Found some Things.....

While clearing one side of the basement I found a couple of sanders.  One is larger than this one and the other is almost the same size of this one.  I know the one I liked best was round one and it did break.  Where I found the two older ones were really not ones that would have been easy to find.  Now I am ready to refinish the tops of my tables.

I also found my old circular saw.  At first I was disgusted with myself as I though I had to buy a new one because I could find the old one.  When I found the old one I did discover that it was well worn and the cord had a short in it.  I am sure that is why I quit using it.  Now the old one is in the dumpster.

I have made many trips to the dumpster today and it was sort of refreshing to get rid of some to the things.  I think maybe tomorrow I will have the basement at a stage of acceptable for a visiting furnace man to walk through.

It is late evening and I pulled off a blog for today. I have found things that I will photograph to share but not today. Thanks for stopping by today.

To The Dump......

Someone stole my Buick and put a dumpster in its place. I can keep it for the whole month.  I hope I am through with it  sooner than that but I guess we will have to see what happens.  I have my construction mess that was all outside on my porch now inside of the container.  I need to clear out the basement too so the box will come in handy.

It is a smooth clear sky that we see this morning.  It is cold but will warm up a little bit during the day.  I can see the results of the earth's tilt as the sun will soon be seen behind that pine tree. I don't think we will see any buds for another month.  Leaves will cover the whole scene by early April into May. That means summer will be on its way.

I shared this photo on my other  blog but I thought I should repost it here. The nook was a sink and cupboard area.  I removed it all and it left a neat reading area or office area for someone to fill.  I have a light to install and we have a couple of coats of paint to apply.  Buying paint can be a challenge when you buy a stock color and then they run out of the stock color.  I won't say much more about that. No matter how old I get, I can't keep ahead of complications that happen. The solution for this project would have been us becoming contractors and hiring drywall experts, painting experts, ceiling experts and flooring specialist.  That being a pipe dream we will get the job done.

My smaller sansevieria  is still overcrowded. I like the green color as is is very healthy in its crowded state.

I am going to downsize some of my plants when we move.  I have windows for them but a lot of them are  not going to move.  If I can find homes for them that will be great. I do have a very large cactus that won't move because of two grandsons that will visit us.  It is planted in a stoneware container that I do want to keep.

On to the jobs of the day which will include spending the day in the basement.  I know that I can find things that need to go into that dumpster and other things that need to be packed. I hope everyone is doing well today.  Thanks for stopping by today.

Sunday Afternoon..........

My tin can collection is needing to be packed.  I will remember them as they are fun to have.  I guess steel-cut coffee was a special kind of coffee. It is interesting that they put a plantation on the can even though I bought that they grew coffee beans in the south.

An archived photo of Barney in his younger days. It looks like spring weather in this photo and Barney seems to be so alert to what is going on next door.

This is an archived photo of a house finch that was at my thistle feeder.  They seem to be plentiful on the north end of the town, where corn is spilled out while being process at the co-op.  We rarely seen them on the south side of town.

I hope everyone is having a restful day.  Our day is warmed up some but we have a sharp wind.  Thank you for stopping by today.

Confused......Chives.

I plant chives in containers and leaved them out in the winter.  They survive the cold and come back up in the spring.  This planting of chives is a couple of years old now.  They had been all frozen down and dead-looking but the warm spell made them perk back up again.

We are suppose to warm up to just freezing during the day.  It is very cold right now.  I was lazy and shot this through the living room window rather than venture outside.

Things that have changed around here can be listed.  I have a large dumpster sitting in the drive where the Buick usually sits.  I am dumping construction waste into it.  My wife and I painted out a whole gallon of paint yesterday onto the drywall and we ran out of paint.  I don't know what I was thinking being only one gallon because it will take about 3 gallon to give that whole area two coats of paint.  Now the dumpster is here, I have to start cleaning out the basement removing unnecessary items.  I have many things that can go to the landfill and I won't be missing it.

We plan to stay inside this morning and not travel until it warms up a bit.  Our area received lots of snow and frozen rain pellets.  It was not like that in the county below us.  When we venture out this afternoon the roads should look good down there.

I wish everyone to have a good weekend.  Thanks for stopping by today.

Friday's Posting....

The inside gallery area is a large room.  The west wall is a normal eight foot tall.  The ceiling slants up to a fifteen foot wall or taller.  I can't reach the top without this ladder.  I will show it all when I have the ceiling all repaired and restored.  We are going to start painting walls today.  I have an area that needs to be sanded, the support post and also a horizontal beam needs to be smooth out some.  Then all the dust from sanding will stop.

