bake you a dessert to keep your mind off all of the above. Me – I’ve got brownies with coconut frosting sitting on the counter. 🙂 Happy Monday!

Food for thought

I saw this on fellow blogger Mary J. Melange’s Instagram, and it made me stop and think.

Right off the top of my head, I could really work on taking my camera off automatic, practicing free motion quilting, or finally moving the extra photos off my laptop and phone.

How about you? What could you do better with this spare time we have?

Happy and safe Monday as we roll into December. 🎄

Turkey for Two

There will be turkey for two this Thanksgiving for the first time ever. Then again, 2020 is the first time ever we’ve tried to navigate a pandemic.

Thanksgiving usually means a family gathering to share an extravagant ensemble of dishes followed by several decadent dessert choices amidst good conversation, laughter, and hugs.

This year it will be small but safe.

NH numbers are dramatically increasing as they are in every other state. For eight months, I’ve watched and read the news about the benefit of wearing a mask, washing your hands, social distancing, but the number of cases and deaths kept rising. I was paying attention, I really was.

This past weekend it hit much closer to home because one of those deaths is someone we know. He was a husband, father, grandfather, brother, friend, neighbor, and someone who played a role in making our family what it is today.

It put a name on that death statistic. He is one of those 262,701 Americans who have lost their lives to this virus.

Covid tired? Missing your canceled cruise, mall shopping, dinner out with friends? We’ll be missing this person. Let me tell you, it is much worse.

Stay safe, stay well.

Going small this year, may allow you to go big next year. ❤️

Let there be light

My mood and the weather have been gray and cool so I decided to do something about my mood at least.

On a warm day last week, I climbed to the attic and picked out some Christmas items, grabbed my tiny fairy lights and set up Christmas. Is it time? No. Do I need it? Yes.

There will be no big tree this year, but I have four small trees with lights, eight bottle brush trees, and two tree wall hangings. It looks festive and when the lights come on, I’m a happy woman.

I was also happy to see that my friend, Laurie Graves at Notes from the Hinterland, had the same idea. 🙂

Barn wall hanging with a red pickup truck and Christmas tree cut out added for the season. It’s amazing what some fray check on fabric and some double faced tape can do. 🙂

I’m working on a few more ornaments and a red pickup truck wall hanging.

Yes, I know I have some strange addiction to holiday red pickup trucks, but I’m not going to seek treatment for it, I’m just going to enjoy it. 🙂

Covid 19 right now is like a deadly fire raging across our nation, and we all have to do what we can to stay safe, keep others safe, but stay mentally healthy.

That’s a tall order, but in my case six sets of fairy lights and a red pickup truck project are really good medicine.

Stay well and do tell what’s helping to keep your mood positive.

Thank you

Heartfelt thank you
to each and every Veteran for your service.

Thread

Although we’re having great weather and I’m still picking up multiple leaf bags full of the neighbor’s pine cones, I’ve basically closed out the gardening season and moved indoors.

The sewing and embroidery machines have been running, and I’ve made table toppers, a wall hanging, and a few Christmas ornaments.

The wall hanging was a panel that included a large colonial house on the left side. I wasn’t interested in the house so I cut it out and then cut trees from that section and affixed them with invisible thread to fill in the space. Fun stuff for a sewing nerd.

This past weekend, a Facebook machine embroidery group I belong to caught on fire with a discussion about giving, receiving, and thanking people for hand crafted gifts.

There was a wide range of responses from love hand crafted gifts because of how special they make a person feel to preferring not to get any because it’s not their thing and they would rather have a gift card. Some said they would also like to receive a simple thanks for a gift while others felt it wasn’t needed.

What are you feelings on hand crafted gifts and do you prefer a thank you when a gift is sent or are you fine with no response? Let’s chat.

Happy Monday and stay well.

Thursday Doors – October 29, 2020

How about a Halloweeny door this Thursday?

My friend, Sue, spotted this door in Chester, NH, while she was looking for scarecrow people. Doesn’t everyone go looking for scarecrow people this time of year? 🙂

Chester is 26 square miles and has a population of a little over 5,000. So, it is pretty amazing that in their 11th year of “Village People” the residents created close to 1,100 scarecrows.

Each individual or family pays $25 to buy a scarecrow base to decorate, and the proceeds go to the Chester Historical Society.

This year, they also took in consideration the pandemic, and the scarecrows can be visited at a social distance or even from your vehicle. Win win. 🎃

Like doors? Check out more at our Canadian door leader, Norm Frampton’s Thursday Doors – October 29, 2020.

Whiny and sarcastic

Covid-19 and politics are clearly affecting my disposition so feel free to move on to someone posting a lovely flower photo. I understand, really. 🙂

I’ve been staying home, picking things up curbside again, and just mainly avoiding my fellow residents because of ‘hot spots,’ ‘exposure sites,’ ‘community spread,’ and a daily increase in cases.

People are sick of Covid-19. I get it. I’m sick of it, but not wearing a mask is not part of the solution. I’d like someday to be able to hug my grandkids again so I’ll continue to wear my mask, and I would sincerely appreciate it if you’d wear yours too.

