Gould Home

We had our first gaming party in the new house. Unfortunately, I did not take any pictures. The house seemed to have worked great for the gaming party. We ended up using eight tables simultaneously for games (and we had two more if they were needed). We ate 10 large pizzas and 5 pounds of salmon. The RSVP list had over 40 people, but I did not actually do a head count except to count people who wanted pizza at dinner time.

Meanwhile, I did take a picture this morning because after a day or two of rain, the river water level is up somewhat as you can see below.

That said, the boats have been put away for the winter, although we can still get the sit-in kayaks into the river if we have another warm spell.

We unpacked and tested out the wheelchair ramps today (ish, as we have no actual wheelchair to test with). This is to support some wheelchair bound guest at our upcoming gaming party. These are temporary ramps, which have the advantage of not requiring an exemption from the NRC and town. Should one of us get wheelchair bound for a long time, we can get an ADA exemption for a more permanent solution.

And here is bonus picture of foliage taken from my living room window.

Meanwhile, we spend another 2 hours pulling out invasive plants today. This is a never ending chore.

Carl Calabria is a neighbor of ours, in the Conantum neighborhood of Concord, MA. He recently posted this video of a drone flyover of the Sudbury river.

The section of the river in this video pretty much matches our typical route up the river when we go kayaking or paddleboarding. The video starts in Fairhaven Bay, with Scout Island in the lower left (you can see a small beach where you can go ashore. It then follows the river downstream (north), and ends with Heath’s Bridge in the distance.

At 0:43, Martha’s Point is on the left bank in the center of the screen. At 1:00, the neighborhood dock is center-left. What you can’t see are all the canoes and kayaks that are stored on shore near the dock.

At 1:33, you can see a row boat on the left near the bottom, with a path leading to that boat. This is my neighbor’s house and that is the path we use to put our boats into the water (except when the water is high). If you follow the path onto shore, then near the edge of the screen you can see our row boat, with its cover on. We keep it near our neighbor’s path (with permission) for convenience, although in a week or two we will probably bring it into the basement for winter storage.

At 1:35, our property takes up the bottom half of the screen, on the left, including that inlet and the peninsular beyond it. You can not see our house, which is off screen to the left.

Now that we have a permit to remove invasive plants in the wetlands, we have continued our invasive pulling. There was a lot of buckthorn just over the wetlands boundary.

Daphne identifies the buckthorn and chops off the trees near the base, then I come in with the weed wrench and pull the stumps out the ground. When the tree is too thick, I chop it down using the chainsaw and I took down a bunch of clumps today.

Here are some of the remaining buckthorn stumps that I pulled out this afternoon.

And here is just one pile of pulled invasive plants. We will leave the piles in the wetlands to decompose, but hide them behind bushes so they are not an eye sore from the house.

This process will take many, many more days to complete.

Our house has two doors on the main level. The front door, which is in the center of the house, and the pantry door, which is on the North side and leads to the garage.

When you approach the house from the street, the pantry door is closer to the driveway, but we do not want guest to use that door. The front door leads to the front hall where people can take off their shoes and hang up their coats so that is where we want people to enter. On the other hand, the pantry door is better for packages because it is protected from rain by the breezeway.

To try to steer visitors correctly, we have added this sign to the walkway.

Now, we will now see if it works.

We just got our walkway lights installed. Here is an evening picture showing the lights when they are turned on.

Also, we got a few inches of rain over the last couple of days. This has significantly raised the water level in the river. Here is a picture showing the current water level.

And here is a picture from a few weeks ago showing the water level at that time.