Days are flying by lately, zipping before my eyes in a blur. We’ve got construction going on here at the homefront – a little bit of this, a lot of that, and in the end, we’re two steps closer to where we want to be with our household projects.

Did you know we’ve never had a working garage door that opened and closed – with actual space to drive a car into the garage and park? Nope, we haven’t.

We’ll have that by the weekend. I’m freakin’ out a little bit about that. We spent a good chunk of time this weekend clearing the stuff and things – and more stuff – out of the garage to get rid of years worth of collected – uhm, stuff (for lack of a better word), and then assembled the remains in an orderly fashion so there’s space for the contractors.

We did yardwork, which was pretty much negated by the rain and wind Saturday night, but we did get a lot of things taken care of (trimming a few branches off our tree, which was fun and really took a lot out of us – but cost much less than hiring someone to do a complete hack job of it), now by the end of the day tomorrow our property – well, all but two feet of it which has been lost in translation – will be surrounded by six foot privacy fencing.

The birds will be happy. My bulbs will be happy. Our house will be happy because it will have a barrier against the northern wind this winter. I will have a beautiful backdrop for photographs, and above all else, I will not be distracted visually while I’m painting.

I think tomorrow afternoon, I will have a naked party in my backyard. All by myself. Whose gonna know? (ssssh, it’s just between you and me, and my fenceposts.)

Then there was pumpkin picking, and carving. The girls wanted their pumpkins to have carvings of things that didn’t exist in stencils, so I drew them for them. That was a challenge! I did my best, and we carved our little pumpkins out, and these are the results:

This is Chickeymonkey’s pumpkin, George. Of course it’s George! She’s a monkey-aholic. He turned out cute for totally wingin’ it, I think.

Catybug’s was much more of a challenge. She has a thing for penquins, and likes Bruce. Yeah. Okay. Figuring out what to cut out and what to leave was no easy task, so it took a lot of planning, and stuff. It’s always nice to have dry erase markers handy for this kind of stuff. That battery operated carver was nice, too.

Mine – my pumpkin is still sitting on the table. Big fat guy, he is, nice flat front, a little green around the edges. He’s perfect. I drew up my own carving, too. I’m excited to get’er done, but I need time, and peace and quiet, and patience. Today doesn’t look like a good day for that – we’ll see what tomorrow is like.

Oh yes, and the blog design. I’ve been working on that, too. I’d like to finish it today, we’ll see how that goes with all the running around and tripping over nailguns and things!

So. You’re all caught up now with all the stuff and things and more stuff that’s going on here, pretty much.

What’s up with you? Where ya been, and how ’bout them snowflakes?