2014

Sorry to seem a bit morbid this week, but it has suddenly been an upsetting one. The first bad news came from Zack and Brandy (Lisa’s cousin) who are providing the bricks and flooring for our house. Zack’s father died suddenly during Sunday night. Understandably, our bricks and floors take a lower priority to this. […]

At the beginning of this week, we were threatened with predictions of dire storms (and just a small chance of a passing tornado). Not much you can do about that, but the building crews took it to heart and cancelled plans for much work for the first half of the week. We were expected to

I was sitting on the back deck on Choctaw Ridge on Friday evening. Yes, the same deck where Booboo the bear came calling a month ago. We have taken to putting the bird feeder out again, but only in daylight and when we are in the house. Not because we want to attract bears –

The house has been attracting a lot of interest this week. As well as several visitors (not including the building inspectors who came on Monday and gave the place a clean bill of health), we ended providing guided tours to two sets of visitors. On Wednesday the Boohakers (who are also building a house with

But there are things to be done outside too. The siding crew are hard at work covering the exterior timber walls with planks of a substantial synthetic material representing planks. For more interest, the walls in key places are covered in irregular shaped tiles of the same material, resembling cedar shakes. Work on the Great

It’s been a busy week of building and supporting the building process, so not a lot of other things have been going on. There have been trips to exciting places like a rock yard to select stone for the house, and things ended on a small high on Saturday night when the Atlanta Braves convincingly

Spring officially started here this week, marked by the Vernal Equinox. But we are not totally convinced it’s real. The weather on Tuesday and Wednesday wasn’t quite as bad as forecast, with night time temperatures down to -5C, though there wasn’t any snow. I hope that the vines in the local vineyards can take it

Spring officially started here this week, marked by the Vernal Equinox. But we are not totally convinced. The medium range forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday in the coming week has been steadily deteriorating, and is now talking about a hard frost on Monday and Tuesday nights. Temperatures as low as -8C may occur, though it

Talking of eating (as always), we are putting a lot of effort into finding local sources of good food. Supermarkets are all very well, but the quality of fresh produce can’t match Waitrose and other stores in London we used. We have found a virtual farmers’ market (place your orders on the internet from what

In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. For us slightly more mature sorts, thoughts of getting out and seeing how the countryside is developing. Which for me, at least, often involves a winery. We went to Three Sisters on Sunday afternoon for their celebration of St. David’s Day (Sharon