bookshelves upstairs

When I look at the date on these photographs, it says February. Surely I haven't been trying to find time to blog about them quite that long!

Back in the winter, then, I finally got started setting up bookshelves upstairs in the guest room/sewing room/storage room. All the concrete blocks and boards were in the basement so they all came slowly upstairs, not all at once.

Here are the last boxes of books that aren't in the basement, inaccessible.

More materials:

Begin to build:

Now to add some books:

There are more than that, now, but I haven't started sorting all the books that are downstairs, and setting them upright; I doubt they're all going to fit on the shelves I have, and there are all the mystery and romance somewhere in the basement yet to be unpacked. I dare not think "I'd like to read that," because I cannot just go and find it, but I browse around, looking at what is in one stack and another, and find many things to keep myself entertained.

pale violets

This afternoon I stopped in the middle of mowing the front yard to pick some of these violets before I cut their heads off. The purple ones are thick everywhere, but these have just opened in the last day or two.
Can you see their little purple veins?

piggy bank

In December of 2011 someone at work gave me a china pig. Cute as he was, I couldn't imagine using it to save coins in, and wasting space somewhere. However, I was inspired to try putting a coin a day (almost, pretty much, just about) into the pig until he was full, and then giving the resulting sum of money to a local charity of my choice. It has taken longer to fill the fellow up than I expected, but this week I found I couldn't fit another coin in. That quarter is wedged in as far as it will go.

So, this week I will take all this to my bank and have it sorted, and then write a check for however much it is to the local (not local to the city where I am now, but local to my former rural home) chapter of Habitat for Humanity, which has impressed me with how much they have accomplished in the less than ten years since the chapter was founded. 

Then I start filling him up again. I will have a long time to select the next donation recipient.

proof of spring

There may not be any bulbs at all in the yard of this new house, but at least there are some things that bloom in the spring.

There are many more waiting for me to find time to pick them.

lots of lettuce

Last week I went to the grocery hoping to find some pansies that were

1. not gigantic-enormous-huge
2. more than one color per six pack

Instead, I came home with a dozen Bibb lettuce plants (the only kind I willingly grow or eat). Due to some misunderstanding or incompetence on my part and the cashier's I found I had bought four six packs instead of four plants, so now every pot that didn't have something else growing in it is now filled with lettuce. I was too rushed to find the gardening fork (somewhere in the basement since moving) and dig up part of the flower beds in front, so I grabbed every pot outdoors, waiting for pansies and portulaca.

They're on the east side of the house near the side porch steps, where I hope they'll be sheltered if there is any frost. It's a month at least until frost-free date.