Happy Dining Room Day!

Ok, that's not a real holiday at all, but that's what it feels like today! Here's the story:

 Billy noticed that there was a shop in Yellow Springs called Atomic Fox and they sell mid century furniture and stuff.  Because of our new mid century ranch, we're in the market for such things.  (thanks for jacking up the price on everything mid century Mad Men! geez.)  And because we have a stupid spangly chandelier in our dining room, we're especially keen to replace it with something more period - we've been searching for the perfect retractable atomic UFO fixture.  So we decided to give it a try.  Terry, the owner, was super nice and when we told him we were looking for some ceiling lighting, he said "hey, i've got something i haven't put out yet" and he brought out this Moe honeycomb retractable light!  whaaa??!!  this is the original ad for the honeycomb line by Moe:

It's the one on the bottom right.  The wiring looked great (and many of that era don't) and the price was decent so we walked around thinking about it.  while we did that, we kind of fell in love with a dining room table and chairs.  the dining room table i have now was the $149 set from Kmart that I bought when I moved out on my own!!  i always meant to replace it when i found the right one.  16 years later, I'd still never replaced it!  it was a good little table, but sheesh.  Plus we were always drooling over mid century dining room sets.  this one had lots of cool features but we feared it was too big for our dining room.  We talked price first and he gave us a great deal on it because we were getting both the table and chairs and the light! woohoo!  so we measured the table then drove home and measured the dining room space and said "yes!!  it'll work" and drove BACK to yellow springs again to get it!  It's so beautiful!  this is the dining room table:

Here's a better view of the chair style.  I'll be changing the seat fabric - it's not original and it kind of like a weird upholstery terry cloth.  

I love these little metal buttons on the chairs, and there's one on the table legs too

This is the light fixture

and this is the retractable part - it lets you move the fixture up and down.  pretty popular in the 50's and 60's.  Yes, my kitchen is plaid!  at first I was like "geesh.  plaid"  but now I don't hate it - it certainly has character!

So Yay for Atomic Fox!  you should definitely go there - but if you buy anything I might want, I'll fight ya!  they have a hutch that matches my new table...we'd have to get rid of a hutch in the dining room to have it, but I'd kinda like it...

no longer a real estate mogul!

I CLOSED ON THE OLD HOUSE TUESDAY!!!!  wooooohooooo!  it feels soo good to have that officially over with!!  no more double mortgage payments, no more having to go over to take care of the yard and clean out the garage and wonder if someone was going to leave crap in the alley or break in!  No more having to swing by after work to pick up junk mail so that it didn't fall out of the mailbox.  Ugh, it's just a huge weight off my mind!  Up to the day of closing, i didn't let myself get too excited - i knew things could still fall through or get pushed back, but surprisingly, we closed on the day we were supposed to - repairs and appraisals all went fine - everything worked out!

So to celebrate, we didn't go out to dinner - we went out and bought a chainsaw!  and a tree!  We sprung for a red oak that's about 11 feet tall - not giant, but bigger than anything we've bought so far (because we've been trying to add trees on the cheap!)  Meadow View nursery is just up the street from us and they were having a big sale on perennials and trees and shrubs so we got a bunch of perennials and also a smoke bush, which i've been wanting forever!  Billy went out this morning and cut up a bunch of limbs that have been piling up.  success!

the red oak:

 the smoke bush:

Oh, and I made the rain barrel last weekend.  we now have two rain barrels - one on either side of the shed!  yay!  all my life I've wanted a rain barrel - now i have two!  they're nothing fancy, but it's 110 gallons of water and it makes it super easy to water the tomatoes every day!

officially summer

Today it got up to 86, but it sure felt hotter than that because it was so muggy!  For the first time this season we turned on the air conditioning - I'm not sure why, but we always feel good about not turning it on!  it's nice to have the windows open, I think.  It's one of those things we just didn't do as much in the city, and something we love about this house - big windows that we can throw open and not feel like the whole world is looking in, and no hearing every person or car on the street like back in the city!  it's cool!  Even when it's hot out, we spend so much time outside now - it's so different!

It seems like everyone I know with a garden is pretty happy so far this season, so I can't really gloat much, but my tiny garden with 8 tomato plants is really looking great!  (Helen, you can show Fred this picture and tell him he may have me this year, but next year, I'm expanding the garden, and it'll be ON! haha! )

Even the cherry tomatoes seem huge!

I didn't plant a lot this year because frankly, i felt like I didn't put my all into the garden in the past couple years and I didn't want to assume that I just magically change my ways.  However, I honestly think that a lot of my lack of excitement had to do with where we were - and feeling like I just had no privacy and therefore not really loving being outside.  It always felt like a chore.  Here it doesn't!  So next year I'll let myself expand (assuming my spirits aren't dashed by deer eating everything when it gets really dry!)

We have 2 apple trees - I don't know the variety - but they're putting on little apples.  We didn't spray them for pests this spring so I don't know if we'll get anything that isn't all eaten up or not.  It sure would be cool to make apple sauce, and apple pies, and spiced apples....
Our neighbor has a big orchard on his property and another up the road on some other land he owns - we watch him spray and treat his trees, so we'll have to pick his brain on what we ought to do.

We also have about 26 black walnut trees and they're getting walnuts!  I'm a little unsure how I'm going to deal with walnuts from 26 trees!  We'll see how it goes.  The neighbor's dad, who recently died, was super into nuts (he was a nut nut) and they have more walnut trees than we do.  Another thing to pick his brain about!

Here's the walnut grove:

My new favorite kind of tree is a chestnut.  We have one in the front yard and it's just the coolest looking tree - a neat shape, cool leaves, and really interesting catkins that then form the spikey coverings for the nuts.  I guess they aren't very "nut-like" nuts - I've never had a chestnut, but I'm already looking up what to do with them.  I feel like I'm going to be spending a lot of time wearing gloves and dealing with nuts this fall!