We’ve had ten restaurants and bars shut down because of community exposure. Hello, people, do you still think it is a good idea to go to your favorite bar when some folks are also going when they’ve already been diagnosed positive? I don’t understand why there isn’t a ramification of any kind if you choose to go out into the community when you’ve been diagnosed with Covid-19.

They shut down hockey rinks here for a couple of weeks after a community spread so they could clean and everyone could be tested before starting up again. What happened? Parents protested the idea of their kids having to be tested before they could return.

Halloween in a middle of a pandemic? In what universe do parents think it is a good idea to send their young children to strangers’ houses to take candy from them? We’ve been going through months of being advised to wipe down all of our groceries so what is going to happen on Halloween – Lysol spray all the candy wrappers?

As I headed to pick up groceries curbside, I drove past so may political signs I couldn’t count them with some of them the size of a small billboards. I’ve never seen yard signs this big before. Maybe they think retirees need large print.

Do you have ugly signs too? I mean we have these huge signs hand painted or with banners that cannot be called anything but nasty and inciteful. It makes me wonder who these people are and what their end game is because it’s certainly not to bring us together that is for sure.

I voted weeks ago, but everywhere I look including my phone, internet, TV, mailings, signs, everyone wants me to vote.  I voted folks, leave me alone. I’ll check back in on the 4th.

I hope this last week in October finds you well, not bothered by these issues, still sane which I’m clearly not, and that you will stay safe this week as we head into November.

Now, I think I’ll just have some apple crumb pie with some pumpkin spiced coffee.

Life will seem much better after dessert at least until I get the next text, email, turn on the TV, or go out to get the mail.

I also need to grab the snow shovel so it’s handy because the ‘s’ word is in the forecast for the end of the week, which is definitely the cherry on life’s sundae. 🙂

Fess up

So, we’ve all been hanging at home for the past seven months or so, and we’ve done lots of ‘stuff’ to keep busy.

Let’s share the ‘best’ and the ‘craziest’ thing we’ve done. I’ll go. 🙂

We’ve actually done several inside and outside projects that have turned out well, but the #1 best on the list is purchasing and installing an electric fireplace in our family room. We have one with a mantle surround to hold a tv in the bedroom, and we’ve wanted one in the family room, but couldn’t really see a logical place for it.

I finally looked at our entertainment center one day and thought – how about taking the books out, moving the electronics, taking out the shelves and removing the doors. So, we did.

We measured and ordered a Dimplex model that would fit, slid it in, plugged it in, and we had heat and flames. (We bought a Dimplex unit because we have had that brand before, and it performs well.)

We tweaked it a little by adding a rectangular piece of embossed metal on the top that directs the heat away from the electronics and added two pieces of peg board that I painted black to match on the sides to fill out the empty space. Love it!

I’ve cleaned cupboards, closets, attic, garage, replaced drapes and a couple of area rugs, but this past weekend I decided to try and corral some cords  so I got rid of two gray surge protectors and got everything plugged into one black one to blend with the entertainment center.

At that point, I just had a laugh out loud moment and decided I had been home way too long if I was down to organizing my electronic cords. 🙂 Although, if I’m being honest here, I will admit that a couple of months back I also purchased a new charging station and organized all those cords.

Now, fess up as to your best and funniest of your at home projects. Come on, let’s start the week with a chuckle. 🙂

Stay well this week, the numbers are getting crazy out there.

By the way, the ‘+’ sign on my MG Instagram account just showed back up one day last week. I wish I had a logical explanation, but I don’t. 🙂

 

Screen time

I’ve spent a lot of time sitting in front of the computer screen this past week, and I need a break, but here I am posting because I hate to miss chatting with the blogging community. 🙂

There was insurance research including a two-hour webinar on a new option. That was followed up with a Smithsonian Garden webinars on Top Twenty Perennials for a Healthy Habitat and Beautiful Winter Gardens, and then a Penn State Extension webinar on Spotted Lanternfly which is the latest invasive heading our way.

I was pretty much done after that, but our insurance carrier suggested if we wanted to get a discount when renewing, we might consider the six-hour AARP Driver Safety Course. After that was completed, I was definitely fried. Good course, decent discount, but it requires some stamina to get through all six sections.

Yesterday, a friend who isn’t on social media asked if I’d try selling her nine-piece dining room set on Facebook Marketplace. It is a huge, lovely set, but I’m not so sure the buyers of today are looking for anything that grand.  She texts me about every hour asking if I’ve heard from anyone. 🙂

Before I quit whining about too much screen time, I have an Instagram question in case someone has run across it before. I have two accounts, NewEnglandGardenandThread and our Master Gardener one, nhscmga. Up until this week, both screens have looked alike with a ‘+’ sign in the middle of the icons to add a photo, but now all of a sudden they are different. I’ve tried googling, but can’t find an answer.

Any thoughts? Yes, I can work around it, but I’m just curious.

Are you finding yourself staring at the screen more during this time at home? Anything interesting you want to share?

Stay well and stay safe. 🙂