You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Using what I had previously thought of as life boats was a common practice during the cruise.
Babson Island a wet landing
wearing Converse high tops sans socks
a mistake
lucky I don’t have blisters
a fine-shell beach
unlike any we have to the east
I know of
so here we are going ashore again
this time for lobster
Babson Island, Maine Coastal Heritage Trust
Just walkin’ along and there they were.
Do we need say how excited we’re feeling?
Let’s look at the continuing progress from the inside.
Next steps will be the roofing, foam insulation, windows, siding, trim, and flooring.
Can this really be happening?
Where, for heaven’s sake, would this place be? We don’t have a lot of options in our remote rim of Maine.
And then I was told the restaurant was a late and lamented site a block from my home, now reincarnated as an echo of the grill and bar next door. Only, perchance, a shade better.
Well, as a reaction, I did have an appropriate Greek slang expression I’d found earlier when researching background for my novel What’s Left, not that I’ll quote it here.
Lowbush, rather than high. Sunrise County is the world capital. This tray is about to be frozen for later use.
Eastport, as you may have gleaned from this blog, can be overrun with deer. They do make gardening a challenge.
The encounters become more lively when mention of an albino deer arises. We’re discovering that Moose Island, where we live, has had a series of white deer, including fawns with the gene.
For the record, they’re probably not albino but leucistic, and as I saw in this case, mostly pink. Defining piebald has its own set of technicalities.
This encounter was on a Sunday morning while I was heading out of town on my way to Quaker Meeting for worship. I passed what I thought was lawn decoration and then realized it wasn’t. When I whipped back, this was the best I could capture before lowering the car’s window, and by then they had slipped behind the house. Wily critters they can be.
The deer in question, by the way, is on the right in the photo.
The naked eye saw only white sometimes tinged with pink or blue. The cell phone camera using a 4-second exposure saw this and much more. Was anyone really expecting northern lights?
this is the great north of my life
including mosquitos
I wouldn’t want to go on a typical
ship cruise
or Navy vessel
the sea’s so blue with a sky to match
in the zodiac, I’m an air sign
The two small dormers in the front bedroom were more of a pain to remove than you’d expect. That part was labor intensive, and they weren’t even braced to handle the weight load of the rafters above them. No, those had merely been sawed off. We have no idea how the heavy slate roofing that came later didn’t crush everything beneath it. (I’ll save that history for later.)
The dormers apparently weren’t added until after 1850, anyway. (Again, an explanation that can wait for later.)
The cedar-shake siding came even later, maybe the early 1990s. For a while before that, it was green asphalt siding. Yes, like what you might see on a roof.
The house color by 1830 was yellow, though we haven’t yet found any evidence of that.
All of that gives us more leeway for redesign, no?
With the front of the house, we’re keeping the outermost panels of the original roofline in recognition of the Cape Cod style. In the renovation, though, we still needed to upgrade the support beneath them, even before replacing the roof covering.
The dormers, by the way, were not identically distanced from the ends of the house. There was a half-foot or so difference. Did they not have tape measures? Make that yardsticks?
The single, big dormer will be a dramatic change, inside and out.
Here it comes!
The Phoenix has a devoted following and some fine views.
Jnana's Red Barn 