We Interrupt this Political Blog...

...to bring you a post about home restoration.

BACK PORCH
I was able to come to some completion on the back porch. Steps are installed, but I still need to finish the railings. Here is a close up of the steps:


And a long shot of the porch:


GARDEN
I cleaned up the garden last weekend. I dug up my potatoes (two meals total, tops), harvested acorn and butternut squash, and picked green tomatoes. Here's some of the last haul:


Fish Pond
I don't have a photo right now but we took the plants out and put them in a livestock tank in the basement along with our one surviving fish. I used the wet vacuum to take out the last 150 gallons of water. I excavated the hole that was punched into the bottom and after two days of drying, filled it with lime base and cemented it up. That was Wednesday morning. Of course it rained in yesterday. I vacuumed out water again and now have three 4x8 sheets of plywood covering it up.

LAST POLITICAL COMMENT (for a while)
Wednesday also marked the two year anniversary of my neighbors Mike, Pete and I going to downtown Iowa City the Sunday night before the 2006 mid term elections and listen to an electrifying (but widely unknown) young senator from Illinois stump for the democratic candidate for Iowa governor, Chet Culver. Of course the speaker was Barack Obama, and we were astonished at the idea of 2,000 people showing up for someone who wasn't Hillary Clinton.