2.5 days of company

Mom came up for a visit, at my suggestion.  She arrived the day of my last night shift, so we didn't have much time to chat before I went to work.  And then I had a couple of days off (one of which involved taking Grace to the dentist for a couple of extractions).

I felt guilty about not accomplishing much of anything at the house, even though I had the excuse of company. 

Corie had a small card table wedged up against the laundry room opening.  The purpose of this was to keep the dog away from the cat's food and litterbox.  It's gross, but for some reason dogs like to much on cat poop.  So we had to keep the dachshund out of the cat box.

My mom managed to catch her foot on the top of that card table while leaving the laundry room and fell flat on her face in the hallway.  Fortunately she wasn't hurt.  However the incident made a back-burner project a front-burner one.

I got out the table saw and cut a 30" x 16" piece of pressboard to fit tightly in the doorway.  Then I fastened two stand-off rails on either side.  Next I made slots in two additional rails, so that they could slide over and lock and unlock the thing in the doorway.  Lastly I put little felt buttons on all the surfaces contacting the woodwork in the doorway so that it wouldn't damage the finish. 

It looks pretty good, is a few inches lower, keeps the dog out of the laundry room.  I now simply need to paint the thing and all will be well.

Yesteday though was a lot of fun.  We wanted to go to Sandpoint (and we did), but decided to check out a couple of local lakes on some back-roads.  We went to Granite Lake and Kelso Lake.  Below are a few images of Kelso Lake from the public dock.  Just a really nice quiet fishing lake.

This is a quick panorama from East to West (left to right).

 

Afterwards, we managed to get lost.  None of the dirt roads were marked.  The digital compass in the inaptly-named Explorer always read "SW" regardless of what direction I turned.  Eventually we popped out near Priest River, crossed a bridge, and headed East to Sandpoint.  I had to get on Google Earth after we got home to determine where we had been.

Looks like a forest service map and remembering to bring along the GPS will be useful in the future.  I suppose I could have used the Navigator on the Blackberry, but there wasn't much cell service in the back-country.  I think it needs cell service to load the appropriate map.

Eventually we made it to Sandpoint, after seeing a lot of neat new country.  And then we had Huckleberry Ice Cream cones!  Beats running out of gas in the wilderness and getting eaten by a bear... ;)