Furniture shopping continues and my snarky friends are still being helpful. Their latest suggestion?
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Well, it is green.
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The dark eyed Junco is a small bird of the sparrow family that we never see until the snow flies. They’re always the first to appear after a storm and we’re not the only ones looking….
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Lord Dudley Mountcatten keeps a close eye as well.
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Well, that’s rude.
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Trim work has started on the bedroom windows which means the man cave has once again been taken over….
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And reeks of wood stain and polyurethane.
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It’s odd how sometimes you read a passage in a book and it just gets you. This choked me up the other day. I hope it’s true….
Winter can be long and harsh in Maine… and though it hasn’t been as cold or as snow covered as previous years, keeping a sense of humor through the dark months is important.
Not wanting to waste any precious time on our week long vacation, day four threw a monkey wrench in my carefully planned trip.
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We woke to overcast skies, an egret in the pond and a forecast of what turned out to be a mini hurricane. Heavy rain, high winds and dangerous surf are not prime beach resort conditions.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, I burned breakfast. Again…. due to the stupid flat surface stove that had two burners in one.
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High level heat if you turned right, high level heat if you turned left. This proved too much for my under caffeinated morning brain to handle and henceforth, the husband was on his own when it came to eggs.
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But at least the dish sponge was happy.
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Not having walked the beach since we got there, I forced my spouse onto the sand before the storm arrived. That’s his arm to the right of the photo, pointing out which unit was ours. I’m not sure why as we had just exited it and I was unlikely to forget that quickly.
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My husband is not a beach guy, not an idle walker. He needs a destination and purpose…
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I told him pleasing his wife of 40 years should be motivation enough.
😉
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We had the beach to ourselves, but it was cool, dark, damp and hellaciously windy.
In case you hadn’t heard, we had a bit of weather up here in Maine.
Turn up your volume for full effect because it was crazy loud in person.
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At the time of year when we should be covered in fluffy white stuff, Mother Nature and climate change decided to throw us what amounted to a mini hurricane instead.
70mph wind gusts and rain that came in sideways.
Naturally it ripped shingles off our roof which my husband had to try and cover and weigh down during the storm.
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It was a crazy day of howling winds, torrential rain and of course no electricity.
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After dark, we turned on the battery operated camp lights and had a marathon 6 hour gin rummy game.
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Lord Dudley Mountcatten supervised.
I won.
Around midnight we heard a big crash and called our neighbor to check that she was alright. A tree had fallen across her driveway and she asked if my husband could bring his chainsaw and help her move/cut it the next morning. My husband… being my husband… went down there right then, in the pitch black dark, with gale force winds practically blowing him down the hill.
The man is nuts, I swear.
On his return?
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He cut up the branch of my choke cherry tree that had fallen. Never a dull moment around here.
The next day was calm…. and people in our town still had their sense of humor.
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Thankfully the temperature was above 40 degrees since we still had no power…. and my poor guy spent 5 hours on the roof replacing shingles.
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It was a doozy of a storm and did a lot of damage across our state, mostly due to flooding.
Here are a few pictures from our area…
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Terrible timing so close to Christmas.
Though there really is no good time for storms like these.
I drove home under some ominous skies the other afternoon.
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And woke up to our first dusting of snow.
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It was gone by mid day just in time for our contractor to drop by between jobs and seal up the new windows with some not so attractive foam.
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He’s finishing off a barn next door that’s taking longer than planned but as soon as he’s done he’ll be back over here to finish our nightmare project.
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As usual, Lord Dudley Mountcatten couldn’t care less.
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💕
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Where there's only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.