New Man on the Job!

 Work went very well today. Randy had a new man, Charlie, working with him and it seemed to be going very well, from what I could tell. They got the door in place with minimal effort and tomorrow will finish up the outside details - and perhaps other stuff. It was so hot, I didn't bother them when they were ready to leave this afternoon to find out what the plan is for tomorrow. Lyle was suppose to come today to hook up the electrical stuff, but he called to let us know he had two emergency calls to take care of. Probably a result of last night's storm. There is no emergency here, although having AC would have been nice after the guys left for the day and the door could be closed off. But within a short time it will be much cooler here and I won't need AC. In the meantime, there's plenty of ice water and with fans going, I'm pretty darned comfortable.

I've been working at my scanner in between other stuff today, scanning old (and some not so old) pictures for the JPA slide show. Some of the pictures are really wonderful shots of people taken a few decades ago, far enough back so you may not recognize them if you didn't know them back then. Lots of familiar names, and it's great fun to remember those people. Even though I grew up here at the pond, I wasn't part of the summer community until after I married Ray Dimick, whose parents had a cottage where Jeremy and Lori Grenier are now, between Comstock's and Bertolini's on Cove Road. It actually wasn't until the 1960s that we spent much time here as a family, and that was after my parents bought the cottage at the corner of Barre Avenue and West Shore Road. After that, we spent every possible moment we could here, and the kids grew up coming to Joe's Pond every summer, even after their dad died in 1969. Great years, all of them, and scanning pictures today was a real pleasure - besides that, I had visits from friends who brought photos from their collections, and that is always fun.

Tonight I'm going to enjoy having a very secure door between me and the night instead of a piece of plywood. I was pretty sure I heard something sniffing around the plywood covering the opening last night, but it was securely fastened in place, so I didn't even try to investigate. It could have been any little (or not so little!) animal - or just the wind.

Here is the door from the outside - the trim overhead can now be finished as I was able to get two coats of polyurethane on the last big cedar plank today (it was only delivered yesterday). There will be some finish work to do on the inside around the door and a threshold needs to be put in place, and then the whole thing will be finished except for the outside steps. There is a lot to all of this, especially when it is so hot and humid. I really felt sorry for both Randy and Charlie today. They weren't in the direct sunlight most of the time, but it was still darned hot doing manual labor. That is the hot side of the house - facing southeast, it gets sun most of the day. I was pretty hot working in the garage for the few minutes I needed to do the painting, too. In between that and scanning here in my little office, I took breathers on the deck. Son Bill came up to check on the porch project, and Jamie stopped on his way home from work, so we hung out in the shade of the big umbrella on the deck. It was hot, but there was a nice breeze. 

We can probably look forward to another thunder storm tonight. I haven't seen the weather for tomorrow, but it seems to be a perfect setup for a good old thunder storm. We had one last night around 10:30 with some pretty good boomers. We lost power for a few moments - just long enough for all the digital clocks in the house to get screwed up. The rain didn't seem to cool things down much, though. I measured .55 inches in my gauge this morning. That seemed to come down all in a bunch within a few minutes, so there was likely some washouts here and there. We need the rain, and it's also good to have some nice hot, real summer weather before fall sets in and the kids have to head back to school.