Yesterday I had some good hours in the garden. Did a lot of weeding and even had time to pick some of that lavender.

I started this morning by putting these parts of my furnace in the water to clean them, thinking I would go to my assignment for the newspaper, then take them out and clean the rest of the kitchen.
But the assignment took me way longer than I assumed, I had to call the taxoffice, which took me an hour and all I learned from that was that I had to write a letter to explain why I think they refunded too little. I wrote the letter, found out we had no envelopes and no stamps around the house, drove to the postoffice, ran some other errants, remembered I wanted to buy something special for DH’s birthday, couldn’t find that in the first nor in the second shoppingcenter I checked, landed myself in a traffic jam, got home, started my cleaning again.
Than the phone rang. DD M lost the keys to her bike. Could I come and pick her up? Well, I can’t let her walk 10 kilometers.
So I drove to the school, got into an other trafficjam, needed some fuel, bought M an icecream and was home around five.
Than I just took the stuff out of the water and just wiped it a bit. Cleaning thouroughly will have to wait for another day…

This is me, being ill. Not a real picture of me, I’ll spare you the details of my watering eyes, puffy face and red nose.
But this is the way I’m trying to cope with my body fighting the flu. Drinking lots of green tea (with lemon), knitting, trying to do only the most urgent things around the house (can a housewife and mother ever take a day off?)
I love how I unintentional color matched my lovely vintage tray (that’s not the one we use daily) with the tea and my yarn. Seems like my feverish head is desperately needing harmony and beauty…

My MIL gave me this bedspread for my birthday last Friday. She actually made it herself in the 70’s and thought I might like it cause she noticed “I seemed to have a thing for old stuff.” Uhm, yeah I do.
I really like it. And I’m thrilled to have some real homemade family-vintage. My family is not that much into homemade things, sadly. There were pillows my grandmother embroidered, but I think most of those have been donated somewhere when she died. And there was this tablecloth my other grandmother embroidered, but that has gone too. I’m ashamed to admit I think I gave it away when we had a temporary change of tastes from vintage and thrifted into black and modern, about fifteen years ago. I have some hopes that maybe my parents still have it somewhere. I must ask them sometime.
There is a downside to this bedspread too: I now feel like I have to make the bed everyday. Which I don’t. The bed is usually a mess and I should be better off with covers like Amanda’s that look good crumpled up.
You can see that’s not really simple, due to a lack of “walking-around-the-bed-space”. But the room just isn’t any bigger. That’s our closet on the left. I was sitting on the dresser that’s on the wall opposite to the window to make this picture. Yep, that’s tiny. All the bedrooms in our house are like that.
But we thought the rest of the house and above all the view were totally worth it. And we still do.

I try this every spring and summer but it somehow never works out. I guess it has something to do with the moist (the windows get condensed when it’s cold and rainy) and the sun (when it is shining it’s quite bright and hot behind these windows). But I like trying.

I’m also fond really fond of the watering can. I always buy vintage ones, but have broken the handles of two of them (the plastic gets hard over the years). I do hope this one will last. At least until my red-loving period (I seem to be adding red to the kitchen almost weekly) is over.
Oh and I know the herb on the right is not thyme, but there was no planter for parsley and I hardly ever use thyme (I used to make coughing syrope, but I bought thyme in the herbshop for that ).

Actually it’s not a corner, it’s the middle of the wall. The weights are from a clock that used to belong to dh’s grandfather.
I bought the flowers last week and they are finally open. I like having flowers in the house, in a vase or on a plant, but I’m not that good with blooming plants. Green plants do very well, I have nourished several back from almost dead. When I brought back a schoolplant I had taken care of during the summervacation, the teacher even thought I had bought a new one. But I just gave it some fresh soil and plenty of water.
Some people say take care of my plants too well, that’s why they don’t get flowers. Flowers are there to make seeds and plants do that when they think they won’t survive. Mine just never fear death.
Well, at least it sounds better than just not being able to sustain any flowering plants…

Outside! Always a sign of spring.

I love a good clean out and straightening of the books. I also think I need more book cases…

(something I’m sewing of course, not the usual ironing, I try to avoid that as much as possible)

\