Another Day…Another Step Toward Completion……

There is an unusual crispness in the air…one that beckons the arrival of fall, even though we are in the midst of what is supposed to be our warmest summer months. This has been a most unusual year for cool summer days and crisp, almost fall like evenings. It is really a pleasure as long as you don’t anticipate swimming, for the pools don’t receive enough of the suns warming rays when there are cool days such as we’ve had. When you’re my age, crawling into a 100° hot tub is more inviting that a 65° swimming pool outside in a cool breeze. None the less, the cool summer seems a much better arrangement than the conversation we recently had with John, our waiter at Hollow Brook Restaurant. He was reminiscing about the winters he endured twenty three years ago when he and his wife moved upstate. He and Lynda both chanted about the four foot snows that once fell in the Catskill Mountains and throughout Hudson River valley. Imagine, four feet of snow everywhere, with the potential for really DEEP snow drifts where the wind would rearrange the snowfall. I remember three years ago when Vick’s brother and parents were snowed in for several days due to eight feet of snow, which fell in a snow storm that fell for a solid three days, non-stop. What do you do with eight feet of snow? How do you even shovel a path…..and to where do you shovel? You need a high loader with a huge bucket to remove snow from roadways, because you cannot plow it. Thank God it got rather warm a few days after that storm and the snow melted down quickly…even then, it took a week to get to a manageable depth, where they could get plowed out and shovel paths to their cars, etc.

I hope we never return to those kinds of winters again…and with Al Gore’s “greenhouse effect” theories…maybe we never will. Still, I’ll take the near, snowless winters we’ve had the past couple of years.

We are waiting this morning for a call from Stemple’s Sawmill, in East Berne. We have the remainder of our previously placed lumber order to pick up, but need another forty of the 6” wide boards we used for barn siding. We still have a gable end to do on the low side of the barn in the back, so we figured we would pick everything up at once. I know Sandra has plenty of stacked 6” boards in the lot up there, so I envision getting a call to come and pick it all up today as soon as her Mom can reach her.

We sold the boat a few days ago, so that is out of our hair and the proceeds from it will go toward our new tractor bill. The boat sale drops the loan significantly. We are still not out of the woods, but now we can see the clearing through the trees and we feel that we will be okay now.
We still have the treated and kiln dried lumber to pick up at GNH Lumber, because I don’t trust rough cut lumber for the superstructure which holds the roof up. Rough cut lumber is not as strong as the kiln dried and will crack or break easier, especially at knots in rafters under heavy snow load. It is for that reason and the need of treated posts that we will buy from GNH instead of supporting the family sawmill. If the phone rings…we will be off to the sawmill. If not, we’ll wait until Josh gets here and we’ll install battens on the bunny brothel to close up the cracks which allow air conditioned air to escape in the summer and frigid winds to enter in the winter. No matter what, we are working toward completion…and this year, we seem to be right on schedule.

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