At Last The House!

Hello! and welcome to our house, Number 2 Doe Park Courtyard. Our house is on the right with the blue door and not nearly as floral as that of our neighbor, Next Door Dave, who plants loads of annuals every spring. This year, it's ivy geraniums and lobelia. This photo was taken in June. I think that's a white rose blooming. We have a yellow rose and perennial fuschias and lavender in pots and rosemary. The lemon thyme adores this cool, wet weather. The rosemary and basil, not so much.




It's raining this morning and every morning since the end of May. Here is the little foyer and hall. The house has got a breezy French Country "Rose-Covered Auberge in the Loire Valley" feel to it with lots of pine flooring, casement windows, and wooden chairs with blue and white striped cushions. I base the entire French Country House thing on those blue and white striped cushions.


Here is the living room, called 'The Lounge' here, which sounds misleadingly swank especially since you can plug in the fireplace. But every night we are very cosy and watch tv and eat dinner on the huge, blue couch. Chicken thighs in all constructions and guises have kept us from starvation since we have a frying pan, but I didn't know how to use the oven for months. It seems that Gas Mark 8 is about 500 degrees. Which is pretty hot. Then we each have three (approximately) McVities Digestive Biscuits, which are wholesome wheat cookies coated wholesomly on one side with dark chocolate.

The house is furnished, but we brought rugs and towels and bedding, family pictures, weights, camping equipment, and books. What else does anyone need?


French doors separate all the rooms downstairs. That's a good idea. I am typing to you from The Conservatory, which also sounds Posh and full of palm trees, and is actually full of light and where we keep the basil and cilantro which were blue and shivering when I put it outside, but is unusable if it rains anything like hard because the upstairs gutter is broken, and the water comes smashing down like machine gunned ball bearings on the corrugated plastic Conservatory roof and you can't hear yourself typing much less people talking to you. Soomeone ends up yelling, "Geez! This is horrible! Let's go in the living room!" And the other person points frantically to her ears and yells, "What?! I can't hear you! Let's go in the living room!" and the other person yells, "What?! I can't hear you! Let's go in the living room!" And it just goes on like that until finally someone just gets up and makes big arm gestures and Navy Seal stabbing and pointing hand signals and mouths "C'mon...Let's...Go...Into...The...Livingroom." It's exhausting. Different kinds of rain sound different on the roof. A light sprinkle sounds like bushels of plastic fingernails.

Oh and spiders! Have we got spiders! This is a picture of a spider, which I realize you can't actually see, but really, I assure you, was impressively massive enough to compare to my lens cover. They're the size of grapes. When Brian goes out the kitchen door in the morning, he has learned to pause in case one is dislodged from the door jamb and is dropping collar-ward from the ceiling. Sometimes, we just leap through covering our heads and screaming, which is pretty funny to watch from outside.

This is our room. Do you recognize the quilt? It keeps us cosy. Nightime temperatures are around 50 and it usually rains. A lot like the daytime, actually. It's nice to sleep with the windows open. Sometimes the neighbor's cat, Evie, leaps up on the garden wall, but then gets confused and comes in our bathroom window rather than her own, which is a surprise for everyone. Last night we heard the fox who lives nearby.

The other night, he and our neighbor's other cat, Silver, who is a big, beat-up tomcat with a limp, were on our front step yowling and barking at each other. We didn't know what it was. Foxes make such weird noises. Very wild animal-y. It's quite nice. If we hear them at night, we jump up and go look down at them running across the back garden in the dark.


Did you see a chair at the foot of the bed in the last picture? On the chair, there is a bowl covered with a yellow checked dish towel (A gift from my mother-in-law). I was making bread (Gas Mark 7) and needed a warm place for the dough to proof. The only other warm place in the house is the dining room where the refrigerator is, but I was drying laundry in front of that heater. In many ways, this house, with its coffin-sized shower and chilly rooms, its spiders and foxes, is like camping - which is quite nice, really.