Some things started, some things finished...

As the snow piles up deeper and deeper I spend more time thinking and planning for spring and summer. Its my sanity preserver I guess, I've never been a winter person and this is just too much winter.

This porcupine looking wooden gadget was the result of a pleasant day's puttering in the workshop whilst hiding from the latest blizzard. It's a bunch of quarter inch dowels cut an inch long and glued into a scrap of plywood made the right size for a standard bedding plant tray. One quick press and voila! Little holes evenly spaced an inch apart in the potting soil, awaiting seeds to be dropped in. It saves an endless amount of time and the seedlings come up looking ever so neat and precisely laid out.
 Another project out of the way is the painting I began before the last blog post. I wish I was not such a procrastinator, the trouble is it's easier to go up to the studio and cut mats for next summer which requires no
thinking, than it is to work through all the planning that goes into each stage of a watercolor. Maybe that's laziness plus procrastination.

One of the considerations we've been turning over this winter is the fact that we're not getting any younger and by the end of the last two summers we've been completely worn out with 7 days a week of non stop work. Something has to give. And we've decided that after 10 years of running our B&B that's enough of that. I feel positively euphoric at the idea of no more extra cooking, cleaning, laundry, bedmaking, staying up past bedtime waiting for latecomers, and  and having to get up way too early  for earlybirds. The thing I will miss the most tho, is meeting wonderful people from all over the world. The adventurers who show up with their worn copy of "The Lonely Planet Guide" in hand, the art buyer from the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art who gave me amazing insights into my favorite painting, Rosa Bonheur's "The Horse Fair", but most of all the children.

The little horse lovers, the bold ones, the shy ones, the ones who let me read them bedtime stories and begged for "just one more". The families who came back year after year..how many times have I said to gangly kids on the doorstep "Oh look how you've grown!" And the special moments I've been priveledged to peek in on...sending a child into the henhouse with a basket and watching the delight spread over her face as she spots the eggs. I guess they will still drop by, but it's a little sad that the sleepover is over.