The humidity continues but it is supposed to break sometime today or tonight.

Please?

Since I stayed indoors yesterday, I got a lot done around the house. Remember, I’m always more efficient when Don isn’t here and he was in the city yesterday. Also – my part of the deductions is finished, Don’s in the middle of putting his part together and we will be done on time. Ta dah!

My friend Barbara, a reader of this blog, recently contacted me and asked if I wanted her Arthur dollhouse kit, as she had never used it. If you remember, I need replacement parts for my rescued dollhouse, which is an Arthur. Yes, I said! So she sent them off to me and the other day I went to the post office and there was a big package from Barbara.

All of the Arthur components. Yay!

Being Barbara, she also added a few little gifts.

A beautiful painting that looked kind of familiar. As I turned it over I saw this:

Wallace Nutting! Perfect.

On a side note, if you look to the right, you’ll get an idea of the globs of glue I need to remove from this dollhouse.

A sweet stool with pretty flowers on the seat.

And two charming plates.

Thank you so much, Barbara! For everything!

Yesterday, I started to address the glaringly empty mantel/shelf that is over my desk. It used to hold many of my figural egg cups.

Here’s what I came up with:

The beginning of shelf full of sheep. There are four putz sheep and one little sheep, most likely from a nativity scene. (Putz sheep were also used in nativity scenes.) The one in the middle is the official Lamb With a Party Hat that I bought in California many years ago. I made a hat for her and she became the logo for this blog.

I look forward to collecting more sheep and adding them to the shelf.

Our Big News

Here’s what’s on the docket for October. We celebrate 20 years of marriage on October 12th. Considering we didn’t meet until we were in our forties, 20 years is quite a big deal for us. This year has been both incredible and heartbreaking and we want to finish it off on a positive note.

So…we’re going to London and Paris with a stop in Edinburgh and we’re in the midst of planning it right now. We’re going to make our flight reservations tomorrow. We figure we’ll be gone about 2½ weeks, maybe a bit longer. We’re so excited!!!

We have been discussing this for a long time, trying to pin down where exactly we want to go. Last week we suddenly changed the itinerary to Paris and Venice, which would also be wonderful. But we ended up changing it back to London and Paris. If we can afford another trip in the future, we’d love to do Venice, Budapest, Prague, etc. This morning we firmed up a lot of details, now we just have to sit down tomorrow and figure out travel times, how many days in each city, and book the flights.

It’s a big, big deal for us as we don’t have a lot of discretionary income and this may end up being a one-time-only sort of trip. If so, we figured London and Paris were the places we simply had  to visit. A romantic anniversary in Paris sounds pretty darned wonderful.

Since this is coming out of my inheritance, I thank my mom and dad for this opportunity for Don and I to travel to Europe together.

We’d love to hear where you’ve stayed, what you suggest we see, any tips on reasonable hotels, etc. I haven’t been to London since 2001 and that trip was with my students and it was planned for us. The one thing that Don and I want to do is explore the cities and walk a lot. Yes, we want to see certain well known tourist attractions, but our main focus will be on discovering little side streets and cafes and the architecture and beauty of each city. And we’ll see a couple of plays while we’re in London, as well.

Cannot wait!

Happy Thursday.