Monday, September 6

Monday, September 06, 2010...Today Is the Beginning of The End....

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Today marks the beginning to the end of summer. The weather is finally beginning to resemble Upstate New York at this time of the year, rather than summer on Daytona Beach, in Florida. New Yorkers are being robbed of their summers because we are not accustomed to the scorching hot, humid temperatures we've had for the past two summers, causing us to huddle in front of air conditioners or collapse in heat stroke. We cannot enjoy our summer like they did here in the past. Vick grew up here...every summer...her Dad being employed by local resorts, entertaining kids by day as the social director and the parents by night as the house entertainer, playing music and singing into the wee hours of the morning....
Vick lived at the resort, spending her summers here with her Mom and brother as her Dad worked all summer long. People came here from the five boroughs around the city of New York and New Jersey to escape the heat, and escape it they did! It was cool enough here then, that no one used air conditioning all summer long. Now, you cook without it. If you want to cool off now, you almost have to go to south of Georgia and into Florida to cool off...crazy weather.........

Well, anyway....this is the beginning of the end. Once the holiday is completed at the end of today...we will be in the off season, here in the Upstate Vacation Mecca of the east. We will have a few stragglers... a few die hard vacationers, smart enough to actually escape the crowds, the prime rates and occasional, unjust prices of the local merchandise, as things return to regular local commerce again. They will intelligently take advantage of the regular living, the normal local prices for fall products and partake of the fall foliage and harvest festivals which occur before the skiing season again drives the area into the prime commerce conditions of the winter ski resort season.

Saturday morning around 10:30, my family left for home in Pennsylvania. It was a really nice visit and Vick and I took them to dinner one evening and the next day we went up onto the mountain to enjoy lunch at Brio's in Phoenicia, where we had a great meal, visited The Nest Egg, an old general store next door and then moved on to Emerson place, in the next little town of Mt. Tremper, to see the world's largest kaleidoscope. It is on the estate of Ralph Waldo Emerson's home which is quite beautiful to see
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From there, we went to Woodstock, where we got pictures of family with Grandpa & grandma Woodstock.

That was a stroke of luck...especially that late in the day! We actually stopped to see candle stock, the candle store that has had a candle burning since 1969. It is a huge mass of wax now, but started with a single drip candle, which when burnt down, was used to light another candle, which was seated in the originals hot wax. On and on the candles burnt and a new one added each time the old burnt down, until the present size of seven feet tall and three feet across was achieved. It is still burning and growing larger every day......forty one years later!
The rest of the time, we just sat around the house and talked and enjoyed each others company until they departed.

Yesterday, our friend and his wife from Slovakia came to visit bearing lovely gifts for Vick, me and the dogs... As always, we were overjoyed to entertain Jiri and it was our first time, meeting Erica his lovely wife. Jiri was the here several times performing carpentry work for us in the beginning...and we owe him a debt of gratitude which he will never understand, but we would not have our beautiful upstairs bedroom, art gallery or reading lounge without Jiri, our other friend Matt and his brother Mark. Jiri and Matt tore off the old roof and walls, then framed out the entire upstairs and got it back under roof in one day...finished the tar paper and shingles the next, and dry walled everything in the next few days. Jiri came back alone the next week and tapped and spackled, sanded and painted the entire upstairs, and then put the baseboard, trim and woodwork up. He also finished the bathroom. We will be forever indebted to Jiri, Matt and Mark for all they did for us. All three gave us something we could never pay for...their unconditional friendship!! The tree returned sometime later and replaced the roof on the front side of the house, adding three skylights on the front porch in the process. They did the shingled roof and three skylights, including enclosed light shafts through the roof to the ceiling and all the trim work, soffits and fascia all around in one weekend!

027694© Cluckin' "A" Critter Farm, LLC

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