Winter Fun

 

Snow shoeing!

In field behind our house.

Yes I do have snow shoes on.

My Saturday exercise.

Barn: Before Through Now

This is our barn as it looked December [correction: thanks Barbara!] 2020 when we moved here.

 

In the above photo it shows a sliding barn door on the far right. An opening once existed to the left of that sliding door but was nailed shut. The door to the very far left was also nailed shut.

Dan did the work to remove the flooring where the cement floor would be poured.  He also removed the loft above that space and a neighbor down the road took the wood.

Work started in June to raise the sill on the right to level the barn. The second opening was revealed. Our driveway was a mix of grass and dirt.

 

Below the new cement floor has been poured by late summer.

And then the driveway grading could be completed.  We could park the car under cover.

Original barn whisperer was MIA so Dan spoke to a neighbor who jumped at chance to do phase 2 - replace the rotten sill to the left of the doorways on this east side, build doors, fix the windows and replace the rotten clapboard. What Dan didn't count on was that he was hiring a boss. Tony's estimate was discounted because of the amount of work that he expected Dan to contribute.  Dan has been out there working every day with Tony and even after Tony has departed for the day. And this has been happening since December 11th in all sorts of temperatures.

What we are calling the garden room door is to the left in photo below. The door above the center window served no purpose so once the clap board was removed, it disappeared.

Photo below was taken Sunday morning through a window.  It was a cold blustery day but you can see the new doors and new clap board. Phase 2 completed. On to phase 3.

Below: The south side of the barn is phase 3. Photo taken Saturday while I was snow shoeing through the field.

In the photo most of the clap board has been removed and  Dan and Tony are attaching braces for a platform to reach the upper part. They completed removing the clap board which Dan burned in our fire pit.  It never got above freezing yesterday.

The upper window will be converted to a transom window to allow for air circulation in the rec room up there.

The backside (western side) will be phase 4 and the north side phase 5. Come spring or early summer the whole barn will get a good coat of paint but not red!

Stay tuned.

Sunset or Sunrise

Looking in the same direction can you tell which is the sunrise and which is the sunset?

 

And did you notice the barn is no longer red?  Old clapboard removed and new put up.  Before and after post in the future.

So did you figure it out that the sunrise was the second photo?

Maybe that wasn't a fair question because you'd have to know that the mountain is to the west of us.  The sunset photo could have been a sunrise if it was to the east of us.

Remembering

 It was a violent attempted coup organized by then President tRump. Thankfully it failed but unfortunately there are those who have no memory of its violence, its anti-democratic intent.

I will not forget. I hope you won't either. Our future as a democracy is at stake.

From the NY Times this morning:

Today is the first anniversary of the violent attack on the Capitol, by a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters who were trying to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election. The mob smashed windows and threatened the vice president and members of Congress. Seven people died as a result of the attack, including three police officers.

The Jan. 6 attack was part of a larger anti-democracy movement in the U.S. In the year since, the movement — which is closely aligned with the Republican Party — has changed some laws and ousted election officials, with the aim of overturning future results. The movement’s supporters justify these actions with lies about voter fraud.

Encouraged by Trump, other Republican politicians and conservative media stars, the anti-democratic movement is following a playbook used by authoritarians in other countries, both recently and historically. The movement is trying to use existing democratic laws — on vote counting and election certification, for example — to unravel democracy.

“We are in a terrible situation in which one of two major parties is no longer committed to playing by democratic rules,” Steven Levitsky — a political scientist and co-author of “How Democracies Die” with his Harvard colleague Daniel Ziblatt — told me. “No other established Western democracy faces such a threat today, not this acutely anyway.”