Back in February I had an itchy trigger finger and felled a bunch of trees to beat the wind. Last weekend I worked from can-see to can't-see to clean it all up. Prized timbers were marked for milling, and Tim Bittorf of Bluffside Services (920-495-8482) is taking the rest away, for wood chips and toilet paper.

It may not look like it, but we're getting close to having Nick's team at Lily Bay Sand & Gravel — the winners of the sitework bids — come to scrape the building site and remove all the stumps. They won't be thrilled, but I'll be onsite for that, grabbing as many unearthed stones as possible for our foundation and patio. Lots more to come soon.

I haven't posted in a while because we were in France and Spain visiting the surfer son who is "studying" in Barcelona this semester.

One of the highlights was driving way off the beaten track to Bourbon-l'Archambault to visit the ruins of Château de Bourbon-l'Archambault. For just 7€ — and with *zero* other tourists present — we were allowed to climb to the top of 2 of the 3 towers (one is closed due to safety concerns) of a castle built in the 1300s.

On the second floor of the east tower (the one to the right in the picture below), the duke and duchess quarters had an en suite fireplace and an open-air "toilet" where the 💩 landed two stories below, presumably left for some servants to scoop up.

Even more impressive was the builders' water management on the top floor. Without proper drainage this would quickly turn into a rooftop pool — sans DJ — but multiple drains carried the water to extended carved stone gutters (that looked like gargoyles from a distance) to get the water away from the foundation. Fantastique!