News from the Country Estate June 14

Greetings from the well-soaked Country Estate!

-The week or so of nice weather (nice for us humans) broke last week with rain, rain and more rain. It rains now in fact. This is all good news for the garden up to a point. The peas, pumpkins, kohlrabi and turnips are doing well, everything else ranges from so-so to dead. If we were subsistence farmers, we'd be worried, but as it is, we say, well you've got to start somewhere. Here is a a recent self-portrait of the eastern branch of the Wagner clan/Maine-branch of the Ruff-Wagner clan. Some of you's have not seen KT's hair short or my face be-goateed. The goat is a recent occurrence for me, but KT's easily-maintained-do is at least four months old. She might add that she is not making any statement other than that of living a simple life expressed through the hair-follicles. As it is, I think she's quite presentable with or without hair :) (Thanks to In-Law Amy for the Bean plaid shirt, it fits great!)


In other news, two weeks or so of stress for me comes to an end as I start work on a new project tomorrow and money flows in again. Not a moment too soon too as big blue trucks don't pay for themselves literally. Its not until they start carting around tools and materials that they begin to make sense. With that in mind I forced the rack I built for the Chevy onto the Italian Stallion (now that Chrysler is owned by Fiat that name seems fitting). Oddly enough the bed of the new truck is two inches wider in the front that the Chevy. Installing the now dry and brittle hemlock posts was not without its challenges. The bed on the new truck is also three inches longer than the Chevy requiring new side planks at a full 8 feet. The result:

I will be putting the whole rig through its paces tomorrow morning. I'll be loaded to the gills with ladders, tools, planks, saw horses and the like for the job on Thompson Lake. We've got two timber frames to raise, one hand cut in Hemlock and one machine cut by South County Post and Beam of West Kingston, RI in Douglas Fir. This will be our first time raising a machine cut frame. It will also be my first time in this particular part of Maine:


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In addition to raising the timberframes we'll be enclosing the buildings with structural insulated panels from Winter Panel in Brattleboro, VT. All that raising and enclosing means a lot of time working with a crane and working on the roofs--exactly the kind of work I had in mind for myself when I was five!

KT sends her greetings to all y'all in the blogosphere and interweb

That's the way it looks from here.