The weeks news. Independence day, our new fridge, a new deck, and a small kitchen.
It’s been a quiet week up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest.
The farmers have been bailing hay this past week, and we have seen many pickups loaded down with fresh hay, some pulling trailers as well as their beds overflowing.
It’s Independence Day, the day our founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, even though the war wasn’t close to being over. Major hostilities ended with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, Va, and a peace treaty was signed in 1783. If it hadn’t been for France, and Spain, France supplying troops and their navy, while Spain sent her navy to battle British navy, things might very well have turned out quite differently. Yet, every one of the signers of the Declaration knew the risks and signed anyway.
We celebrate with fireworks, reminiscent of the “rockets red glare” from the Star Spangled Banner, written by Francis Scott Key during the battle of Fort McHenry in the war of 1812. In many towns, there will be parades. Here, there was nothing. Because of the tinder dry conditions here, fireworks have been canceled, and I can’t remember any parade occurring in years past. I do remember, one year, traveling to Boston with my mother. I had managed to find a load heading that way, and was there around the end of June. We went to the celebration in a park, I don’t recall the name, and watched the Boston Pops preform. Near the end of their program, they played the 1812 overture, and at its finish, church bells rang and cannons were fired to precisely coincide with the ending of the piece. I would like to note here that the overture isn’t about our war of 1812, but the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at the gates of Moscow Russia. The piece was composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1880.
We had ordered a 21 cubic foot refrigerator a few weeks ago, and it came in this past Thursday. Now, taking a tape measure and saying, “yes, it will fit,” and having it sitting in your living room wondering how it’s actually going to fit, are completely different things. The kitchen is 6 feet wide, by 14 feet long, we just put in a full size gas range, have a Hoosier cabinet, an “L” shaped counter, and a rather large sink. Some rearranging was in order as well as a bit of elbow grease, and we have a working, though even more cramped, kitchen once again. I should point out that when I took everything out of the refrigerator we had, and put it into the new one, the difference was staggering. We ended up not putting the door handles on the new fridge, because, first off, they forgot to send the screws to install them, and secondly, they stuck out too far and we were worried they would get broken. Now, I have to build a new addition next year, if only to have enough room for this huge fridge.
I have also built a deck for our propane tanks on the west side of the cabin. It connects to the main deck so we can use a dolly to move our 100 lb propane tanks around with some ease. Now, all the tanks are outside. The lovely wife has been trying, without much luck, to polyurethane the red fir flooring we got for the bedroom and living room. I built her some large saw horses to put the boards on, and that helps, but that isn’t the issue. We have so much going on before my surgery, that it gets pushed to the background. She’s hoping this coming week she can get at least the boards for the bedroom finished; the rest might have to wait until next summer.
Our heat wave has subsided, dropping temps back into the 90’s during the day and mid 50’s at night, thus. making sleeping much easier and working outside less stressful. Now, if only we’d get some good, steady rain.
Well, that’s all the news for the week. Bye for now.
