Dear Everyone,
We are well. How are you? There are many things to do at Camp Accokeek, I've enclosed pictures of all the fun times we're having. Can't wait for school to start so I can show off my new Michael Jackson Thriller jacket. Anywho, here are the activities we're been participating in.
Bridge Building for Beginners
With the swale both functionally and aesthetically situated, we were faced with the obvious question, "How does one safely cross such a swale?" Why, I hadn't been faced with such a concave crevasse-ian conundrum since high school where my friend Wyatt and I confronted Map 24 of Doom II "The Chasm" (which we drolly referred to as The Chas-m, using an ecclesiastical 'ch' pronunciation, due to Wyatt's eldest brother being named Chas. We were virgins.). Fortunately in the time it took me to formulate such a needless remembrance, we were the fortunate recipients of two build-it-yourself cedar bridges from Brie's parents.
Brie sanded and sealed the individual pieces to avoid the natural greying associated with even water resistant wood such as cedar.
And then they took their proper homes in the yard (though this is just two pictures of the same bridge). Walt has mastered bridge crossing while Ramona and her short legs prefers to skim along the rocks.
Tools and You (a primer)
There's been a significant tapering off in the realm of tool acquisition, but there was shared interest in expanding our Makita tools range (they all share parts and batteries) so Brie collected the requisite box tops and $.35 and sent away for their weedwacker (though regionally you might call it a weed eater or trimmer) and a blower (though I default to calling it a leaf blower as just calling it a blower sounds unsavory).
The leaf blower arrived and something was off about it. I'll leave it to you to assess what. My only hint is that I've included Walt for scale and he is dog sized, not some terror of an atomic age film.
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Oh, this isn't a new item or anything like that, but Brie keeps urging me to sing the praises of buckets.
She's found that with the amount of tools we're using and the expansiveness of the property, using a bucket to collect all of the needed ear and eye pro, hand tools, and other useless tag-alongs has proven a revelation. It allows projects to start orderly and makes clean-up far less a hassle. So please, consider the humble bucket, won't you?
Wetlands and Biomes
Death, taxes, and "Oh Shenandoah you rollin' river." Some background on the above clip, for those unable to make heads nor tails: A torrential rain storm, following weeks of similar lesser storms, really overwhelmed the whole of the area's ability to absorb even one more drop of water. And so we have here a fully flowing river of water through the swale, visible and even preparing to jump the banks. Reminder that the swale is a two foot deep, one-two foot wide trench with overflow cisterns and water permeable tubing to help push water along. This is thousands(?) of gallons of water passing through our yard during just this clip? The major upside is that this and the not-pictured flooded side yard were back to normal about an hour after the rains stopped. Hell yeah engineering!
The Room however is growing worse by the day. With the three layers of carpeting removed, the water is soaking deeper into the MDF subfloor and the warping is out of control without the carpet weighing it down.
This is where my foot went through the mush floor just by walking. The hammer is for scale so you can see just how much The Room tried to eat me like that part in The Thing where the body ate that guy's hands.
We've gotten some quotes from contractors about demoing the interior and waterproofing the exterior. The goal is to get that done pre-winter.
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In the back of the property, I decided on the one non-100 degree day this past month to finish tearing down the lean-to of broken dreams. We're making like Andy Dufresne and setting part of it out each week during bulk trash pick up. It's like the opposite of when Radar shipped a whole jeep home piece by piece on M*A*S*H.*
Fourth Wave Feminism and Intersectionality
That damned closet. Of all the projects we've tackled or threatened, this closet has been Brie's white whale from the jump. The doors on the right are a necessary housing for the water heater and furnace. Fair play to you, house. The door on the left side of this obelisk is a coat closet. But its placement makes this the very first thing a visitor sees on opening the front door. Also the doors interfere with each other and with either door even partially open one can't move through the space. On top of that it blocks natural light and just generally impedes the open concept flow of the front of house.
As keeper of the master schedule, I finally pulled a Ronald Reagan and told Brie to tear down that wall. Ways I'm not like Reagan: I acknowledge the AIDS crisis.
Why the fuck are these walls reinforced like this? THIS ISN'T LOAD BEARING! It isn't even connected to the ceiling!
Apparently the power for the furnace and water heater runs through THE FLOOR. You can see the metal pipes in that 3rd picture above that run to outlets and then the power splits off of them to run into the wall on the right to power the furnace/heater. We're gonna bring in an electrician just to verify our options, but we may box in the power source closest to camera in the leg of a built-in phone table/gossip table. It would hide all the cables, give us a stylish built-in, and still solve all the other issues with the closet.
Animal Husbandry
Ramona and Walt continue to be oddly copacetic with one another. Walt still has the occasional issue (he had some snapping-while-sleepy thing going on in July, but that seems mostly resolved), but they seem to like and appreciate one another while being wholly individual.
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The whole family was coming home from picking up some lunch this last Tuesday when we found a tired old pit mix wandering on our street.
He was very hot and thirsty and a very good boy. Clearly loved and used to living inside. Brie sent out the alarms over NextDoor and through contacts in the neighborhood. Less than 2 hours later and we learned our new friend is Rocket and he lives up the large hill, deep into our neighborhood. He sometimes likes to sneak away when his owner works in the backyard and since the street goes steeply downhill and he's an old dude, he only goes one way. Glad to get him back home safe.
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Well folks, that's been camp this year. We've been trying to keep busy and we're making lots of friends. There are rumors that there's a pandemic like outbreak of Monkeypox, but our camp counselor says that's a lie used to keep gay books in Florida schools, so I guess both sides are equally right.
See you soon,
Stephen and Brie
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