Allison visits the farm!

Road before (after ice storm).

Click on photos to enlarge.

Road today. Most trees are gone.

Looking north. Still a few small trees to cut
and brush to burn.

Lots of limbs and twigs to burn.

More firewood than we will ever burn!

We were delighted today to see that Allison had ridden along with Kathy's son, KJ, when he came to work at the farm. Allison is the oldest of Kathy's three granddaughters. And even though she was sick with a sore throat, she still worked very hard.

Bonnie worked in the basement in the utility room, putting up wainscoting, painting, and working on the walls above the wainscoting. It is coming along. Bonnie also spread 25 lbs. of Companion grass on the vineyard this week while she was on vacation. Companion grass is for vineyards, orchards, and just about anywhere else. It is supposed to only have to be mowed a couple of times a year. Guess we will find out!

Kathy was outside all day. KJ had cut lots of trees yesterday and cut even more today. He had hoped to be finished today but didn't quite get done before his chains became dull. He has only a few trees on the north side of the driveway to do. Kathy spent her time (along with Allison) dragging limbs and twigs to the burn area and pulling some from the road in to the property more where they could be more easily drug to the burn pile at a later date.

Kathy tried to get a fire started, but she is the world's worse fire starter and very little was actually burned. Then the wind picked up so she gave up. She also stacked all of the firewood KJ cut in one area. Unfortunately, it will need to be moved at least one more time when Bonnie decides where she wants it. The funny thing is, we never had campfires all the years that we camped. Maybe we had 3 fires. And some of the firewood Denny brought from our lot to the farm was purchased at the campground in Peru when we camped there quite a few years ago! But maybe we will surprise ourselves and have campfires at the farm.

Kathy treated everyone to Elmo's pizza in Roanoke and she said the garlic chicken pizza is yummy!

Tomorrow will be a more restful day. Kathy is working on a painting project at the cottage and wants to continue that. Let's tell you about it. You see, we bought 4 or 5 gallons of our primary wall paint months ago. When Mike was just about done painting, he told us he needed one more gallon of that paint. So we took a container with the formula printed on it back to Menard's and had one more gallon mixed. Well, when Mike needed to touch up some walls after he closed off the ends of the stairway railings leading to the loft, he (or his helpers) used the new can of paint and it looked horrible. It didn't match! Kathy was beside herself trying to figure out what went wrong. Bonnie purchased a gallon of white paint and Kathy has been mixing it into the paint that does not match, trying to lighten it up so she can cover 5 areas in the cottage where the non-matching paint was used. It has been a frustrating battle, but she is getting closer and hopes to have a match tomorrow.

Denny and Barbara started burning limbs and brush for us on Thursday. Denny is much better at fires than Kathy is! While we were burning on Thursday, our neighbor, Ellen, stopped by and carried a few bunches of twigs to the burn pile and introduced herself to Kathy and Bonnie. Kathy gave her a tour of the cottage and she invited us both to stop by and see her house one day. If you enlarge the 4th photo from the top of today's blog, you can see Ellen's house over Denny's observatory. It is yellow, has a large barn, and a pond. It is a very attractive homestead.

We have water to both outside spigots and also a faucet Rex installed near the pressure tank in the basement. We are still carrying water from the basement to the upstairs bathroom so that we can use the main floor toilet. Hopefully, Rex will have working toilets for us soon!