Well, it only took… what, four years or so? But the interior of the house is finally getting to where we want it to be. So I thought I would post some pictures for everyone to see.
Tag: photos
Autumn in New England
It was a gorgeous weekend here in Vermont. Fall colors are probably near their peak if they haven’t hit it already. On Saturday Kelly and I took Lilo (our youngest dog and also the youngest of all our animals) out on a short expedition to downtown (where we dropped off our voter ballots) and then we walked him to the downtown park near the river. Kelly had been there before, but it was my first time there. I have been missing out because, as you can see, the park is gorgeous.
I will continue to post here in the blog now that I have gotten back into the habit again.
-Geoff
Today in History – John Brown Leads Raid on Harper’s Ferry
On October 16th, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a group of followers in an armed attack on the U.S. Armory and Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Brown had hoped the attack would spark a slave revolt across the South, or at least cause many slaves to join him at Harper’s Ferry. But it seemed nothing went as Brown had planned. By the morning of the third day, October 18th, U.S. Marines under LT Israel Greene (overall commander of Federal forces opposing Brown was Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee, the future Confederate general) stormed the engine house where Brown and the last of his men had fortified themselves. Of the 22 raiders, 10 were killed during the raid, 7 were captured and later hanged, and 5 managed to escape. Brown himself was badly wounded but survived to stand trial. Brown was tried in Virginia state court rather than a Federal court largely due to the intervention of Governor Henry Wise and the ease with which he convinced President James Buchanan. Brown was convicted after the jury deliberated for less than an hour. On November 2nd, 1859, after Brown gave a statement that became known as his “last speech,” he was sentenced to death by hanging. Due to Virginia law a month had to pass before the sentence could be carried out. In the intervening time, plans for a rescue were made by some abolitionists, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but none were carried out. That month Brown had hundreds of visitors, wrote over 100 letters (most of which were immediately published), and hundreds of letters were received by Brown, Governor Wise, and others connected to the trial. Brown’s trial was the first to be reported in newspapers around the entire country (even the West Coast) due to the recent completion of the transcontinental telegraph. Although newspapers everywhere reported on the event, only a few papers actually had reporters present, and at least one of those reporters went to great lengths to hide his identity from locals. Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859, the first person to ever be executed for treason in the United States. His funeral would take place on December 8, 1859, after his wife Mary had traveled with Thomas Wentworth Higginson and others to retrieve the body from Virginia and bring it home to North Elba, New York.
Kelly and I took a trip to northern New York in late November 2024 and had the opportunity to visit the Brown farm and see his grave. Note the snow already on the ground in November.
As I get back into the habit of posting here in our blog, I will put up more pictures from our little day trips like this.
– Geoff
Goodbye to a sweet kitty
I am a little late in posting this, as it happened a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to make a post about our cat Mabel. She was the older calico cat that we adopted about three years ago. She mostly stayed in her room, and so the person she interacted with the most was me. And she was daddy’s girl, in many ways. She loved to sit with me when I was reading. She also loved pets and cuddling near me in cold weather. We were really hoping that she would eventually be comfortable enough with the other animals to not just have to live on her own in her own room, but it just wasn’t meant to be. We know that Violet really wanted to be friends with her. I wish that had happened. Still, she was loved dearly, and we were happy to have given her a comfortable and loving home in her golden years. We miss her already.
-Geoff
One reason I love this house – the fireplace
Doing some housecleaning today in the kitchen and the room next to it. The room next to our kitchen is kind of a warming room, at least that is how I look at it, but we also call it the library annex since it is next to the library and will, most likely, contain a number of bookshelves and lots of books.
The room’s most distinguishing feature is the mantle and fireplace. It is gorgeous. They literally do not make them like this anymore.
I can’t wait until the day I am able to make a small fire in there, and enjoy the space by sitting with Kelly while having a glass of port or Madeira and maybe some of the furkids warm themselves in front of it too.
~Geoff
Greetings, everyone, from our new home in Vermont.
As we had mentioned earlier, we had been looking for a house in Vermont for some time. We had been looking for months, and then a few days before Christmas last year, we put in an offer on this house. That offer was not accepted for a good while. That’s a long story.
