24 and 6

It's our house-a-versary!!

Today marks two years since The Big Move.

We still don't have a fence. Or a family room.

But I'm predicting that within the next three months, we will have both. So close. So very close.

Maggie has managed to dog-hair up this place nearly as good as the old house was. The storage room is an absolute disaster. But only because of the family room project.

Amazingly, all of the old kitchen appliances are hanging in there. This is a good thing. It's good that they are lasting, and we aren't having to invest in shiny, pretty, fancy new things that work properly and that we could give nice names to, like we did with Stanley the Dryer. If I keep repeating to myself that I love love LOVE my kitchen appliances, maybe I will come to believe it is true. Maybe THEY will come to believe it is true. Maybe they will last long enough that I can get that back deck I so desperately want.

On the upside, we do have a third bathroom that wasn't there when we moved in. Some of our walls are no longer white. The garage door is fully functional. Those ugly bushes are gone from the the front of the house, and that nasty rose bush is nearly contained. I say nearly contained, because we dug the whole monstrous thing out last spring only to have it sprout again and come back in full force. So this year, while it is still small, we are going to try again.

I'm looking forward to more summer evenings watching the sun set from our front porch. Looking forward to welcoming Alisa back to this house. Looking forward to it feeling more like home, the farther down the road we get.

And speaking of Alisa, today also marks six months since she left for France. Time is absolutely flying by now. The first few months she was gone, time did this funny jilting run-walk kind of movement, where it would speed up for a while and then almost seem to stop. But now that we are on the downward track to her homecoming, it is speeding up all the time. I hope she soaks in every moment from here on out. I also hope she remembers how excited her family, and in particular her two little sisters, will be to have her back home.