10 October 2009

Miserable rainy morning… spent feeding cats at Lynne’s, doing laundry there, and buying a tarp at Goodro Lumber in Middlebury to cover the pickup. Alverta arrived late morning bringing a goodly supply of one of my favorite desserts – Butter Fudge Fingers. After lunch the skies suddenly went from low overcast to clear. Putting on winter jackets against the wind-chill, we walked around the property with Molly admiring recent handiwork, then took the trail down to the lake. Alas, we found that recent winds had toppled the new dock stairs into the water, the rope normally used to secure them in an upright position being used as a painter for the canoe of late. There is only one way to raise the stairs into their stowed position and that is from IN the water… which today measured 59° on the brisk-o-meter. Returning to the top of the hill, I decided to see how much of the remaining pile of junk wood would take to the still smoldering stump fire. With Alverta’s help, we quickly reduced the remaining pile by ½ and had a nice blaze going. Mid-afternoon Alverta left to return to Burlington and I realized that today would be the warmest of my remaining stay… and there was a nice hot fire... so back down to the lake Molly and I went. The dock stairs were quickly, shall we say, very quickly, raised out of the water… and it actually wasn’t too chilly… once I was back on the dock. By dog, cat, and human feeding time the junk wood pile had pretty much gone up in smoke.