Busy Weekend

This weekend was a pretty busy one. People should not call their 2nd house "vacation house" if they spend most of their day cleaning and fixing up the place. But then, you tell yourself that it's all worth it when you can sit down and relax (what else can you tell yourself?? it's too late).

For me, I sat down for 10 minutes and saw a woodpecker standing on a dead tree few feet away, then I realized that I have to cut Leo's hair (we spend most of the weekends in this cabin, so we don't have time to go down to Chinatown to have his haircut, hence I started learning to cut his hair. How hard could it be? it's just hair, that was what I said to him). While I was setting up the chair, I decided to check on the water filter system because the water smells like rotten egg (maybe not that bad, but it smells). So I looked at the filter system, it is the size of 1 liter coke bottle, and decided that this cannot be so bad to take it down and clean it up. The problem is that who knows when this was installed and the filter would not come apart. Then water started dripping and Leo started getting paranoid. After struggling for 15 minutes, we decided that we would go to Loew's and get a whole new system instead of just changing the filter.

While Leo went upstairs and dressed, I decided to give it a try. Effortlessly, I twisted it open. Magic! So now, I started taking out the rotten egg smelly filter and broke the rubber band. I went up stairs and dressed. Drove to Loew's.

While at Loew's, I could not resist buying 2 plants, Rhododendron, so beautiful on the picture (next year, it will boom, I told myself). Drove home, record breaker, we spent less than 1 hour in Loew's (for all of you who live in the city, driving to Loew's is 45 minutes one way). We also did not stop at Dunkin Donuts (directly next to Loew's, very tempting, bow tie and coffee).

As soon as we got back to the cabin, I started planting the shrubs because I thought mosquitos come out in the dawn and dusk. It was 2:00 p.m. with my shovels into my garden. I heard mosquitos flying around. What about dawn and dusk??? No way, I was at the garden total 10 minutes because I felt the mosquito bites on my arms. Quickly digging holes, putting these 2 plants in and ran back to the house. I got 3 bites on my foreheads and 5 on my arms. The bites were so huge, I felt that I have 2 foreheads. And I planted the shrubs too close to each other. Dame it.

What better way to end this busy day? A bottle of Chilean wine and steaks. That is worth it!!!

Nice Weekend

The past weekend turned out to be a very nice one! It started out pretty humid on Friday night when we looked for a new place to have dinner on the way up to the cabin. Usually, we were in the hurry to drive up. But now, we wanted to explore some other towns on the way up. We found a kebab place packed fully of people. American kebab is different from UK kebab that the kebab here comes with salad and kebab there uses stir fried cabbage (what I remember long time ago when I visited UK). But this kebab house is pretty delicious- lamb chops, beef and chicken kebab with carrot and raisins rice. I can't complain.

After the dinner I felt the rain drops, then it began to pour. We can hardly see cars around us and we had to use emergency lights. Boy, I was so nervous that I grabbed the edge of the seat so tight. The mighty power of nature!!

Finally, we stopped at a gas station to wait it out. It was pretty incredible. You can see some trees fell on the highway. Imaging that a car run into it!!

By the time we got to the cabin, we felt like driving for eons. A bat on the front porch almost fly into me. It's a good thing to see bats around because they suppose to eat Gypsy moths. But I guess there are just too many Gypsy moths and so few bats around.

When I got up the next day, the weather was nice and we stopped at the Berryville farmer's market. Picked up a piece of Fallsdale Farm's goat gouda cheese and T-bone steaks. Had a bottle of wines and saw my bee balm blooms.