Cabin closing 2006
While the Twinz of Terror were out in California, I was up at the moomincabin “helping” The Commander close the place for the season. This MAINLY involves draining the pipes. There are other important tasks but this is the most difficult task and one you do NOT want to do wrong. This was the first time The Comm faced doing it without my dad, who had died the previous March. She doesn’t look very happy in this pic but I assure you she was not crying, it’s just a wonky picture. That said, I think she *was* a bit overwhelmed. Thankfully, after that year, the GG took over the whole process and he is an expert at stuff like that. He can do it all standing on his head with one hand tied behind his back. I am TERRIBLE at hands-on mechanical stuff. It just isn’t in my wheelhouse.
It was a GORGEOUS dead calm day with warm sun and I had picked up whine and lunch stuff from one of our fave Sault Ste. Siberia restaurants, Karl’s Cuisine, for a deck picnic. So here is Radical Betty sitting on the steps. We had probably already put the deck chairs away.
While we were eating lunch, we heard a really strange unearthly noise and looked up to see an old birch tree kind of spiraling down into itself. Remember, I said there was NO WIND. It just picked that moment to implode. It was probably already dead. Here’s part of what was left of it. Not a very illustrative pic.
People sometimes ask why we close the place so “early” so here’s a cautionary tale. That gorgeous cabin-closing day was a Saturday. The following Wednesday (that would be October 11), The Commander and Radical Betty decided to drive down to Petoskey for a little boondoggle, lunch and shopping and that sort of thing. They got down below the bridge and it started snowing. And snowing and snowing and snowing. It was getting pretty deep when The Comm finally took the situation into hand and demanded that RB turn around. They did make it home safely and hey, the moomincabin was closed up so no frozen pipes!
October 8th, 2021 at 6:18 pm
Snow isn’t unheard of east of us this time of year. (why I don’t live anywhere too near the Cascades) She does look overwhelmed, as I would be too. I don’t like tasks like that. Any mistake (which I’m prone to) would be dire.