Christmas Roses, you've met them before...

My lovely birthday bouquet is now down to the roses, so I've incorporated them into a group of houseplants I'm rooting in water, and they're now Christmas roses.  This is in fact my favorite stage of roses: when the petals square off and curl over,beautiful geometry.  They have a fruity smell, and now you can detect it better because the lilies are over. 

The other plants are philodendron, cuttings from friend, sansevieria, cuttings from friend, begonia, cuttings swiped from friend unknown to her, spider plant, great-great grandchild of an ancient plant who has propagated so many times I don't remember its origin.

I'm getting ready for a Big Thing Upstairs, new flooring.  Longtime blogistas will remember voting when I got samples of the downstairs laminate and showed you.  We ended up with Flare Cherry, which looks wonderful, and still like new, so I think I'll repeat the theme in the two bedrooms.  I won't put you through another contest!  but it's high time the ancient wall to wall put in by the builders, and the survivor of many animals, was retired and replaced.  Also I catch the underside of my slipper sometimes on the rugs, and it's a good idea not to have them upstairs.  Hallways and stairs will continue to be carpeted, fairly new carpet there, and I still like it.

This is a big budget item, and has pushed window replacement far down the list, but before I can get it done, I have to move a ton of stuff, sigh.  The men who have done several big jobs for me in the past, are wonderful about working around big furniture, moving it, moving it back, etc., but I have to move all the books, bookcases, various containers of craft items,  all the stuff on the closet floors, since I'll get them to floor right into the closets, looks lovely when done.  And I bet my cleaners will be tickled, that much less vacuuming, in place of damp mopping, much easier.

It will entail taking my platform bed apart again.  HS and I assembled it a while back, when I wanted to reclaim my own bed, taken apart when HP and I combined households, and it took a while for me to find the parts, since they'd been doing service as shelves here and there, and desktops in the studio and on and on.  Then I couldn't quite remember the order of business, and patient son kept the eye rolling to a minimum when we built and rebuilt it until it finally worked.

This time, when I broke the news to him, he said, after a pause, well, the good news is that I think I can remember how to assemble this thing this time.  Also, I'll help take it apart.  And I didn't add, but could have, this time we'll have all the parts in one place...

So that's the New Year adventure.  But first we get through Christmas, with a nice dinner out, no work, and I have the second season of Downton Abbey to watch, again, from the library.

And this morning, a cheerful sight at the bird feeder: a little redbreasted nuthatch, not the white breast who often shows up on the tree, but a newcomer, never seen on this patio before, noshing away happily and making many trips.  This is a good omen.