I’m here, I’m fine, just really super busy and lacking any desire to blog. I like blogging when I have a good bit of free time and that has been a rare thing lately. Not that anyone was worried, but just in case you were , you know, about to get worried, I figured I’d tell ya what’s going on for me.

It’s finally cold here - it went down to 30-some degrees this morning. And guess what? Our heat is not working! Not good. Thankfully it’s not too cold yet, and we’ll get someone in to get this fixed tomorrow hopefully. For tonight, I’ll be piling on the blankets.

Rob and I put up these shelves in our family room yesterday, in addition to thoroughly cleaning the room. It was the first time we both got down on our hands and knees and scrubbed and dusted everything in the room. Usually we piece meal our cleaning: the baseboards and heaters will get scrubbed and the rest of the room gets a once over so we can pick up the rest of the house, too. So we decided to really focus on one room and will do the rest of the house in suit. By the time we get done, the family room should need it again. We’ll see how our new plan works for us. It’s been a struggle lately to keep the house as clean as we’re used to because of how busy we’ve become.

Oh - and about the shelves - I got the cutest little affirmation signs and sheep figurines to put on them. I’ll take a picture in the morning to show you. It’s totally adorable! I love filling my house with uplifting artwork all around. I’ve got a lot of stuff that talks about love, faith, hope, kindness, etc. sprinkled through out my house. It’s a good reminder of the person I want to be and the life I want to live. I also want the kids to be surrounded by positive affirmations as they grow.

That about sums up what’s happening here. Now tell me how you are.

I woke up dizzy again this morning. I haven’t had this problem for months, so I was surprised when it happened. I immediately ran to the medicine cabinet for some Antivert until I remembered Grace ate all of them. I settled on a Zyrtec instead. After I ate breakfast, I made sure to do the Neti pot and Sinus Buster regimen - that’s something I didn’t do yesterday.

Earlier this week our air conditioning stopped working and we had to put in a call for service. It turns out that our unit is just old and we can’t run it at 70 degrees 24 hours a day - which is fine by me! I’m always freezing while everyone else in the house is comfortable. What happened when we ran it for so long at the temperature is the unit froze. Or so we thought since we saw some icing on the pipes. After turning the system back on for a few hours, the temperature in the house wasn’t really getting any cooler, so Rob decided to take a better look at the unit in the attic. (We’ve got a unit outside and one in the attic.) Turns out there was a side panel that wasn’t on completely and the entire attic was being cooled, but not the rest of the house. After Rob replaced that panel, the house started cooling down immediately.

Now I’m wondering if there is something in the vents that is causing Aric and I a lot of sinus and allergy related misery. He is a mess this morning, snotting and snorting all over the place. His face has “that look” when his allergies have flared up and I wouldn’t take no for an answer when I told him to take a Zyrtec, too. He is usually pretty reluctant to take medicine, preferring to “tough it out” instead. He also used the Sinus Buster spray, but I wish he would use the Neti pot to cleanse his sinuses of the debris that is obviously circulating through our house right now.

Since I haven’t taken Zyrtec in a few months, my body isn’t used to its effects. It’s been about an hour since I swallowed that little white pill and already I’m getting very, very sleepy. I hate this.

When we planted grass around our patio, the bag of seed spilled a bit - right into one of my planters, giving me my very own Chia Pet! How funny is this? Cracked me up when I saw a sod garden growing in my planter. I’m not sure what happened to the flowers that were in there - I think they got washed out from heavy rains and the planter was just a bucket of potting soil.

I told you I would take pictures of the work we did yesterday, and I did not lie. :-)

Here are the deck planters. You can see the rest of the pics, along with my comments on my Flickr.

I’m so excited to have the back yard start to shape up. Now we just need to get a fence and about a zillion (okay, 10) trees chopped down and I might start to feel a bit satisfied with the property. I hold my yard up to the bar of my parents’ yard - and it is no where near measuring up, but I reminded myself that they have had 35 years to get their yard in the shape it’s in. We’ve only been in our house for one year. Speaking of that, can you believe I didn’t go a big, “It’s been one year since we moved in!!!” post? I’m kind of disappointed in myself. I hope my house doesn’t disown me. I still love it, I promise.

Rob and I had a productive day today. When I woke up, Rob was already outside moving topsoil to the area that got messed up from the gravel and sand. He planted grass seed and watered it real good while I started transplanting some wild hosta into a pot. The hosta was growing way in the back of my yard among our big ivy patch and turned out to be quite a lot larger than I thought it was. It ended up filling a huge pot, a place in my flower garden where other types of hosta are, and I started a new area for another piece of it. Sweet! The hosta in the pot was wilted pretty bad tonight, I guess it’s in shock. The one I put in my garden is doing fine, though. I hope the one in the pot survives okay. And how lucky was it that I had some big, wild hosta growing in my hard? I’ll take pictures tomorrow maybe.

I also planted some coleus and petunias in rectangular ledge planters that are on the back of my deck, repotted my African Violets with African Violet potting soil, and added a new, smaller Peace Lily to an existing one that wasn’t doing so well. I still have dirt under my fingernails, but hopefully it will be worth it when my plants all start taking off.