What I did over Thanksgiving vacation:
So first of all Rob, Carrie, Sarah, Mike, Zach, Kathie and my Dad came up the weekend of the 18th and 19th for the end of the futility that has been Iowa’s football season. That week we lost to a very mediocre Minnesota team. It remains to bee seen who we will lose to in the Alamo bowl but that should be settled this weekend.
Other than the football game there was lots of fun activity, going to woodworking stores, eating and seeing the new James Bond movie. We had a chocolate cake from the ‘50s grill to celebrate all the Novemberish birthdays, even if everyone couldn’t be present.

Sunday after everyone cleared out Sandy and I loaded up our rented truck and I headed up to our property for a week of working on what is now referred to as the cabin (formerly the sauna). Sandy had to work Monday-Wednesday so I was on my own until Thursday.
I arrived well after dark (it gets dark just after 4pm up there) unpacked the truck and arranged a place to sleep in the cabin. It was a cold night, six degrees but Lucy and I managed ok. The next morning the lake had frozen over completely and as the sun came up the ice started expanding and there were about two hours worth of interesting sounds coming from the ice. I wish I had a recording of it.
After the cold night my goal was to get the wood burning stove installed so I’d have a heat source for the remaining nights. Of course the rest of the week the temperatures were in the 30s and 40s for the most part even at night. Most of the work revolved around installing the chimney and stove pipe and then insulating the attic area. It was a long day but I managed to get through it all.
Much of the next two days were spent installing the pine tongue and groove paneling we had bought at Menard’s back in October. Wednesday and Thursday I built and installed framing for the windows and door. In the early afternoon on Thursday I took a “shower” which consisted of a five-gallon bucket of water I had warmed on the woodstove. I stood out on the deck in the sun and washed up as well as I could, it was chilly.
After the shower I drove out to the gate and unlocked it so Sandy and my Mom could get in when they arrived. I saw lots of wolf tracks along the road on the way out to the gate, I’m pretty sure most of them were less than 24 hours old.
After that I went back and removed and reinstalled the windows since they had just been temporarily mounted in October and then finished up some of the trim stuff inside. Sandy and Mom arrived around 7pm I think, I had been hoping they’d show up with a nice Thanksgiving feast but no one had the energy to do much cooking at that point. So Sandy whipped up some pasta and we saved the grilled turkey breast for the next night.
Friday and Saturday were spent putting the “siding” back on the outside, this was a big job and I didn’t really expect to finish it but Sandy became kind of fixated on getting it done. She yelled at me a few times to get back to work, and with a few additional hours Sunday morning we managed to get through it.


Here's a bit of what the inside looks like now.

This is the finished product outside.
We did manage to have some fun while we were there, Sunday morning my Mom and I (accompanied by Lucy) went skating for about an hour. The ice was thinner than I would’ve preferred but was at least two inches thick everywhere we went and it was nice and smooth.

Saturday morning Sandy and I walked over to visit our neighbor Mr. Nelson. He directed his nephew to give us a tour of the place which was interesting. He has two cabins a workshop a sauna and an outhouse. One of the cabins was his original building on the lot. It originally came from a resort on Brule lake that closed in the ‘60s Jim purchased it at a government auction, disassembled it and hauled it by hand into his lot where he put it back together. It’s always kind of an interesting lesson in local history being around Jim.

Sandy and I have new email addresses.
I don't want to print the whole thing here on account of the spambots. But if you use the the beginning of our old addresses followed by @comcast.net you should be able to get either one of us.

11/5/06
OK so obviously it's not a good idea to make a post like the previous one and then not follow up in a timely fashion.
There has been a lot of concern and questions about Lucy. Let me state for the record that she is fine. Well she seems to be fine anyway. It's been almost two weeks since her little episode and we haven't seen any similar symptoms since. If anything she seems a little perkier than she was before our week up there. She's been going out for runs with Sandy and has actually been running (as opposed to exploring and rolling around on her itchy back). We're hopeful that the whole thing was caused by something she ate or drank and that it won't happen again.
Also if anyone has been avoiding calling us our phone is working again. It turned out that the problem was in the wire that goes from the phone pole to our house.
Here's an update on what we did during our week up on our property:
The goal was to turn the "sauna" into a well insulated small cabin that we can use year 'round but particularly in the winter if we want to ski in and spend a weekend. Here's what it looked like before we started

It looks cute (especially with the little icicles along the edge of the roof) but trust me it was a total dump. I bet there were at least two pounds of mouse crap in there plus you could see right through the walls in a lot of places.
So we made a trip to Menards which Sandy hated (she claims we were there for 3 hours) bought a bunch of supplies and rented a truck and headed north.

The weather was very cooperative most of the week, it did snow a few times but never very much and it did rain one afternoon which was kind of frustrating. Here's what the tent looked like our first morning.

We stripped the sauna down to the framing cleaning out all the poop infested insulation and the junky stuff inside it. One of our main goals was to install a regular exterior door because we wanted it to be airtight and well insulated. The problem was that the thing was only 77 inches floor to ceiling and a standard door is 81.5 inches tall. So to make the door fit we had to raise up the roof. We accomplished this by bracing up all the framing and then lifting the whole thing up by 11.5 inches and then re-attaching the corners. You can see in this picture that it's in the process of being lifted and that the 4x4s on the corners have been cut and are lifted away from the floor.

Once the lift was done we removed all the studs (except the corners) and replaced them with full length studs. Originally it was my plan to take the full length studs out of the house, but after looking I decided there wasn't anything in that place that could be removed without causing the whole thing to collapse. So I made a trip to town and got some new studs and other supplies.
We had bought a door at Menards and saved the windows when we remodeled the kitchen. Here's some of the new framing in place and more in progress. Sandy was beginning to work on the foam insulation

We were really getting tight for time at this point so everything was a big rush and kind of stressful. But with a good boost of help from my Mom and Dan we managed to get the fiberglass insulation up on the inside and the tyvek on and the windows in place. Then on Sunday morning we got the door installed and the Sandy got the tyvek finished and taped on the seams. So this is what it looks like right now

I'm hoping to go back up the week of Thanksgiving to finish up some things like installing the woodstove and the paneling inside.