New Floors!

We got new floors! We had all the carpet in the living room, hallway, and stairs ripped up and replaced with hardwood floors. They replaced the stairs entirely, built a new handrail, and put in tile on the landing. It looks very nice! The stairs and railings still need to be stained and/or painted, but otherwise it's all done. Here's a picture when they were only half-done with the floors, with the cats inspecting the work:



Here's the finished product, with some of our furniture moved in:




Unfortunately, now everything else looks old and worn out! So now we're thinking about getting a new couch, painting the walls, and all sorts of other stuff. We'll see how much of it actually gets done, though.

Where the wild things aren't

We were in Vermont this weekend. In the year and a half that we've had the vacation house, we've seen very few animals (unless you count insects, which we've seen plenty of). You'd think, being out in the middle of nowhere, that we'd see more animals than we get at our own house in the suburbs. But no. We've seen some birds, maybe a squirrel or two, and that's about it. We have seen a hoof print of a moose, and a paw print that looked to me like it belonged to a mountain lion. Well, today we saw different animal, one I've never seen at home (but I know they're there) - a garter snake! I didn't know it was a garter at first, I had to look it up on-line. Here's a picture of our snake:



It was hiding under the porch steps when I took the picture. But when we found it it was sunning itself on the driveway (it was awfully cold this morning!).

So that was our excitement for the day. One of these days, though, hopefully we'll see some more....interesting animals.

Hello, world!

This is my first ever attempt at blogging. I'm doing this as a way to practice writing. You see, I hate writing. Hate it with a passion. But, I'm currently in the early stages of working on my doctoral degree, which of course will involve writing a thesis. The thought of writing a 200-page paper frightens me like you wouldn't believe, so I'm trying to get used to writing now. Either that or I'm just searching for new ways to procrastinate :-)

I don't know how successful this blog will be, how often I'll post to it, what I'll post about, or anything else. It's an experiment - we'll see what happens!