After these many months of denial that my husband has been publishing a not-yet-professional website, I have come to the conclusion that it is important to relate a few other things that have been happening around here with a new perspective. Therefore, here is my first installation as the second voice in this chaotic, messy, extraordinarily unboring life that we are living.
In the beginning, it seemed pretty straightforward: add a few bedrooms and bathrooms, renovate the existing ones, add an inn-sized kitchen and a pool. Months later, there is nary a wall standing, whole floors are gone, new old stone walls have been built outside and well, basically we have turned this place into an unrecognizable shell of what was, but hopefully will again be, a grand old dame of a place. Still, in all of this destruction, I have come to love it even more than I did when I first saw it. What began as a search for something I couldn’t quite put my finger on has become the realization of dreams I wasn’t aware I had, and that makes the craziness of it all bearable.
As the rest of the country is enjoying perhaps a hint of the spring that is just ahead, we here have solid sheets of thick ice and still a blanket of hard snow covering most everything and today the high is slated to be 20 degrees but won’t get there. Still, there is beauty to be found. And find it I will, as we now have a puppy to walk.
Mona entered our world three weeks ago, and lest you think we have enough on our plate without heaping a new pup on top of it all, she has in fact made me smile more in these weeks than I have in months and everyone here has fallen hard for her. Mona and I already have our trainer, so when we finally do open this inn, she will be perfectly lovely, instead of just lovely to me.
My daily bread is out of the oven and thumbprint cookies filled with a ginger-raspberry jam from the summer are baking for the crew. It’s been a long while since I have posted anything on our Instagram feed, and if you could see where we are living, you’d understand. But it’s important to me that this crew gets a little something every day that says thank you for putting in the hard yards and it’s important to this crew that I keep busy doing what is driving me to live this life. It also keeps me out of their hair.
This week was a big one for me. The bread oven is taking shape, brick by brick, and the kitchen bump out has finally happened. The space where I will be spending all of my time can now take shape. The appliances have been ordered, and cabinet building is underway. There’s a new energy here- quite literally, as the geothermal wells have been drilled and the solar field has been prepped- and there is the sense that Things Are Happening. Finally.
Charles and I leave tomorrow for Albuquerque to attend our first innkeeper’s conference. There, we will meet the team behind our reservations systems, the marketing team and hopefully a few other people who have also chosen this alternative career path. Perhaps most importantly we will meet our professional website designers, who will take what my husband started and make it official. Maybe making it official will convince me that we are actually doing this thing because up until now there’s been a bit of a fantasyland aspect to it all. As I said when I first started writing this, my first ever blog, after months of denial….