So, house.

It's a house. It's got an ancient furnace in the basement, and two (out of three) radiators upstairs don't work. The electrical is ancient enough that when I had extra outlets put in (because there were exactly zero outlets in the dining room or in the room I was going to use as an office) it ended up costing three times what I thought because the electrician couldn't connect the wires to my fusebox and had to put a subpanel in. It's been windy, and it feels like the windows are more for show than for actually keeping the cold air out. There is not a lick of insulation in the attic (unless you count an empty bee's nest, which I guess would provide some insulation). Nearly half the rooms in the house are painted pink, and the carpetting in the living room is among the ugliest I have ever seen.

However, there appears to be beautiful, finished hard wood underneath the carpet, and underneath the linoleum in the dining room, too. There's carved wood molding around almost all the doors, and most of the doors have antique engraved (!) hinges. The clawfoot bathtub is deep enough that I can float in it, and my hotwater heater is butch enough to fill it up with hot water. I have a view of Lake Superior from my kitchen and bedroom, and the other side of the house faces some woods and a creek. The yard is big and sunny, a little barren looking right now, but I can think of it like a blank canvas, then.

I started prep for my vegetable garden this week. I don't have a rototiller or a strong enough back to till it all by hand, and tilling disturbs the soil too much anyway, so I'm doing a kind of lasagna gardening thing with old moving boxes. Right now they're jut weighted down with leftover potting soil, but the plan is to cover them with topsoil, compost and mulch, and then plant directly into that in the spring, digging through the cardboard (which should be mostly rotted by then) if necessary.

I moved in the first week of September, and would have had plenty of time to plant trees and things, but I was too busy with packing/closing/moving/unpacking to arrange that, but now I have all winter to decide what varieties of apple or pear or plum I want to grow. I can fit a few fruit trees along the south/west side of the house, maybe something else in the front after I tear up the (uneccessary) driveway, and bushy or brambly things everywhere else. My mom got me some peonies, and I planted them along the south side of the house, underneath the kitchen window.

And now that I have posted something, maybe I can get back in the habit of posting regularly.