Good, Bad, Ugly

We are remodeling! Actually, I'm writing about it while Sarah and Kevin do it. Because, you know, the kitchen's too small for more than two people. And someone has to supervise, and look online for new cabinet hardware. And post pictures.

So the first picture is my newly painted craft room. Lovely shade of blue and I like it very much. I'm trying to keep it in a usable state, but that means many of the things that were stashed there before the remodel are now scattered in other places. I'm slowly sorting through it all, and some of it gets tossed. A few things are allowed back in the room. As you can imagine, this is a slow process.

The second two pics are the work in progress that is the kitchen. The grittiness of the photo is the dust that's in the air because Sarah is sanding the walls. Breathing it in is bad. Also bad is the old hardware from the cabinets. We are finding many viable replacement options as far as looks and cost, but the spacing of the holes is unique. Everything we are finding in stores has a wider hole spacing, which would mean filling and redrilling holes. We are hoping to avoid this added chunk of work, so I'm going to see what I can find online.

The old wallpaper (which is nowhere to be seen, thank goodness) was ugly. The bare walls are actually a slight improvement :) Odd-shaped counter piece is also gone, to be replaced by something white which we hope to find through Ikea.

Stay tuned for the final pics - though I think we're a couple weeks out from that yet.

Happy Birthday to Andrew

Andrew is 27 today!!! He was born at 3:40 ET at the Naval Regional Medical Center at Camp Lejeune. 10# 6 oz...like no one has ever heard me mention that little fact :) When we was a day shy of two weeks old, we moved him across half the country, and he met his grandparents for the first time.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DREW!! Enjoy your day!

Losing My Landmarks

This summer, the long-awaited widening of Monona Drive has begun. The stretch currently under construction begins at Pflaum/Nichols and continues to Broadway (or vice-versa if you're heading north.) I had a hard time envisioning how this road could be widened, probably because I always overlook the fact that these kinds of things are brutal. The cuts were very deep. Trees, parking lots, business signs, landscaping - all gone. The lower half of Monona Drive is hardly recognizable.

All this digging-up meant the loss of some old landmarks. Not the historic kind that would bog down the process with preservation-minded efforts, but the little touchstones that I notice, usually subconsciously, as I run through the course of my days. For instance, Fat Jack's shrubbery tribute to their featured menu item - the pig. Had I realized that it was going to be bulldozed down, I'd have taken a few photos. So for now, until such time as shrubbery-pig-pics appear on the web, I will have to make do with my memories of the twelve-by-twenty, green, sculpted-by-Stihl pig, complete with snout and wired-in red spotlight eyes. Even though the eyes creeped me out a little, I'll miss him.

Another one of my favorites was also coniferous, and strangely, also involved lighting, and just came down a day or so ago. The big blue spruce at the corner of Acacia and Monona Drive has been on my horizon for as long as we have lived in this house. When I'd spot it from a few blocks away, I knew to move into the right-hand lane to make my turn. During the holidays, the tree was beautifully lit with gracefully-draped strands of the big, old-fashioned kind of Christmas lights. This lovely tree was removed so completely that I had a hard time even finding the spot where the trunk grew up from the ground.

The woods that border the drive used to seem deep and mysterious to me. Then, after having lived here for over ten years, I finally hiked through them. Turns out they are not all that deep, but beautiful nonetheless. At one time there was a fence along the Monona Drive side of the woods. That had been removed quite a number of years ago, but three brick pillars, part of that fence and gate structure, still stand. Or at least they did. If they aren't completely down yet, they are well on the way to it, having gotten knocked about and missing many bricks. The brick fence posts always reminded me that this area had been inhabited long before the Taco Bell and Dairy Queen came to Monona Drive, and I was glad to have that reminder.

Reading what I've written makes me realize that I've turned that certain corner (actually, probably some time ago) and now I act as historian for my children, telling them what used to be. I can drive around Madison or Lena and spend a good part of the time telling stories about and pointing out things that aren't there anymore. Keeping my landmarks alive, I guess.