Sun is shining! Some signs of siding! More bear sightings!

Thursday night.  The sun has shone for the past two days--but to herald the end of summer the temperature drops dramatically at night.  The sun sets earlier, and the nights are too long and cold in this big old house.

That said, the last two days have been splendid.  Wednesday morning with sun shining and Johnny and George working on trim and siding, I began the day with coffee and boiling potatoes, eggs and green beans for the salad I'd decided to make (to celebrate the sun and also visit of Margie who was driving out from the city).  Even in that dreadful underground kitchen I was so happy cooking that I even sauteed apples with a bit of sugar and walnuts to have with ice cream for dessert.

I had put a long overdue load in the washing machine (I"d been waiting for sun so I could line-dry), and hung my full wardrobe out to dry.

I was clearly on a productive roll.  This year, I've done very little around the house beyond some minimal scraping and lawn-mowing.  Last year I'd spent days cleaning and taking load after load to the dump, but this year, I've felt (maybe this is not quite true) that the major structural work had to be done before I could really begin to do things inside.

semi-sraped ceiling

But with lunch and clean laundry waiting, and Margie arriving in a few hours, I was inspired to scrape the ceiling in the eventually-to-be-screened-in porch.  Ray, who had finished the scraping of the front door and was priming it had done a bit of ceiling scraping (George had done some last year).  It is work that everyone hates.

Scraping the floor and the walls had been really difficult, but much of the ceiling paint was almost flaking off on its own.  It's unpleasant work as the flakes and dust (most certainly full of lead) fall all over you--hair, eyes, mouth, etc., but it does come off.  Standing on the ladder, I'm tall enough to scrape, but not tall enough (or perhaps not strong enough) to get a good angle to scrape up the bits that don't flake off.  Nonetheless, I managed to remove pounds of scrapings--doing my bit for home improvement.

The first round of siding is up on the back of the house.  We are indeed moving forward.

While George and Johnny continued their labors, I met Margaret in Chester.  Two weeks at a green market on 77th Street and Columbus, at the flea market I'd gone to with Regina and her sister Patty (whom I hadn't seen since I graduated high school many many decades ago), I tasted delicious cheese from the Valley Shepherd Creamery which I learned was in Long Valley, about twenty miles down 206 from here.  Margaret had never heard of it, and was eager to visit so we met there this afternoon.  It is pretty amazing--extraordinarily excellent cheese of sheep, goat and cow's milk.  They have opened a store in Soho and will soon be opening one in Park Slope--but it was quite wonderful to taste and buy these cheeses right on the farm.

On arriving home, for the first time, I saw the entire bear family as well as many many deer in the big field in front of the house. One pretty excellent country day.