One down, plenty to go

I made my first trip up to the farm this past weekend. Dad went up on Thursday to rub my face in the fact he is retired and can do whatever he likes whenever he likes. I guess he had great weather and a nice prime rib dinner at Butcher Block with the Arnos on Friday night - blah blah blah. I headed up after work Friday night, just escaping ahead of some intense rain showers. I was playing around with the Garmin 396 with the XM satellite weather feed watching the storm chase me out of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. It was smooth sailing the rest of the way. The weekend forecast is for rain from that storm system to soak us all weekend long. I open my eyes Saturday morning to a blindingly bright room. I stagger into the kitchen to look for some caffeine but all I can see through my squinted eyes is sunlight. I glance at the 150 DVDs I brought up for some R&R and realize that we should probably take advantage of the nice break in the weather and tackle something from the growing Fix-It list Dad keeps. After a quick trip to McDonalds for some liquid energy Dad and I discuss the sagging porch. The windows don't open and the storm door is starting to get jammed in the frame. Since it had been dry for a couple days this is a good a chance as any to crawl under there and try to correct the situation. It turned out to be easier than expected and we have the porch raised up a couple inches in no time. This makes the front stairs, which have been sagging as well, look even worse. We tackle those next, raising them up and pushing them back into place as well. That leads to the door sill, which is in pretty bad shape. We head to Chazy Lumber to get a pressure treated board and decide to replace the entire storm door while we are at it. It has always annoyed me that the existing door was mounted incorrectly on the inside of the door frame and is mounted backwards making the outside of the door in the house and the inside of the door (with locking mechanism) exposed to the outdoors. This has also created the situation that requires us to keep the door from blowing open into the porch by attaching a bungee cord! Classy look. We borrowed some tools from Ed across the street and, as crooked as everything is in that house it is amazing how perfectly the new door fit. After cleaning up we return the tools to Ed. He is so thrilled that we returned them all in good working condition (he clearly had doubts when he handed them over :-) that he gave us some venison stakes to grill up for dinner that night. Dad throws in a big steak to make sure we have enough red meat and he concocts a great potato, onion, and cheese side dish to throw on the grill as our requisite "vegetable". The rain does eventually show up late afternoon, so we eat inside and watch a DVD. I guess bringing them up was a good idea after all. Getting up Sunday the weather is beautiful again. Dad called and got us a tee time for 11:30. It is perfect golf weather - sunny, mid 60s, and no bugs. Before we head out Dad and I take a ride down the trails in the ATV to check out the extension that Dick built. You can now get down to the stone wall right near the corner of the property where the skinny part of the land begins heading east. We proceed on foot hiking further east to locate the hunting shack and put up markers to plan the best route for extending the next leg of ATV trails. After a questionable (65), but fun round of golf and lunch at the club we head over to the Glenwood Cemetery in Champlain to look up some recently transplanted gravestones for some family members. (UPDATED: Dad posted an update of what was learned on his genealogy site. He also provided a more detailed report that I have added as a new entry in my blog.) All in all it was a very productive weekend. The irony is that of all the work we put in, only the door sill was on the official Fix-It list. I wouldn't want my little brother to feel left out on all the fun, so we'll make sure to save some projects for his return next year. Here are some photos from the trip.