Another week!

Well, here it is, Saturday night. Another week has flown by. And a full week it was - but then, which ones are not? My work on projects around the house was interrupted again and again, but I did get some things accomplished. Two things, really - building shelves and painting a window. About three years ago I reorganized the front entry way and took out some shelving to make room for a wood rack for the wood stove. The dismantled shelves have been sitting around all this time, waiting to be re-assembled. Finally did it! It involved first clearing out the corner behind the front door where I wanted to put the shelves. Sweeping, vacuuming and then scrubbing everything - floor, walls and ceiling. Then, painting the area where the shelves would be going, and also cleaning and staining the pieces of wood that constituted the shelves - 30 separate pieces in all. And finally, re-assembling the shelves in their new location, this time with screws (the original shelves had been built with nails). This took several days, though I only worked an hour or two or three each day. Here is a bit of a before and after (I didn't get a photo of the way the corner looked before I cleared stuff out of the way).

This is the corner after I cleaned it. I had started painting but hadn't finished

After painting

The new shelves

 I still need to finish painting the entry way, but that will have to wait. I'm happy just to have the shelves.

The other project  - painting a window, I'll wait to describe until I have a picture of the window. I forgot to take a "before" photo, but can get one of the completed job.

This was also a week of preparation for a memorial service for my friend of 50+ years,  Betty Greenhoe. She is the mother of Eliza Bergh, who has become a very good friend of Ellen's. Betty was 91, and a very gifted theater director. My son, John, worked with her in theater when he was about age 11 to age 16 or so - 1972 to 1977. Betty was a very wise woman, and we miss her. Her memorial service was today, in the Dummerston Church. I helped assemble a choir of 20 singers, and gave an extended remembrance and appreciation of her life as part of the service. Her grave, and the grave of her husband, Joe, who was also a brilliant theater director at the old Windham College in Putney (they both went to Yale School of Drama), is just two lots down from Shirley and Betsey. I knew a lot of people would be gathering today for the committal, so I wanted Shirley's and Betsey's graves looking really nice, so I put some work into that this week. I have been wanting for some time to incorporate sea shells and stones and driftwood into the little garden in front of Shirley's headstone, so I did that. It looks nice I think, with some new mums.

Newly decorated

Together

Today after the committal of Betty's ashes