Our farming neighbors went away for a few nights recently and asked us to watch their wonderful dog Peaches.
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She’s the quintessential lovable mixed breed and we’ve loved her since she was a hurricane rescue 13 years ago.
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Unfortunately, Lord Dudley Mountcatten did not share our enthusiasm for a house guest.
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Peaches is extremely mellow and very used to cats. She doesn’t chase or pay the least bit of attention to them.. but His Lordship still couldn’t figure out why this creature was in his house.
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Bad timing there. Lord Dudley was so close… and then someone knocked on the door.
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It’s a credit to Peaches temperament that our cat would even be in the same room.
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Of course the fact that she spent a good deal of her time with us sleeping might have had something to do with that.
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But I still think I’m going to pay a price for disturbing His Royal Highness’s routine.
After our visit to the fair, we tried a place I’d been hearing good things about for dinner….the Old Mill Pub in Skowhegan.
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It didn’t look like much and since the inside dining room was packed, we headed outside.
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Where the view from our table wasn’t half bad.
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Things started well with a fabulous blueberry mule.
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And an amazing French Onion soup for the husband.
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This is his go to appetizer so when you’ve tried hundreds, you always appreciate when it’s done right.
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Dinner for me was yummy maple bourbon glazed steak tips with garlic mashed red potatoes and sautéed broccoli (not pictured) …. and a light and lovely lemon butter haddock and mashed for the spouse.
We’re not often in this part of Maine, but I’m putting the Old Mill Pub on my list of places to revisit if we are.
Because it wouldn’t be a fair without some chickens.
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There were quite a few prize winning divas strutting their stuff.
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But this all black rooster took the prize for bizarre.
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The next blue ribbon winner?
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Must have won for bad hair day.
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How do these Polish even see?
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There were fancy pigeons, but to be honest these made me sad.
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They’ve clearly been bred for over exaggerated foot feathers and the poor things could hardly walk.
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But the peacocks were lovely.
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And this duck who decided no one could drink because he wanted a bath was funny.
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We ended with a very curious goose who followed me all around the enclosure. I believe he was for sale and wanted to come home with us… but alas, my husband refused.
Because if we didn’t have bad timing we wouldn’t have any at all , the last day our contractor was working on the ceiling project found us out of town… which meant we didn’t see the finished product until the next day. And while I’m pleased to have our living room back to normal without a plastic room in the middle of it…
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I’m not entirely pleased with the end result.
Yes, the section of ceiling that used to look like this….
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Certainly looks much better like this.
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And the beam that used to look like this..
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Is much smoother now.
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And while it’s wonderful not to see the sag in the middle of the room and worry that the roof could fall on our heads at any moment…
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There are two issues I’m not willing to accept.
While it’s true I knew the replacement popcorn wouldn’t exactly match the existing, I wasn’t expecting such a glaring line of demarcation.
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It’s very noticeable in spots and that just won’t do.
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The other issue is stain resolution. Years of slow roof leaks left us with random brown spots on one end and though our guy hit them with some sort of Kilz product and turned them white again…
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It’s a noticeably different white and drives me crazy every time I look up.
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Since our contractor is due to return in two weeks to install new windows and a door in our bedroom, a plan will be hatched to deal with the problems. He knew I wasn’t happy and because he’s probably going to be the one to lay our new flooring in the living room he suggested we wait until then and repaint the whole ceiling. That’s probably what should have been done in the first place but we both thought we could get away with not doing it. Which is what you get for thinking. Trying to save time and money with home repairs is fruitless and rarely works.
Is the beam solid and more structurally secure? Yes.
When we visit a fair, my husband is always drawn to the museums of old tools. Partly because they’re interesting, but mostly because he’s old enough to remember using some of them.
He loves checking out the antique tractors but this particular brand was new even to him.
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Cockshutt?
A more colorful name than John Deere that’s for sure.
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No matter how many times I tell him or how many warning signs he reads… he’s always touching things when he’s not supposed to. If he did this with women instead of old farm implements.. we’d have a problem.
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I always wonder where they find these fabulous wagons and carriages. Some of them are in amazingly good shape.
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Ouch!
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Clearly this museum has a sense of humor.
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A library and one room schoolhouse from the early 1800’s.
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The rig in the front of this picture is an early snow press. There were no plows to clear the roads back in the day, they just tried to flatten it as best they could.
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My husband’s father used one of these on their farm. Any guesses what it is?
I’m constantly getting suggestions on my FB feed to buy things from Etsy. And while I’ve purchased a few odds and ends there in the past… these new items didn’t make me want to break out my credit card anytime soon.
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Unless it’s Halloween and I’m dressing to attract a male polar bear? I see absolutely no need for these boots.
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Good grief. I don’t want fully operational and functioning gnomes, why would I ever want defective ones?
Along with Etsy, Amazon is flooding my feed with crazy cat items it thinks I need to purchase for His Lordship.
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Yeah. That’s not happening.
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And look at the face on that cat. I don’t think fur is the only thing that’s going to be terminated.
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Okay, they’ve got me here. Lord Dudley Mountcatten might actually like a pool table of his very own.
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