It's May Already?

May?  It's approaching the middle of MAY?  Seems like just yesterday we moved into The Log House, but it's been 4 1/2 months already.   And yet, I'm still as goofy happy about it as ever. 

The progress on the house is now just a bunch of little finish work.  Well, I say "little", but every new door knob sends me into a squealing squealer of squealingness.  We have doors on the downstairs bathroom and the kids' room/spare 'oom and the artic entry is in process of having its walls and ceiling finished.... see?

 

That brown is just the primer, but it's a lovely chocolate color in person, and I don't mind lookin' at it while waiting for the boards to be applied!

 

 

What else have we been up to this last wee while?   Well, a little of this:

 

 

Bob and Jim enveloped in a cloud of sweet steam from the evaporator, boiling down sap into maple syrup.

 

 

 and a little of that....

 



The menfolk splitting wood for next winter.  Already.

and cuteness....

 

  KITTENS!!!  Yes, we have two sweet kittens now -- who love to climb The Boy like he's there just for that reason.  And he loves it.

I can't get a very good angle of the arctic entry to show you the work as it goes on, but I'll squish myself into a corner and try to get some good shots as the board walls go up and the floor goes down.

Homemade quill and blueberry ink

What do you do with too many old frozen blueberries and a serendipitous crow feather on a lazy Sunday night?

Yes.  2011.  And it wasn't alone in there....  

Turn the feather into a writing quill and make blueberry ink, of course.  Duh.

I thought it was inspired; The Husband thought I was a little crazy to be so excited about a dodgy old crow feather I plucked from the muddy ground.  He was also a little skeezed out to be honest, so I washed the feather as soon as we got home.

To hasten the juicing of the berries, I dumped a few frozen beauties into a glass bowl and microwaved them for a minute, then smooshed them.  It only takes a little bit of juice to make ink, so now I have a bunch of lukewarm mushy berries sitting around.  Ah well.

The Hubs has a bunch of these sheathed razor blades from his days as an aviation electrician, so I cut the tip of the feather with that AND DIDN'T EVEN CUT MYSELF.  It's a minor miracle.  Don't forget to cut both at an angle and a tiny vertical cut at the point.

Sneaky me slipped in a little history lesson with The Girl and GirlCousin while they thought they were having fun writing with the quill.  Heh heh heh!   (Cue pompous lecture-voice:   "Well, girls, you see... blah blah blotting paper...  yadda yadda blotting sand....")

Truthfully, I was entertained by the whole process much longer than the were the children.

But The Boy wrote this, not I.  Really!

After a the ink/blueberry juice dries, it turns from reddish-purple to a pretty navy blue.

If your inner nerd is as jazzed about a gross old feather and a few tablespoons of staining fruit juice as is mine, give it a try!   Tots easy.   Annnnd makes me want to go read Jane Austen.  Again.

More Summer!

It was a hard winter.  But this summer is making up for it!

 Pop's garden is bursting at the seams:

Pea plants as tall as The Boy

7-8-2014   

What?  Doesn't everyone have peas in their car console?

The Girl and my parents and I went for a hike on Friday.  It's one of our favorite hikes, back to a little rapids and waterfall.

And now we're overrun with cousins.

It's a great summer.

Lovely Winter Day

So, we went on a family adventure today with my Mom to enjoy winter in the Adirondacks rather than keep whining about it.  It was a little awesome.

We discovered that the playground at the Paul Smith's College VIC is just as much fun in winter...

 ... unless you get your boot stuck in a hole.  Of course, your mother will laugh, because she still has dry socks and is watching from the sidelines.  Not that this happened to us today.  *ahem*

So, we went inside the VIC and attempted to focus on naturey things.

The Girl pretends we're going on a four gazillion mile hike today and points out our route on the topographical diorama.  Uh, no.

We did enjoy an art installation that we'd forgotten was going to be there.  The Boy took a shine to a $600 painting.  Start saving, lad.

Funny story:  when The Boy was 3 or 4 years old and we'd just moved back to the North Country from Merry-land, a huge bunch of crows would gather in our backyard every day and have a LOUD conversation.   Our crazy little boy would run out into the yard and stand shouting at the crows, "HEY, YOU CROWS!!   BE QUIET!!!"   Every. Day.  

You'll be pleased to know he restrained himself at the art show today and didn't shout once.

Grandma is always trying to make us learn.  Sheesh.

Okay, so we did learn something new today, and not just that if you throw a skunk pelt on a boy he'll get a little freaked out.  Heh.  That too.   We learned the term kames.   Look it up.

If we had more gumption, we might have rented snowshoes and gone out on the trails.  But, whatevs.  I like the comfy log furniture inside.

The true highlight of my day?  I stopped to gas up the car at the only gas station in Gabriels -- and I say this completely seriously -- it's my FAVORITE gas station.  There's one pump, and it's the old-style analog dial numbers kind, where you have to flip the lever down after you lift off the pump handle.  No pre-pay or pay-at-the-pump here, suckers.  Gas up and THEN go in to pay.  The icing on the cake for me was the patron in line ahead of me at the register inside; she was buying a 12-pack of Keystone Light, a can of vienna sausages and lottery tickets.  And then got into a late-model Subaru and drove a mile down the road to a really nice house.  Ah, it made me smile.

We also made our annual pilgrimage to the Saranac Lake ice castle  -- er, palace.  

Guess who even remembered to wear her long underwear this year...   too much info?  Sorry.

Tons of cool ice sculptures this year!  Horses and dragons and knights, oh my!

One of the things I love about the Ice Palace is that the ice is harvested in blocks right from Lake Flower and constructed on the lake shore.  

The Boy explaining ice harvesting to The Girl.  Unused blocks are lining the edge of the frozen lake, in front of them.

This year, contemplating ice harvesting felt a little bittersweet.   The Hubs' great uncle Bill used to cut ice from Our Lake and sell it to summer lake folk.  It's something the long-time camp owners remember fondly, and one of the roads along the north end of The Lake is still called the Ice House Road.

Great Uncle Bill cutting ice during the winter of 1946-47

We miss Uncle Bill.  He died last month at the age of 99, and was a fixture at The Lake for more than 50 years.  It's because he started the family business on The Lake in 1946 that we are knee-deep in this Log Adventure, after all.  I blame him.  

Okay, I credit him.   Thanks, HoneyBear.   May your fishing spots be forever secret.

See? A stony problem.

We went to a sweet little Harvest Festival in North Bangor, NY at Bonesteel's Gardening Center this afternoon, and did all kinds of fun things, like:

But The Girl clearly thought we were there to acquire MORE STONES.

Is there a 12-step program for gravel-gatherers?

Stone

We took a trip on Saturday to look at stone.

Wanna know why?  Huh?  Do ya do ya do ya?    It's SACAUSE (as The girl says) Bob is going to start facing the chimney!  Woo!   Not because it'll be super cool pretty, of course; mostly something about the chimney cap and the roof line and moisture...  I wasn't really listening, but I *did* hear chimney and stone facing!  That's good enough for me.  

We talked with the stone company owner/quarry dude and ogled the rock.

And The Girl misunderstood and thought we were there to fill our pockets with gravel.  

After she filled hers, she filled mine.  I'm a little worried now that all that gravel is now inside my house somewhere, since the Tupperware container I gave her to hold it all when we got home... is now empty.   I'm laying odds that it's all in the couch.  But I'm afraid to look.

 The moral of the story here is:   sit down gingerly at my house.