Star Island, Day Five
Jun. 25th, 2012 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingToday was catch as catch can for breakfast and we never did really get around to any kind of organized lunch. Mom walked the dog in the morning, I walked her around 2pm, and Dad walked her in the evening. In between all that, Dad headed down to the Shaw cabin, where Jeff Shaw is having some kind of work done, and persuaded the contractors to come look at our roof, which is OLD and has started to leak slowly over the kitchen during heavy rains. (Also, a roof which needs to have detergent powder with bleach sprinkled on it yearly to kill moss is probably not in the best shape. Just saying. And I did the annual sprinkling this morning. *pained smile*) Anyway, the contractors inspected the roof and agreed that it would be unlikely for us to make it through the winter without significant problems, and they have tentatively scheduled us in for September. So we will get a new roof! Apparently with a 35-year guarantee! Yay!
Around noonish, Mom and I headed in to the mainland to buy charcoal lighter fluid, anti-sensitivity tooth care products for her, and some other groceries. We took a bag of trash and some recycling over while we were at it. For a long time, there was no trash disposal for the island; everyone recycled what we could, took the big items to the solid waste plant in... I forget exactly where, dumped organic trash out in the woods or down the bank, and burned the rest. Which stank. Literally. But several years ago the Star Island Protective League collectively bought a dumpster and the marina owner agreed to host it for us, so now we simply carry non-organic trash over to the mainland for pickup like normal people. (This may or may not be more environmentally friendly. In the case of a bunch of plastics, it almost certainly is; I don't want to think about the chemicals they release in a fire. In the case of various other crud, who knows.)
Anyway, the point of that preceding paragraph is that I drove the boat there and back, for practice. I am a sedentary person by nature -- I trick myself into exercise by cleverly living a mile away from the smoke shop and not having a car, so I walk two miles at a decent speed every day I have to go to work. But this means that when given the option of going in to town to buy groceries or staying in the cabin, I have tended to choose staying on the island. Thus I do not have nearly the boat driving skills that, say, Vicky does. (There is also the minor factor that Vicky likes shopping whereas I regard it as a necessary evil -- we have a similar split in our positions on cooking, btw -- but even so.) My landings were rather graceless, but perfectly serviceable, so yay me. \o/
Later on Mom and I raked a bunch of last year's dead leaves onto a tarpaulin and dumped them down the bank. Several loads went beside the steps down to the dock, to help stabilize the ground which is still largely bare after the new steps were installed last year. The last couple loads we just flung over the bank in no particular direction. They will be useful without precision placement. Even with the riprap at the bottom of the bank, we are still working to combat years upon years of erosion -- mostly from ice damage. The east shore faces three miles of open water, and when the Forest Service was keeping the lake level higher (Cass Lake is on the Mississippi and thus part of an extensive water management system), ice tended to grind away at the base of the bank every winter. Three miles is a lot of water, and water does, after all, expand when it freezes.
Dinner was leftover chicken and stuffing from Thursday night, which was still quite tasty. :-)
Now I am going to turn the computer back over to Dad and continue reading Anna Karenina, which I abandoned last summer around page 200 (of 820-ish). I am starting over from scratch, since when I opened to the page I had bookmarked, I had completely forgotten who the characters were and how they had gotten into the situations described therein.
Around noonish, Mom and I headed in to the mainland to buy charcoal lighter fluid, anti-sensitivity tooth care products for her, and some other groceries. We took a bag of trash and some recycling over while we were at it. For a long time, there was no trash disposal for the island; everyone recycled what we could, took the big items to the solid waste plant in... I forget exactly where, dumped organic trash out in the woods or down the bank, and burned the rest. Which stank. Literally. But several years ago the Star Island Protective League collectively bought a dumpster and the marina owner agreed to host it for us, so now we simply carry non-organic trash over to the mainland for pickup like normal people. (This may or may not be more environmentally friendly. In the case of a bunch of plastics, it almost certainly is; I don't want to think about the chemicals they release in a fire. In the case of various other crud, who knows.)
Anyway, the point of that preceding paragraph is that I drove the boat there and back, for practice. I am a sedentary person by nature -- I trick myself into exercise by cleverly living a mile away from the smoke shop and not having a car, so I walk two miles at a decent speed every day I have to go to work. But this means that when given the option of going in to town to buy groceries or staying in the cabin, I have tended to choose staying on the island. Thus I do not have nearly the boat driving skills that, say, Vicky does. (There is also the minor factor that Vicky likes shopping whereas I regard it as a necessary evil -- we have a similar split in our positions on cooking, btw -- but even so.) My landings were rather graceless, but perfectly serviceable, so yay me. \o/
Later on Mom and I raked a bunch of last year's dead leaves onto a tarpaulin and dumped them down the bank. Several loads went beside the steps down to the dock, to help stabilize the ground which is still largely bare after the new steps were installed last year. The last couple loads we just flung over the bank in no particular direction. They will be useful without precision placement. Even with the riprap at the bottom of the bank, we are still working to combat years upon years of erosion -- mostly from ice damage. The east shore faces three miles of open water, and when the Forest Service was keeping the lake level higher (Cass Lake is on the Mississippi and thus part of an extensive water management system), ice tended to grind away at the base of the bank every winter. Three miles is a lot of water, and water does, after all, expand when it freezes.
Dinner was leftover chicken and stuffing from Thursday night, which was still quite tasty. :-)
Now I am going to turn the computer back over to Dad and continue reading Anna Karenina, which I abandoned last summer around page 200 (of 820-ish). I am starting over from scratch, since when I opened to the page I had bookmarked, I had completely forgotten who the characters were and how they had gotten into the situations described therein.
