23 September 2019

What a day!  Started out without Tammy and crew… which was not expected.  About 10:30, while solo wall building, Fran Viko (Tammy’s partner) showed up, bringing news that the Lapidus’ needed some urgent help.  [Later got the voicemails Merry had left on both my home and cell phones.]  Upon returning to Fern Lake a couple hours later, found Tammy and Jake continuing where I had left off.  Nate arrived an hour later (he was mowing lawns all morning) and was immediately dispatched to the local gravel pit for another load of desperately needed A-stone… which the pit owner (D&F Paving, yes, the same company who did a great job laying our asphalt driveway and then wanted to charge me triple a reasonable price to sealcoat the asphalt last year) closed to other contractors as of today.  Grrrrr!  So Tammy sent Nate down to RMG in Castleton to pick up a pallet of Government-rejected military gravestones which we will use to build steps into the barn and shop.  When Nate returned (amazingly, given how the day was going) with the gravestones, Tammy sent him up to the Carrara Concrete facility in East Middlebury, ‘cause they have huge stockpiles of crushed stone.  Nate got there just before 4; they closed at 3:30.  Double grrrr!  In spite of all the drama, we got 24 feet of the wall along the north side of the driveway completed.  Over the weekend and today, many, many people stopped by to complement the beauty of the wall finished thus far.  Go team!