planning ahead

Yesterday I watched it snow horizontally from my office windows, and this morning the windchill was -16 Celsius when I left for work. So much for the warm and the little green buds of spring.

Winter, I hate you.

(Aside: I think it may be good that I don't live in Calgary. The annual Chinook would just kill me. It would just lull me into a false sense of security and then break my heart with 45 km/h winds.)

I am forging ahead with the garden planning, although by now I am impatient to be doing. I am thinking of starting some tomatoes, basil and bunching onions this weekend. And we've got so much work to do outside: there's the dethatching and general cleanup, all the dead ends I didn't bother dealing with in the fall, and we have to have get a new lawn in. I don't think the old one is coming back. I think we're going to go with seed, not sod. And then there's all those books to read, to tell me what I'm doing.

We also have this lovely old patio set that Pd's father gave us. Unfortunately, it had spent untold years in the back garden at the farm — he literally cut it out from the weeds — and now it needs a little bit of intense scrubbing with steel brush and Dremmel to get the rust off before we paint it a glossy black. (I floated the idea of yellow, or bright blue. Pd wasn't impressed.) That needs to take place outside, because our house does not have a well-ventilated anything, and I would like to begin soon so we can make as much use of it as possible this summer.

There's a lot of stuff inside, too. I didn't realise how anxious I had been for winter to be over until it started warming up and my mind starting going through all of the plans for Reno 2.0. We want to insulate the addition/sun room/library, which means ripping everything out, putting insulation (and a better window) in, and then patching it all up again. There was actual permafrost on the window this winter, and it was cold enough that even Pd — who is much hardier than I am — consented to buy a small electric heater. In the summer, it's unbearable except for in the early morning. And we are hoping to put in air conditioning, because last year it was 28 degrees Celsius downstairs, before the humidity, and Pd and I both got heat stroke last year (although mine was not at home), and I can't do that again. But there's no point in putting in air conditioning if it's all going to escape onto the porch.

That's the major renovation this year. After that it's majorish redecorating — I'm not sick of what we've got, but we're going to switch the current bedroom and den around. That means painting when it's warm enough to throw the windows open, and possibly some Towers of Hanoi-type maneuvres involving the furniture and the currently empty second bedroom. (The library is full of bookshelves, which are themselves full of books. You can see where this is going.)

I think we'll be able to do it all by the beginning of July. We'll have to, really, because the second bedroom is going to have to be decorated — or, at the very least, populated with furniture — and that has a fairly firm deadline of late August or early September. I know that seems like a long time for mere decoration, but the family reunion is going to eat up my mid-to-late July, and I want more than two weekends to build/move in all the furniture, put up the curtains and all that, and I don't anticipate I'm going to be moving very quickly by then.

It's going to be the baby's room.