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Happy cookouts and bonfires and carnival, everyone! Don't drink and boat! Not even if you just really want to go to the next island over (looking at you, Wax's brother)! That's how everyone dies on Midsummer!
We bought two little boxes of local strawberries, a carton of whipping cream, a jar of nutella, eggs and milk, and our favorite white wine, so we can have crepes for the celebratory meal. (We can already smell the neighbors' cookouts and it's not even five.)
Yesterday Wax assembled two removable windowscreens so we can now open windows in all the downstairs rooms simultaneously. There was one in the house when we moved in (shared among 3 downstairs windows), and to duplicate it we finally bought a bunch of ~½"square lumber last week (they're like 19mm2 with notches out of them and are intended for window muntins in old-fashioned, single-glazed windows – the structural elements that separate the panes of glass). The frames are just three little horizontal bars attached at the top, bottom and middle to two vertical ones with a nail (and a dab of glue) at each end - | =| (sort of), and a piece of fiberglass netting stapled around the edges. We still have to make the ones for upstairs, which are a slightly different size. Then ventilation will have been achieved and we can set about bugspraying, painting, etc. Wax's vacation is going too fast!
Wax only has one niece who is still a little child left. Oona must be like 8 I guess - school aged, anyway. Wax's goddaughters are 18 (bartending, learning to drive) and 13 (a pastel goth, not speaking in public, and yeah, I mistakenly wrote 14 in the last entry, but she's 13) respectively, and the triplets are 15. They're only detectably unadult when you look at their faces; the boys are both taller than me now and both are baritones, and Ciara is also possibly a goth (going by the outfit she wore at their birthday party) and could be mistaken for a time-travelling dEliA's model from when I was her age.
Once family Christmases are all adult again we can have wine and cheese and board games with snapsvisor instead of hours-long present-opening marathons with crying! I definitely miss the pre-child Christmas parties. And we've already agreed to have the family Christmas at our house this year! In spite of the one floor and three walls that still need to be done, Knypplinge is now cozy and habitable and, more importantly, dinner-party ready. In fact, as I noticed while I was trying to vacuum-pack the incredible quantity of spare duvets and pillows amassed by Wax's mom... we have enough bedding for all of them to sleep over, if they all came with any SOs and all got snowed in on Christmas eve (that is, 11 guests). Not mattresses, but blankets, pillows and sheets, definitely. (The wool blankets are in chests - it's only the duvets and pillows that are vacuum-packed and crammed into storage bins under the bed.)
We bought two little boxes of local strawberries, a carton of whipping cream, a jar of nutella, eggs and milk, and our favorite white wine, so we can have crepes for the celebratory meal. (We can already smell the neighbors' cookouts and it's not even five.)
Yesterday Wax assembled two removable windowscreens so we can now open windows in all the downstairs rooms simultaneously. There was one in the house when we moved in (shared among 3 downstairs windows), and to duplicate it we finally bought a bunch of ~½"square lumber last week (they're like 19mm2 with notches out of them and are intended for window muntins in old-fashioned, single-glazed windows – the structural elements that separate the panes of glass). The frames are just three little horizontal bars attached at the top, bottom and middle to two vertical ones with a nail (and a dab of glue) at each end - | =| (sort of), and a piece of fiberglass netting stapled around the edges. We still have to make the ones for upstairs, which are a slightly different size. Then ventilation will have been achieved and we can set about bugspraying, painting, etc. Wax's vacation is going too fast!
Wax only has one niece who is still a little child left. Oona must be like 8 I guess - school aged, anyway. Wax's goddaughters are 18 (bartending, learning to drive) and 13 (a pastel goth, not speaking in public, and yeah, I mistakenly wrote 14 in the last entry, but she's 13) respectively, and the triplets are 15. They're only detectably unadult when you look at their faces; the boys are both taller than me now and both are baritones, and Ciara is also possibly a goth (going by the outfit she wore at their birthday party) and could be mistaken for a time-travelling dEliA's model from when I was her age.
Once family Christmases are all adult again we can have wine and cheese and board games with snapsvisor instead of hours-long present-opening marathons with crying! I definitely miss the pre-child Christmas parties. And we've already agreed to have the family Christmas at our house this year! In spite of the one floor and three walls that still need to be done, Knypplinge is now cozy and habitable and, more importantly, dinner-party ready. In fact, as I noticed while I was trying to vacuum-pack the incredible quantity of spare duvets and pillows amassed by Wax's mom... we have enough bedding for all of them to sleep over, if they all came with any SOs and all got snowed in on Christmas eve (that is, 11 guests). Not mattresses, but blankets, pillows and sheets, definitely. (The wool blankets are in chests - it's only the duvets and pillows that are vacuum-packed and crammed into storage bins under the bed.)
