Let there be light!

Our dining room was missing something.  I figured out what it was when I couldn't see my dinner.

Maybe you could tell from the last picture - it was a light!  (I guess I don't take too many pictures of the dining room)  There were the wires for a chandelier hanging from the ceiling (maybe you can see them in the middle picture), but no light.  I was looking for something a little decorative,  but that still fit in with the rest of our house.

Ahh, that's better!  With a dimmer and everything!

Let's get a little closer.

I love that the crystals make it a little more formal (hey, dining rooms can be a little more formal), but the dark metal makes it more modern, as do the crystal balls - they're not cut crystals like the older chandeliers you see.

Lots of other stuff going on around here too - hopefully more posts soon!

Local Wildlife

On Sunday, as I was getting the house ready for Sarah's bridal shower, I opened the front window and heard a lady yelling.  That's weird, we can't usually hear people up here.  Then I see my neighbor's cow from across the street go wandering up the road...

I have a feeling the phrase "my neighbor's cow" is going to be a much-used part of my vocabulary up here.

Today, I drove up to the post office at lunch, and when I came back, somebody ELSE was trying to cross the road...

Not a cow.

He was right smack in the middle of the lane, so I pulled in my driveway and ran out to the road to move him to the side.  That sucker was UNHAPPY about the help.  As soon as I picked him up, he started thrashing me with his tail, and trying to kick me with his back leg (flipper?).  I set him down n the side of the road, and he turned around really fast (seriously, why couldn't you just crawl that fast?) and just glared at me.  So I'm standing on the side of the road yelling "Go on, get!  The stream is right over there, stupid turtle!" and pointing.  Because turtles can totally understand yelling and pointing.  Since he didn't move, I went inside, but I've been checking every few minutes to make sure the stupid thing didn't try to go BACK across the road.

On the plus side, if he becomes a problem, I can always try to call the cute Game Wardens on "North Woods Law" on Animal Planet.  My husband never reads this blog, so I can say that here.

Sarah's Bridal Shower

This weekend we had our first official party!  We hosted Matt's sister's bridal shower at our house, and I think I can say it was a success.

food and decorations set up in the sunroom

the sunroom

gorgeous cupcake wedding dress

Sarah, the beautiful bride-to-be

As you can see, we had a mad rush to get the sunroom painted.  I think it's my favorite room in the house right now.  The guys had a pretty hard time getting the old woodstove out of the sunroom and down the steps to the basement.

It took three of them to do it, and I had to go to another part of the house because I was so afraid they were going to drop it and I was going to have to do a hospital run.

But now that the party is over, I was able to pull some furniture from other parts of the house and set it up a bit.

Next week (fingers crossed): the deck unveiling!

We've been married for a year!

No, that's not Matt, that's Milo the Alpaca that we met on our Memorial Day Weekend trip to Martha's Vineyard.

This is us on Monday, our first wedding anniversary, in our pretty kitchen.  We did a little anniversary trip to Brunswick, ME and got to walk around and look in the antique shops and little boutiques.  It was nice and relaxing.

Here at the house, we've been prepping to have the deck built.  We saved a bunch of money by Matt and a friend digging the enormous holes for the deck footings (seriously, 3' wide by 4' deep!).  Then this guy showed up to drop the first delivery off:

And this morning the contractor and his guys started framing the deck.

Then it started POURING so they left to eat lunch.

We have some tenants on the front porch.

Mama and the chicks aren't so bad.  Papa is annoying and keeps trying to peck his way into the house through every window on the first floor.  It also took him 3 weeks and multiple tries to build their nest - it kept blowing off that ledge because he didn't do it right.  Onyx can't wait for the front door to be left open.

And now for some magic!

Messy nook in the loft:

*poof*

No more mess!

Amazing what you can do with a tension rod, a twin sheet, and some curtain clips.

Small-town living...

Small-town living at its finest.

I went to town hall to pick up the permit for our deck, and found out they have my name as "Christine" in all the systems so I had to go to 3 different departments (and wander around the basement) to get it fixed.

