Is it really Friday already?

This week has gone by so fast, maybe because it's been one of those weeks that seemed "off" -- by that I mean Tuesday didn't feel like Tuesday (and so on). You know, THAT kind of week. 

Readjusting to the schedule... trying to remember to cook :)  I was really spoiled during our time in the U.S. when I didn't have to very often.

Back to enjoying the laundry. It's just so satisfying to hang clean clothes, towels, sheets on the line. Plus the smell of line-dried clothes is like perfume to me.

Happy to be in my own living room, looking at my own books on the shelves, the clutter of quilting magazines and graph paper covering the coffee table... I am truly a homebody at heart.

Which makes the idea of building our own place such an adventure! I've drawn so many floor plans... as we've considered and changed our ideas yet again. Now we're thinking that the apartment over the garage will be our permanent home, not merely a stop-gap measure. Why not just make the apartment a "real" home?! So back to the drawing board, making the footprint of the garage/apartment larger to accommodate long-term living.

Last night we spent a happy hour looking through house-related magazines, jotting down things we really liked in a notebook. Makes me so thankful we decided to bring Ivan's collection of Fine Homebuilding magazines -- the kind of periodical where we read EVERYTHING, including the ads :)  We also brought a few issues of Inspired House, and then we've picked up a few Spanish home-style magazines here in the last couple of years.

We won't start building until next year (at least) but we want to get the ball rolling with our architect so that we have plans in hand before we go on furlough this Spring. That way we can get started as soon as we get back, preparing the site, and so on. Our hope is that a team (or two) of men from some of our supporting churches might be willing to come down and help us put the basic structure up the following Spring. It would be great if we could be ready to move into the apartment by the time the lease on this house is up in September 2012.

Just dreaming at this point and putting it in the Lord's hands. His plan may be different than ours, as we've so often discovered :)

One step at a time!

Ivan talked with a couple of builder friends and we've decided the best thing to do to make the casita more secure is add another layer of plaster (cement) so with that in mind, he found a used cement mixer for sale. He's been cleaning it up and, even though it ran, he saw that it needed a new something-or-other so he changed that last night.

He's debating on whether he wants to try and run electrical from the road to the house first or just see if our neighbor will let us plug in the mixer at his place and do the plastering first. We have decided to bury the wiring in a conduit, along with cable lines, to make it a little harder to steal (because the first thieves also took all the wiring from the house as well as the line out to the street).

¡Poco a poco!

On a more immediate note, I made Ben's No Bakes this morning, using a mixture of the cocoas. ¡Que rico!  It's looking like I'll be (mostly) caught up with the have-to-dos soon and will have time to get started on a quilt (or three). Friends are expecting next month so I really need to get busy on a baby quilt. I've settled on a pattern and fabrics, and made a sketch with colored pencils last night. Now I just need time to sew!

But for now I need to get back to the business of cleaning. I sure will be glad when they finish the construction next door. The layer-of-dust-on-every-surface-every-single-morning is getting old. Reminds me of living in Kentucky and the constant battle with coal dust.