Will this be done in time for Christmas?

Two hours tonight to figure out how to increase. Half a toe complete.

Baby, it's cold outside

Zero, in fact.

Three things about winter in my house:
-wood
-drafts
-oil

The thing about wood is, it shrinks in the winter. This mostly causes small changes that aren't irritating but which give you pause. Such as:

-the floor in my kitchen is covered with vinyl. Vinyl does not shrink. So, every winter, the floor shrinks under the vinyl and my kitchen floor has air lumps.
-Also, the wood frames on the windows shrink and make awful noises like ice cracking.

Now, drafts. The kitchen is full of drafts. It is insulated solely by the cabinets. So when you open a cabinet, you are greeted with a blast of cold air. Icy air seeps out from under the corner cabinet and the oven, and freezes your feet. And the door is like a sieve. I have resorted to shoving coats in front of the worst drafts.

Finally, oil. The house is heated by oil. I love the oil company. They have been awesome. But oil is just so.damn.expensive. So the heat is usually 65 or less. Unless we have company. I like having company!

I was reminded today of a problem we do NOT have in this house (knock on wood): frozen pipes.

The project begins

This weekend, our project begins. We were going to finish the upstairs. Then we were going to finish 2/3 of the upstairs. Now, we are going to finish a room upstairs. In the back. In its current footprint.

So... mostly this is just insulating, at this point. Insulating and drywall.
Let's see how terribly wrong this can go.

What IS that?

Last night, I was sitting on the couch, and I was curled up, and I felt this sticky thing on the seat of my pants. It was really stuck, it wouldn't come off, no matter how much I picked at it.

So I finally gave up, and just went to bed.

Tonight, I am sitting on the couch, and I curl up to read some blogs, and I feel SEVERAL sticky things on the seat of my pants. But this time they haven't become fuzz encrusted yet, and I can see... they are little bits of candy cane.

I need to clean the couch.

Say what?

My daughter just stomped out of time out. When I explained she needed to go back to time out and that it's rude to stomp, she claimed she "just wanted to play marching band."

...to further this story, as I am writing this, she just flat-footed it out of the room. Which sounds like stomping.

I dread the day she enters puberty.

The boy child, meanwhile, has turned into Peter Pan. He chases his shadow around the house and he just informed me that the shadow was "bad."

Fuses and buttons

It took me 20 minutes, but I replaced the fuses in the string of Christmas lights we had that stopped working halfway through the season. I plugged them in and they are good as ... wait.

One light is flickering. One green light.

So I gave up on them for the night.

I need to be a success and sew buttons back on my coat. If I have two posts about this, does it make it a recurring blog theme? Or is it just sad that it's been three years and I have the same coat, still missing buttons?

New Year New Post

This is the year that I am finally going to stop biting my fingers.

My actual new year's resolution is to waste less food. Because last year's resolution was to stop biting my fingers, and it seems silly to make the same resolution year after year after year.  I have some sausages going bad in the meat drawer right now, so it's not looking like a good start for this goal.

Exciting house news, though: We discovered that the oven does, in fact, have a light switch. You know, so you can see what's cookin' without opening the door. It only took seventeen months to find.