on the way home

November afternoon.

the house

around the neighborhood

I went out for a run on Cape Road. I usually run on a quieter dead-end road but I tried something different for the sake of variety. I hated running on the side of the road with so much traffic going by! and won’t do it again, but it was nice to go down a familiar road on foot and see so many details about the neighborhood that I never notice from the car.

Limington Academy

sign on the old Limington town hall

old church

What a relief to turn down a quiet side road away from the traffic. I wish we had more off-road paths for running and biking.

out back behind our house

beautiful photo by Dirk!

kitchen progress

here are some newer photos of the kitchen becoming more kitcheny and inhabited.

feels like things have been moving slowly here, but we have been plugging away on the cabinets, bit by bit. Actually Richard is putting in a lot of hours on the cabinets – he’s building the drawers and we’re supposed to be doing the cabinet cases but we’ve fallen behind a bit. Tomorrow I will hopefully put in some good long hours in the workshop and get caught up!

working on cabinets

for the first set of drawers, Richard experimented with different construction techniques, each of these drawers is a bit different! We weren’t sure whether it would work to use wooden runners and forego the metal hardware. The benefit of runners is that they make your drawers move smoothly and easily (even if the drawer construction is a bit imprecise or imperfect); the drawbacks are that they’re kind of ugly, they’re kind of expensive and they reduce the size of the drawer. We talked it over and we really just love the simplicity and integrity of all-wood construction, without the ugly modern metal hardware, and since we’ve got Richard’s expert skills and we’re not mass-producing this stuff, we can attempt to make all of our drawers so tidy and perfect that they will slide easily on wooden runners without wheels. You can put a bit of special wax on the wooden runners to help the drawers slide more easily.

Judy and Paprika celebrating our new cabinets!

Here’s the first set of drawers, installed next to the beautiful sink cabinet! We did load up those drawers with heavy silverware and dishes and they still slide quite nicely. In this picture we had mis-matching drawer knobs on the drawers; we’ve since changed them all to the smaller size which looks much better! I ought to post a more recent photo here but the kitchen is a total mess at the moment so it’ll have to wait. Now that we’ve got the stove and sink installed and everything, I am so absolutely chuffed that I can finally COOK again, for real! It’s been almost a year since I had my own kitchen to cook in!! So I’ve been baking a bit, and really obsessed with making fruit smoothies every morning (I know that doesn’t sound like cooking, but when you have no countertops to cut on or sink to rinse fruits and clean up, it’s just not that easy to chop up fruits every morning!), and on a total pizza-making kick. We got a bread machine at a yardsale last year and I finally dusted it off and tried it out, it makes up some delicious pizza dough for me to play with. In general I feel like I’m just wildly appreciative of some really basic kitchen pleasures and amenities that one would ordinarily take for granted.

hooray for cooking again

it’s still winter.

serious icicles.

it just keeps snowing and snowing and snowing and snowing
we got snowshoes which is awesome – morning dog walks are much better with snowshoes!
can you believe that: A) we moved back to maine exactly one year ago! and B) there was no snow on the ground on this date last year! i’m pretty sure this has been one of the snowiest winters of my whole life.

snow

so much snow.

workshop

just a gratuitous messy-workshop photo.

fall forest

The fall leaves have been so incredibly spectacular for the past month. Every single day, rain or shine, I go outside and think “I can’t believe we live in the middle of all this! I feel so lucky!” The only unlucky thing is that Laika tore a ligament in her knee last month, and is on bed rest until it heals (locked up in her little crate all day every day, poor thing!) so we haven’t been doing our wonderful long walks in the woods with her. Anyway, in the past two weeks a few fall storms and windy days have brought down a lot of the foliage, but here are some photos from a walk near the orchard in Hiram earlier in the month. It’s a little sad to think that all this wild color is a bright farewell to the season and soon there will just be bare branches and snow and howling winds. Sigh. Time to put on a Nick Drake record and another sweater.

more flowers

blue bellflower, and aquilegia

poppy seed pods

rosa acicularis? and tiny raspberries

wow! I love poppies! what a treat to find them blooming in our yard in limington.

rosebud with ant

clover, buttercups