New house!

I've finally moved into my new house, despite all attempts by my control freak mother to prolong it as long as possible, and I love it! It's a 1300-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bathroom beauty, complete with sunroom and koi pond. I moved in for good last Friday after spending a week and a half lugging carloads over from my mom's garage. My cat came with me the same day, although he wasn't nearly as happy as I was about the situation. He's prone to carsickness, so he ended up throwing up his breakfast all over himself and then crying the rest of the way. I felt so bad for him! And then the first experience he had when we arrived was a nice, warm bath, every cat's favorite activity. Needless to say, he hid under the bed for the next two days.

I still have so much more work to do to make the house liveable, and I'm now flat broke, so I'm not sure how much will get done before the end of the year. I have to finish unpacking, rearrange furniture, hang stuff on the walls, and plant all of the plants that I bought that are waiting impatiently to go into the ground. Plus, I'd like to get started soon on redoing the bathrooms. Luckily, they're small, and the majority of the work I need to do is to paint the walls and cabinets and tile the floor. However, even that small amount of materials is more than I can afford, so I'm just going to have to get used to making do with what I've got. On the upside, I've got plenty of room for entertaining and for guests to stay, so I'm excited to finally start having people over again.

I've carved out some time to get my garden going this year. It took me three separate days of one to three hours of work to clear out the weeds and mix in 18 cubic feet of amendments, basically steer manure mixed with compost. The soil felt so much better afterwards, but I think I'm going to need another year of amending the soil at several-month intervals before it's up to the standards of some of my garden neighbors. I rotated the beds this year, putting the tomatoes on the West side, the peppers in the southeast corner, and the squash, cucumbers, and eggplants to the north. I've planted six heirloom tomatoes (including two purple varieties, a green zebra, a red italian variety, a yellow-orange hillbilly, and a yellow pear), 18 romas for making sauces and pastes, 18 red peppers, 6 purple peppers (which seem to be "in" this year for whatever reason), 2 orange peppers, a green tomatillo, around 20 bush beans (some of which I'm hoping will be purple, the rest green), 12 pole beans, four types of squash (including a pattypan, a yellow squash, a light green speckled squash, and a standard dark green zucchini), three types of eggplants (Japanese, dark purple, and rosa bianca), three types of cucumbers (one lemon, can't remember what the other two are), and 5 basil plants. I'm so excited to watch my garden grow this year after the disappointment of last year.

Anyway, as you can see, things are finally going well for me. I'm hoping this keeps up, as the last few years have been pretty rough, culminating in an entirely terrible past six months. I'm looking forward to a happier time in my wonderful new house!