Back Together

 Happy New Year, gentle readers!  Thank you for your patience (the two of you who are left, anyway).  One of my goals for the new year is to actually update my blog.

The past few months have been chaotic, to say the least, and they aren't getting easier, but I'm learning to deal.

So, first, Christmas at Ken's house and then Ken's house after she took some time to reorganize and clean things up.

Christmas tree:

Looking into the kitchen:

More of the kitchen:

The foyer:

Living room:

Fast forward to today, after I put all of the Christmas decorations and gifts away, cleaned, reorganized, etc.  My study:

The kitchen:

Back in October, I had a garage sale to get rid of my old bedroom furniture and a few other things.  All of the money I made went toward buying a new refrigerator for the house so that I could put the old almond one with the wheat stalks etched onto the shelves in the garage.  Here are Father and Uncle of Ken at the garage sale:

And here she is:

So far, I LOVE it.  I also love having a garage refrigerator, which is getting fairly full.

More of the kitchen:

Brother of Ken gave me a lot of herbs and spices from Penzeys for Christmas, so I had to reorganize the entire spice cabinet.  I love to do this kind of thing.  Baking spices are on the top, cooking herbs and spices are on the bottom, organized by jar size and then alphabetically.

The living room:

Moving on, Uncle of Ken's room, which is now home to my growing collection of vintage fashion accessories:

The Grandmothers' room (a.k.a. The Leah and M Suite):

My room:

And, finally, the built-in closet in the hallway, which I have posted about before.

Inside, it looks like this, which makes me extremely happy:

I love to have everything this organized and neat.  This cabinet allows me to do this with all of my linen and I can open the doors and look at it anytime I want to do so.  I think that part of the reason I am so obsessed with this cabinet is that it is one small corner of my world that is fully under control right now.

Anyway, that's all for now, but I promise to be more regular about posting than I have been.  I love my new job, I love my new house, I'm getting settled in, but I have an ever-increasing amount of work to complete.  Family of Ken had a very nice Christmas, which included a week long vacation to Charlotte, North Carolina and a visit to Biltmore Estate in Asheville.  We had a great time, laughed a lot, enjoyed good food and good drink, and, most importantly, got away from our daily lives for a while.

Kenna and I hope that you all had happy holidays!