Well. It has been a long, long time since either of us posted here. But to be honest, we really had a lot going on. After all, we packed up all our stuff, put it in storage, moved to a long-term hotel, found someone who could board both of our cats, cleaned out and fixed up the house in Winthrop, sold that house, looked endlessly for another house in Vermont, finally found it, put in an offer, waited for it to be accepted while we struggled to find others, got our offer accepted, then had to threaten to take the seller to court after he had signed the purchase and sale agreement and then changed his mind, moved to another hotel, finally closed on the house six months after our initial offer, found contractors, struggled to get them scheduled in a timely fashion, looked for new jobs, changed hotels again, found new jobs, started new jobs, moved into the basement of the house, got Vermont identification and car registration, and waited for all the contractors to finish their work so we could figure out when we could actually move into the actual house and not have to sleep on Army cots in the basement anymore.
And if you think that’s a lot, that’s really just the abridged version. We also lost our beloved Scratch Fury, who suddenly threw a clot, became paralyzed while boarding, and then rapidly deteriorated, so we had to quickly go see him while we still could.
Oh yeah, and I also had my left knee replaced, and had to undergo the surgery, recovery, and physical therapy while all this other crap was going on. Like I said, busy.
So anyway. We finally found the sort of house we wanted, in the village of Bellows Falls in the town of Rockingham in Windham County, nestled in the southeast corner of the state. This beautiful old Victorian was built in 1904, and came with a first-generation garage that was built sometime in the 1920’s. Both the house and the garage are part of the Bellows Falls Historic District.
So there have been a LOT of projects here since we closed on the house in June. The first was replacing the roof on both the house and the garage. We also repaired (inside) and replaced (above the roof) the chimney.
We also had the entire electrical system rewired, as it was largely still knob and tube, and while the electricians did that they also wired parts of the house for ethernet and for speakers. They even replaced some of the fixtures with pretty ones that Kelly and I had found on craigslist.org. Some were cheap, and some were free. Much shopping Kung fu on Kelly’s part.
Also also wik, we had all the wallpaper taken down and we picked some lovely (and historically appropriate) colors for the walls. They really turned out beautifully.
There were also some other improvements made to the house, such as improving the half bathroom next to the kitchen and making some other adjustments and improvements to the plumbing in the basement. We also got a brand-new dryer (the old one died a sudden death, after popping the breaker a few times) and as of this weekend, we will also have a new kitchen refrigerator. The old basement fridge died within 48 hours of the dryer dying, and so we had the contractors move the old kitchen fridge to the basement to take its place. We also added a security system, which is nice for seeing when packages get dropped off. Seriously, it works GREAT for that. And we had gutters added to the house, because it didn’t have any for some reason. We also had to make some adjustments to the fence in the back yard, after Nymeria proved she was more than a match for it on several occasions.
So I will make a point of doing some follow-up posts to show you our progress.
~Geoff
A Summer Weekend in Vermont
Kelly and I took Dash and Nymeria with us to southeastern Vermont this past weekend. The weather was mostly sunny and actually got quite hot for Vermont. But the dogs generally enjoyed themselves, as did we.
We have become particularly fond of that part of Vermont, basically between Springfield and Brattleboro, and are doing a lot of sightseeing and antique shopping in it. It’s amazing how much greenery there is. I can imagine why so many people come here in autumn.
RIP Denise Taylor
Some years ago, my Neurologist said to me, “You sing, right?” And the rest, as they say, is history. I’m not sure how many years it has been since that fateful question, but this Plague Year is the first year since then that I’ve not been a part of the When Patients Heal You annual concert. COVID kind of got in the way of that.
Continue reading “RIP Denise Taylor”Today in History – the PTBT. Plus commentary on current events.
Today, October 7th, is the 57th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy signing the Partial Test Ban Treaty, officially known as the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water.
Considering how dangerously close we had gotten to World War III during the Cuban Missile Crisis the previous October, this treaty was a long step towards a permanent solution to the dangers of nuclear war. I am old enough to remember the last few times we really had to worry about nuclear war, like back in 1983. That was the year the TV movie “The Day After” came out, and also happened to be the year we had a couple of close calls of which the American public was blissfully unaware.
Continue reading “Today in History – the PTBT. Plus commentary on current events.”
Today in History: The Great New England Hurricane of 1938
Today is the 82nd anniversary of the day the “Long Island Express” came ashore on Long Island, New York. This is the storm that my grandparents’ generation always talked about when they talked about how bad hurricanes in New England could get.
Pretty damn bad.
Continue reading “Today in History: The Great New England Hurricane of 1938”
