Rehoboth Beach January 2009
a cold walk on the beach
Took a quick trip up to the beach house this past weekend to get some work done on the house. My Dad and his wife have decided to extend the patio into the back yard, so that meant a lot of digging. Matt, Bobby, and myself dug about 8 square feet 6 inches down. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the ground was not frozen two inches deep. We couldn’t just take shovels and dig in the dirt, we needed a pick axes to break apart the frozen ground into large chunks. All this digging on one of the coldest days of the week. Temperatures didn’t get above freezing all day and there was a constant biting 15mph wind making things worse. Fortunately the excavated dirt didn’t have to end up in a land fill. We made a flower bed along part of the side fence, waste not want not.
Jesus geese
We also got some some work done on the deck. All the boards have now been replaced with Trex boards. As a beach house the environment beats wood to death in a couple of years. The Trex will provide a maintenance free and splinter free(!) surface for years. The posts got a make over of white Vinyl too. With the sun quickly falling and the wind picking up, the temperature was becoming unbearable. So at about 5:30 we decided to call it quits for the day.
With the Super Bowl on Sunday (Steelers won in a good game) no one was sticking around for more work. Sunday’s weather turned out to be in the low 60, sun shinning with a clear blue sky, and very little wind. If we had that kind of weather on Saturday, we definitely could have gotten more work done. But the bitter cold temps made work pretty difficult. For me it was a little motivating, at least if I kept moving I was warm.
For a work weekend I was able to get away for a walk early each morning. On Saturday I headed down to the beach. Surprisingly there were about a dozen people walking or running along the shore. At least the cold weather froze the sand and made walking on the beach easy. On Sunday I headed over towards Silver Lake and found a plethora of geese, ducks, even a blue heron. I was not the only one taking photos either, I ran into a few birders at the lake. They told me about a red billed duck sitting at the edge of the lake. I saw it but didn’t think anything of it, apparently this duck is rare this far north in winter.
It was a lot of work in the cold this weekend but I love heading to the beach house with the family. It was a great surprise to see Bobby, Tracy, and of course my niece Ellie. Cute kid, growing up so fast. The work is never done so we have already planned for another family work day in mid-March.
LOTS of ducks
