Hand-made floor tile pads by Tammy Vitale with manufactured tiles.

The cottage floor is done except for a last mopping but who knows when we’ll do that (hopefully before we buy furniture). The next step is shades for the windows, then a rug and furniture and then, maybe, we’ll be ready to rent it.  It’s getting so cute I don’t want to rent it.  Taxes are getting so high if we want to keep it, we’ll have to rent it.  Such is the fate of bottom middle class folks, I guess.  At least it’s ours for right now and I have to say I have loved fixing it up (can’t remember – have I ever posted interior pictures here?).

Anyways, some more pictures follow.

About yesterday’s YouTube post – not quite there yet as you can see.  Have a question into Typepad about how to get it to fit the column or the column to fit it.  Also should have saved it at max instead of "good."  But I’m learning.  Meanwhile if you want to see it as it’s supposed to be seen, full image, here’s the YouTube URL: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-s9iJhA83Q

The music is by Loreena McKennit (which I have mis-spelled in the credits, another thing to fix) from her CD Book of Secrets.  The song is The Mummers Song.  We heard that song going to the Poconos years back and couldn’t figure out who it was.  Unusual since Husband knows just about everyone out there.  Well, out room at MTV and The Mummers Song was on it’s way up the charts and that’s how we discovered Loreena McKennit.  We went on to buy all her CDs.  I really like her music a lot.

So here are more photos of the cottage for your viewing pleasure. Includes pictures of the finished (grouted) wall too but the sun was so bright coming in the window that it was hard to get a good photo of it.    The red tiles with the black grout were the original idea for the whole floor.  It would have looked great had the clay cooperated.  But you know each "failure" teaches me something new about clay and handling it, so I don’t necessarily consider it a failure.  Just another lesson. 

thought for the day:  Before snake became the dark god of our underworld, burdened with human sin, it carried a different weight in our human bones; it was a being of holy inner earth.  The smooth gold eye, the hundred ribs holding life, it coiled beautifully and mysteriously around the world of human imagination.  In nearly all ancient cultures the snake was the symbol of healing and wholeness.  Even the old ones, like the Adena people, who left no recorded history, left a tribute to the snake in one of the mounds near Chillicothe, Ohio.  Over 1,200 feet in length, the mound is an earth sculpture of an open-mouthed serpent that clasps an egg, a new potential for life, between its jaws.  This is only one of many worldwide images of snakes, some curled about an egg, others with tail in mouth, telling us about the germinal beginnings of life and renewal, of infinity gone in a circle round itself.  Linda Hogan, Dwellings:  A Spiritual History of the Living World