See "A Trip to the Post Office" slide show on the Current Photos page.

    
Had a week (6 days) of weather in the 50s and not getting below freezing at night. We still had about a foot of snow left on the ground by the time we got a fresh foot of nice powdery stuff on Friday night. Yesterday we had at least 100 Gold Finches, Purple Finches, Nuthatches, Chicadees, Blue Jays, and Downy & Hairy Woodpeckers all over our feeders.
     The warm weather got us thinking about if it would wake up the bears. While doing some research we found this picture in a "Birds & Blooms" magazine. Thought others might enjoy.

Well, I call it the fireplace but it is the brick hearth area where the woodstove sits. When we bought this house in February of 2004, almost all wood and cabinets were dark colored. Patti had visions of how we could brighten the place up and felt that at the same time, this would make the rooms feel larger. Since then we have done new lighter cabinets and some staining of the walls to acheive that lighten of things. I had resisted the staining the walls, maybe because I knew it would be a lot of work....maybe because I didn't want to cover the wood....maybe because I didn't think it would actually make the room appear larger. Whatever that reasoning, I was definitely wrong. The staining happened and the room was much more enjoyable and really did seem larger. It was nice. The next step would be a new mantle.  What was there was a board on a couple of book shelf brackets. I ordered rough sawn beams from the lumber mill and let them sit and dry for almost a year. Then in January we built our new mantle. The next step would be to cover the dated, dirty, and dark used brick. We pick out some cultured stone by Owens Corning and waited for delivery. This weekend is the installation. It is a chore but all good things include a little bit of work. Friday evening we spent hours sorting the stone and laying it out in the pattern for the upper and lower areas of the back wall. That is a key process. I really don't think we could have gotten the thing to fit correctly or have the top and bottom areas appearances close with their mixture of sizes and shapes, had we not done those preliminary layouts. Yesterday morning I laid tarps and plastic then started in. I was putting the mortar on the wall and back of rock and putting them in place to our pattern. Patti was coming along behind and working in the mortar seems between rocks, smoothing thhings out and cleaning where I had dribble on the rocks. By the end of the day, we had done almost the entire bottom. This morning I will run to the hardware for more mortar and then back at it. Maybe a stop at DD. The adventure will continue.

We started building this site on New Years weekend. Here we are three weeks later and it still isn't published. What the heck, it has taken me years of thinking about a web site to get to this point. Someday it will be ready for publishing and we will just keep plugging away to that goal.

In the mean time, there is just so much neat stuff to do outside even if it is merely watching nature or walking the dogs. The chill as one walks out the door make you feel alive (it's 3º this morning).

It is fun to watch deer as they work their way through the woods grazing on what they can find. The Chickadees sit on the branches almost next to you and chatter away in their own little Chickadee language while the Nuthatches wander up and down the trees (definitely a sight to see). The Woodpeckers tap away on the trees, that is except for the big Pileated who sounds like a machine gun going off in the woods and the squirrels racing from tree to tree or through the branches like acrobats. Lets not forget the Turkeys who wander through the woods with their alien-like stare and leaving behind large "peace sign" prints in the snow.

We also have a project going redoing the wood stove hearth area. Since New years we have put up nd new mantle and supports, stained it and added copper accents. We lightly framed the area in and now the final step is mortaring cultured stone River Rock over the old used brick.

In our spare time, we will continue working on the development of this site.