What the ------- ???!!!

What the heck just happened to11 months?  I'll tell you what happened.  Arabella's Garden had a terrific shock, and the gardener has been paralyzed into inaction, i.e. silence on the blogging front.  Wherefore art thou now, Arabella?

In reality, Arabella herself, my grandmother, split the scene long ago.  But my garden, named in her honor, is still here, only now ... in transition.

Looking back I see that my last post was June 29 of last year.  Right after I wrote that, baby chicks started hatching and I spent the next 48 hours scrunched down in the coop, watching mamas and babies do their thing.

All that bending over did my back in, and by the time I was walking upright again, Fate had Intervened, and you know how that goes.  You can't argue with Fate.

Fate, in the form of a perfectly innocuous decision to check out a few houses on the annual Tour of Homes, put on by the local builders' association each summer.  Mostly dedicated to showing off the kind of ridiculously humongous, bloated McMansions beloved of real estate agents everywhere, each year there are always two or three 'normal' homes, and my sweetheart and I like to check these out, for future reference.  'Future' defined as 'let's think about downsizing sometime in the next 5-10 years'.

Call us boring, but we have lived in this house and neighborhood for 38 years.  We are homebodies, and we love our cozy, if unexciting 1950's ranch style house and big, roomy garden.

I love my 500 square foot separate music teaching studio.

But honestly, we don't need this much house -- or yard. After observing various friends, family members and aging parents through the years making decisions -- or lack of decisions -- about housing for the later years in life, we made a vow to be smart and plan realistically.  Not move to a small town with no longtime friends, medical services or social networks, not move onto acreage needing mowing, disking, plowing, weed-whacking or moving irrigation pipe while we are in our 60's, 70's and 80's.  Not move into an old house needing constant repair and maintenance.  And also not stay in a too-large house on a hill with a huge amount of snow shoveling, pine needle raking, weeding, and watering until we were too old and too tired to make a move.

Despite this somewhat vague, long-range plan, no one was more surprised than we were to find a couple of small houses on the tour, that we really liked, and which were in our potential price range.  Just like that -- *SNAP* -- we said "it's time!" and flipped over into Prospective Home Buyer Mode.

And there went the rest of last summer!