I just planted 92,200 seeds

Yes.  I did.  well, "planted" may be a little strong - i spread them.  We've been experimenting with some no-mow zones in the back 40 to do something a little more interesting than just a field of lawn with trees on the edges.  Grass grows a lot taller than I thought it would when it's allowed to be natural!  I know a lot of that is the height of the seed - not the grass itself, but still... it's up to my waist or higher! I bought a bunch of wildflower type seeds on Amazon in bulk and mixed them with sand to help disperse the tiny little bits, then used one of those little monkey-grinder kind of spreaders to spray them over the area.  I know it's not entirely the right way to do it, but I only spent like $30 on all of those seeds so we'll see how it goes.  Technically to establish a prairie area, you're supposed to remove all sod and grass, use herbicide to kill it all, then seed, etc.  I have a hard time believing that the way plants naturally seed themselves won't result in a few plants surviving this approximation of that!  It's hard to see in the picture - I'll have to take better pictures.  We have several curvy tall growing areas - one of which has a "nature trail" mowed through it, which makes it cool to walk though.

I spent hours in the garage of the old house trying to get it all cleared out today.  i made a lot of progress and kicked up a lot of dust and mouse poo.  bleah.  i also dug up some lambs ears and ajuga to plant at the new house.  I finally freed a pot of rue - the stuff actually jumped from a bed INTO that pot, then totally took over and actually rooted itself down through the bottom of the pot and into the ground!  it had always gotten so big that i chopped it way back each year to keep it in check - i wanted to bring it to the new place where it could reach its full potential, but I couldn't get it to budge from the ground until I brought some tools to pry it up today.  it was crazy!!  I bought this thing in a little 3" pot with some herbs.  it's quite a grower.  i think it's meant to be a shrub.  I haven't even looked that up yet.

Can I make anything other than a bag?

apparently, I cannot.  I felt like using my embroidery machine, and for some reason, bags seem like great things to showcase that!  Last weekend I made a clothespin holder using the same green fabric, and denim remnants that I used on this bag - it just made me happy!

Isn't that the coolest design?  I love it.  Urban Threads, of course - it's the only place I download patterns from!  and they're having a sale right now!

I used a vintage table runner for the lining - I'd had it sitting around forever and it was the perfect size!  yay!

Making it ours

I've never been a huge fan of yews, but they certain can't be beat when it comes to hardiness.  And in the 60's it was definitely the go-to foundation shrub!  We have them all around the back porch, and though they weren't overgrown, they blocked the view if you were sitting on the porch swing - and we quite often are!  We were going to pull them out, but this morning I made some attempts to dig them out with a shovel - it wasn't going to happen easily. I don't know why i thought it would!  then i read about it on a few forums and short of using the truck to pull them out of the ground, it was not going to happen easily.  However, I did read that yews can be pruned back really had and they'll green up on old wood, so I decided that'd be the compromise.  Just whack them down and then keep them shorter.  This is what they look like now!  They'll look like crap for a season, but I think they'll be just fine!  And the view is so much better!!

This is what it looked like before:

Also, in the spirit of making the place our own, Billy pulled out the flagpole in the front yard the other day!  we were taking a walk around and he just pulled it out with brute force!  yay!  really - we weren't going to put out those seasonal craft store flags, it just needed to go!  

In animal news, we had all the cats go awol on Wednesday night - we forgot to latch the screen door on the porch and the cats found a way to slide it and they took off!  when i woke up on Thursday morning, i saw the door open and knew what happened - it had happened once before, but only one cat decided to take off.  and he came right back when he saw me walk to the door.  This time, however, i ran around and was only able to find Olive and Borris - the two tuxedo cats who are about a generation away from being barn cats and could probably make it, even though they're declawed.  The one I couldn't find was Buckley - the fancy pants Himalayan!  Of course, it's the one who has had all the street smarts bred out of him in favor of pretty.  that's the one who was out there!  he didn't come home all day so i made flyers at work (i know!) and stopped at every house on our street.  i met some nice people!  still he didn't come home.  all day Friday he didn't come home.  ugh.  we felt awful!  we walked the property thinking he might just be hiding under a shrub in his usual scaredy cat fashion - nothing.  Then on Friday night he just walked up to the back door like nothing happened!  it had been raining a lot but he'd obviously found a hiding place and just stayed there because his feet were muddy, but he was dry - and you can tell when a long haired cat got wet then dried out - it's not pretty!  Whew! we were sooooo happy to see him!  Today our neighbor - an animal lover probably in her 70's - yelled over "did you find your cat?" and we said YES!  and she said YAY! and pumped her arms in the air - it was very sweet!  Oh, in other animal news, Janet, the wild turkey, was in the yard taking a dust bath in the dirt where our grass still hasn't grown over the new septic system - it was so cool!  

finally finished

I got a wool table mat kit at the Woolgathering last year and started it as a Christmas gift for my mom - because we were in the middle of getting the house we kind of bypassed Christmas but I showed my mom a picture of what I was making and told her it was in progress!  Lame, I know.  I did finally finish it up though - in time for Mother's Day!

She's big into this primitive kind of stuff - it's not really my bag, but I did have a good time working with the nice felted wool!  Boy, this picture really makes the unevenness of my stitches stand out - not cool!  I backed it with some calico.

And, I can't stop talking about the wild turkey we've seen in the back yard a couple times now!  Isn't that wacky?  apparently not so much, when I talk to other people who've seen tons of them, but I have never seen one in my life - much less on my own property!  It's a crappy shot because it's as zoomed in as my camera would go - it was really far out there!  I've decided to call her Janet.  maybe that's going too far.