30 November 2015

Sean called at 6:50 to say that there would be no geese at Fern Lake today.  Spent the morning cleaning that part of the basement where additional partition walls need to be built.  Also moved 129 (but who’s counting?) 2x4x16’s from where Chree and I had stacked them (the pile was blocking the area where the east wall of the shop needs to be built) to a spot clear of all anticipated near-term construction.  Spent an hour taking the backhoe and the front end loader off the Kubota.  Definitely need another place (barn????) to store my man-toys… the lower level of the woodshed just ain’t big enough. After lunch, took the stripped-down Kubota up to Champlain Valley Equipment in Middlebury to have the new snow blower installed.  Left the trailer there and continued on to Burlington to do numerous errands, including picking up my laptop at Best Buy (it died just before Thanksgiving and had to be shipped to Missouri for $700-worth of repairs).  On the way back south, stopped at The Residence at Shelburne Bay and enjoyed a longer-than-usual visit and dinner with Alverta.  Got back to Fern Lake just in time for bed…

29 November 2015

Left Virginia at 5:15 in order to get ahead of the post-Thanksgiving traffic.  Succeeded, but did encounter the remains of an obviously fatal accident on I-287 in Morristown, NJ which, amazingly, only held up the journey by a couple of minutes.  Arrived at Fern Lake 9 hours after leaving Springfield, which included a stop for fresh produce (and ice cream, of course) in Brandon. Unloaded the truck into Kate’s house, which was quite chilly, at least for those of us acclimated to mid-Atlantic temperatures… her thermostats were set to 45°!  Took most of the night to warm the structural thermal mass using the propane stove in the living room, even after closing the doors to all the rooms I won’t be using (i.e., the other four bedrooms, Kate’s bathroom, and the study).