Andy Writes

HI everyone!

It has been an interesting summer, to say the least. We’re starting to feel at home here. I remember the time we were coming in our road and were just about to cross the little bridge that spans our trickle of a creek, and realizing that it didn’t feel new anymore. That was a good feeling.

Yesterday it was raining pretty much all day, and while I managed to get a few wires pulled and outlets installed, I spent most of the day in the motorhome playing with the children to give Tabitha a break.

Things have been happening more slowly on the house than we planned. We had planned to sell the trailer once we got up here, but it got damaged almost immediately upon arrival, so we had to wait until we could get it fixed up, and by now most people aren’t looking for trailers, so it hasn’t sold yet.

Cherokee is no more, but if she was still here we would be selling a litter of puppies about now, so that plan didn’t work out very well either, but we’re just kinda plugging along and doing what we can.

It’s actually okay to be this way. Thanks to some generous sharing by our distant relatives and thanks to the time I went snagging with Dad and John we have all the canned salmon that we need, and thanks to that 600 lb pig we got a year ago, we have a freezer full of meat and scrapple, so we don’t really have to worry about what to eat.

We already have a place to live here in the motorhome, so that is taken care of for a few more months until we hit hard winter, and the income is a great blessing to keep buying the building materials that we need to continue with the building.

We’re just kind of hunkering down and doing what we can when we can and not worrying about what we don’t have because we have the promise of tomorrow.

I have been amazed at how much work it is to do things when you do everything by hand instead of skidloader:) I’m hoping to rent maybe a backhoe sometime and pull a bunch of the rotting logs out of the woods so that we can walk through the chest high grass without constantly tripping and stumbling and climbing.

The grass here grows tall and lush because of the summer rains, it would be a great place to have a few cows or other livestock, I can’t wait to get some animals around here.

Speaking of animals, we have been getting animals through here! Our neighbors horse comes through every once in a while, and it always give me that initial thrill of adrenaline when I notice a large animal right there until I realize that it’s only a horse.

The other week three bull moose came charging through our little property.

They say that most of the year moose prefer to be alone, and then around August they start to hang around in bachelor groups, and I suppose that was a small bachelor group.

I’m not getting my hunting license this year because it would be rather pointless with so much food already put away, and the nonresident hunting license is exorbitantly expensive.

It is still affordable to go fishing as a nonresident, so I am taking advantage of that as I can. Right now I am waiting on the silver salmon to start running up the Anchor River so I can go down and get my two per day that I am allotted.

Okay, back to the moose. The other morning I came out of the motorhome and started down to the shipping containers where our generator and batteries are stored, and then I realized that I forgot to do the customary check to make sure there were no Large Wild Beasts in the area. So I looked around, and lo, there was a cow moose and her half grown offspring placidly chewing the browse and looking at me like, “My, what are you?”

Add her large size to the fact that she was about twenty yards away, and it was a thrilling experience! I quickly did an about-face and went inside the motorhome to get the camera, then I proceeded to step into our unfinished house and take pictures of them through the window frames. It was pretty awesome, to say the least.

I think that we are in for the perpetual fall rains now. It has been raining pretty steadily for the last day, with more forecast the rest of the week. We hope to get the roof on within the next couple weeks!

Andy