I've been a bad blogger

No, really, I have. My re-found love of my kindle has kept me reading for days...

And lately, I've been reading Joanne Fluke's Hannah Swensen Mysteries. If you like murder mysteries and an easy read, they might be for you... The main character is a baker (and I'm realizing how lame and ridiculous it seems as I type it) and the author lists recipes in the book, much like the Leslie Meier Lucy Stone Series, if you've read those.

So I've been baking. I made an awesome batch of peanut butter cookies from my favorite cookbook:

And they were gone so quickly, I never had a chance to take a picture.

So, I decided to make my FAVORITE cookies in the whole wide world: ginger molasses cookies.

I was so excited to finally have the ingredients and the bf wanted to help. Somehow, I got distracted... It happens to me a lot when I'm baking. My mom can attest to my many baking fails growing up. But I'd been on such a roll and I don't think I'd messed anything up in at least a year.

But, I only added half the flour needed.

So they looked less like this:

Courtesy of my mom @ Red Gate Farm

And more like this:

They taste fine, but they aren't the cookies I grew up eating.

I think I'll have to give it another go today.

On a better note, the table is DONE!

It looks quite different in different light, so I did one photo with and one without flash:

With flash

Without flash

With Miss Freyja playing fetch in the background

I love the new chairs. Not only are they much more comfortable than the old ones, but I don't feel like my chin is on the table when I'm eating.

And the chairs still need some work done...

Sorry it's so blurry; my camera didn't want to focus (and you can see we really do live in a basement!). But some of the joints need to be re-glued....

And I'd like to recover and re-pad the seats... Maybe something from tonicliving.com?

I haven't decided anything on that front yet.

Freyja seems to feel right at home at the table....

Maybe the salt and pepper shakers are at fault?

And an EVEN BETTER note, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 came out on blu-ray yesterday, so we picked it up at Costco.

For those of you who don't know, I'm a big Harry Potter nerd. 

Lucky for me, it's stormy outside. I'll be on the couch in my sweats for the next few hours dorking out to my favorite guilty pleasure if you need me :)

New dining set!

I've been spending a lot of time on craigslist/kijiji looking at new dining room tables and chairs. What we have now is fine:

Yep, that's a dog on the table.

But it's not something I want to have forever. So I found a set I liked and we drove an hour to get it.

That wouldn't be that big of a deal if we had a truck, but we drove home like this:

It's a good thing the bf and I have experience tying down sailboats, or this could have been a complete disaster...

We unpacked everything out of the car and here's what we came home with:

A dining room table w/ leaf

4 chairs

A hutch

Unfortunately, the table got a little damaged in the move... We were planning on refinishing the whole set anyway, so it's happening sooner rather than later.

We're not sure when the furniture is from, exactly (we think the 50's), but it all has these cool old tags still on it. I'm going to have to  do a little research on this, I think.

And we don't have room for the hutch downstairs... so we're leaving it upstairs for now until we're in a place that has more room... It will be replacing the rickety old bookshelf.

We started the refinishing work this weekend, starting with the leaf in case we seriously messed something up. And let me tell you, it was a lot of work. Whatever they used to seal tables when this was made, it works.

The leaf, after one coat

The bf hard at work

Still sanding, 45 minutes later

Even I did some of the work...

And after an hour and a half of sanding... We were finally done.

It's still a little wet here, but you get the effect. I'm just hoping we get some nicer days so we can get this table inside and use it!

And Freyja? She wasn't much help at all. 

She played fetch for about an hour...

And then decided it was nap time.

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