Tunkhannock

We arrived in Tunkhannock on the evening of July 4 and after setting up Snoopy watched the fireworks across the valley. We started working Monday morning on various projects, including: installing doors and door hardware in the basement bathroom and laundry room (Bob), applying sheetrock mud to the garage ceiling (Wendy), insullating and vapor sealing the outside wall of the bathroom (Wendy), soldering about 60 plumbing joints between the bathroom and laundry room and the water heater (Bob), and opening up the six bedrooms in the Cottage (Wendy). Applying sheetrock mud is really hard. Similarly, installing doors is really hard because they have to be level and square in all dimensions. In addition, the first week was really hot (90+ degrees, including one day of 103 degrees [the hottest place in Pennsylvania]). We swam a lot in the pond, where the top several feet were almost bath-water warm. Still, it is beautifully peaceful in the evenings. We've gone to see "Toy Story 3," a great movie, have eaten out once, visited the Tunkhannock library to blog and send longer e-mails, gone to the Tiki Club in Scranton on Friday night (a social club of the German-American organization where you get a meal for $5 and beer ($1) or hard liquor ($1.50) and dance in an open-air space overlooking one of the numerous valleys in Scranton among an eclectic group of people), had dinner with Tiny and Cathy Sands and met a bunch of the neighbors and hung out around the Cottage. There are numerous animals around the Cottage. Can you find the large black snake in the above photo? It's a good thing I like snakes and black snakes eat rodents of which there are a plethora in the Cottage.

The pond is filled with frogs who are a constant chorus all day and night. When we head down to go swimming they all chirp and jump into the water. The edge of the pond now has water plants and these guys (with bodies about 4") hang out and croak. Some have bright yellow throats and others have white throats. Briar, Markus' dog, can be persuaded to float on noodles or in a single-person raft. Darwin stays far away from the water. Bob and Darwin play 18 holes of golf every day since the course has been mowed (Bob participated in some brush-hogging and Markus is engaged in "extreme" brush-hogging the steep sides of the pond).

One of the other projects I was involved in was creating this mosaic for the floor of the basement bathroom. Bob, Andrew, Julia and I designed the bathroom. Julia purchased all the tiles and delivered them to a warehouse on Markus' return route from Berkeley. The tiles came in 1" squares which had to be cut into halves, quarters, triangles and various other shapes. After initially breaking a lot of tiles Markus showed me how to use the tile cutter which made cutting the halves or thirds easier. The design turned out pretty well, particularly considering they didn't supply us with all the tiles we needed. I had to use some tiles from the floor of the shower (which is in shades of blue). We ordered the mosaic from England and they shipped the tiles to Tunkhannock (including the shower tiles which were made in Mexico). We have a large carbon footprint with this project.

Each morning we wake up with the above view from Snoopy. It has rained a couple days (desperately needed) and been foggy. We have been visited by a cardinal who threw himself at the windows of Snoopy, waking us at 5:30 a.m. We are in a desperate rush to finish the bathroom for the Barn Raising in August.

Bob and I leave Friday for Richmond, CA for son-in-law Jens' 50th birthday, returning Monday. We then work for two days before heading for Urbana, IL and my 41st high school reunion, followed by the Professional Disc Golf Competition in Indiana for Bob. He will take Snoopy and I will fly back to Scranton to work on the Cottage for the last week of July. Markus and Carol are graciously agreeing to care for Darwin as we fly around.