Recent weekends

I'm not someone who often sits still.  My hands like to be doing something, even if it's just holding a book so my mind can do most of the work :)  As such, I usually have a project or two planned for the weekends - here's what I've been up to for the last two weekends while Jordan was at work.

Fixing

I have a friend/coworker who is an electrician (with two bachelor's degrees, and a master's degree, and she's worked a bunch of different jobs, I keep saying to her, "I would honestly not be surprised if you started telling me about that time you walked on the moon!") and she's pretty darn awesome.  I asked her very nicely if she would come out and take a look at the wiring in the house, as the house inspector had a few concerns.  She agreed, and one Saturday we spent 2 hours properly re-identifying the breakers.  When we moved in, the breaker list was a disaster:

You can see that stuff has been crossed off, written over, written upside down, changed.... and there were a few troubling blank spots.  It was also 'mirrored' - the left side of the list was the right side of the breaker box.  So very confusing!

It was two hours of *click* "Okay, which lights are still on?" as my friend turned off breakers and I flipped switches, plugged the radio into various sockets, and felt radiators for heat.  When we were done, the new breaker list looked like this:

Renumbered and properly labelled

We still have one mystery breaker, and Jordan and I will hunt around to determine where that one goes this weekend.  And we were able to identify one breaker which had three baseboard heaters on it, which was the inspector's concern.  We'll have to try and deal with that in the spring.

My friend also put merrets on some loose wires we had in the shop and the longhouse, ensuring that we won't electrocute ourselves - not on those wires, anyway!

Crafting
Nicola and her friend Deja invited a bunch of women over to the Rescue for an evening of wine, food, and wreath making.  After having some great food, much of it supplied by Deja, she led us through making wreaths with nothing but a clothes hanger, paper, tape, wire, and pine and spruce boughs.  Then we got to decorate them!  Deja and some of the other ladies had brought assorted Christmas decorations, and we got to work with the wire and glue guns to pretty them up :)

Giant wreath and modest wreath.  Same size hangers underneath them, I promise!

It was great fun, and I got to hang out with some awesome ladies :)

Baking
This past weekend, I decided to do some baking to try and use up an overabundance of eggs.  I spent 4 or 5 hours on Saturday afternoon whipping up goodies to keep my sugar tooth satisfied until Christmas break.  There was no yeast involved in any of these, and everything except for the pie shells and tarts is found in the Company's Coming Muffins and More cookbook.

From back to front: Left row: 1 regular loaf of cinnamon-topped bread, 2 small loaves of orange cranberry bread, 1 dozen easy cinnamon buns, and one dozen coffee cake muffins.  Right row: 2 pie crusts and enough dough for 4 more crusts, 8 mincemeat tarts (homemade shells but store bought filling), and 2 small loaves of lemon bread.

Most of this went in to the freezer so it can be easily defrosted and devoured :)  The two pie shells are in the oven right this moment to provide us with quiche: one to eat, and one to freeze.  Easy peasy!

This coming weekend, I hope to bring in the bookshelves and unpack our books (as there's been too much to do outside to worry about it until now) and hopefully identify that mystery breaker.  I also have a few weatherproofing projects in mind, one for the house and one for the pumphouse.  Here's hoping those get done!

At the moment, we're also puppy sitting - Doodle has joined us again for a few days.  The pups are happy to see each other, and they have already greatly enjoyed running around outside.