I took a photo of the new support post that is incorporated into the wall.  The photo is a bad one and when it is all painted I will share it so it will make more sense.  For now it looks like it is a haunted wall.

My two weather rocks share the story of what has been falling from the sky.  We have had thunder and strong winds all night.  It did finally quiet down and the frozen rain left pellets on the ground.  It is snowing right now. We are back to normal temperatures now, cold, and we shouldn't be surprised about it with it being February.  

We are getting tired of the rubble and disorder.  I look down at the dining room table and see the things waiting to be put into boxes.  Everything of every kind is laying on the table as it is headquarters for organizing things.  When I get the gallery done I will start moving all the boxes into that room.  

We did get our  taxes done yesterday for the most part. We had different things going on so the woman is getting a second opinion or the job she did with them.  We will have to return a second time to sigh papers and we can have that done for the year.   Thank you for all stopping today.  

Grandson #1........

It has been four years since our grandson A.J.  was born. We received an email about it on the internet as we were having morning coffee.  It had been a long night and our son just texted us to get the information out there to the family.

He is such a good little guy who is always out there soaking in information.  We bought him the first large lego toy from us.  I am sure he has others but we know that the building block thing will really interest him. He is into monster trucks right now but I think he has them all on his toy shelves.  We do have to get creative to find something different for him.

I bought a new magazine at the bookstore last weekend.  I started my very first fish tank back in 1973. I had guppies and they did reproduce quickly.  I am dreaming that I will get back into the tropical fish world.  The magazine really had a lot of info about the sources of the fish and where they harvest them in the wild in many different countries.

People who are addicted to the aquarium world really do bug out their eyes when they see them floating around in tanks at the store.

I still have my goldfish so there won't be any switching over to the tropical ones soon.  It may happen at the beginning of this fall when winter again starts to rear its white head.

I haven't talked much about the project for a while but I have not wanted to talk about it.  I do think that I am close to having all the walls prepared for painting.  I had added a new support post which required all new gypsum plaster.  It takes a lot more time when you start from scratch.  I also had an area where we had a sink and cupboards for the studio part of the gallery.  That is all gone now and it left me a nook to rework with new drywall and patching of bad places in the existing drywall.  I won't photograph until the most of the ugly ceiling is covered up.  When I am done, there will be lots of photos.

It is tax time in our household this afternoon.  I am betting we will have more taxes to pay but we will wait and see.  I don't use my paycheck deductions as a way to have a saving account.  I did work a lot during this tax time so maybe I will just break even.  Whatever happens just will happens.

We are waiting for the snow to start.  The county to the north of us is in a storm warning area.  Since we are only 4 miles from that county line I am sure something will slop over onto us.  I guess the weather people think we have weather walls around us by telling us nothing will hit us, but I bet we will see white.

Thank your for stopping by today.

Good Morning Sunshine........

It is a hopeful day of having spring weather one more time.  Snow is on its way as the natural balance takes place.  It is nice to have the furnace retired for a while and it will go back into use by this evening.   We have no snow right now but that is good for us.  The maple tree and sycamore tree are our living sculptures without leaves.

Monday is on my Mind........

I attended Robert's funeral a month or so ago.  He had lived to be 100 years old. He is my sister-in-law"s dad who was a part of our family every since my brother married his daughter back in 1963.  I call this my Norman Rockwell photo as it tells such a story of who Robert was.  I think we were at my mom's funeral and all the ceremonies were finished.  Robert decided to walk the cemetery to see who was out there that he knew in his past. This was at the Murray Cemetery and he and his wife are buried at the Osceola, Iowa cemetery. The photo was taken in the summer of 2008.

A photo from my archive of a swan at the zoo.  He was irritated about all of the noise and splashing that the koi were doing.  The koi were fighting for fish food as they were being fed by visitors to the zoo.

An archived photo of my two grand dogs who live in Maine.  I guess there are a couple of cats in that group who are also my grand pets.

The gallery was a great place to display and sell our work. This is the corner of the room that I worked in all morning filling holes and cracks from the aging process of houses. I am certain that we will have a few walls that will become display areas in our new place.

Thanks for stopping by today.  Have a good rest of the day on this Monday.

Two Trees.......

The sycamore three that glows is one that survived our tornado a few seasons ago.  A large garage truss hunk from the branches up on top after the tornado had passed.  The truss had to be cut up with a chainsaw to cut it up to get it out of the tree.  The tree has similar color of the birch but this is much larger in trunk size and not really as white as a birch.

My birch really has a different branch configuration.  The bark is really a lot whiter most of the time.

Thanks for stopping by today.

Grandsons........

A professional photo of Teddy.  He is making fast changes in his maturity.  I saw a video on the net of him pulling himself all over the floor by using his arms. He has such a sweet personality and smiles a lot.

