Permission and Snow

Some people have made comments about having to log into my blog now, when previously they did not have to, so I thought I would explain why. I was reading a friend's (friend A) blog, and clicked on another blog link on the side of her blog, and one of her friends (friend B) had written this experience that one of her friends (friend C) had experienced, and it made her scared.

Friend C had written her daily activities with her two kids and what they do everyday as a family, and one day she was at the park with her kids. A guy she didn't know approached her and asked her if she was _(name)_____ and she said she was. He verified her kids names, and she asked him if he worked with her husband or knew her husband somehow. He said he didn't, that he had just read her blogs and knew that Thursdays was the day she went to the park near her home. It kind of scared her. She had never posted specifics regarding her address or specifically what street she lived on, but by posting her daily activities that she did with her kids, she had given enough information that he knew all about her.

After reading that, I knew that we should try to make our blogs private. Yes, I want people that I know to read what I have been doing, but I want to be able to control it as well. In order to make your blog private, go to Settings, then click on Permissions. It will ask you to enter all the email addresses of your friends and family who you want to invite to read your blog. They will then have to sign in, choose a name to leave comments with, and in the future they will have to log in to view it. Even though this might seem like a pain, I feel more secure knowing that only those that I have invited and accepted my invitation are reading my blog. I can go and add more people anytime too! It's great.

We woke up this morning to inches of fresh powdery snow. It's a pain to shovel, but so beautiful when it comes down. I don't know when it started snowing, but this morning I shoveled about 6 inches off our walks (Corey had to go to work early) and it is still coming down. I shoveled at about 7:30, and it is now 9, with more than an inch covering the walks again. I am glad that I didn't have to drive to Logan today, but hope it is finished before tomorrow morning!! I want to be safe and alive at least until I graduate. Maybe I will post pictures, but that means I will have to go outside to take more and get cold. Oh well.

Charles is coming today, and I am excited! That means I get Little Buddy all to myself, no sharing (because his parents always get him to themselves, and the last time I saw him he was favored by other aunts). Well, not that I want to, but I need to do some homework. Last semester; I can handle it!

Doggies and Catties

I was going through some of our pictures, and found some cute old pictures of our zoo, and then added some new ones. Bailey is such a daddy's girl, she follows Corey everywhere possible when he's home. Not one to be left out, Bo is not far behind her. They sure keep us laughing and smiling.



The picture on the left is from the summer when we got a load of mulch. Corey was spreading it out, and the dogs were helping him. They were concerned that there were too many big pieces of wood, so they sorted through it and eliminated the larger pieces. The picture on the right is more recent. We have a large kennel for the doggies to sleep in, and Bailey decided to make a penthouse. The ground floor was not good enough for her, so she sleeps on top during the day. Sometimes at night when we tell them to go to their crate, she tries to jump up on top for the night. We laugh and then get her down and put her into the crate. Bo can't jump up on top, so he just waits for her or watches her enviously. It's quite funny.


The cats don't like getting their picture taken often, so I don't have any recent pictures. The picture below is shortly after we got Lily, and the two cats are getting to know each other. They loved Heidi's chair, and are sad that Corey and I haven't gotten them one. They lay around the house out of the way of the dogs, usually hiding in our bedroom as the dogs are not allowed there. They used to be spoiled, but because the dogs take up so much of our time, they get little attention. Maybe they don't notice.

After pictures!

Here is the long-awaited after pictures. We only had one angle from the before shot, but the room has so many more uses and looks so much better we had to show it from more than one angle!












The second image is of the closet. We used this temporary storage so that later when the room needs to be used as a bedroom, we can take down some of the shelves and put up the hanging rod. We will finish the trim when we do the trim throughout the rest of the house, and we need to trim the bottom of the closet door before we install that, but we aren't too worried about that yet. For now, we are calling it finished!




On a side note, we finished framing in one of our living rooms today. Mom and Dad Bowman came and helped us, or we wouldn't have as much to brag about. We owe them so much time! The living room we framed in is harder than the other one, because we added a closet, and that had many small walls to frame in, where the other living room has the ceiling and then only a few other small spaces. It is really coming together quickly now and we are quite pleased and proud of ourselves. Thanks for everyone's help! We can't do it alone.

Update on House

We have been working hard on finishing a room, and we are nearly done with it. I will post an after picture later, after I describe the before picture posted below!


This lovely image is of the attic bedroom. It had beautiful wall paper on much of the surfaces and lovely carpet on the painted wood floor. Some of the wall paper decided it didn't like the original color it came in, and so was trying to gradually change into a more reddish color. There was a closet in the room, but we did not get a good picture. The closet was built into the eaves, so it didn't take up any extra floor space than what you are seeing here.

Here is what we did. We tore down all the surfaces of the walls and ceilings. It is the old kind of drywall, and we wanted more height, so we took it all down. We took the entire room down to the studs and the floor planks. Part of the problem with this room was that the staircase was too steep, and when we re-built it, we had to cut more of the floor of this room out. We also wanted to change the location of the closet, so we decided to put the closet over the new staircase ceiling, hiding the angled floor. I hope that all made sense, but I promise, pictures are soon to follow. In addition, there was a hallway leading to the bedroom, so we decided to move the bedroom door back into the hallway, creating a little more space in the bedroom. After all was framed, we added many electrical outlets, two light fixtures, a smoke alarm, and drywalled it. We then did the mudding and taping ourselves (hard, but we did an awesome job!) and painted it a lovely shade of brown, with white on the ceiling and gray on the floor.

