Up to speed

I haven't posted anything for a while so since it is drizzling out, again, I figured today is as good of time to update as any.

So, since my last post I have been getting a lot of use out of the new chainsaw. I've been clearing the buffer around the house of brush so in the event of forest fire it is a little easier to protect the house. Mary also started a new garden area on the old goat pen so taking down the willow around that area helps get a little sun on the plants and reduces the number of mosquitoes around the garden.

On the 5th of July Brad and Maija threw a deck warming party on their new deck at the cabin. The weather was perfect and the bugs were well mannered, for the most part. I got a chance to walk around the property and was surprised how dry the lot had become. When mary and I first bought the cabin in 1990 the lower half of it was so wet you could hardly walk on it. By 1995 that area was covered with 2 to 3 foot high birch trees. By 2000 the lower part of the lot was so overgrown with 12 to 15 foot tall birch trees that you couldn't walk down to or even see the lake. One good thing about all the trees is that it makes the cabin almost invisible. Since we pretty much stopped using the cabin when we moved to Willow that feature helped to keep intruders from doing any damage to the property. Now that Brad is up there almost every weekend he has started thinning the birch so the lake was actually visible, a little, from the deck.

I haven't gotten as far on the house painting as I had hoped but I do have all the windows scraped, sanded and primed and I have washed the whole outside of the house so we are just about ready to start painting.

This summer has been kind of cool and damp but we have finally started eating things out of our gardens. Mary has supplied swiss chard and some herbs from her garden. We have eaten spinach and radishes from my garden.