Past couple of weeks - Shenandoah, Monticello, etc.

[tagryn]

A couple of weekends back, Donna and I went on an overnight trip to Monticello in Virginia, and along the way drove the length of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. The leaves weren't quite changing yet, but it was still a very nice drive. Skyline has lots of pulloffs with dramatic views of the valleys below, and we stopped at a National Park lodge in the middle of the park where we're likely to come back and stay at some point in the future. Monticello was impressive: the gardens are extensive, and the tour of the house itself was very interesting, although no cameras are allowed so I didn't get any pictures of inside. Overall, it was fun to get away. I've uploaded six photos from the trip to Flickr, click any of the above photos to go to them.

The first photo are of flowers from our garden. Its been getting chilly at night (more on that in a second), so I've been bringing my container plants inside. So far the peppers haven't died yet, so I'm hoping to get one more crop out of them before everything goes to ground. I've been getting a lot of use out of our lawn sweeper, it seems to have been a pretty wise purchase, much easier than raking. Its a bit demoralizing to clean up the yard, then have a storm come through and dump leaves all over again, but its that time of year.

Been doing a fair amount of little DIY work around the house. I used a chainsaw for the first time to cut up some medium-sized tree limbs that were behind our shed, I didn't want them sitting there all winter and wanted them gone before I had to use our yard waste cans for leaves full-time. I replaced one of our screen door handles that had broken, and also made a brace for our patio door by taking a dowel, cutting it to size, and drilling a hole in one end to put string through to allow us to yank it out of the door's running slide when we want to open the door. When its in the slide it leaves enough of an opening for the cats to go in and out, but at the same time it prevents the door from opening fully so we don't have to worry about someone breaking in that way if we're at the other end of the house.

We also had the furnace checked, then I thought it would be a good idea to replace our old thermostat with a programmable thermostat which saves on heating bills by raising and lowering temperature settings automatically to match the usual times we're in and out of the house. Well...good idea, but when I took off the old thermostat and wired up the new one, nothing worked. Couldn't even get the fan to come on. So, after trying everything, we were left with space heaters for a week and I had to call the heating guy to come out again, and he fixed the problem in about 10 minutes. Apparently I just didn't have the wiring right, and I'm feeling somewhat like a dumba$$ and $200 poorer for something which I should have been able to do. Oh, well. We also now have a kerosene heater as backup in case the power goes out; generally both winters we've been in SoMD have been relatively mild, but what we do get are windstorms that take down power lines and 1-2 ice storms every year. We've been lucky so far not to have lost heat, but now we at least have some source of warmth that isn't electric-dependent.