A Belated Weekend Report with Pictures

I meant to post this on Monday, but, well, MONDAY.

This was my weekend:
SATURDAY

I did some spring cleaning, including moving the Minerva altar from the living room to the bedroom (I have altar shelves in both rooms, and the living room one tends to be focused on whatever is going on right now--often whichever book I'm working on--and I thought that since Minerva spent most of her time in the bedroom, she'd rather be there) and changing the comforter cover from the winter one to the spring one. This was actually a pretty emotional endeavor, because it meant washing the last of Minerva's fur and smell off of the other comforter cover. On the other hand, it really needed washing, because the last weeks of her life she had been spitting medicine all over it. (She was NOT happy about taking meds.)
Here's the altar now--that little wooden box with her picture on top of it has her ashes in it. A lovely sympathy card from my friend Karen Rose Smith is to the left.

Here is the gorgeous spring comforter (which was made especially for me, along with the wall hanging above it, by one of the artists at The Artisans' Guild)

The same bed, with cats a few hours later. If you look closely at Angus, the yellow cat, you can see that he is holding his right eye partially closed. He has something going on with it--probably viral, and returned from an occurrence a month ago--and I have to put antibiotic ointment in it twice a day. You can imagine how well THAT'S going.

Lest you think these guys are the only ones getting attention, I also spent some time playing with Luna. I need to do a post about her soon--did you realize I've had her for over a year?

I know the pictures are a little blurry...she rarely stops moving!






SUNDAY

On Sunday, my friends Ellen and Chris and I had a small birthday celebration for Jo, my step-daughter's mom. Some of you may be aware that Jo, as well as being sort-of family, came to Blue Moon Circle rituals for a couple of years before she had a massive heart attack a little more than a year ago. To be honest, no one expected her to be celebrating this birthday (she's since had another smaller heart attack, open-heart bypass surgery, and is in her 11th year of dialysis), but she's tougher than she looks. Or more stubborn. Either way, we broke her out of the nursing home for a few hours so we could celebrate her turning 54. She had a great time.

Chris made these great cupcakes

Jo asked for pizza, so that's what we had.

Blowing out the candle

Opening gifts

Of course, in with all of the cleaning and partying, I also did a lot of writing. Here's a picture from Saturday evening of Magic helping me.

The Red Writing Chair

So tell me, what did you do last weekend? Anything interesting planned for the one ahead?

A Solstice Celebration & The Messy Mudroom Mission

Saturday was a wonderful day. The weather was perfect (a rarity in NY state) and Blue Moon Circle had a fabulous water-themed Summer Solstice ritual together, followed by a lovely feast. I spent the rest of the day resting, then doing some writing on the new novel I'm working on, interspersed with reading a fab short story my mother wrote, and doing some editing on that. Then we emailed back and forth about it, which was also lovely. All in all, an unusually pleasant and relaxed day.

I finally figured out how to put up pictures of the witchy gang while still preserving everyone's privacy :-)

Angel food cake with fresh local strawberries and homemade whipped cream. Yum.

 I was going to take a lazy day on Sunday--the plan was to relax and write, and not do much else. But then I woke up with more energy than usual (probably thanks to the ritual the day before) and the urge to Get Something Done. So I called my wonderful friend Ellen (who will work for wine, bless her) and asked her if she could come over and help me finally tackle the messy mudroom.

You have to understand that, over the course of the last year or so, I have cleaned and cleared almost every room in the house--getting rid of clutter and stuff I don't need any more, reorganizing and neatening what was left. The only room left is one upstairs (which was the craft/crap room, and is now going to be mostly storage...as soon as I finish sorting through the last bunch o' crap). And the mudroom. Oy.

I'd done part of the mudroom too--reorganized the shelf where all the tools and nails and electrical bits live. But the rest of it was still pretty much a disaster, including loads of cobwebs (the spiders seem to love it out there) and some rodent droppings in awkward places. It was so overwhelming, I kept putting off dealing with it. But it is the space people enter and leave the house through, and that's about the worst space to still be a mess.

Here's what it looked like when we started:

 

Most of that stuff actually needed to be in there, but boy, was it a mess. So we literally took everything out (except the washer, dryer, and freezer, and the one shelf unit I'd already done, which is to my left as I took the picture). Everything. The shelves got washed off, the floors and walls got swept (I lost count of giant spiders at about a dozen...but there might have been some girly shrieking from time to time as I stumbled across yet another one), and the ragged old plastic taken off the window.

 Look! The walls are yellow! (That's Ellen, heretofore to be referred to as Saint Ellen.)

Then we rearranged the shelves into a placement that worked better and made the room look larger and less cluttered, and put All the Things BACK. (Except for the two bags of garbage we collected in the process.) This is what it looks like now:

It makes me so happy--I keep walking out there to look at it. I can find everything, get at the stuff I need to (like the step stool in corner by the freezer that was impossible to reach), and it is CLEAN. Happy sigh. All that's left to do is go out there with a sage smudge wand and give it a little extra boost.

I gave Ellen a bottle of wine (and let her do two loads of laundry while we were working, since she doesn't have a laundry room) along with my undying gratitude. And then took a nap after she left. Man, that was a lot of work. But so worth it, since it is now a pleasant space for people to enter and leave by. Much better energy by far, not to mention just plain nicer to look at.

The rest of the day is going to revert to my original plan of relaxing and writing, along with some leftovers from yesterday, and maybe even a glass of wine. I think I earned it, don't you?

Contest Winner Melissa and Borrowed Husbands

Melissa is the winner! Contact me, Melissa and tell me which annual you want. (email me at magicmysticminerva at yahoo)

Today was "rent a husband" day. Snort. My pals Robin and Jess were kind enough to let me borrow their husbands for the day to get some major outside work done that I couldn't do myself. (I paid them, of course--it was a lot of work.)

Yay George! Yay Andrew! George got here about 8:30 and Andrew at 11, and I worked outside with both of them until about 4. They took down some pieces of trees and shrubberies that had gotten way overgrown, George re-wired a broken light for me (damned ice chunk!), Andrew mowed, and stuff like that.

But the big thing was the entrance to the house. Because I live in the country, the back door is where everyone enters the house. And I suddenly realized the other day that while I'd been cleaning, reorganizing and throwing out stuff INSIDE the house (in part to revamp the energy in a positive way, and in part because the stuff was just making me crazy), the outside of the house looked like sh*t. The concrete pavers that led to the door were cracked and crumbling and ugly gray. The door, which was installed 10 years ago, after I moved in, was still gray primer. There were weeds and piles of crap everywhere. NOT good feng shui, that's for sure. Also not pretty.

So George redid the pavers, and moved some hostas I had by the barn. And I FINALLY painted the danged door. Now it looks like this:

Yay! I'm going to buy a few pots of colorful flowers to jazz it up even more, but for now, I am tired and happy and very grateful for borrowed husbands.