March Snow and New Additions

Strange combination of things to blog - eh? Well, it's what's going on right now.

Last week we had quite a few snowfalls, I think I ended up with a total of about 6 inches that landed on my property. Nothing record-breaking, but noteworthy nonetheless. The crocuses are coming up through the last thin remnant of snow that still has yet to melt. Today it got warm and toasty in the sun, warm enough for my cat to sunbathe. Warm enough that Dane came home and put on shorts. But the snow is still covering my back-back yard because the sun hasn't hit it yet. And if it exists in the shade that means - it's still COLD out of the sun.

It reminds me of a hike my family and a couple friends went on years back. It must have been about this time of year. We were hiking to a lake in the Snoqualmie Pass area so the girls wore bathing suits under their clothes. When we finally started losing the trail and decided to stop and eat before returning to the car the girls picked some nice large boulders in the sun and sunbathed - we never got to the lake. But the boys in the meantime were having snowball fights. In between the boulders and anywhere where the sun hadn't hit yet there was snow, perfect for packing.

On to the second topic - new additions. I've been searching for years for the perfect addition to my household, something needed replacing and I had a certain type in mind - a stove. When we bought this house it had the original stove in it and needed replacing. I think within the first year we found a replacement from the throwaways of a person remodeling his house. So we got a stove almost identical to the one we were replacing. It worked better but was just as old so it didn't have a lot of life in it. Like I said, I've needed to replace it for years. But I had something specific in mind - a white slide in or drop in with a WHITE ceramic/glass top. Very hard to find. I found one on Craigslist a couple weeks ago in a listing regarding emptying out a storage unit so the sellers could move back to New Zealand. They had been living in Bellevue which meant that they had high quality stuff. I called and left a message for the guy to give me a price for the stove and he called me from NZ to tell me that it was on Ebay. So I found it on Ebay and ended up being the only bidder on it! I got it for the opening bid of $245! Killer deal! It's a Maytag, only a couple years old and I've seen it listed for anywhere from $1200 to $1500.

So, since Rick and I kind of agreed that he could do the bulk of the cooking once he lives here - you could say he just got a new stove. He got me a beautiful ring, I got him a beautiful stove.