(Originally published in The Plain Talker, April 2006)

I'm always glad to see Spring get here, this year more than ever. I didn't get to spend much time enjoying the warm weather last year, so I'm hoping to make up for it. It will be our first summer in the new cabin, which will be interesting, and the first time I get to enjoy the new place this year will be the first time, ever.

Don't get me wrong; I've spent plenty of time at the new cabin this winter; I said it would be my first time to enjoy it. Every other time I've been there since we got it at the end of last summer, it has been an all work, no play situation.

First, we had to move into the new place. I hate moving; H-A-T-E it. Moving out of a place you have loved all your life, and knowing that it's just going to be bulldozed once you're gone, is especially tough. And when the high point of the move is being able to say, "Wow, am I glad we didn't get killed trying to carry that refrigerator up the back stairs!" you know it wasn't any fun at all.

(Actually, the real highlight came a bit earlier. Two friends of mine were trying to unwire a light fixture at the old cabin, and they were struggling a bit, in part because it was a little dark in the cabin. So I said "Maybe y'all should turn that light on, so you can see what you're doing." Now, anyone with a positive IQ should have known I was joking. But no, another friend actually went over to the light switch and turned it on! Much yelling and cussing ensued, but fortunately the only thing that was hurt was someone's pride. So really, the highlight of the move was being able to say "Gee, I sure am glad you didn't get electrocuted; there's no way I could have moved this refrigerator without you.")

But, we got moved in (and no one died during the refrigerator trauma or the "fun with electricity" fiasco) so all was well and good. September and October are usually great lake months, and I was looking forward to spending some nice fall afternoons at the lake, and getting comfortable in my new surroundings. Or so I thought; fate had a lot of fun slapping me around in 2005, and the autumn months were no exception. The only time I got to spend at the new cabin was the day I went to do some much-needed yardwork; when the highlight of your lake-time is mowing the lawn… well, that's right up there with not getting crushed by a runaway refrigerator. Heck, "mow the lawn" and "at the lake" are two phrases that don't belong in the same sentence, much less paragraph, and that makes the lawn-mowing that much more unpleasant.

When the calendar turned, and I no longer had the bull's-eye painted on my forehead, we planned to go to the lake more often; we had to, there was work to be done. We had taken a bookshelf from the old place, and as it turned out, it was as reluctant to move as I was. (That many years in one place will do that to you.) But we both had to go, because I didn't want either one of us to get crushed by the bulldozers. I had always said that they'd have to pry me out of the old cabin with crowbars; the bookshelf actually meant it, and so it moved into the new place a little worse for the experience. Repairing the bookshelf was a priority, because I was getting tired of stumbling over the piles of books, stacks of games, and all of the other stuff that was now on the floor.

So we headed to the new place with hammer and nails, saw and stain, and lumber to replace the boards we had damaged; we also had to shorten the bookcase by a few inches, so it would fit in its new home. We also planned to paint the cabinet doors in the kitchen, as well as tear out one section of cabinets, and replace it with drawers. (Whoever heard of a kitchen with no drawers?)

That January weekend, I learned that I had taken something for granted at the old cabin. The old place had a well, unlike many cabins that pull their water from the lake. The new place does not have a well… and the intake hose was nowhere near the lake, since the water was down almost eleven feet. So we had no running water, which meant no plumbing, which was not a situation we had wanted to deal with on a cold January weekend. Periodically "communing with nature" is fine when you're camping; when two bathrooms are inside, mocking you, it's something else.

Naturally, we didn't come close to finishing everything that needed to be done that weekend. When we went back a week or two later, the water was still lower than our intake, so we roughed it some more. And we got a little more work done, so at least we were seeing light at the end of the tunnel. The bookcase came together without much of a hitch, the old cabinets came out much easier than we had anticipated, and the new cabinets (with drawers!) went in almost as easily. On the down side, we realized that we were going to have to strip and sand the old cabinet doors, though eventually that was done, and they were painted.

We still had to do the countertop on our new cabinet, which involved tiling and grouting. When we went to do that, the lake had risen just enough that I could move the intake into the water, so we had running water… until I found water pouring from a broken pipe under the house. So we added that to the repair list; it was another month before we could get back, but when we did we fixed the pipe, finished the countertop, and even sanded and stained the furniture on the porch… almost; we ran out of stain before completing the job.

But that should just about do it for the inside of the cabin, except for cleaning up the messes we've been making with our projects. And cleaning up won't be easy; my wife has very high standards when it comes to cleaning up (much higher than mine.) And we still have some outside work to do, most of which involves placing stones to make a path from the dock to the cabin. Many of the stones are the very same stones that made up a similar path at the old place. My mother had gathered them herself, mostly from the side of the road; as I dug them up and transported them to the new place, I gained a whole new level of respect for her, because these suckers are big and heavy. (My dad says that her old station wagon never drove right after hauling all of those rocks, and I believe it.)

Once the path is in-- hopefully, we'll get that done well before summer-- I'll finally get to sit back and enjoy the new cabin… except for when I have to mow the yard.  Mowing the lawn at the lake… nope, it still sounds wrong.

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