hey mom! slovenia was amazing, for the country and the company. now
in Dublin... back in boston early this week. yikes! i have mixed emotions.
I'll bet! She's been on the road since late August. And Boston is freezing, at the moment.
It's officially cold, here, now. Highs in the low 40s, lows in the mid-20s. I brought my plumeria and epidendrum orchid in a little late. They look cranky about it.
I thought I heard murmuring about catching a ride back to Hawaii, somehow. Since we're trying to learn how to use our wood-burning stove, we thought we'd also try to organize our wood supply. Turns out, there's very little level ground near the house to set up the wood-stacking thingy. The previous residents have had it mostly stacked against the house, but that's a Bozo no-no, in the fire-safe code, so we moved it down the hill, a bit (had to dig a bit to flatten the ground). It's one of those things we've intended to get to for months, but it never sounds like that much fun. And if you're smirking to yourself about our having to learn how to use the wood stove, wipe that smirk right off your face! 
It's a crazy-complicated, totally non-intuitive (yet) jumble of vents and cranks with a catalytic converter (to burn cleaner!) that has to be activated at certain temps and watched for certain ember bed levels, etc., to get it into this Zone, or something. Whew! We need a tutor! The manual will have to do, though. Our wood pile is a safe distance from the house, now, but we're probably in more danger of burning the house up from the inside...Mushrooms are everywhere! We had a very wet October and a very dry November, combining to make the perfect conditions for them to pop up through the leaves in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Here are a couple of kinds growing a few feet from the house.
They get huge in one day! Don't know as much as want to about them, yet, but they're fun to look at. So strange!Studio is nearly complete, thanks to my new best friend, Mr. Hammer Drill! I hadn't even heard of such a thing before last weekend, when John mentioned it. I knew about hammers and drills.
But not hammer drills. Anyway, two walls in the room are concrete, and if I want shelving on them, and I do, they either have to be suspended from the ceiling (somehow), or we needed to drill into the concrete. We had already worked on concrete (which is just as hard as you think it might be), when we installed grab bars in the guest bath, last May. Took forever and 'bout ruined our regular drill. Well. Where has this little gem of a tool been all my life? I won't say it was like a hot knife through butter (it's concrete, after all), but it was, maybe, like blunt knife through, uh, really stale bread. Or something like that. So-o-o, a couple of trips to the hardware store, and we have shelves! Pics tomorrow...