Bon jour Miss Fifi!

I'm sharing this sweet little ceramic poodle at Vintage Thingy Thursday. Hope you will check out ColoradoLady's link party and enjoy all the wonderful treasures!

When my daughter (who's now 18) was in elementary school, she took notice of the fact that my husband collected orphaned hubcaps and wheel covers that he'd find in the ditches of the gravel road near our house. So when she'd walk home from school along that road, she'd occasionally pick something out of the ditch and bring it to him - bungee cords, nuts and bolts, anything that looked like it belonged in the garage.

One day she came home with this cute pink poodle, having plucked it from the ditch just a few yards from the driveway. I thought it was adorable, and definitely NOT for the garage! I did a little Googling and a little Ebay hunting, and learned that the unique texture on the legs and tail was simply known as "spaghetti." So it was a spaghetti poodle. I was frankly astounded that all the texture seemed to be intact.

I also discovered that there used to be a little gold chain extending from the collar down to a smaller puppy figure, which sadly was missing at this point.

Miss Fifi in her sassy little bonnet has been a resident of our display cabinet ever since.

More soon!

Home goals for 2012

Inspired by the challenge issued over at The Nesting Place to post about "home goals" for 2012, I thought I would put together a little list of the house-related projects I would like to accomplish this year. Make no mistake, there's plenty of room for improvement around the ranch (not a working ranch, mind you - just a good ol' 1950's ranch home)... but, these are the things I've been dreaming about for about 3 years.

1. Stepping up the cleaning efforts. My mother-in-law came over one day several years ago, looked around my kitchen and asked me, "What are you teaching your daughter about housecleaning?" And I laughed and said, "That it's best to have children so you can train them to do it!" Fortunately she quieted down after that, otherwise I might've had to put a mop in her hand. Seriously, I'm a horrible housekeeper. Even though I hate clutter, and I hate dog hair. I just hate housework a little bit more. So in 2012 I vow to try just a little bit harder. Believe me, there's nowhere to go on this one but up. (In my own defense, in the photo of the bathroom much of the mess was caused by the cat. I'm not kidding. He gets up on counters and knocks stuff off. On purpose. I'm getting just a little bit tired of picking up after him.)

2. Creating a workable basement laundry area. This project will involve scraping mold out of a cinderblock shower (which no one uses), removing a metal cabinet base and homebuilt shelf, and some general clean-up, then creating an attractive sorting and folding station that a person would actually want to work in.

3. Closets. Four of them, one in the hallway and one in each bedroom. Contents need to be sorted/purged, and then hardware needs to be replaced that's been missing since 2008.

4. Master bedroom. Just clean it, and change the sheets more often.

5. The porch. Nice little screened-in porch just off the kitchen... just clean it up, replace the cushions on the glider, and paint it some kind of really hot tangerine color so it feels Caribbean and looks like a tequila sunrise. Hang white Christmas lights around the ceiling. :)

6. All of these are infinitely do-able. But, as they say in sales, you've got to have a stretch goal - something that's probably not going to happen, but wouldn't it be fan-freakin'-tastic if it did. So my 2012 stretch goal is (drum roll): re-do the kitchen! Not talking thousands of dollars... just paint the cabinetry, fix the soft spot in the floor under the dishwasher, replace the flooring, and replace the Jurassic-era microwave and cooktop.

So there we have it - home goals for 2012! Hoping to have some progress to report soon!