Weather

Last night our upper road held nicely but the lowest culvert overflowed and severely damaged the first 100 yds of our road.  Murch's sand mound is still ponding water which leaks onto our road so we hacked a trench it to redirect that flow. 

I spent 3.5 hours putting down more stone and regrading the drive to make it passable.  I wanted to get all the erosion ditches refilled and repair the water bars that were breached.  I rolled some rocks out of the outflow side of the lower culvert.   The inflow side was a little clogged with weeds so I pulled them out, but that doesn’t do anything about the curve in the flow that the high water created. That is the next hydrologic engineering job.

Bald Eagle Creek is really high and running hard and so is Laurel Run.  Alt 220 from Julian to Milesburg is closed—there is a "road closed ahead" sign on 220.  Lots of water in Waddle and the fish ponds look like they are draining out onto Lower Julian Pike.

 

After almost continuous rainfall since Sunday evening the rain finally paused tonight at sunset allowing the fog and mist to take its place.  As the sun set, the clouds aloft were relatively thin and allowed the pale yellow shades of the sunset to filter through the fog.  These pictures were taken at 7:30 and although the colors do not show much yellow, the fog does seem to glow in the twilight.

A visit and rain

Admiral Von UberBaron came up for a Clem's lunch on Saturday.  We are wondering what his first project in the new basement workspace will be. A workbench and some tools benches have to be first, but then what?
Sunday work was cut short by torrential rains after we fertilized some trees and delivered 2 loads of field rocks to the rock wall.  We re-cut some herringbone diversion gullies in the road to move water off.  It's amazing how shallow these gullies can be to change the direction of a stream just enough.  We dig them every 50' or so.  Every car and truck on the road degrades the gullies a bit, but we had no significant erosion from the storm.

Fall 2004

Although we were not around, Steve Balkey and Al Zimmerman kept us informed with these great pictures.

With the heavy construction finished, at least for Phase I (Carriage House), it was time to get the road into usable condition with some culverts to direct water. We've seen how the water wants to cross the road; now Ameron will give it a socially acceptable path. D was leery at first that Culvert 3 was going to pump water directly into her basement, but Balkey assured her he would build a deep enough ditch that wouldn't happen.


Progress, Oct 8
Progress, Oct 8

Culvert 1, Oct 10

Culvert 1 into the forest
Culvert 1 from the house

Looking over Culvert 3
Culvert 3 south

Deep into Culvert 3
Reshaping the road

The septic area from the garage
We'll plant dafodills and feed the birds here.

Septic area up hill, looking back to the house
The mound

Al Zimmerman stopped by on Nov. 23 to check up on the progress and sent these pictures: the first we'd seen of the inside. He was very impressed with the workmanship and said he'd be back.


Hardiplank going up
to the bedroom

Maple flooring with natural water-based finish
Kitchen

Trex deck
on a typical foggy day

From the bedroom to the closet and kitchen
the living room with no railing

Hickory kitchen cabinets waiting in the garage
front yard

Verizon has the phone ready for the security people, Vigilent Security Systems ((814) 237-5450). The next step is to hand over the keys at Christmas.

May 2004

May 7, 2004
The weather has dried enough to begin the road. D called to warn us that Ameron was taking lots of topsoil way, but we had arranged to trade topsoil for rocks. We are grateful that she is looking out for us. We needed a lot of truckloads! It must have looked like a parade of elephants in a circus.
May 12, 2004
The construction phase of the road is done. We'll let the big trucks pack it down and see where the weather takes us before finishing it off with finer gravel. We'll probably need some more culverts to get the water downhill properly. Now on to the house and septic areas. Ameron is moving a lot of dirt for us.
May 22, 2004
Steve Chilcote has planted 500 spruce, 100 white oak, 100 red oak, 100 sugar maple, and 50 dogwood. All the trees but the spruce are tubed and staked. He also put down a couple of tons of lime and some fertilizer.


May 24, 2004
Michael is working on Huston Twp to get our building permits. They only meet once a month, so we have to be ready when they are, or wait a month.


May 26, 2004
Michael will interview the 2 low bidders for our building project and have a recommendation soon. The Baroness and her Loyal Pooch take over the Barony supervision for the summer on June 09, 2004.