Time to give C some space for his creative retirement activity – garden art. Part of the fun is combing the beach for interesting wood and sifting through thrift at the local stores. This is a 65th birthday gift for his sister. The vase on the bottom can actually hold flowers: Unfortunately his stash of…

Not that I’m planning on starting another kitchen from scratch. Nope, I’ve had the good fortune to say I’ve been there done that. Twice. Each time is a learning experience and there are inevitably things you’d do differently. Maybe, if you’re planning a new kitchen you can learn from  my experience. Most of the issues…

People told me that in retirement I’d have so much to do, I’d wonder where the time went. So true. How did I ever fit a day of work into my schedule?  Deep breath. One thing at a time. Fortunately mostly good these past two weeks. The first good thing was the opportunity to participate…

Years ago we heard about a couple who planted a few apple trees in their front yard. After several years they had so many apples they had to enlist family and friends to help with their apple problem. Something about that appealed to me. I wanted a fruit problem, too, so I convinced C to…

The trouble with making fresh pasta is you to make pavlova. Never fails. C sees the extra egg whites and asks if he's getting Pavlova. The opposing scenario occurrs when we start with Pavlova and have a load of extra egg yolks, then we had to make creme brulee. Lovely problems to have. With a…

My turn for some painting. Finally. We've settled enough into our house, having located all the boxes of art supplies, that I've gotten back into more frequent painting.  In our house design, we created a den-sized "studio," just for me, a complete luxury that lets me close the door on the mess task oriented clutter…

As promised in my last post, here is the recipe for M's wonderful outside art activity that kept both kids and grown-ups occupied. Soap resist painting: Supplies (all obtained at a rural Dollar General): Foam board, the surface for your painting: The instructions called for watercolour paper, but as this was primarily a children's activity…

Many years ago we were a camp family. C was the Executive Director of a non-profit summer camp, I was the relief cook, E at age 4 took her first out trip and came back happy for the experience of putting her bare foot in her boot already occupied by a giant banana slug. M…

Or in this case stuff out, stuff in. First some background: when the kids were small we moved from a 2300 sq ft house to one that was 1800. Adjusting to the smaller space we adhered to a strict rule that if something new came into the home, something of equal bulk had to be…

You don't get those in retirement because technically, every day is a day off. But we found ourselves engulfed in long days of unpacking and organizing, many looonnng days in a row. It was time for a badly needed day off.  We started with a walk, the short way to the beach, the steep way.…