Fiddleheads and The Last Two Feet of Snow

On Friday our good neighbor Pease brought us over a bag of fiddleheads he had picked that day. They made a great veggie dish to go with the delicious soup Lauren had created Saturday night. Fiddleheads are another sure sign of Spring and as I was surveying the back yard this morning with Dusty I admired the last two feet of snow. There’s a warm breeze blowing today and my guess is that by 8:00 AM tomorrow that snow will be history.

So good-bye snow

You’ve been nice to know

Bringing pleasure to the skiers

Aiding the economic flow

See you next season

When the cold winds blow

January Update

It is 2:45 now on a lazy Saturday afternoon and it looks like it may snow soon. Lauren and I just came back from the Transfer Station where we actually came back with nothing extra this time. Earlier today we took down our Christmas Trees, yes trees, we had two of them. Why, because….well why not? We certainly have enough decorations for two. Lauren deserves the credit for decorating them. My job was installation, keeping them watered, and then removal. I did enjoy them because they added a nice festive light and feeling to the home.

In other news, we had seen a raccoon at the side of barn the other day so I set the Hav-a-Hart trap inside the barn and on Thursday thought I had caught it when I saw the trap closed. But instead I had caught the neighbor’s cat that was very happy to be released. We haven’t heard the ruckus lately that we had been hearing under our kitchen floor which is a crawlspace that allows access and shelter for the raccoons, porcupines, and woodchucks. When these guys get going it can sound somewhere between a party and soccer match. They chatter loudly, run back and forth, bang into the floor, and chew the bottom of the floor joists. Because “we” don’t have access to this space our only solution currently is to take a block of wood, place it on the kitchen floor directly over where we hear the noise and then proceed to bang the daylights out of the wood with a hammer to try and scare them off. It seems to work but sometimes only temporarily. Recently someone told us to put a rag soaked with ammonia down there. I remembered this worked well when we were having raccoons get into our garbage barrels in Massachusetts years ago. The problem with this is our limited access to get the rag under there and then do we really want the aroma of ammonia wafting up through the kitchen floor? I don’t think so.

Thanks to this last snowstorm on Wednesday all the bare spots which were on the ground are now covered. Hopefully it will stay like this until spring so we can do more cross country skiing. We did our first cross country ski of the season a couple of weeks ago after the first big snow. It felt great to ski, yes and fall, along the trails at the Bethel Inn and at the end of a good workout I was able to take my skis off and walk 100 yards to my house. On Thursday I walked up to Suds Pub for Hoot Night and met up with our long time good neighbor from Magnolia, John O’Hara. We caught up in conversation while the local musicians played. I Love Hoot Nite at Suds. Tomorrow we’re going to watch the Patriots game with Matt and Sari Rochford who are other long time Magnolia neighbors of ours. They apparently come up with their kids most weekends now to go skiing at Sunday River. It’s uncanny just how many people from Gloucester and Cape Ann we keep bumping into here and how many have bought homes up here. Enjoy the cold…it was zero here last night. Hey, it’s snowing now.

