Strange Happening

 I received a message this week from Thierry Guerlain about a strange experience he had a couple of days ago. He said it was one morning when he was about to eat breakfast. He looked out onto the water in front of their cottage and saw what looked like a blue plastic raft with attached ladder floating down the pond. He said he looked away for a moment and then realized whatever it was had gotten lower in the water. He watched, amazed, as it sank below the surface. He has no idea how deep the water is where it went down, but there must have been a hole that allowed water to get inside and that's why it disappeared so quickly. 

Theirry said when he first saw it, he intended to go out and retrieve it, but he was in the middle of breakfast when this happened. As it happened, he probably wouldn't have been able to get to it before it went down even if he had left his breakfast and gone immediately. It wasn't something he recognized as part of a neighbor's water front toys, so he asked me to put a notice here to let people know that if it is yours and it came loose or has disappeared from your waterfront, he can tell you exactly where it is - under water near his cottage.  Contact him and he'll point out the spot for you!

I'm not that familiar with water toys these days, but it could have been an inflatable, I suppose, although from what Thierry told me, it seemed to be a solid structure. Someone will be missing it. If you recognize anything about it, get in touch with the owner or with Thierry. His email is tguerlaine51@gmail.com. or give him a call at 802-343-6566.

Thierry also mentioned that he has been unable to subscribe to this blog. I was aware that Feedburner, the company that provided that service to blogger.com discontinued it in April this year. I recall seeing the announcement, but I thought there would be an alternative provided. However, that hasn't happened. Those of you who have already subscribed as a follower will still get notice in your email when a new post is added; however, no new subscribers will be able to sign up to get those email notifications. 

I'm looking into some way to work around this - and hoping that Feedburner will reconsider and offer that service again, but from what I've found so far on line, that isn't going to happen, at least not in the foreseeable future. I am still exploring options, but will need some help from son, Bill, I expect. I'm not good with technical stuff on computers. If it can't be fixed with a screwdriver or a hammer (and often a hammer seems like a good option to me these days!) I'm lost. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, after you've put Joe's Pond Reflections into your search engine a few times, it will probably come up automatically with other frequently-visited sites when you go to your search engine. That's the best I can offer for now.

Jamie and Marie came down yesterday afternoon and put my recliner chair together for me on the new porch. I was thrilled to have it done. I had put the two rockers together myself, but I knew the recliner would be complicated, and the instructions even said that it would be "easier with two people." For them, it was super easy and done in about 15 minutes.

Randy came unexpectedly to deliver the screens for the porch yesterday, and he will be back in a few days to put them in place. Then, the porch will be all done!

The pond is almost finished, and Ben expects to be out of here as early as tomorrow, if all goes well. He has some last-minute work to do around the porch area where the newly seeded lawn took a beating during the porch construction, and will fill and seed in the "road" that is now firmly packed across the back lawn. I will have pictures of the beautiful stone walls he and Shawn have built with some of the rocks that were "growing" where the pond is now. When I exclaim over the amount of rocks they have uncovered, Ben just shakes his head and says, "This is Vermont." 

Already, my lower lawn is drier. The gnarled underbrush and tangle left from a lumbering operation several years ago is gone and the area is now clear and useful again. I'm hoping there will be plenty of wildlife to watch this fall, and especially next spring - from my bug-free porch! Fred would love this. We had fretted about how awful our lovely woodland was after we had the soft wood trees cut out. I will never, ever, have one of those big machines that cut, limb and pile logs all in one swoop. It was a monster machine and not only did it leave brush and stumps in it's wake, there were huge gouges in the earth, even though the work was done in the winter. The snow was deep and the ground was not frozen solidly because of all the springs in there. It was a mess. Now, at least part of it has been reclaimed.

There should be an official announcement about the West Danville history book very soon. We will be meeting again soon and planning our next move to get detailed information out to everyone possible - perhaps with a fairly firm publishing date! We are confident it will get published before the holidays. Our problem right now is that we can only afford the cost of printing 500 pages, so if it goes over that, we will need to make more severe cuts - either text or photos. It will be large - 9 x 12 , soft cover, perfect bound, and 500 pages. I can tell you that we will keep the cost under $50. Printing and other costs are running very high, so we will need to sell a lot of books to make that back so the historical society can break even - even though an enormous amount of the work on this book has been volunteer. There have been expenses for editing, formatting, printing, and sometimes photos and documents that we had to obtain from other sources such as libraries, town clerks and other historical societies. Hardly anyone does anything for free these days. We were fortunate that four people were willing to devote eight years to researching and writing as volunteers, and we're also grateful to so many people who have freely contributed information or services along the way. It's been an adventure, and we are very sad that two of our original committee members , Jane Larrabee and Dot Larrabee, are no longer here to enjoy seeing the book in print. So, stay tuned - I'll have more information soon!