Birthday festivities

As of yesterday, our eventful October has ended, culminating in the most important of celebrations…my birthday! Yes, there may be three days left in the month, and yes, there may be one very popular holiday still at the end, but seriously, the birthday is a hard act to follow.

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A gorgeous weekend in North Carolina

This weekend, we made a long overdue trip back to Raleigh, NC to visit with friends and family. We were last there at Easter, and we had planned to make a trip sooner, but summer and life got in the way until October. However, it was an absolutely gorgeous weekend, and we crammed a whole lot of fun and catching-up into three days.

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Making up for lost time

It was astounding how many visitors we had when we first moved to Washington, but I was even more astounded by how few we had after we bought our house last year. We now have a lovely guest suite with a private bath downstairs and have had practically no guests all year to enjoy it! Even when we hosted Bart’s sister and our niece last spring, we stayed in the guest room while they could take a couple of rooms upstairs. However, in October we have been making up for lost time in the guest department. From weekend visits from friends and family to having someone dog-sit while we were out of town, we’ve hosted quite a number of folks in rapid succession at Hotel Taylor the last few weeks.

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One year: looking back

Believe it or not, this weekend marks one full year that we’ve been in our new house. I guess that after a year, you can’t really call a 52-year-old house new, but it still feels like yesterday since we had boxes piled high everywhere. We’ve been pretty busy this year, ripping things out, putting new things in, and making our own personal mark on our space. We’ve also accomplished a lot out of the house, from regional travel to making friends, from getting involved at church to traveling out of the country a few times. Let’s take a look back at what all our first year as homeowners in the DC area has brought us.

Home sweet home

 

• Learned to wake up at oh-dark-thirty to get to work at 6:00 am.
• Renovated/updated a bedroom and a pantry closet.
• Traveled to Raleigh to visit family and friends.
• Went to a few baseball games.
• Made trips home for Christmas and during the summer.
• Almost finished logging two huge oak trees we had cut down.
• Bought a new car (and put 8,000 miles on it in just over three months…seriously???).
• Organized the garage.
• Went into DC to see the zoo, cherry blossoms, and the National Portrait Gallery.
• Took a driving tour of Gettysburg.
• Perfected my waffle recipe.
• Survived a few polar vortices, including one with a broken boiler.
• Pulled through horrible allergies and a bout of stomach bug, bleh.
• Made two international trips (three for Jennifer).
• Made peace with high humidity (just kidding, I still hate it).
• Watched our once paralyzed dog chase squirrels across the yard again.
• Uprooted gigantic azaleas with a pickup truck.
• Successfully grew basil–though it sadly died when the weather turned just a little cool–and an avocado.
• Decked out our front porch.
• Toured New England during the fall, including a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
• Crushed some candies and started doing fun, creative stuff again.
• Observed birds, squirrels, deer, chipmunks, foxes, raccoons, snakes, and golden-doodles in our yard.
• Swept every known kind of outdoor debris off the deck all year long.
• Hosted fewer visitors than we did while we rented our first year here (though we’re making up for it in October).
• Gotten involved and met more people at our new church.
• Generally felt like we finally belong here.

Not that Washington, DC is “Home” yet, but it’s our home for now. We’ve learned to appreciate the opportunities here in DC and how to deal with the crummy parts, like traffic and overcrowding. Being settled in our own house and finally having friends and being involved in a church has helped us reorient and figure out what our new chapter of life looks like. It’s ever changing still, but that keeps life interesting, right? It will be interesting to reflect on the coming year next October to see what year two in our house and year three of Washington, DC, look like.

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Closet inception

Back in September, we began an update of a pantry/storage closet below the stairs in our basement. We decided to do everything ourselves, from installing new drywall to putting down new flooring. It took a little longer than we expected, but we recently put the finishing touches on the project.

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Blood moon

One thing about working at an observatory is that you are surrounded by people who know what’s cool to look at in the sky. I’m really not an astronomer, and while I enjoy seeing neat things like comets and eclipses, I never ever know when they are or where to see them. I did hear the hubbub about the so-called blood moon happening this morning, but I promptly forgot until I got to work. Fortunately, I was reminded by my friend in the office next to mine, and we went outside to do a little amateur observing.

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Baseball Hall of Fame

Baseball is the quintessential American sports experience. Since its alleged inception 175 years ago by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, NY, the mythology surrounding the game still looms large over the players and fans who continue the baseball experience today. Bart and I were baseball fans as kids and have renewed our interest as adults; while we would never claim to be hardcore fans who know every stat and fact about the game, we still appreciate rooting for our home teams and learning more about the history of the game. Since we moved to the east coast, we’ve wanted to take a trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and we finally had the opportunity to do that this weekend.

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Sticking my neck out

My modus operandi for knit and crochet projects seems to be biting off more than I can chew, usually in the form of enormous blankets that take me months, or even years, to finish. I decided that I should maybe take a different approach and try a few smaller scale projects here and there, especially stash-busting efforts that would slowly nibble away at my modest stockpile of odds and ends.

Way back in June, I mentioned that my goal for the month was to try some amigurumi toward this end. I don’t know if there is a specific definition of amigurumi, but I take it to mean the crocheting of cute, small, and sometimes eclectic items, particularly animals and sometimes objects. I don’t know how small amigurumi is technically supposed to be, but I fell in love with this adorable giraffe, which claims to be amigurumi but is a bit large. Amigurumi or no, I decided I wanted to try my hand at whipping up a stuffed animal in crochet, starting with this one.

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