Sep 11 - chores

Chore has such a negative connotation -- it's really about living and taking pleasure in small accomplishments and being active.

It was a cool day with drizzle ... time for the first fire in a few months, inside and outside.

I had a pile of scrap wood from construction downstairs this summer as well as from cleaning out the old woodpile of my Dad's and a rainy, no wind day was perfect for burning. When I say "pile", I don't mean something large but there was an hour or so of burning. One thing that I plan to do but have not gotten to yet is to dig out some of the ashes and take them to the dump. The reason that I want to do this is because there are still ashes there from the major construction here and they include nails and other metal parts that were attached to the wood that I don't really want left here. Had we taken them to the dump they would have been burned there as well, so it's a logical place for this.

I also got a fire burning inside. Our wood stove throws off a lot of heat though and by late in the day even though it had been out for hours, we were opening windows. That is typical for this time of year though -- a fire in the a.m. is cheery but then it warms up outside and we open windows.

I spent an hour or so moving some more firewood down to the pile close to the cottage -- emptying one more row of firewood in the woodshed. That leaves about 1.5 cords in the woodshed. I'm still waiting for Halle Brooks to deliver 5 cords to stack for next year.

What else did I do ... oh yes, I transplanted some trees. I moved a couple of small trees to the area between us and Davies' as well as down by the waterfront. I then decided to move the old woodbox that my Dad had positioned beside the cottage. It was stuck amongst the trees between ours and Davies about on the property line or perhaps more on Davies property. Our contractor had moved it there with his zoom-boom as he called it, really a Gradeall forklift. It is quite heavy and would probably take at least 6 of us to move it but using the 4-wheeler and some 2x6's and old pipes as sliders etc. I dragged it out of the bush onto our driveway and up the hill. It's now located beside the driveway between the garage and the barn. Jason is interested in using it as a woodbox so when he has enough guys here we can load it onto his trailer and take it down to the appropriate location.

Late in the afternoon the sky cleared and it warmed up to the mid 70's, but then by dinner we had more raindrops.

Sandy worked in the barn most of the day staining rafters. These are 4x8's, 16 feet long, that will be the roof of a gazebo that I'm going to build on the deck by the waterfront. By the end of the day she was pretty well through work on this group, half of the rafters. She will finish up the rafters in the next few days.

I also cut the 18' and 20' 8x8's in half getting ready to move those down to be the uprights of the gazebo. I have them on the Whaler trailer in the barn ready for moving down but there is no point in positioning them until the other 8x8's arrive that will be the horizontal support for the rafters. Those will probably come in while we are away in Europe and Florida so I'm hoping to do the major part of the gazebo assembly between mid October and mid November.

That's it ...