cold and blue and bright

It's starting to look very winterish around here. All bright blue skies and bare trees. Without the leaves we can see houses we never knew were there, tucked off of the road or down in the valley. Hints of roofs, curls of smoke, porch lights that used to be hidden by the foliage. Even our house, which is nestled so well into the woods that you'd never find it if you didn't know it was there, is almost spottable from the road. The green light bulb that hangs over the porch of the cabin can be spotted, just for a second, through the trees as you drive by.

The rest of our wood arrived this week. At the moment it is blocking our driveway, a huge jumbled heap. But we have plans to try our hand at stacking it into a holzmiete - a round, domed woodpile that, in theory, speeds up the drying time, takes up less space and is faster to stack (if you know what you're doing, which we don't) Besides being slightly more interesting to look at than the run of the mill stack-between-two-trees piles that abound here, it will fit better into the space that will become our permanent woodshed, just off the sun room in the patch formerly occupied by the hot tub.

When I do not come home from soccer or play rehearsal or PTO meetings and fall instantly asleep (ahem, I blame it on the early evening darkness, surly it isn't just...age) I've been slowly but surly embroidering constellations onto a quilt for Briton. Or maybe it's a comforter. Something in between I suppose. Hopefully, amidst wood stacking, rehearsal, school dances and last soccer games I'll finished that up this weekend so I can share it with you. But I'll forewarn you now, it's orange. Bright, traffic cone orange. Per his request. Sometimes my head hurts a little from looking at it after I've been sewing for a while. All the more reason to get if finished and back to projects with more muted hues.