JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

I have been absent from TT for a while due to all sorts of reasons. Chief amongst these was our move from the UK back to the US.

Having had our year in London doing the big-city thing, we are now comfortably ensconced in a nice old house in the Southern US, renovating and repairing.

So here, since my last TT post, are thirteen things I have been doing:

1. Sold everything we owned in England: Let’s hope this whole sell everything move to another continent thing is not going to become a yearly tradition…
2. Moved back to the States: For good? For now.
3. Moved into a 100+ year old house: Through the magic of Southern familial attraction there are three generations of my family living here.
4. Rebuilt a front porch: What is a Southern house without a porch? A Northern house, that’s what it is, and I simply won’t have that.
5. Replaced rotten windows: Who builds exterior windows with flat sills?
6. Gutted and rebuilt a bathroom: Damaged by above windows.
7. Bucked, split & stacked 3.5 cords of firewood: All deadfall, by the way.
8. Refinished heart pine floors: I will never understand carpet, or the urge to cover beautiful wood floors with it.
9. Hauled almost 2,000 lbs of trash to the dump: Did I mention that I had been busy?
10. Cut down 120 cubic yards of brush: Drought or no drought, the trick in the South is not getting things to grow, but getting the right things to grow…
11. Begun building a library: Carpentry + library sales = I think my book problem might be returning…
12. Reading Marcel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past: Seven volumes on the notion of involuntary memory in the form of a semi-autobiographical novel.
13. Enjoying the NHL season: Now that I am on the right continent for it.