Tom & Brenda's Family Journal

The US Coast Guard icebreaker Mackinaw heading up the river on Wednesday Visiting with my Aunt Elsie with my parents Music in the Park is a weekly concert at the Locks Park. Almost always a great time. You may wonder what we do while we are at the Cabin. Although I often write about boatwatching, we do have many other activities that fill our days. Visiting with friends and loved ones seems to be the number one focus of our days. For example, yesterday we started our day with our normal coffee with our neighbor Lodie. After that, we had a visit from my sister Kathy and my brother's grandson. We decided to take them out to lunch because Kathy had never been to Lockview-one of our favorite spots for whitefish. And every trip to Lockview requires a trip to Zak's. Zak's is an ice cream place on Portage Avenue a block from Lockview. After Kathy and Scottie left, my niece Ashley stopped by. We took her out to Bay Mills to get fireworks for the 4th. We had to make a stop

We have been here at the cabin almost two weeks. What have we done in that time? We don't spend all our time relaxing but we enjoy every second we are here. Boat watching is a favorite activity. Here are two 1,000 footers out front. Graham, our cat, does spend almost all her time relaxing. She goes from window to window to keep tabs on the goings on in our yard. I have to say that we haven't had any chipmunks in our attic so far so maybe her patrols are helping. We did get to observe a lamprey release in the St. Marys River last week up close and personal. The sterilized males are released at spawning time to try and control the population. Lampreys are a big problem in the St. Marys River. We continue to work on the fallen trees and also weeding the flower beds. I am looking for another way to control the weeds in my sea wall flower beds. Every year by the time we get here, the weeds have a big head start and I spend many days cleaning them out. I am thinking of cov

We were greeted by tree problems from the moment we drove into the driveway. A freak wind storm during May had left many trees down on our property and also on our neighbor's. In fact, two of our trees landed on our neighbor's roof. This pine tree lay across the driveway so that became Tom's first project after unloading our belongings. Tom made fast work of this one since it involved no climbing. There was another small tree down in the side yard. Tom made that into firewood very quickly. Our neighbors had taken one of our trees off their roof and left the brush which we cleaned up. The big project was the tree that lay on Nancy's roof. It was one of two that fell on her house-cracking her picture window and damaging her chimney and putting two holes in her roof. Tom studied the tree and came up with a plan to winch the tree up and have it land on our lawn. We brought out the lawn chairs for the spectators-all the women-and Tom and Rich set to work putting a chain