The room will be used as a clean studio (the dirty one is outside in a building next to the garage) an office, and a craft room. We bought a metal desk for really cheap at CompUSA, and put the drafting table in for additional work surface. The closet will be used for office supply storage until later. To get access to the eaves storage, we put in two doors, one on each side of the room.

We didn't replace the window yet, but we will when we do many others later on. Overall, it has kept us busy!

Italy day Five: Villa Garzoni in Collodi

Collodi was the next day on our wonderful excursion through Italy. The author of Pinocchio used the town's name as his penname. The villa is not inside the garden, but adjacent to it. While we were there, they were once again in the renovating phase of some parts of it. There also used to be tall and thick foliage surrounding the walls, really cooling the main area down, but these have been removed.




This image was taken by Peter, one of the professors on the trip, and it is a picture of what the villa and garden used to be like.

This is what it looks like now. This image was also taken by Peter (I didn't get one as beautiful!) and shows a great view of most of the garden. These pools alternate shooting the water from the center, and ducks and swans swim in both. It was beautiful.

This is a close-up of the central element in the garden. The staircases are beautiful. Decorating the walls and some of the walks (usually on the stairs and the landings of each terrace) were different colored rocks. These are original from when it was constructed, and luckily they have been maintained well to survive so long.

This is a close-up of the topiaries that fill the main lower level of the garden. There were many different shapes throughout the space.

Some of the brilliant color that decorates the garden. It is made up of different colored glass, therefore was not a place for people to walk on. In the previous picture, this is seen in the background of the topiaries and greenery patterns. Another exact decoration is on the other side of the main walk.

I took this picture to go along with the following two images. The staircase in the center of the garden has four levels, from the bottom of the stairs to the top. This level is the second level, and has a grotto that is under the staircase leading up to the third level (go back a few pictures to get a better visual).

A view of the second level from the center of the staircase. I was amazed that palm trees grow in Italy so well.

Brett, deciding whether to go into the grotto or not. We had already been inside the grotto once, and many of us were gathered at the entrance of the garden sketching and writing in our journals, when another student, Karin, came up and said that she had gotten wet inside the grotto. She thought that when she stepped in a certain way that she caused water to squirt up from small holes in the floor, and she got wet. Our professor, Elizabeth, and another student went up to investigate the grotto some more. They discovered that there were two valves that when turned, squirted water from two different places in the grotto. We decided to play a trick on her husband, Peter, and we all went to the cave. It didn't work because he got suspicious, but we had fun trying anyway. It was refreshing to get wet ourselves too!

Further on at the top of the stairs was another terrace that led higher. These steps were old and in the center were fountains of water.

The fountains at the top of the entire garden. There was a pool also, but it was green and interesting.

Looking down the fountains. It was a great view!

At the very top was a path that led towards the villa. We couldn't go into the villa, but the path led us through some interesting greenery. This is bamboo. We learned that an ancient way of torture was to strap someone down to the ground. Once the person was tied to the ground, the torturors would then take their hands and feet and tie them over a piece of growing bamboo, which would grow through them as it grew. I don't think the Italians practiced that form of torture, so I felt safe! At the end of this path was another staircase, and at the top of that was a maze. I took a picture, but it didn't turn out enough to tell what it was, so I will not post it. Mom would have enjoyed it and stayed there the whole time.

This is a theater that they would use to put on plays. Each statue was placed at the end of greenery that acted like curtains, creating different wings on each side.

Another image by Peter. This is looking back at the villa after leaving the theater area.

A view looking down at much of the rest of the garden from the theater area.

Looking straight down the terrace after leaving the theater. Many of these small trees were orange trees, but they weren't good for eating. A student who used to live in California called them sour orange trees. Peter tried one, it was sour.

Many of these gardens are not used in exactly the same way as when they were first constructed. In this garden, we found that they had started building many small structures or just enclosed spaces that housed different animals, usually birds. This image is of a bird and butterfly house. It was so humid in there, but was still cooler than outside.

A close-up of a beautiful butterfly or moth, and some flowers. Ironically, when I was going through Peter's pictures, he has one of the exact same flowers and butterfly, with its wings further open. I decided mine was good enough to post.

New House Pictures and Icicles

For the Christmas season, we have been trying hard to make more progress on our house. We have been framing and drywalling in the attic room, and that will be done (including paint) on Monday, the 7th of Jan! The hope is to create a clean and quiet environment for me to study in my last semester of school. I will post pictures when the blessed event occurs, but in the meantime, we have a new front door.

It is not completely framed in, but still works and is definitely more secure than the previous door. We don't know if it will always be white, but for now it is, and we are quite pleased with it.




These icicles have been hanging from our roof for weeks now, and just keep getting longer. The sidewalk under them is always an ice skating rink, so many times when I walk here, I look down and then knock the bottom off many of the icicles on my way by. I took this picture this morning, and already, they are gone. The sun is out and the day is looking to be fairly warm compared to the past few single-digit temperature days, but only in preparation for this next huge storm coming our way. We'll see what happens.