It Feels like Home

We did it! We moved into our house a week ago today and have had seven days of house projects and seven nights of warm comfortable sleep. Our biggest surprise and delight is just how warm this house is. We never turn the thermostats higher than 68 degrees and it always seems to be warm. In fact I think I probably made a $5,000 mistake by putting baseboard heat on the second floor because it has never come on until we finally forced it to come on last night for the first time. We’ll set the thermostat to 62 degrees at night on the first floor and the second floor seems to stay at 67 degrees with the rise of the heat. Oh well another lesson learned.
It was a busy week and although I can’t show you anything as impressive as a new heating system we did accomplish a lot of little things and that is what we “need” to do because this house has a thousand little things that need to be done. First we got our new FRIGIDAIRE Refrigerator delivered to the house. It has an EnergyStar approval and averages only $41 an year in cost, yay…go green! Because we bought it at Agren Appliance in South Paris, Maine we got a free DVD player and they’re taking care of the $100 rebate we receive. I have to side step here for one moment to acknowledge my memory of Annie Van Ness, Lauren’s Grandmother who always called any refrigerator, no matter what make, “the Frigidaire.”
Another important item we had installed was the Cable Internet and TV Service from Time Warner Cable because….well like everyone else in the US that’s the only choice we had. Oh yeah, I could get Satellite or I could string together some coffee cans and stick an aluminum pie plate on my roof. Whatever happened to free TV? Yes we have “choice”; Pay or… stay in the Dark Ages. I apologize, I digressed.
Let’s see, we got our bedroom set up and we have my office space functional. We found the curtains we were looking for so now we have curtains in the bedroom instead of a bedspread hanging over them. I replaced some old broken floor boards in the first floor bathroom and enclosed one of the two doors in it so we had sensible place to put “The Frigidaire” (yes, we put it on the other side of the bathroom). I replaced some of the old smoke alarms with new ones and installed an extra one. I insulated many of the gaps and cracks in the basement foundation with fiberglass insulation and GREAT STUFF Expanding Foam Insulation. When you can see daylight between some of the granite rocks you know you need to fill it. I removed the old stovetop and oven and will haul that to the dump later today.
Lauren is a cleaning and painting machine. There are multiple layers of dirt, grease, crud, and grime on every surface area in the house and armed with TSP and DAWN Liquid Detergent she is cleaning, scrubbing, re-cleaning and then painting. Until we can get to the point where we can actually remodel the kitchen and bath we’re just trying to get it to “clean and bearable”. She’s doing a great job. Lauren also seems to like going to the hardware store as much as I do. That’s a picture of her in front of Western Maine Supply taken yesterday just as the snow started to come in. I think she likes some of the recognition she gets from the guys coming into the store. Hey, if it puts a smile on her face…it’s okay.
It wasn’t all work and no play last week. Lauren had three of her longtime friends, Mary, Mona, and Cindy come up for a visit from Gloucester on Tuesday. I got to hang out with them that night where we had a nice supper and then went to Sud’s Pub for a drink and where Scott the bartender commented on my “Harem”. After that it was over to the Funky Red Barn where we played a game of pool and there were only two other guys there but Mary knew them because they were from Gloucester too. It’s a small world.
On Friday we went out to dinner with Susie and Gary who we had rented an apartment from in their house for the month we were here while waiting for our heat to be installed. We stayed a little more than a month so instead of charging us they said “take us out for dinner and we’ll call it even”. So we went to the Jolly Drayman at the Briar Lea Inn which is an English style Pub and had a wonderful dinner and wonderful time. Gary actually bought the Briar Lea years ago when it was just an old farmhouse and turned it into an Inn by installing ten bathrooms and a ton of other work so we now know a lot about the history and evolution of the place.
Well it’s Sunday and I’ve got work to do. I have to go to the dump for starters. The other picture above is the scene from our bedroom window this morning. Thanks for checking in and hope you are all well! Peter

Our First Weekend in Bethel as Homeowners

Okay we still don’t have heat in the house we recently bought but we were able to find a small place to rent for awhile in the neighboring town of Gilead. It’s clean, has a nice kitchen and bath and it has heat. Last night Lauren and I decided to try out the Mountain Explorer which is the local free bus that runs constantly between the downtown area of Bethel up to the Sunday River Ski Resort making several stops between at key hotels and restaurants. We got on at the Bethel Inn which is right across the street from the house we just bought and got off at the South Ridge stop at Sunday River. Once there we entered the main building and were greeted by throngs of skiers and snowboarders clomping down the hallways in their ski boots. It was just after sunset Friday afternoon and the place was hopping. We spent some time at the Foggy Goggle and had a drink while we watched the skiers coming down the mountain and ride back up on the Chondola. Everyone was clearly having a good time inside and out. We then hopped back on the Explorer back into town and got off at Suds Pub for some dinner and drink. While we were waiting for our food a couple from our old neighborhood in Gloucester, MA came walking in the door at Suds. Matt and Sari Rochford knew we had bought a house in Bethel because the grapevine is alive and strong in Gloucester. Matt’s dad Billy was one of my groomsmen when Lauren and I got married almost 29 years ago and Matt’s mom Arlene and my mother-in-law Joan “talk”. It was so nice to see them and it made us feel at home. In addition we met two other couples who live in York, Maine but own homes in Bethel. Lauren seemed to hit it off with the women and I was so glad to see her talk, laugh and smile. We really don’t know many people here and Lauren definitely needs some other people besides me to talk to.

Today we went to Western Maine Building Supply to buy a snow rake for the roof and some 2 x 6’s. It’s supposed to rain Monday and that will make the snow on the roof heavy so I needed to at least get some of it off the low pitched porch roof. Lauren looks pretty professional using that snow rake, doesn’t she? The 2 x 6’s I used to help prop up the barn roof. The barn is in very sad shape because not only has it been neglected but over the years different people or maybe just one cut out some key support members and it has been falling apart. I’m not sure I can save it because the closer I look the more OMG things I see. After this we decided to check out some of the festivities at the Bethel WinterFest which starts today and runs until the 31st of January. First we went to the Gazebo on the Common to view a few ice sculptures. They were very nice but not kid-proof because as we were leaving we heard a crash only to look back and see the one with bears had been knocked over by a two year old. Then we drove down to Festival Plaza by the Casablanca Movie Theater and tried out some snow shoes which I really enjoyed. After this we tried out the snow-maze which is only 4 feet high so really tough for kids but not so easy for 5 to 6 foot adults either. It was bright blue and sunny skies today and no wind so it felt great. So far, so good.