Episode #24 Day Trips & ITB, 1st Month of Year THREE Our Country Cottage a Narrative

In this episode Our Country Cottage has not finished sending me power failure alerts and In The Beginning, ITB, covers the first month of year three of construction. In The Beginning, month 25, August. This is the part of the episode where I go through pix, emails, logs etc to give you the best recollection of the construction of Our Country Cottage. I had three visits to OCC this month. Each was three days long. The first visit, I had a load of those flat pack boxes from that store, known for its assemble yourself furniture. My collection promised that they would turn into two closet organizers for the master bedroom closet. The instructions had a picture of two characters putting them together. Seeing that I was by myself, I took it as a handy suggestion and proceeded to do it with the, unwritten, one character option. More challenging, but more rewarding and much less debate as to what goes where etc. I found a picture with them assembled and in place. Proof positive that just cause it ain’t written in the instructions, doesn’t mean it won’t work. Our cook top was used for the first time to make breakfast. Also, due to very heavy hail our vehicle was parked in the garage for the first time, but not without acquiring some new contours. I seem to remember running around outside with pieces of cardboard protecting my head from the hail. Yes, cardboard cut from those flat pack boxes. The last day of this visit was a gorgeous, sunny day and I took the time to do a photography project with my phone. 30 pix in 30 minutes. Got some cool shots. So this part of the podcast ,ITB, is supposed to be about how the construction was proceeding not what I was doing by myself. Spoiler alert. Nothing happened for the whole month. After spending alone time at OCC, I called the project coordinator to see what was going on. Turns out our contractor had been very ill for a time, hospital stuff, etc, but he was doing better and should be back soon. While back in town, more furniture evaluation trips were made to flesh out Our Country Cottage. My next three day visit saw the grass getting cut, some brush getting wacked and my partners first overnight stay. The last visit of the month, yes three days again, gave me pix of starry early morning skies, drainage round the septic tank area, a gravel pile and those piles of construction leftovers. There are a couple of lovely pix of the front of OCC with the lights on at night. I printed some of those pictures from that 30 pix in 30 minutes project and put them in a multi pic collage frame sort of thing, and that got hung on a wall. A note in my log book informs me that there were 4 deer and two elk on the front clearing at the same time. A regular zoo. So that’s it for ITB, month 25. Will next month pick up? Tune in next time for, “Its month 26, do you know where your contractor is?” Now on with the OCC update While winter has been refusing to loosen its grip on Our Country Cottage, my visits have evolved into a one day trip, every other week. The month started with, what has become, the regular “Power has been lost” email from OCC. A check to see what local weather condition were at the time of failure revealed that the temp had dropped to -35C (-31F) that night. So understandable. I was not concerned about anything breaking in the cottage as I had drained the water a while back and was in no rush to go up. In fact, it was ten days later that we went up. In that time span Our Country Cottage emailed me 110 times to let me know that power had failed. You would think that once it failed that would be it. Remember that OCC is primarily solar powered so when the generator decides it does not want to work until someone presses its buttons, to clear errors, the batteries get charged by the sun on clear days. So here is what happens, power fails, sun comes out and charges the batteries until they reach a certain level to turn the power back on. Once the power is back on the boiler sees a de