Then the lady behind me says "You just moved here?  Let me tell you about everyone who's running in the elections next week" (for road commissioner and school committee) and then the town clerk had to tell her to go away and yelled at her (twice) for attempting to influence the election (again, this is the election for road commissioner).  I'm pretty sure she had spiked her Diet Coke, because she followed me to the parking lot, told me her life story, interrupted herself at least 8 times to switch topics, and then turned around and left walked to her car in the middle of a sentence.

The town clerk also introduced me as "Mrs. Gardner" to the 107-year-old woman who finally fixed my name in the system.  I think that's the first time I've been called that seriously, and not like "Hey Mrs. Gardner!" by one of my friends.

I also discovered that even though I registered to vote when I applied for my driver's license on March 15, because no one moves to Acton (like ever) the DMV only sends new voter registrations to town hall every three months.  So they didn't have me enrolled as a voter.  How am I supposed to vote for the next road commissioner if I'm not registered?

Then when I got home, I opened the free regional daily paper that comes in the mail, and there were THREE ADVERTISEMENTS for the Acton road commissioner election!  Guys, this is probably the hottest election since Bush v. Gore.

I might have to start hanging around at town hall more often on my lunch break, but they're only open like 3 days a week.

Living in Maine

We met the neighbors recently.

Seriously, they live across the street.  They usually wander over to the road once a week or so.  And their boyfriends live up the road a bit.

Isn't this such a gorgeous view?

If anyone comes to visit, we'll take you for a walk.  There's a 4 mile loop that's mostly road but partially trail through the woods.  We have a few of those - trails in the woods for ATVs that show up as "roads" on Google Maps.  Don't try to take a car on them, though.

One of the things I think is just so cool about living in farm country is all the locally-produced stuff you ca buy.  There's a natural food store a few miles away (the yoga studio I go to is attached to it) and they sell milk in glass bottles from a dairy a few towns over.  I've started buying it - because it takes less time to bring it over from the farm to the store, it lasts WAY longer in my fridge.

And I tried buying eggs from the guy up the road from me, but he wasn't home.  I supported him anyway and bought eggs from his farm at the natural food store (they list the farm the eggs came from on the carton, so you can decide which farmer you want to support).  There's a farmstand on the way into town that sells their own local honey, and they just opened for the season.  I'll be trying that soon, too.

Since we're in a rural area, we don't have trash pickup, so we have to bring our trash and recycling to the "transfer station", which a fancypants word for the town dump.

I don't mind doing that, but I definitely love having recycling available.  Living in the apartment complex, we weren't able to participate in the town recycling program.  We use about half the trash bags as we used to when we separate out the cardboard, paper, and recyclables.

Oh, and the cardboard and paper goes here:

Yeah, we're kind of pyros.  But don't tell the local fire chief.   We just save up all the cereal boxes etc and burn them with the branches we collect from the yard and all the dead trees Matt has been cutting up.

People have been asking how I like working remotely.  It's definitely different.  I do miss having everyone in the office to talk to, and it gets lonely sometimes.  But I'm always able to call, IM, or email people to say hi.  My department has a team meeting once a week, and since my boss and I both have iPhones, we've started to do the meetings over FaceTime so I get to see everyone weekly.

My furry coworker has started to hang out for about 10 minutes in the mornings.

Then the printer will scare him away and he'll start his daily 8-hour nap under the skylight in the loft.

Have a great day!
xo

Happy Spring!

So it's been a couple of weeks, but I really didn't feel like I had enough stuff to share - it's really been little things going on around here.

Our kitchen is 99% done - all the electrical is working now...

...and we got all the outlet covers on...

...so the only things left are getting the appliance garage put in the corner, and a little piece of trim above the fridge.

I finally unpacked the box of picture frames and got some decorations up on the wall!

a Venn diagram that I bought Matt for Christmas,  a stitched note I made him for Valentine's Day last year, and a carving we bought in St. Lucia on our honeymoon

a napkin from our wedding

When my dad and stepmom came up, the guest bathroom looked like this, with the mirror sitting right on the vanity top:

The electrician came by last week to move the light box closer to the ceiling, and center it over the new vanity, and last night we finally got around to putting the mirror on the wall, sitting on the chair rail.

We didn't hear it crash down in the middle of the night, so I guess that's a good thing.  Matt is still a little nervous that the top corners aren't 100% tight to the wall, but I think it's because the wall isn't 100% straight.  As long as it doesn't fall down, I'm ok with it!