Today, Liz and I went down to the basement for a few hours to tackle the last remaining portion (in the main basement area). We’re close to finishing up all the paint work, and are making a push over this weekend to get done.
A delicious meal of dumplings, pot stickers, and fried rice. If I was asked to manifest my childhood as a single meal, this would be it.
Liz and I arrived on Friday to spend the Christmas weekend with my family in Indianapolis. Though I originally purchased Beasts of Balance for myself… I decided that it would be better as a gift to my niece and nephew.
The ladies, checking out some family photos on Tricia’s laptop. For some reason, my iPhone added this extra blur/gauze to things and this looks like a ridiculous stock photo.
After arriving, we got a tour of the new place. And ended up in the basement, watching a bit of TV. We ended up sitting at the basement bar, watching the second half of “It’s a Wonderful Life” – which was a nice thing to do, as we were visiting for our “Early Christmas” celebration.
A table absolutely filled with hand-made slippers. Meg created a set for every guest who requested a pair – in exchange for a donation to a local organization – Center on Halsted.
This group is really quite phenomenal. I knew they were good live, but they sounded amazing. While I was happy to hear them in such an intimate setting, I couldn’t help but feel that they deserved to be better known, given how good they are.
Each seat had its own name card. This year, Savannah realized they didn’t have cards for me and Liz… so she made ours.
We got home tonight, and though we were tired… threw on our work clothes and put a little time into organizing. We had on our to-do list the task of clearing out the guest room, and so took down some excess wood and relocated lots of boxes.
On walking to the train today, I noticed that Liz was adorned in several items that she made herself. Her hat, her scarf, and her gloves were all made by her, and also matched perfectly (as they were all from the same yarn).
Getting all the cement in between the existing pipes wasn’t an easy thing, but Liz did an amazing job. It looks awesome back here, and this covers up the last remaining bits of brick along the perimeter of our basement!
Phineas and Liz have this understanding they’ve built up, over the years. From time to time, if Phineas is at an elevated location (the stairs, or the top of the cottage) and is there waiting… Liz will wander over, and position herself nearby.
Thinking back over the previous weekend, pancakes seem to be finding their way to my plate, somehow. I am liking this trend, but prooobably need to slow down on the flapjacks soon.
I woke up early this morning to run out to Home Depot, to pick up some additional Quickwall bonding cement. This is what we’ve been using on our basement walls, to help seal and prevent moisture. After being close to finishing the back basement area, my estimate was we needed about two bags total. We had one, and I needed to pick up another.
Our first batch was… not great. It was much too soupy (think pancake batter), and didn’t really solidify much. We ended up having to open a second bag and manually mixed in more concrete, to try to firm things up.