please can I just get ONE more day of summer?

Frost came early this year. It's like the weather knew it was September. It was almost as soon as the calendar flipped over, things got cold and windy and unsunny. I was kind of hoping for at least one or two days where it might reach 20 degrees, but it's only been rain or I'm gonna rain! and then no rain.

It's only been a particular bummer for me because I wanted to get the wood trim on our house painted. I've only been talking about it and thinking about it every week since March. I'm a total procrastinator, hey?

But it was hard! I'm telling you! I thought I could just go out there, take an hour, scrape the old flaking paint off, pop on some new paint, and maybe (if it needed it) paint a second coat either an hour later or a day later. Whichever.

But the scraping doesn't go like it goes in my mind. At the most, some of the obviously flakey stuff would come off immediately, otherwise I was literally sitting there, scraping a 1 cm square area for about 10 minutes with no results.

That's not cool.

So my hand got tired and I put it off.

And now you're probably thinking that there were lots of nice days I could have gotten it done. And there were. But when it was nice, it was almost too nice. The trim I need to paint is on the south side of our house. We learned very quickly after moving in that it's mandatory during the summer to close all the curtains on this side of the house as soon as 11 a.m. hits. I'm pretty sure if I didn't, we would roast to death. We would. I'm not being overly dramatic. So there was no way I wanted to work out there, in the middle of the day, with the sun pounding on my head. And when it was raining, obviously I couldn't paint; and when it was kinda chilly, I was most likely waiting for the wood to dry from rain that happened the day before. So anyway, you know. Excuses excuses.

What I was really counting on was a nice fall. Cooler but still warm enough to work outside. And here it's been. Cloudy and overcast and making me want to go do it, but scaring me just enough with the chance of rain for me not to.

The first day (Friday) when we had blue skies and sun, we got frost and a high of 9. Paint won't dry in 9 degrees. Sigh. So instead I went out and pulled some weeds in the front, cut some things back, cleaned up all my pots for fall and for our eventual move, and scraped all the weeds out of the driveway crack (because even though I won't be shovelling snow here for very long, I am not shovelling over those damn weeds again. Total headache). At least I did something else relatively major out there this year.

Anyway, enough moaning about that. Let me show you the tomatoes I got from my three measly plants this year. Thank goodness I was super nervous and scared about frost and cooler temperatures and pulled most of them off the plants almost 2 weeks ago.

I've got them set up just like my gram always did. In a little box tray, with a lining of newspaper and covered with newspaper, on the floor of my pantry, in the dark. Although mom tells me gram used to wrap each of her tomatoes in its own individual newspaper nest. Aww. She really loved tomatoes. She used to eat a bowl of canned tomatoes with sugar sprinkled on them.

This isn't nearly all of them, though. I just took enough out for decorative picture purposes. They're all ripening very nicely and we had one of the larger ones in the birthday salad. I'm bummed I didn't get as many as last year, but there's always next year!

I also forgot about these two cement bird statues I have. They were outside and then mom was telling me she saw one of them on some design show. So I was like, I think I have them, and I went and pulled them out of the weeds and brought them inside. So there. Add those to my collection.

House update!

Here's how it's looking right now. Pretty snazzy, eh? I'm really happy with the outside colours. I wasn't sure how they'd work together on a large scale and with the shingles, but they all blend together really well. The siding has got a little green in it. Silvery green. It's very reminiscent of olive tree leaves which is probably why it's called Olive Grey. The door is the last part that I'm hoping works out. It's not supposed to be white. I think that's just their 'for now' door. It's supposed to be a brighter teal blue. I hope it looks nice with everything else! We've kinda been able to see inside through the windows and it's still in the framing stage, so we definitely have a ways to go yet.