Tag: Winter

  • Winter Solstice: Longer Days Ahead

    Winter Solstice: Longer Days Ahead

    Welcome to day one of the Adirondack Coast‘s coldest season. Today is the winter solstice, the first official day of winter, and — more importantly for the likes of my mother and others who favor longer days and shorter nights — the threshold between the briefest day and the most prolonged night and imperceptibly-but-steadily lengthening…

  • Boathouse Repairs 6: Northside Post Wraps Installed

    Boathouse Repairs 6: Northside Post Wraps Installed

    Boathouse northside post wraps have been installed, and southside companions are in process…

  • Zipping Up the Icehouse

    Zipping Up the Icehouse

    Nothing like a region-wide winter weather system barreling down on you to accelerate winter-proofing the construction site, right?!?! But racing the arrival of a pre-Christmas blizzard isn’t the only motivation for the sudden transformation from 100+ year old T&G sheathing to green ZIP System insulated panels though. We’ve been working toward this goal for weeks.…

  • Boathouse Repairs 5: Piece-by-Piece

    Boathouse Repairs 5: Piece-by-Piece

    As temperatures drop and winter weather threatens, Peter and Supi are toiling against the onset of winter. They’re taking advantage of shop work when possible, fabricating post bases — piece-by-piece — painstaking duplicating our boathouse‘s existing post and railing details while ensuring the most hardy, weatherproof construction possible to ensure the longevity of these handsome…

  • Persimmons & Seasonality

    Persimmons & Seasonality

    I’ve waxed whimsical on autumn before, and I’ve celebrated wonder-filled winter aplenty, but what of the blurry overlap between the two? Well, today I’d like to pause a moment betwixt both current seasons. Or astride the two, one foot in autumn and the other in winter. To borrow a morning metaphor from my breakfast, let’s…

  • Sherwood Inn’s Boathouse ​Billboard

    Sherwood Inn’s Boathouse ​Billboard

    Does anybody recollect seeing the Sherwood Inn‘s boathouse billboard as photographed above. It’s well before my time, but probably not too long before my earliest Essex memories in the 1970s. I recently reached out to our friend Cheri Phillips to find it what she might know about the photograph above. She generously gifted me the…

  • Garapa Decking 2008-2009

    Garapa Decking 2008-2009

    I left you wondering, patiently waiting for a couple of weeks after the “Deck Rebuild” update. I promised a post specifically focusing on the garapa decking, but days turned into weeks, and no garapa gallery. Sorry. Rest assured it was an act of omission, my friends, not an act of commission. (Maybe “fall” earned its…

  • Seasonality

    Seasonality

    Seasonality might strike you as a strange menu for organizing a blog (and an even stranger way to navigate a narrative.) But in many respects it may well be the *only* useful way to structure a circular story that’s slim on plot, chronically a-chronological, and deeply immersed in the poetics of place. Summer’s End Haiku As if…

  • Midwinter Mending

    Midwinter Mending

    Sometimes it seems words can get in the way of our will and our wants. Often even. Sometimes words blur or over-focus or misrepresent… But they’re what we’ve got. And so it is that my morning words today, “Midwinter Mending”, endeavor to broadcast my will and want without blurring or over-focusing or misrepresenting. Allow, if…

  • Nor’easter Neige

    Nor’easter Neige

    Nor’easter Neige: Rosslyn’s boathouse, icehouse, and carriage barn after February 4, 2021 snowfall.

  • Winter Wonderland 2019

    Winter Wonderland 2019

    Sometimes meteorologists get it right. And Rosslyn’s winter wonderland 2019 just might become Exhibit A in the Meteo Defense column. Thank you, snow gods! Winter storm warnings wander across our radar often enough this time of year that we become a little meteorology skeptical. Not cynical. Just suspicious that promised snowstorms won’t quite measure up…

  • Snow Fleas: Soggy Snowmelt and Springtails

    Snow Fleas: Soggy Snowmelt and Springtails

    Snow fleas? That’s a thing?!?! Yes, you read that correctly. Yesterday my bride, my beast (a perennially curious and wanderlusty Labrador Retriever) and I explored some soggy-but-still-snowy woodlands along the western shore of Lake Champlain with John Davis (The Rewilding Institute) and Jon Leibowitz (Northeast Wilderness Trust). It would be difficult to find a more interesting…