So I am busting out the old school blog. I hope to write here about the family. The crafting and little jot and tiddles will be on Clever Nesting and Facebook (why am I so networked!?) but the posts about the kids will go here. This is a good place for them. I’ve missed you, Love and Blunder.

95% of Elise is shy, sweet, and simple. The last 5% is a red-hot temper that growls, arches her back, and screams in high frequencies.

She loves her sister, and she loves getting her in trouble. She is currently trying to cute me into not typing on the computer by pulling on my arm and saying, “Mamamama!” She loves music and will ramdomly pound on the piano as she passes by. She loves to play ball, and snuggle dolls, and is definitely a Daddy’s Girl.

Our lives wouldn’t be complete without you, Elise! Thank you for being our little girl!

Fresh, delicious, and local. YUM!

After weeks of insisting that food here is largely safe, regulators in China said Tuesday that they had recently closed 180 food plants and that inspectors had uncovered more than 23,000 food safety violations.

The story continues:

Regulators said 33,000 law enforcement officials combed the nation and turned up illegal food making dens, counterfeit bottled water, fake soy sauce, banned food additives and illegal meat processing plants.

“These are not isolated cases,” Han Yi, director of the administration’s quality control and inspection department told the state-run media.

China Daily, the nation’s English language newspaper, said industrial chemicals, including dyes, mineral oils, paraffin wax, formaldehyde and malachite green, had been found in everything from candy, pickles and biscuits to seafood.

Hungry?

In this house some of those questions were easily answered. We have the original blue prints and the original work order for the home, passed down by the 4 previous owners of this home. Almost nothing in our house has been changed except the kitchen has been updated and the basement finished.

We also know quite a good deal about the original owner of the house. Mr. Sittle and his wife were the first people to build on this street in 1926. They moved here from a farm and brought some of the pieces of their old barn with them, which are still in the garage. Mr. Sittle was a milk man for a local milk company, he drove a horse drawn milk wagon up and down Market Street, when it was still a brick road. He was driving milk for that company still, when they started delivering the milk in trucks.

Our next door neighbors moved into their home when the Sittles were retired. They tell us all about how Mr. Sittle would bring a lawn chair out into the front yard just to watch my neighbor’s children play in the yard. My neighbor, Bob, recollects Mr. Sittle with a look in his eye like he’s remembering a long lost friend, or a close family member.

Now our neighbors are reaching retirement and Bob comes out and chats with Olivia and tickles Elise and pretty much acts like an on site grandfather. I can see that he is pretty satisfied in becoming the neighborhood replacement for old Mr. Sitttle.

There are wonderful quirks, and not-so-wonderful quirks. For example, our pest problem. For the two springs that we’ve lived here we’ve gotten a rodent in the house. This spring we’ve had more than one. We get them in the fall, too. We don’t, however, have them year in and out. I think they keep wondering if we’ve moved out yet.

We get some traps, and keep extra clean for a few weeks, and then they’re gone. This year’s guests aren’t gone yet so we’ve gotta stay alert.

It’s kind of creepy, but I think of all country women out on the farm who live with this kind of vermin and find it common place. It’s just the symptom of living in an older house, there’s nothing you can do to change it.

So, that’s my introduction to my series (every time I intend to start a series I only write one post, so I hope this is the exception) on our old house. I’ll also post about upkeep, gardening, the neighborhood, and if I think of anything else I’ll post about that, too.

Happy spring cleaning to all of you, on the Memorial Day weekend!