A LITTLE WINTER, A LITTLE BIT OF CLEANOUT

 

Part One

 

I know I promised kitchen improvements, and they are coming. Slower than I'd like. But we finally had a visit from Old Man Winter, which was good timing for me. I took my two weeks' vacation in the beginning of February, concentrating on shoring the floors and rewiring as much of the rest of the house as possible. Then we got snow. The biggest snow since the blizzard of 2015. It was okay, I was working in the cellar. that will be in the second part of this post, hopefully tomorrow.

 

 

Twenty inches. Started wet, then came from the east.

Yews were unhappy. They are still suffering from the 2015 snow.

 

 

Good thing I brought in a TON of firewood; I saw this coming.

 

 

This is what a writer's desk looks like. I got a bit of that done the first day. It started at seven a.m. and I went tout to shovel a path to the cellar bulkhead and shop when it was six inches deep. We were expecting eight. I needn't have bothered.

 

The mousetrap is for my giant pup Speckle. She'll eat anything made of wood or plastic on the table. Being eighteen feet tall, she can reach these items easily. She has a penchant for DVDs from Netflix. Or the library. There are mousetraps all over the house. Most are not set, but this one was in response to her eating "The Wolf of Wall Street," a library loaner since replaced by yours truly. Good flick, too. At least I got to watch it before she ate it.

 

 

Just before the snow, we had a stretch of nice fifty degree weather. I decided to try to clean out my tractor shed, the last major building I haven't touched or cleaned out. Not in this pic.

 

I'd been shoving all my non-firewood take-home scrap from my job into the tractor shed, and now it was time to burn that which was useless...

 

 

...and clean out, sort, and stack the 400 year old heart pine. God, what a lot of junk. The old farmers saved everything. Note the trash bags.

 

Lucky me. A huge pile of newspapers three feet deep. I TOLE you they saved everything.

It took me hours to dig out less than a third of the papers and load them into trash bags for recycling. That allowed me to see the sill plate of this timber-framed structure and also to build in some racks for my best heart pine. Soon you will see some of the things I'm doing with it.

All the papers date from 1957 to 1960. Many of the Sunday magazines were in great shape. Here Jean Seberg (rowr!) is made up to be Joan of Arc.

 

Apparently newsworthy...

 

Was this supposed to be a pun? No, there really was an article about cheesecake, despite the cheesecake photo of someone that looks a lot like Mary Tyler Moore (though she was likely younger than this in 1957). She did have great legs, though.

 

MTM died within a few days of me finding this. I had a big crush on her when I was a kid, one of the few non-blondes in my catalogue of TV beauties. Lizzie Montgomery, Barbara Eden, Goldie Hawn..

Like I say, prolly not her, but a close match. No cred for the photo, either.

 

I rewarded myself on the night of the Big Snow with Chicken and Potatoes. Comfort foot on a bright snowy night.

 

Next: Part Two, More Snow Pics and The Cellar