This evening is dank on South Mountain.  Anne is with friends watching the movie, Buck, at a nearby senior center.  I, Chuck, stay home recovering from intense soreness associated with a week of scrubbing and staining our log house and its porches and rails.  The place looks like new and we have not even coated the walls.

We work hard at this project, weather permitting, because we will be on the road again for almost eight weeks beginning in a couple when we fly to San Francisco to visit Alex.  We look forward to seeing that fine town and taking a road trip with Alex to Fort Bragg passing through wine country on the way out and going down the coast coming back.  Anne and I will take a boat ride from Ft. Bragg with Deb Shearwater in search of sea birds including, of course, shearwaters .

Bold seniors, we will take a red-eye flight home on Sunday/Monday so we can provision the motorhome and begin a northern cruise on Wednesday before Labor Day.  First stop will be Eastham to visit family.  After the holiday we will continue north to Nova Scotia, pick up my sister at the Halifax airport, and tour that province of Canada.  Two weeks later we will send her home again and take the rig to Acadia National Park.  After that we make a short stop in the White Mountains to check out its leaf color and then arrive at Schenectady for the second weekend in October before returning here.

Our stay at home has been good.  The weather has been warm, even hot two weeks ago.  While we appreciate the usual coolness here on summer evenings, it has been pleasant to have at least one year with warm nights.  We are most often home in the autumn when warmth is too scarce.

Our return after our ten-week stay in Carolina brought a welcome reunion with our neighbors and an excuse for several relaxed get-togethers.  We have also, of course, been going to York weekly to visit my folks and support their progress.

This weekend we visit Elley in NYC.  Driving into Brooklyn is always an adventure.  Wish us well.  Leaving the mountain for that trip we will stop at the old-fashioned hardware store in Shippensburg for some housewares and at a “Dutch” grocery I recently found where Mennonite and Amish folk buy sacks of flour, rolled oats, and even doughnut fillings.  We will buy granola ingredients in smaller quantities, but still cheaper than at supermarkets.  It seems we find treasures where ever we are.

The woods here are intense after the wet spring set them off.  At some point I am going to have to drive the forest back from the house.  The shade cools the house in summer but also poses a threat of wood fall. The overhanging branches would also endanger the house if the forest caught fire.

Now we struggle with the renovation of our exterior.  I bought a “roof safety kit” with a rope and vest.  The rope includes a rope grab and snap hooks intended to keep the user, me, from slipping and sliding off our steep roof.  It has worked so far and enabled me to clean the wood on our four dormers.  I’ll have to go up again to paint on the preservative stain.  Wish me luck in that too. 

We finished the cleaning yesterday after about seven days of work.  Today the rain made for a roofer’s holiday.  We took care of indoor chores and worked at completing plans for our travel to Canada and Maine.

It seems remarkable that we, who are retired, have so much to do. 

Anne spent much of the morning studying medical insurance.  She becomes 65 this year and “eligible for medicare.”  In fact the government strongly encourages you to enroll in its insurance program.  It becomes almost an offer you can’t refuse. 

Medicare is subsidized by the government (supported in part by that amazing FICA tax), but the coverage is incomplete and bizarrely packaged.  She will have to buy some insurance from the government and some from another insurance company.  I will continue with the company that we are currently using, but my cost will be more than half of that of our joint coverage.  Probably in the end our total cost will be slightly less, but so too her coverage.  Why, I ask, did the government ever get into the insurance business? 

It is too bad we do most of our chores when we are at home.  The location is so fine and the house is so cozy, but we come here to work, work , and work.  We will have to take a vacation here someday.