Luna's Baublebilities

But I still had to build a fire yesterday. June 1st and it was only 54 degrees in my house. I don't function well below 65 or so, the urge to curl up with a blankie and take a nap is just too great. I hate the fact that the Summer Solstice is upon us every year before school is even out. Other school districts in the country are finishing up (or are finished) right now but we have to go straight through the third week of June. Of course that is all related to the weather. We can't even reliably plant gardens here until after Memorial day, unless we have tons of mulch and plastic coverings to keep baby plants alive, so Upstate NY has a later end of school year date than warmer areas because there was not much need to let the farmers' kids out any earlier than this and those last few weeks of August are so precious for our growing season.

Etsy Bloggers carnival theme this week is to write about our summer plans. - Boy do we have a big summer ahead of us. We are anxiously awaiting a lending decision from the bank about our new place and as soon as we have a go ahead, we have got to start working. We are currently boxing up all non-essentials in our house to be put away in storage so we can start listing this home for sale. Once we close on the new pace, we have got to do a few cosmetic repairs, put in all new wiring and plumbing (because the Amish ripped everything electrical and almost all the plumbing out) remove the outhouse, build an entirely new bathroom in the upstairs attic, replace several windows, wash and paint all the walls, sand and re-finish several floors, install appliances, counters and cupboards in the kitchen, bath and my studio(!!) and maybe we'll be able to move in before the Winter Solstice!

Molly Bryn has been wanting to learn how to blog so I'm planning to have her blog the progress of the new Beorningstead down in Burnett Hollow. I'm so exited to see the progress of our new home as we prepare to move in. I'll let everyone know when we begin that blog - Molly has a great voice and loves to take photos so I'm sure it will be a fun blog to read. I'm also excited about the prospect of boxing up all of our non-essentials for several months. I suspect that there will be lots of things I don't miss tripping over that we will not put back into our new home. As it is, I have at least one huge box of orphan projects that will NOT be coming to my new studio. Anyone want it?

I also hope that we get to do some hiking this summer. Bryan aspires to hike all the high peaks in the Adirondacks and 4 years ago our family climbed Mt. Marcy - the highest peak in NYS. Bryan has climbed it many times and enjoys it but it was really more of a hike than I like and my mother-in-law said that she would probably not attempt such a long hike again, either. I like a quick, easy climb with lots of time to enjoy the scenery on the way up and a pretty view when you get there. We have talked about climbing all the ADK peaks that still have fire towers, I believe that there are 17 of them. Maybe we'll get in one or two of those this summer, if I can get my body back in hiking shape.

The mixed media drawing at the top of this post (which I cannot seem to convince GIMP or Blogger to resize for me - aaaargh!) was inspired by a hike up Mt Van Hovenberg when Molly was about 7. It is titled "There Was an Orange Salamander on the Trail." We have since discovered that our salamander was actually a red eft, which has since become one of my favorite teeny crawling things. What you cannot see in this composite scan is that the clouds, water and contour lines have a lot of sparkley gel-pen accent work and there is a teeneency little eft on the trail. The scanner just seems to read the sparkley as grey and the eft is invisible. Oh well.