Hello, Gorgeous

I’ve missed you! And by you, I mean YOU (and the blog in general).

The short of it:

• two weeks of being sick
• estate sale prepping
• judging a book contest
• grading/class prep

The long of it:

First, I got sick for a couple of weeks. What started out as a sinus infection turned into bronchitis with a touch of pneumonia. Thanksgiving was a napfest, and I only got up to eat a wonderful meal with my mom and dad (sis was with her boyfriend’s family) before going back to sleep.  Plus, we’ve been getting ready for my grandmother’s estate sale. We need to sell the house, but we cannot do that until everything is out. Because she had downsized about ten years ago, a lot of the furniture is gone, so we didn’t want to pay a company to do it because it’s pretty pricey, and we’ve got some hefty medical bills to take care of. So each weekend, my mom, sis, and I (and various other friends/family) have worked nine and ten-hour days sorting, tossing, organizing, and pricing. Imagine sis and I picking up various glassware/jewelry/kitchenware, saying “How much?” and shrugging our shoulders. A lot. The sale is this weekend, and it’s been all consuming.

Plus, I come home, and my house is a wreck, so I don’t feel like I can sit down and take time away from my own laundry, dishes, not to mention grading and class prep, which has been out of control this semester from a combination of teaching American Lit after a hiatus of about a year as well as revamping my ESL courses.

In other words, I’ve been overwhelmed. I’ve read here and there, but it’s been light fare. Plus, I’m judging a super secret book contest, and I have quite a lot to read for that by the end of the month.

None of this is bad (ok, except for the being sick), but it has meant I’ve been completely out of the loop. If I’ve done any blog reading, I haven’t commented, simply because it seemed like it would take too much energy. I haven’t even really been on Twitter.

But I feel the satisfaction of working really hard on something meaningful. It has also been neat to come across aspects of my grandparents lives that I never knew, for example, the postcard from their honeymoon they mailed to themselves:

And, of course, Maddie has come along and been increasingly bored. But boy does she like a soft place to land. Here she is, tucked up in an old hat box full of hats, gloves, and bags I plan to take to a vintage store:

And I promised sofa photos. The sofa made it to my house last weekend, actually, but I needed help moving my current bedroom sofa into the dining/reading room and getting this one in here. I’m so pleased. I didn’t even have to rearrange the collection on the wall. And I’m a bit in love…

So what have you been up to? I’m all ears. And I’ll be back either later today or early tomorrow with a giveaway and an exciting prospect for the new year…

jenn