I’ve been absent without leave for way longer than I ever thought I would be.

It’s so easy to let go and stop blogging when you have a wonderful co-blogger to pick up the slack.

Like everyone else, I’ve been busy with this and that. Here’s my particular this and a bit of that.

It started with a long overdue reno on our tiny guest cottage.  It’s nothing but a workshop from the 50’s that was converted to a miniature “house” in the 60’s. Very basic, no frills.  Backing up a bit, we had a major water supply line leak on the main house a couple of years ago that led to the water being inadvertently cut off on the guest house.  My mistake, actually.  Oops.

I don’t have to tell you that a house without water is pretty much a lifeless storage building, the bathroom and kitchen gathering dust, the plumbing drying out, the corners accumulating an amazing number of roly poly and spider carcasses.

A friend needed a place to roost for a while due to emergency home repair issues, and it provided the shove I needed to get the house back in shape.  There was trench-digging in July for the plumbing reconnection, carpet removal for mold and allergen problems, and a new tile floor went in in its place.  Did you know you can’t install glue-down vinyl composition tiles over painted concrete? The adhesive reacts with the paint and pulls the paint up so you have to remove the paint first. Enter the rental of a concrete grinder.  It’s sort of like operating a very dusty indoor roto-tiller.

Once the guest house was operational, my beekeeping neighbor told me his bees had absconded. He thinks he’d fed them too much sugar syrup and they ran out of room just before he was about to add another super. I’d been worried about my bees running out of room, too, even though I wasn’t feeding them, and this news made me step up my plans to add another level to my Warre hive, shown below with the extra box already added.

I hurried to the workshop and built two more boxes, both with observation windows because I love the windowed one I have so much.

It lets me take a peek at the activity without having to open the hive.  We added one box and so far the bees seem happy.

On the heels of the building frenzy came three days and two nights in the children’s hospital with an appendectomy for one of the kids.  Oh, to have the regenerative ability of a seven year-old. That kid was up and at ’em before I was. Two sleepless nights on a strange couch took more out of me than abdominal surgery did for the child.

As soon as I could see straight again, I was seized with another building frenzy.  I knew for some time the boot bench I built years ago was way undersized for the number of shoes and boots and gloves, etc. we were accumulating. I found this plan at ana-white.com and four days later had this storage phenomenon just inside the kitchen door:

With baskets on the top shelves for gloves and hats and below the bench for shoes and boots, backpacks and coats on the pegs, it should contain at least 20% of our shtuff.

Thank you for the beautiful plans, Ana!

There has been some canning (salsa, tomato sauce, black and blueberry preserves, sweet peppers, tomato sauce, fig preserves):

Add to that, some excitement over my sweet friend Courtney’s beautiful debut novel.   More on that to come later, I hope.

I hope I’m back blogging.  I know Deanna must hope so. I will update on the chickens’ progress (they are doing very well!) and Deanna and I have a nice little craft-along planned for the gift-giving season around the corner.

However, I do have another project that will probably be exciting coming soon.

Meet the termites under my kitchen floor.