I mentioned a few days back that we are on a mission to reduce the number of mice that get into our house. That includes ‘Diane getting even more aggressive about filling every tiny hole in the foundation of our house… As monitoring the outside the outside perimeter with our game camera, and Diane sprinkling red pepper all over the sill. Today we added something else… We now have these small boxes that are solar powered and when they sense motion they send out aloud ultrasonic sound and flashlights… The idea is to scare animals away… I think our friend a possum didn’t like it much.

 

sorry friend .. We hope you find a nice place for the winter… Just not in our house

nite all, nite sam

-me

We wanted to take a longer hike today so we chose one of our favorites… It’s the old duck Brook Trail that heads from notch Road back to our house. It used to be part of the long trail but was made a side trail when they dealt a bridge over there winooski.

What made this walk interesting is that there was a ton of dry leaves. It was unusual because the weather tends to get much wetter around this time of year in the leaf mass is usually pretty matted down.  Today there was deep piles a very dry leaves which made for fun, noisy and very slippery walking. It was actually worse than walking on snow or ice because we didn’t have crampons on… We kept slipping and falling in the calf-high piles of leaves that covered the trail. … It was more fun than frustrating. It was interesting to see that there were still flowers out there… This time of year should be much colder

 

nice to be outside for so long !

ah.. here’s a better view of the lift chair swing we made for Sam yesterday… So glad to get that done. funny Side story is that I had forgotten to turn my tracker off on my phone so here’s a picture of my day working around the house.. And one photo of a “moon shadow” from tonights full moon !

 

back to work tomorrow

nite all, nite sam

-me

We were psyched to begin working on the lift chair swing for Sam. We’ve had this old lift chair from the Bolton Vista run since a week or so after Sam’s death. My friend Chris and I went up and I bought this for some reason. I guess I always intended it as some sort of tribute to Sam.… The 16th anniversary of sam’s death is coming up in a couple of weeks so we felt motivated to make this happen. Yesterday we had taken some measurements of the wonderful swing that Maries  uncle Frank had made for her memorial garden… We had taken measurements and we talk to Frank and found out that he and his wife Vicky had actually bought us a set of braces that you could use to build the A-frame to hang this way.… Jen reached out to them and luckily they had plans to come to Burlington. They agreed to bring those swing brackets which were a key piece. We so appreciate their help on this!… They drop the brackets by and we headed to the hardware store to buy a bunch of pressure-treated wood to build a very tall frame. We have decided we wanted to keep the entire structure of the lift chair intact… Which meant the frame had to be 11 feet tall.… That’s a lot of wood for the top of our little CRV.

Diane and I iterated a couple of times on a design and headed in to buy the wood and hardware. We got back from that trip and quickly got to work.… Luckily just at the end our friends Morgan and Joe came by and morgan and I were able to lever the giant structure up into the air. Joe is pretty heavy is a carpenter so he was able to help us with some of the finish work as well. It was so great to have them here to hang out with as we worked

 

Thanks to Joann Morgan we were able to get the whole thing done in a single day. We celebrated by going out to dinner with them and Kevin and March in Burlington for tacos… Great day

nite all, nite sam

-me

ps.. Diane is continuing her Master plan to mouse brief our house… It seems to be working. Our mouse captures our way down. We’re monitoring the outside of the house and one funny thing is that this possum circles our house every night… Both front and back doors. It’s kind of a pet I guess… As long as he doesn’t get into our house. I ghotta put thsi video to music (Phish’s Possum ?)

 

Marie’s uncle Frank and her dad made a beautiful swing out of a lift chair that looks over Marie’s memorial flower garden.… Diane and I have had an old lift chair  from the Bolton Vista run since a few weeks after  Sam died. We were inspired by Marie swing to make one of our own in Sam’s memory. The 16th anniversary of his passing is coming up in a couple of weeks.

First we took a quick hike up Bolton then headed to the  Kenneys to take some measurements of the very nice job that Jens brother had used… 

 

 

looking forward to building this for Sam

nite all. nite sam

-me