accomplishments and addictions

Well, I can't compete with my daughter Kate in getting things done. She is amazingly organized. However, I do feel good about a couple of things. My studio is cleared out and I have some ideas of where and how to find a cheap work table. I'm mostly caught up with the trimming and cleanup in the yard, and I have lost (probably temporarily) the two pounds that I had gained since returning from England in early October. The weight loss must be due to all the walking that my friend Patty and I are doing almost every evening. We usually walk for about an hour. Her pedometer tells us how much of our walk was aerobic - usually all of it, as we are fast walkers. Burning off 300-400 calories seems to keep my weight on track. I don't know what will happen this winter when it gets dark early. We can't walk until Patty gets home from work and it will be dark soon after that. We'll just have to use flashlights, I guess and stay on level paths.

Today one of our favorite antique stores was having a "flea market" outside. Basically that meant that a few of the dealers who sell at that store brought out some of their less valuable items and reduced them up to 75 percent off. That's my kind of sale! I got a neat blue oil lantern, a table for plants, a birdhouse, a purple bottle with a cow embossed on it, and some more little

china animals for my wall boxes. Above on the right are the table, lantern and purple bottle. Above on the left and center are some of the birdhouses that I've been collecting for the past year or so. I have them on three sides of my deck - on the railing - and also hanging from the soffit. The squirrels knock some off the deck every so often and I have to search the back yard for them, but mostly they don't break in the fall. (Birdhouses, I mean. Of course, squirrels don't seem to break in falling, either.) Haven't quite decided if I should bring the birdhouses in for the winter or not. There are quite a few of them, but they are small, so could probably fit into a couple of boxes. On the other hand we don't get very harsh winters here, so they would probably be ok left outside. Considering my overstuffed storage room, outside is the likely solution.

As you might guess by now, I am addicted to "stuff". I particularly like outside stuff because it never has to be dusted! Inside, I have so much stuff that I cannot display it all at once. I rotate my decorations according to season. This situation has come about partly because after my husband and I split up, I moved from a large house to my current town house - about half the space. And my husband didn't want anything he had to dust or hang on the wall, so I ended up with far more than my share of 'stuff'. And, of course, I have the pottery I make and cannot seem to get rid of. I only display my masks. (There will be photos of them on flickr, one of these days.) The rest of my clay things are packed into boxes in the basement storage room. I do have some dishes that I use, but most of my creations are decorative, rather than useful. Finally, I hate to admit it, but in the last few years, I have acquired even more 'stuff'. I really need to stop buying or start selling! I chatted with several antique dealers today and they each said that they got into selling because they had accumulated too much stuff for their houses. That may be my future!

Fall has finally arrived here in Maryland. Last night, the temperatures were in the 40s and today was sunny, but cool. Very nice weather, actually. I've almost finished my Halloween decorating. I put fake cobwebs on my little evergreen tree out front, with 'help' from several of the neighborhood kids. Now all I need are some little spiders (plastic, not real ones) to add to the webs. Halloween is big here, with most of us decorating outside. Quite impressive. I'll try to take some photos soon, now that I have figured out how to post photos on the blog.