25 April 2014

Called amazon.com again this morning and the nice call center lady agreed to overnight me a snatch block with no charge for the expedited shipping.  Then went into Brandon and bought a mailbox on my way to the Post Office.  Walked into the latter establishment and said I needed to set up a mailing address for 1750 Lake Dunmore Road, figuring I’d be filling out forms in triplicate for awhile.  The guy behind the counter (who I had never seen before in my life) said, “Perkins?”.  I said, “Yes.”  He said, “You’re all set.  I’ll tell the carrier.”  Gotta love small town Vermont!  Ran into (figuratively, not literally) Tom Whittaker (the real estate agent we worked with to acquire the Fern Lake property) as I left the Post Office.  He says the housing market in this area is still really slow.  Back at Fern Lake, quickly installed the new mailbox on the post I made yesterday and then wheeled the contraption out to Route 53.  After that, donned my tree felling regalia and dropped and cleaned up everything that I could (without a snatch block) at the sauna building site.  Six trees left to go, all leaning over the wood walkway.  Based on my conversations last evening with Jimmy and Larry, took down a beautiful white pine (that I really wanted to keep!) right at the entrance to the lower “driveway” into the house site.  With that tree gone there’s a good possibility that a cement truck will be able to use that driveway when it comes time to pour the west frost wall… which would save lots of hard labor and/or the considerable expense of hiring a concrete pump.  Too nice to be inside, so for the remainder of the work day built a bin for lugging firewood around using the hand truck, made almost entirely out of lumber salvaged from the old stairway that went from the Glassner’s deck down to the waterfront.  Reuse, repurpose, recycle, that’s Chree’s motto!