Opinion: Comforts of Home inspires spring fever

Adding to my spring fever is this week’s In Focus topic. Comforts of Home: Lawn and Leisure is a new focus for us, and we’re pretty excited about how it turned out. While SBJ covers real estate, remodeling and other issues related to people’s homes, we wanted to do something different – something that would provide us with the opportunity to dig in, if you’ll pardon the pun, to all things lawn, garden and leisure. You know, the sorts of amenities and activities that make home feel more like, well, home.

If you haven’t yet begun to think of springtime and getting outdoors, it’s a pretty safe bet that you will be after reading this issue.

Meanwhile, while I’m holding off on buying my gardening choices for spring planting – I’m excited to try some Knockout roses, which according to columnist Frank Shipe, are “indestructible” – I’ve decided that now is the perfect time for some sprucing up indoors.

Enter “the yellow submarine,” which is what I like to call the big yellow dumpster that’s sitting in my driveway at the moment. It’s a whopper, and we’ve rented it for a couple of weeks so that we can fill it up with whatever we choose to get rid of. The dumpster, or roll-off cart, will hold two tons. It’s getting pretty full, but if we actually manage to unload two tons of refuse, I’m going to be embarrassed!

But boy, we have a lot of stuff that needs to go – not limited to but including broken toys, furniture that’s outlived its usefulness, and all sorts of miscellaneous stuff in boxes that we still haven’t unpacked after moving into the house three years ago. It’s a bit ridiculous that even after we donate clothes to the church mission house, and odds and ends to the church garage sale, we still needed the yellow submarine to cull out the rest.

Once Project Throwaway is finished, I want to paint the walls, rearrange the furniture, hang up some Home Interiors wares that I bought more than a year ago (but still haven’t removed from the packaging) and look at options for redoing the kitchen floor. But we have so much stuff that I can’t concentrate on all that until the house is cleared out.

The neat thing is that I am having fun fixing up the house, and by the time spring gets here, I can focus on growing things, or at least trying to do so.

Old Man Winter: Bring it on!

Health update

I’m scheduled to meet with my exercise physiologist in the next week or so, and I hope to see some improvement in the form of a lower number on the scale. I’m still not as consistent with my exercise as I should be, but I’m still hanging in there. I’m also trying to quit smoking, which hasn’t really helped much in terms of eating less.

Some people say that the idea that quitting smoking makes you eat more is a myth, but I don’t necessarily agree with that. I hope to be able to start some weight training this month in combination with my use of the treadmill, which isn’t so bad. I’ve found that I can actually stay upright on the treadmill and read, so it makes it a more pleasant experience.

Maria Hoover is SBJ In Focus editor.[[In-content Ad]]