The house is coming along “stepwise” as Nick would say it. And though every owner of this house has been a frequent shopper at the ‘local’ hardware store, buying a plethora of tools, we’ve little to show for it. I’ve brought up what I can spare from the main residence, but we still seem to hunt for this and that. So it was off to the hardware store this morning to enable the days’ activities.

Island hardware in Crow Valley is a true Orcas Island institution and according to its affable owner, Neal, provides insurance and retirement to employees. The folks who work there are no nonsense with a dry humor which means no purchase happens without comment.

So today when we brought up a big plastic pail, a machete, a large pick, large contractor bags, red duct tape and a shovel, the question on everyone’s mind in line behind us was quickly verbalized by the checkout clerk,

“Y’all gonna kill somebody?”

The truth was far more benign though very dirty—inside and outside the house. We needed to bury our internet cable since the installers left it laying across our driveway. And indoors I needed to clean years of filth from under the gas insert.

The first was a straight forward dirty job. Nick dug. I buried. He sweated and I got muddy.

However, the indoor job was pretty gross. The prior owners had both dogs and cats and had not, in the three years they lived there, vacuumed under the living room gas insert. The problem is that they’d scooped rocks and shells from the beach. An interesting idea in theory, but not in practice. And would undoubtedly ruin your vacuum.

So I spent my afternoon (and first day of my vacation) sorting rocks in the living room by size, tossing out extraneous objects and pebbles small enough to be vacuum ingested. The remaining mid-size and bigger rocks got washed in the big plastic pail to remove the fur, dust bunnies and cobwebs. Three hours later, I went to put them back only to find it’s now time to go rock hounding. The pebbles may have been small, but there were lots of them.

Still, a job well done! I won’t run over the cable in the dark and it is now possible to vacuum under the insert. And there was time left to sit and watch the sunset.