Back In The Saddle Again...

Yup, two weeks ago I was out of town.  It's rather laughingly called "vacation".

My wife found a nice resort up north that was well within our budget.  She'd gone for a few trips without me, because I had decided to spend time at home, rather than traveling.  This time, I went.  Still regretting it.

The cabin was very nice, as was the weather.  We arrived on Saturday, unloaded the vehicle with two dogs and two people and stuff for the week.  After dinner from the resort's restaurant which was good we had our first night of ... well, chaos is probably the best way to explain it.  Cheyanne hopped herself up onto the double bed, which between my wife and her did not leave much in the way of room.  When combined with Freyja's patrolling the place, I got up and went into the living room to keep her company.  

We ran into Fergus Falls the next day to pick up groceries and a few things, like a dog bed, which we apparently needed.  The second night I slept poorly in the double bed, nearly falling out of it a few times.  With three other bedrooms and a total of 6 other beds, I had options.  Unfortunately, the bedroom right across the hall from the one my wife had chosen, facing the lake, had locked itself.  Doubly unfortunate was that the lock turned out not to be one of those simple "passage lock" sorts where you get some long thin item and push it into the hole in the knob.  That did not work.

Fortunately, the knob had screws on the outside that allowed me to remove it.  Where I discovered that the lock had somehow jammed itself, and the plunger, you know, the bolt that slides into the door frame to keep the door closed, was also damaged.  Not by us.  So another trip to Fergus to pick up a few items we forgot, and add a new doorknob with a simpler lock, happened.  I slept a little better in the bedroom across the hall, having also picked up a fan to move the air around.  The sound and the air movement made me feel better - though there was plenty of air movement outside.  Most of the days we were up there, we had a strong, probably 25-30 mile per hour wind off the lake straight into us.  Which, when combined with reasonably moderate temperatures, was very good.  The cabin had two window air conditioners to cool the entire place down, but we did not need them.

The only really hot day was on Wednesday, when we hit the low eighties and had some humidity.  The storm that came over Wednesday night turned out to be not much, fortunately.  Thursday we wandered into Alexandria and visited the Runestone Museum.  For those who may be unaware, a rock was discovered by a farmer while clearing land for his farm.  The rock contained inscriptions which took some time to decipher, but noted a party of visitors from Scandinavia had been in the area in the 1300s, well before that other fellow claims to have "discovered" a populated land.  The legitimacy of this marker was questioned for years, but the scientific evidence has been pretty clear in that it's not any sort of fake.  Aside from how an otherwise functionally illiterate farmer would manage to forge a work that contained the inscription which matched runes also appearing in Norway in the 1300s, there's the evidence that Vikings had settled in Greenland for a period around the same time.  

So after that, and a lunch in Alexandria, we came back to the cabin, spent our last two days, and my doorknob install seems to have met their approval.  Given that I accomplished it with a screwdriver and a pocket knife and I had to mortise in the new plunger as it included a plate the old one did not have, I figure that was a good week.  

We did return home in a drizzle, which summed up last week pretty well.  The entire state of Minnesota had been in some form of drought for the past two years, with limited rainfall.  That's completely been wiped out, and every portion of the state is either adequately watered or flooded.  Several of our state park destinations, including Forestville and others, are pretty severely damaged with flooding, and there are others that are trying to prevent more damage.  The problem with flooding is that it's pretty hard to keep out.

Growing up on the Mississippi River, I was fortunate in that the bottom of our lowest-level basement was a full ten feet above the average river height, so even spring melt didn't cause us any worry.  Others were not so lucky.  

But I spent last week, at least four days of it, working tired.  My back is still not happy with what I did on those rather firm beds up north, and the rest of my body is, well, getting old, like all of us are, so there's not any point in complaining.  Just gotta do what I can to stay ... well, semi-functional.