Our New Neighbor

No, Jerry is not moving.
This is our new neighbor at the cabin.

My husband and I have occasional bouts of overdoing it. We did it this weekend with a capital O for ouch. My muscles are very sore and reminding me that at 5'6" (somewhere over 40. . . ) you can't do it all. It started with the Minnesota State Fair on Thursday afternoon/night. I'm not going to tell you how many pounds of Fresh French Fries were consumed. Friday we were up at 5:00 and drove up north to FINALLY close on our cabin. Sign the papers, eat in small town cafe with good hash browns and get back on the road. We barely made it home in time to pick up the kids and head to the Target Center in Minneapolis with some friends, to see the Katy Perry show. I'm so tickled to tell you that we ate at Hell's Kitchen with my pastor. Wink. She called it pure hell. French fried sweet potatoes this time. Much healthier. Then on to the show. I've been told Katy Perry doesn't call it a concert, she calls it a show. I concur. Not the musical highlight of the year, but so fun, and entertaining, and I do think it was totally worth spending our kids' college fund on the tickets.

Saturday morn? Crack of dawn to clean out the storage unit. Bill and Calvin and I made two trips with the U-haul trailer. We no longer have a storage unit. One small step towards order in the universe. Of course it might be canceled out with the whole cabin thing. . .

There was a piano in the storage unit. Bill and I got the 1906 Kohler and Campbell into the truck, lifting it the 12" up and over. This is not a spinet. This is an upright grand. Yeah. We bought it from a gal at church for $100 and spent $250 getting it moved to the storage unit back in May. A cabin's got to have a piano. Hindsight is 20/20 but those pianos movers seem to make really good use of ramps.

We drove the U-haul trailer behind the jeep up to Nisswa. We slept our first night in the cabin. Sunday, getting it off the truck and into the cabin turned out to be even harder, and Two Kotrbas and a Truck probably should have spent another $250 to have real movers on the other end. It actually took about four Kotrbas to budge it, but it was all worth it, to hear the kids sit down and play in the cabin and hear the music ringing out the open windows through the pines. Probably tells you something that we don't have a boat but we have a piano.

The cabin is old. It was probably built in the 1920's. This is the first change of owner in a very, very long time and so there has been a lot of hoopla. City. County. DNR.  Everybody has something to say. Thank you to Bill's folks for manning the electric and septic and gas and roofing and plumbing and well-digging contractor appointments. All that stuff had to be up to code before we could close. There were a lot of mysteries to say the least. Bill's dad loves a good mystery--thanks, Dad K.

So, the cabin adventure begins. Bill spent much of Sunday afternoon rebuilding the toilet. First things first.

At lunch, we met our new neighbor. Sir Eagle gave us quite the show. Bill was able to get his camera while he ate his fish on the dock. The eagle that is.

If you know me, then you know that at the very least, birds are a reminder from God that everything is good. This was a very big bird, so everything must be very good. God bless you Sir Eagle, and God bless our new Little Pines Lodge, and God bless all the cabin mysteries and the future times we will spend there with family and friends.