all the things, pumpkins, cleaning, a painting

 

This is a painting I did of the road where we live.  I've finally found a frame (at a thrift store) and hung it in the hallway.  I painted it last year.

I'm still cleaning the house.  When I get on a jag it's best to just keep going until I'm satisfied.  Esme says I've cleaned out all the 'smell of home'... Mark says when I stop I'll fall over probably.  I'm cooking a pizza now so the home smell comes back.  I probably will fall over later tonight and it will be 'okay' that I do.

I'm also starting to learn hiragana Japanese again.  I had a dream the other night that someone was speaking to me in a restaurant in Japanese and I couldn't respond.  I didn't want to have bad manners, but I didn't understand them.  So, I started on a little Duolingo Japanese and it's not hard.  The phonetic letters look a lot like something I designed for my diary when I was a little kid... especially the 'fu', 'bu', 'pu' differences... odd.

Our pumpkins are starting to ripen.  Some of these are 20 lbs or more!

 Old family photos I had printed in Fargo a long time ago.  I had found the negatives in a desk of my mother's and she didn't have any prints - so I printed it up and framed it for her and kept a few prints in my own photo album in their envelopes.  It was a happy surprise as I didn't remember I had them.  I also found some pictures of my wedding dress from 2002... which I got to show Esme.  That was something I was regretting when I thought I had gotten rid of all of those pictures.

 

These pictures show my mother and her family, circa 1951.  The big guy in the pictures is her father, Floyd Warren Hulrbut.  and Grandma shows up in the top picture, Vera Irene (Lipe) Hurlbut.  The  children are from left to right, Joanne (Doyle) Hinton, James Doyle, Josephine Hurlbut and Gerald (Jerry) Doyle.  Jerry, Joanne and Jim were all from Grandma's first marriage.  Jospeh and Jeanne had not yet been born.  My mother is running away from her big brother in the top picture with a ball... I think she is about 2 or 3, which is why I am dating it about that time.