Sugar Plums Lining Our Driveway (click to enlarge)
Spring is here – big time! To the left are the Sugar Plum trees lining our driveway. The berries make delicious pies – the pies are sweet in the way rhubarb pies are sweet in that there is a definite tartness to be enjoyed. Sadly, the berries from these particular trees will never see the inside of an oven. What the birds don’t get, will be devoured by the deer and occasional moose. But we content ourselves with the abundant currents and gooseberries.
My sitting area (click to enlarge)
On a more mundane note, I usually get up around dawn, which is to say between 5:00 AM and 6:00 AM. Not because I am particularly ambitious but, truth be told, I find it very hard to sleep when the dark begins to give way to light. This particular time is far and away my favorite of the day.
My routine is to make coffee, fire up the confuser, take care of the morning ablutions, and sit down beside the stove and read blogs, post new blog entries, study (usually a pericope of Old Testament Hebrew), and catch up on mail.
This morning will be spent planning the coming day and week ahead. Don and Bonnie arrive today and I’m very much looking forward to seeing them again. If there are implicit leaders of this little community, they are the ones to whom most of us look. Gail arrives tomorrow – driving out from Sammamish – and I’ll need to have the place ship-shape. That’s going to be a challenge because I may cut a few corners here and there. Gail? Never!
Thursday, we take off to pick up the 2 new composting toilets we’ll be installing for our guests. But, that is really just an excuse to visit Mike and Margie Howard and Jack and Kaye Gaines in Bozeman. Great fun!
Deck Beginnings: Ledger and Beam (click to expand)
Finally, Dana arrives this coming Sunday for an intense week of deck building and other tasks to get ready for our July guests and the annual SHLC fly-fishing and Bible study boondoggle in August. The deck will be completed and we may even get so far as paneling the inside of the bunkhouse.
When complete, the bunkhouse will sleep 8 adults (a triple bunk bed, a single twin bed, and two 4×8 lofts sleeping two people each, head to toe.
