Screen House

We put up our Eureka screen house out on the lawn tonight. First time in two years it's been up.

We bought it two years ago and left it up for a few weeks, right up until a severe windstorm knocked it over and across the lawn. When we gathered it up, we found that the 'spider', the thing on top where the support poles slot in, had gotten broken sixteen ways to Sunday. With no way to connect the poles, the screen house was useless.

Fortunately, Carole found out where to order a new 'spider' from the manufacturer. Then we did nothing to get it attached to the screen house, so the screen house stayed useless. Finally, sometime last summer Carole called a local camping and hiking store and found that they'd repair it for us. Even then, with it fixed, we never got around to putting the thing up again. Silly us.

Tonight we finally did.

We've got some spirally metal stakes that people sell for tethering your giant inflatable snowmen during wintry weather, and if we get around to it, we're going to locate 'em and use those to stake down the screen house so we don't have to take it down when I'm out of town and not able to rush out and collapse it when a big thunderstorm's in the offing.

Pity that we have so many mosquitoes locally that we can't really relax outside at night in the summer without something like this, but hey. It was nice sitting out there tonight and hopefully we'll get some more use of it before the end of the summer.

I'm scheduled to travel to Denver, then Portland (Oregon), then Raleigh, then Portland again, then we're on vacation for a week and will be going to Mountain Lake, Virginia for my parents' second 50th anniversary wedding celebration. After that, who knows?