I Welcome You to Cracker Box Palace.

Oh, Kids. Don;t get me wrong. I love my house. I REALLY love my house, but it has so many issues. Right now we are spending tons of time to fix them, but it could be a rough road for the next couple of months.

 Last weekend, we trimmed some branches off of our pine tree that were hitting our roof and messing with our shingles. I love to climb trees, saw off branches and cut them up for the wood pile. I really miss not doing that for a living. Sigh.

Then a couple of days ago, our handyman guy came over and reshingled that section of the roof and fixed the roof on our beloved screened-in-porch, that was, as my friend Pete would say, "hillbillied" originally. Whoever did it, used scrap leftover crap, and didn't seal anything, so it leaked and all the wood was rotting. We're hoping this does the trick.

 On December 11th, we're having a company come and encapsulate the crawl space. It will keep the air in our house from being so humid that we're breathing in floating mold. It will cost a ton of money and it won't make our house look any better, but it will help keep our house from killing us. Plus, it should make it less attractive to termites and keep our beautiful wood floors from warping. We will save ourselves $1500 by going down and ripping the old, gross, wet insulation out of the crawl space ourselves, and that is our next project that starts this weekend. We will soon find out the value of $1500 in real, gritty, gross, terms. My plans to ease up on my drinking might have to wait a month...

These were the last hold-outs in my garden. I will miss it until April. Lucky for us, the catnip is still going strong.