Scattered Thoughts . . .

While I'm on a roll in sharing some photos of our times at the lake house, I went back two years to the first time the grandkids spent some time with us at the lake house.  While sorting through some of these older hard drives from that timeframe, I realized that I had some video showing the moment when they arrived at the house for the first time.  So...  I went digging for those video clips. Will and Sue (Sheila's parents) were kind enough to deliver Lukey and Kenzie to us. I expected the kids to be excited bundles of energy but, it is funny... I should have known better.  In situations like this they have shown us that they are more cautious, observant and deliberate than the type of person who throws caution to the wind with boundless excitement.  And, truth be told, I'm happy to see that they tend to be cautious, observant and deliberate when thrown into new experiences.   As we walked down the hill from the car to the house, they were wide-eyed and quietly looki

The sun rises behind the lake house... behind the mountains... behind the tall trees... toward the southern sky so to the left behind the house. Although the sun instantly burns off the fog and illuminates the opposite shore of the lake the moment it rises above the mountains, we are left in the shadows of the mountains and trees for another hour or so. By the time the sun gets up high enough to burn off the morning fog and begin to warm up our side of the lake, it is sometime between 8:00 and 9:00 am.  Here is this first light beginning to light up all the shadows on our side of the lake... In my previous blog entry, I shared a photo of Kenzie sitting in a chaise lounge with her baby doll... she was sitting in one of these chairs (below), watching me on the dock as I was shooting photos of loons. She was patiently waiting for me to begin making breakfast. I suspect Lukey was still sleeping away in bed since Kenzie usually gets up when I get up and Lukey is typically the last on

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry this past week or two, the lake house has been on our minds because now is the time of year for planning our summer and, since the lake house is on my mind, I've been sorting through old photos of our times at the lake house. A few photos have caught my eye while sifting through these old photos.  Okay... really... quite a few photos have caught my eye and I'm left wondering why I didn't do anything with them. In this case, two photos of Kenzie from last summer caught my eye that I wanted to share here. In this first one, Kenzie is fishing on our dock. I found her expression amusing... it appears as though she is saying, "What's on my line? WHAT's on my line???" Either that or the dock is too hot for her feet and she is wincing in pain! Either way, it is an amusing expression making for an interesting photo... I've shared this next one before but I never told the story behind it so it was worth sharin

Finally!  Our new washing machine arrived around lunchtime yesterday... after waiting almost four weeks (I think it was a day less)... not a moment too soon. We were about out of clothes to wear! In order to install the new washing machine, we needed to push the dryer aside to give us a little room to work. Well... the moment I pushed the dryer aside, I realized that we had a problem with our connection to the dryer vent ductwork. The entire back of the dryer was covered in lint and dust... not good at all.  After the installers left, I pulled the dryer out completely to see what problems I could find with the dryer.  It is a long story but I am left with a problem... sometime soon, I'll need to figure out how I'm going to fix this leaking ductwork that runs under our flooring. This is problematic because we have no basement nor is there even a crawl space in this area of the house.  So, I needed to figure out how I am going to connect to completely damaged ductwork. F

I somehow managed to have a couple of productive days... yesterday and today... which allowed me to install the new temporary flooring in our master bathroom and our new toilet! We've been without our master bathroom since mid-January so it was nice to finally feel well enough to be productive and get it up and running again.  We had a problem with our toilet way back in January. The toilet was falling through a rotting floor. We have bigger plans for this bathroom but, at this point, we're not ready to completely renovate this room so it needed a relatively easy and quick fix. A toilet falling through a collapsing floor moved this project ahead of all of our other projects. Emergencies like this really screw up a schedule! Being forced into this repair project meant making another 'clean spot' with some temporary upgrades and repairs.  I re-framed the floor... re-framed toilet support... added reinforced subflooring... painted the wall behind the toilet whil