Little House in the Big Woods

Just wanted to let everyone know that all is well and I'm still around. I have had a hectic couple of months and have just moved from my apartment into a lovely small house I'm renting from a woman who has a really big house on about 4 1/2 acres. It's a wonderful place with lots of trees scattered around the property. I have a front porch with white rockers on it - the kind they sell at Cracker Barrel! Brandon and I got moved in over the Thanksgiving weekend. In fact, due to other issues, my mom moved our Thanksgiving dinner day to Saturday, so we ended up moving on Thursday and Friday. I don't have any photos yet but hopefully after this weekend, I will have some nice pics to post of my new place. Until then, please enjoy this drawing I did so you'd have an idea of how it looks. As you can tell, I'm sure, Brandon gets his artistic talent from me :)

Wish I could say the move was uneventful but it wasn't. For the first time in my life, I have a real laundry room! I love my laundry room because I am an ironer. I iron a lot because my mom instilled in me the importance of ironing your clothes. I will admit that I have relaxed it a bit when it comes to jeans and also things that look wrinkle-free when I get them straight out of the dryer, but for the most part, I iron a lot. Anyhoo, I can leave my ironing board up all the time and just go in there, plug in the iron, and iron my clothes without a lot of hassle. I know I'm digressing so I'll get back on track now . . . . . Friday night, I put a load of clothes in the washer and then I took Brandon to my mother's house for him to stay the night. I was gone about an hour and when I returned, my living room carpet was soaking wet, the kitchen had water running coming half way into it, and my laundry room was flooded!!! My washer hose had somehow come out of the drain and shot water all over from the whole wash cycle. It was horrible. I have never had anything like this happen before and I was horrified that the carpet in my great little house that was just cleaned by my landlady before I moved in, would be mildewed and ruined. I was sick! I used every bath towel, hand towel, wash cloth, dish towel that I could find and still had water going everywhere. I mopped too but that was pretty fruitless. 3 1/2 hours later, I got all the water up out of the laundry room and kitchen. I soaked up the carpet water as best I could and have just waited it out. It seems to be drying very well but there is a stain. I'm going to try to use a carpet shampooer and see if I can get that out before I have to own up to what happened to my landlady - who, by the way, is an angel of a woman. She's so great and I think we are going to be great friends.

I have definitely learned a hard lesson about leaving the house while the washer or dryer is running. The hose came out again Monday night, but I happened to be in the kitchen and heard it so I was able to catch it before the water ran anywhere other than the laundry room floor. I have since taped the hose down to the drain and I'm hoping it will be ok now.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I'm still eating dressing - yum, yum!

Love,

Denise