Back In The High Life Again

When I am traveling, the 2 month mark is usually when I grow tired of trying to figure out where to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. Finding a place to stay in every new place gets old pretty quickly too. The old towns of Europe lose their quaintness and they all just blend into one annoying cobblestone street clogged with tourists.

I was watching the latest season of an Amazon Prime Series called “Alex Rider”. Its not a great show but I don’t feel like I wasted my bandwidth watching it. This last season was largely filmed in Malta. It cinematography is better than anything I could describe in writing. I originally planned to stay a month but a week was plenty. Still a nice place just not much to keep my interest for more than a week.

I am glad I saw Sicily but not much reason to go back other than the fact that the raised a huge ancient statue that I only saw laid out on the ground. According to this News story, they must have raised it within days of me being there.

My chill time in Sardinia put off the travel fatigue. It was pretty easy living. Walking the dog around the dock in the morning, puttering around on various deadline-free projects around the house and enjoying delicious home (boat) cooked meals almost every night followed up by a few hands of an Italian Gin Rummy card game we think is called Pinale.

It’s a good game to while away the evening hours. HERE is a link to a page on my website where I have the rules if you are looking for a new card game.

The rest of my trip was spent mostly in Eastern Europe. Countries whose language is Slavic based. A language and alphabet with little in common with English. Most of the the population, at least in the bigger cities, can speak at least some English and probably a few others. You can almost see them swap languages in their brain when you ask them a question in a language the understand but don’t normally speak. I do like these Old communist countries but the are mentally fatiguing getting through the day. I ended up with a few rainy days in Berlin. Mostly looking for a good Donner Kabab before I had to go back to the Kabab desert that is Pacific Northwest. And to be honest even the Kababs I had on this trip weren’t as good as I had in Georgia the previous year.   Photos for this trip are on the photo page.

But back home now and time to get back to work. I updated the photo mage with links from the trip if you are interested. The light winter meant I was able to drive all the way into the property 2 weeks earlier than I have been able to in all the time I have been up here. The cold weather is sticking around though. There have even been snow showers off and on today. The last day of April. The snow is not sticking but I think Punxutawney Phil has some explaining to do.

I set up a trail cam to take a picture once a day and once each night of the cabin. Plus when anything came into frame. It alerts when the motion sensor triggers a photo. When the snow melted and the wind started blowing the tarps around, it was taking a picture so often that it was almost like a movie when I strung them all together and flipped through them. There were so many pictures that I blew by the monthly limit for alerts and the SD card filled up. I edited out all the fluff and created a one a day timelapse plus a few of the motion triggers.

I was trying to get the cabin framing inspected before I left but I ran out of time and dry weather before I left so just wrapped it, locked it and left. Usually winters are pretty hard on the property but so far I am only noticing some easily fixed wind damage. The house wrap I put around the cabin to protect it from the weather stayed on but just barely. I was half expecting to find a sleepy bear stumbling around the cabin but I didn’t see any remnants of any animal intrusion. So good to go for starting the big push to getting the cabin livable.

My goal was to focus on the remaining bits of framing that I have to do to at least give the framing inspector a smaller list of dings against his checklist. I got an official letter from the county saying that my permit was about to expire because it has been a year since my last inspection. I did some final touch ups and scheduled the inspection hoping for a busy inspector who isn’t too detailed oriented. A couple of minutes later, I got a call from the county saying that I have to get the electrical and plumbing inspected before I can get the framing inspection. Haven’t even started that so I was resigned to jumping the bureaucratic hurdles to get the permit extended. Ugh. Then the lady said I could just get the windshear engineering inspected and I would get another year if I passed. So I scheduled that and hoped for the best. Part of that inspection is to make sure that I nailed all the plywood on correctly. I would have to rip down all the wrap so the inspector could see the nails holding the plywood on. There are minimum standards for the number of nails and placement. I wasn’t too worried about that. At this point I think there are more nails than lumber on this cabin. That being said, there were a couple minor problems but nothing that would stop me from passing the inspection.

Now the work really starts. I am waiting for the siding to show up so I can rent a big boom lift to install it and get the remaining windows installed. I am looking forward to not hanging precariously from a high ladder all summer.

I’ll keep taking pictures and videos but not much new until I have a whole new pile of supplies to trip over. Stay tuned.