We really had no ultimate plans for our sun room other than taking advantage of the solar gain. Even before completely finishing it, it was functioning to provide just about all of our daytime heat this past winter.
We started thinking it would be a great place to sleep someone. Our friend Cybelle's visit from Brazil coincided with my dad's and so she has slept there on a borrowed air mattress. We shopped for a sofa bed while at the IKEA store in Denver. Now we have a sofa sleeper. We're ready for the kids to come visit with the twins now!
This sofa bed is easy to pull out, and even has storage for linens. The other red wall will have a table and chairs, so we can enjoy breakfast in the sunshine in the winter. Just need to exchange the table base.
The yucca flowers opened and it has gone to seed. I think it was more spectacular before the flowers actually opened. The seed pods look like green chiles to me! The evening primroses continue to bloom without any watering, and scorching winds. It's warmed to summer now, and we have fires in southern NM blowing smoke our way.
We made a trip to Colorado. It was an opportunity to take my dad to see his great-grandsons. I scheduled the trip to coincide with the itinerant Brazilian Consulate being in Denver. Fortunately I had submitted the correct, necessary paperwork so that I could get my American marriage certificate registered with the consulate, and finally get my passport in my married name. Just waiting for the passport in the mail now!
The itinerant consulate operated much the same as any other bureaucratic entity. There was a lot of confusion. A lot of waiting. We arrived there when they opened at 9 a.m. and left at 2 p.m., the first couple of hours waiting on the person that pulled my already prepared paperwork from a stack, and then moving on to waiting on the only person who was doing marriage and birth certificate registrations. There were a lot of cranky, tired children waiting in the all too small church as well. I was glad it was only Dale and I. I finished the pair of socks I've had on my needles since the beginning of the year, except for the seams with Kitchener stitches, which I did later. They haven't been washed yet!
The boys have grown and changed so much, walking and really understanding what you say to them. They still like my cooking, and were enjoying chicken soup with some creamed spinach.
We also took the opportunity to do some shopping for furniture at IKEA in Denver.
The sun room is finished except for a small table glitch. I picked up the wrong base, bar height instead of table height, and we need to exchange it.
When we finished the exterior building of the sun room, Dale laid some flat stones in the roof drip line to prevent splashing in the dirt and mucking up the walls. It was temporary at best. With my dad visiting and redoing the stones at the exterior of our front door, I finally got busy and cleaned up the area in front of the sun room.
