Getting Ready For Winter

Already?! It's still only August!

Around here lately we're having a tough time believing it's August. It's just not been the scorcher that August is known for being. It's actually been more like April--Which can actually be a good thing. While there have still been days of hot weather, they are sporadic and this weekend was not in that category.

It has been a busy, busy weekend for Tony.  He and Rachyl signed the papers on their long, long-awaited home on Thursday!  Ever since that moment (and even before, with special permission) there has been work going on there.  It's been a constant job site since they came home on Friday.  Okay, that is after they took us and Denny & Heather to eat a celebratory dinner at Applebee's.  Since that time it's been practically nonstop work over there.  A small wall ripped out, new paint throughout, new flooring in places, new ceiling fans, etc, etc.  Tony has been so driven that I'm sure he even hated to stop for sleep.  He has had lots of help from everyone too.  The excitement has enveloped pretty much everyone in the family here, and rightly so!  Rachyl has been trying to get a house bought for over two years, and they've been working on getting this particular one for half of that time.  Due to the nature of most houses that are currently for sale being of the "short-sale" variety, there's apparently a lot of red tape and hoops to jump through.  Well, they finally made it!

I've been browsing Craigslist for firewood lately. Partly just to ease my squirrel tendencies, and partly because the price for firewood always goes up the first of October (at least among the firewood vendors). Saturday I found a pretty good-sized pickup load that we ended up paying $70 for. Honestly, if he would have not taken our $70 offer (he wanted $80) we would have passed. The reason was that a good 10% of it was more recent cut and would do us no good at all this winter. We were planning on going to the little town of Snoqualmie for their annual Train Festival, but our quick trip to get the firewood sort of waylaid us for a while first.

When we came back we just parked the truck and headed to Snoqualmie.  After all, we had picture-taking on the mind!  On our way we stopped at Mark and Rachel's house and picked up their oldest daughter, Celeste.  We like to include them in things whenever we can.  The event itself wasn't spectacular, but we all had a great time.  We took a lot of pictures, but only part of it was train-related. There were people, activities, and just the town sights themselves that all lent themselves to our viewfinders.

Yesterday was work day.  I had a lot of firewood "rotation" that I had to do.  Last year we (okay, Kevin actually) cut a few downed trees up in the woods behind our house.  We had all these "rounds" that have been sitting back there patiently awaiting their turn to jump into our woodstove.  Before I could put all the "new" wood that was still in the truck into it's rightful place in the storage area, I had to move all that other stuff out.  As I went I occasionally had to split one of the pieces a little smaller as I stacked it.  When all that wood was stacked I turned my attention to the rounds that I had moved.  I used my seldom-used-for-heavy-labor body and split all of it.  That was a lot of work.  It took its toll on my lower back and left wrist by the time I was done.  Only my wrist still hurts a little this morning but it's much better than it was yesterday.  Maybe the hot tub helped eh?

I don't think I've mentioned it on here, but I started a new blog a couple weeks ago called Leftovers.  It's a place for me to park what I consider to be worthy shots from a photography standpoint that didn't fit into whatever theme I was shooting in or whatever.  In other words, shots that came out great but I really didn't have a reason to keep.  Artsy-fartsy?  You decide.  I'm just very happy with some of the stuff I've put on there so far.  It started as kind of a "catch-all" but has evolved already into just plain good photography.

At least for me it's good.

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