This is a sweet photo of Teddy with his Uncle John on the day of his baptism ceremony. He had a cold but still would smile at all that was going on around him.

Big brother AJ has grown up a lot too.  He turns four years old this month.  He is out there learning and asking questions as he runs through the world to do so many different things. Teddy has the same kind of hair growth as AJ, so Teddy will have hair just like AJ.  AJ gets to go to a barber to get his hair cut. It seems like just yesterday that this oldest grandson was born.

Random Choices on a Busy Day.........

Lots of red is showing up n the morning skies and lots of pink hangs around in the evenings.

We took a friend of ours to lunch yesterday and I found out that she had attended this school. I taught in the school for a few years down in a basement room.  She is an older woman and she attended 2nd grade in this building.  The building was torn down and I created a drawing of it to give people of the community a chance to remember it.  If my math is correct she was in school there in 1944.  I was teaching school there in 1976.

Her family moved away for a while to Nebraska and then she returned to Woodward as an adult. She and her husband used to be our neighbors and then she moved to her parents home on the other side of main street. We have reminded friends for 40 years and my wife goes to her house and they paint art work together every few weeks.

This is a large painting that I created quite a few years ago.  It is a large painting which is probably why I never sold it.  I have sold smaller prints of in the past years.

We are warm today and that is good.  It is nice to see sunshine and stepping outside is not a shock to the system.  It is too complicated to explain what I am doing right now with the room but I am still patching drywall getting things ready for a coat of paint.  Thank you for stopping by today.

Morning Sky........

The vapor trail does seem to be scattered in a formation as it disperses.  I am not sure if it is a temperature front but we are going to warm up around  here in the next few days.

The garden angel has survived the winter weather and appears to be welcoming spring.  Spring won't be here for a while but the February thaw is going to be ridiculous. We are suppose to hit close to 70 degrees F. by Saturday.

I purchased one more piece of drywall yesterday and will  finish the last of my patching of the walls. We are getting closer to painting the walls but there seems to be specifics spots that deserve a lot of attention.  It is nice that we don't have to deal with severe weather conditions and it makes the remodel work easier.  Going outside to cut something with the skill saw doesn't required me to bundle up when I go outside to do so.

Thanks for stopping by today.

Middle of the Week.......

On the wall in the living room hang these three visuals.  The Impressionist painting, by J.B. C. Corot, is actually a print mounted on wood. It was a gift from a friend.  The photos are from a woman who use to blog.  She had lived in Washington and then moved to the eastern coast.  She started sharing her photography and then started selling them at shows.  I won the one photo scene with the trail from a contest.  She sent my a sheep photo also as I always admired her animal photos.

The oxalis is reacting to the longer days of sun by putting out new buds. It seems to be cold outside today but the sunshine is very welcomed

I will downsize the number of plants that I will be taking to our new home.  This plant will probably get planted into the larger planter that is filled with oxalis also.  It can sit outside all summer on the patio.

My major project continues.  I get discouraged because it is n't done but I finally realize that I have improved the room so much that sticking to the project will be worth while.  Thank you all for stopping by today.

River Birch......

An archived photo of this tree.  It is just early spring when I took this shot.  I like how the birch keeps peeling back revealing fresh natural colors.

Our oldest grandson is worried that we won't move any of the toys.  He really doesn't need to worry as we would do anything for our grandkids.  Packing up toys will be a joyful thing to do.

My wife has wrapped each of her dolls in tissue paper and they are all laying inside of two large tubs ready for the move. She hasn't added to her collection for some years now as they are not for sale anywhere .  I think the last one that I bought was a girl's doll sold at a Christian bookstore.

I am blogging late tonight and using all archived photos. It has been a busy day and it is time to wind down for the day.  Thank you all for stopping by today.

Lines in the Sky........

The neighbors row of trees make a nice pattern against the Sunday afternoon sky.  The balsam pine to the right is growing larger each year, faster now that it doesn't have two silver maple trees to shade it.

Across the street the maple tree is a line filled pattern with a squirrel's nest at the top. This is the one bright orange tree in the fall across from our house.

Looking up yesterday while being outside with Barney, I could see that I needed to get my camera.  The sun in the west was causing glow on the tops of the birch.  A lot of the buildings along the street were being lighted up from the afternoon sun.

The hydrangea is to a pretty sight at this time of the year.  Eventually the dead parts from last years flowers will fall off and the stems will leaf out again.

Busy as usual today on the remodel job. Things are being accomplished that make me feel like it can be competed.  Not for a couple of weeks, it will get done.  I hope everyone had a good weekend.  Thanks for stopping by today.