Last Weeks of Summer

Three weeks from today, my onground classes start at Spartanburg Methodist College; it will be both similar and different for me.  It will be my 3rd year of full-time work at the college, after 1 year of adjunct work, but the beginning of the tenure track for me.  I'll write more about that in a few weeks.  

I wish I could say that our plans to be in our fixer-upper house in Spartanburg are on schedule, but they are not.  I will make a few phone calls today and hope to figure out where we are.  We've been having electrical work done and HVAC work done, and from what I can see, we're close to having final inspections done, but those haven't been scheduled yet.  

Once those final inspections happen, we'll paint and redo the hardwood floors.  We're holding off on the kitchen remodel until next summer, mainly so that we don't sink all our liquid cash into a not-liquid asset, our house.   The kitchen that is there is workable, though far from ideal.  We've had worse, but we are now used to having better (like a dishwasher).

Today I will also go to Hendersonville, where my favorite quilt/fabric store, Beginnings, is having a 90th birthday party for famous quilter Georgia Bonesteel.  Her books on lap quilting were some of the earliest on quilting that I read.  Those books in the 1980's had a plan for how one could quilt in smaller pieces and then join the pieces together into a bed-sized quilt.  

I've spent the summer making a quilt in my old-fashioned way, hand stitching much smaller scraps into what I hope will become a beautiful quilt.  

I do a lot of this work while my spouse is watching T.V.  This week we've both been enjoying Clarkson's Farm, which is a good reminder of why farming is so difficult, even when one is a TV figure with other income streams that are significant.  Jeremy Clarkson has lost several small fortunes in these seasons of doing farming.  He can afford it.  It's a very funny show, if one ignores the sobering reality of farming in a world where the climate has changed dramatically.

I'm hoping to have a quilt top ready for Quilt Camp in late August.  I want to create a quilt for our new bed that I hope we will have in the house by late August or early September.  In some ways, each time I pick up my needle and thread, I feel like I'm doing some version of "manifesting."  

It also reminds me of my garage sale rambling as a child, where I would pick up things like napkins and dishes and think of the hope chests that I read about in books about pilgrims and prairies.  In my darker moods, I find myself thinking that I'm doing the enjoyable work while trying to ignore the harder, sweatier work that needs to be done to make the house habitable--or even avoid phone calls to contractors.

Happily, our time line is our own.  I've been commuting every week day to Spartanburg, and I can keep doing that.  So far, the costs that come with an additional house have been manageable.  And I much prefer to spend summer in the mountains, instead of doing home renovation work in the Upstate (SC) heat and moving in August.