Winter is coming

So, the new house is open-ish, where the old house had been a series of closed rooms off of a central hallway.  In the old house, during the winter, you would walk into the kitchen, onto the nice vinyl floor, take off your boots and put on the nice warm slippers you may have actually remembered to leave against your return by the kitchen table.  It was a biggish kitchen, and there was room enough to accommodate these necessary seasonal arrangements.

One enters the new house into a teensy-tiny space with white ceramic tile on the floor, closet directly in front of you, galley kitchen to the right, living room to the left.  You might, I suppose, stand there on the cold slippery tiles and dispose of your boots, balancing on one leg at a time and trying not to put your sock-foot into an icy puddle. . .but then there’s the problem of where to put the derned things, the living room having a wood floor.  Boot tray, I guess, except…

The living room in this, the new house, is quite spacious, and we’re only using about the inner two-thirds of it.  The front third, frankly, is a mess.  It’s the first thing you see when you come into the house, and it’s kind of become a holding area for cat pillows, and things that have to be moved out to the garage, and a table that I thought would be useful as a reading table, so Steve and I could wean ourselves from sitting at the kitchen table all night, but it turns out that idea doesn’t really work. . .

Anyhow, I was looking at all that yesterday, trying to figure out how to make it more seemly  (and, yes, thinking in terms of more! book shelves! as one does) when I remembered these facts:

Winter is coming.

We will need somewhere to put on, take off, and store boots.

So, the use for the front third of the living room has been identified.  A mudroom storage bench can go into the space under the windows, so we can sit down to put boots on and off.  Boot trays are easy.  The wooden floor. . . well.

It would be best, if we could just extend the foyer tile into that section, but that’s not happening before winter, or possibly at all.  So, next best is a waterproof rug.

Well.  Things to shop for.  I needed that.

In other news, “The Vestals of Midnight,” an Archers Beach story by Sharon Lee, has been turned in to editor Michael Ventrella for the Release the Virgins! anthology.  I think that’s the last of the short stories I was committed to writing off my plate.  Not that there won’t be other short stories, but there are presently none spoken for, with, like, a deadline attached.

This means that I can put all of my attention on Accepting the Lance — except for the shopping, that is.

Hope everyone is having a pleasant start to the week.