Warm weather lingers longer

—and luckily, long enough for me to FINISH PAINTING.

My appeal (in the last installment) for a longer ladder was answered by friend and former co-worker Laura with: “When are you going to learn to just ask Randy?” Thanks to both of you for providing this critical piece of equipment! I was up and down said ladder about a hundred times, interrupted by a brief-but-anticlimactic threat of rain on Saturday, stopped only when the sun went down —

—and back at it Sunday morning to complete that narrow strip above the living room windows.

Here’s me on the ladder, trying to stay focused on the job in front of me, not the view into the living room nor the sunny riverbank behind.

Ah, the river…. In the past week, most of the green has drained from the landscape but the color spectrum is still dazzling, especially when the sun sparks up the river. Makes a fella want to throw down their paintbrush and go wandering—which reminds me of the beginning of Wind in the Willows…

Meanwhile, work inside the house hasn’t completely stopped and there are another hundred things on the to-do list.

But still, it’s light-years beyond where The Project was a year ago, when the month of October brought endless rain. Here’s what the site looked like on 10/17/23.