Great work on the house, Bob! I lost my mom in Feb 2022, my Dad's partner of over 60 years, and he's been stoic about it outwardly but was an enormous blow to his life spirit which is usually always quite high. My sister has just gotten him interested in traveling again the last few months and has been to the woods of Upper Peninsula Michigan and to Maine. He didn't have much ambition to travel for at least a year since nearly all his traveling had been done with my mother. I drove out with my wife and daughter to see him in Florida last month for first time since a year ago September, and got to work as I usually do chainsawing and mowing and trimming to bring some light back into the overgrown riverfront property and tackling a mess of projects he'd been waiting on me to do when I came. Not something any of my family there seems motivated to keep up with. He's still fit enough to keep up with some of it himself, but it's too much work without some help. He was so thrilled to see everything cleaned up and repaired, like a big breath of life blown into the property. Part of it is self-interest, I've been hoping to move back and build on the back four acres for awhile now but money is never quite there.
Good trades people anywhere are hard to find, it's a refrain I keep hearing. I could probably make a mint in the contracting business, but it's not really what I want to do. Kind of prefer the low pay but no obligations life of my niche woodworking and occasional mechanical work. America seems particularly to be suffering from years of outsourcing its manufacturing and focusing on consumption and convenience to where the number of skilled trades people and repair people has diminished to near crisis point, and/or priced beyond all reason. I find myself doing steady repairs, both automotive and small engine, for a tree service friend who hooks me up with logs at times who has everything constantly breaking on him. He'd be bankrupted by now from downtime without work and high repair costs if he had to depend on Stihl dealers to repair his gear or auto shops to fix his truck.
Photo is of the remaining bit of Australia that remains on my Dad's property, some casuarinas at least 70 years old now that are the last ones not to be blown over by hurricanes. The whole beach of about ten of them interwoven actually did go over in 1977 in a storm, but we trimmed them and pushed them over back into place and they're still there. All the others ones on the property have been taken out by other hurricanes, but as they're non-natives, haven't shed a tear about it. They are the best wood my Dad has ever found for smoking fish, though, so he likes having some still around. The bench was barnacle encrusted from a neighbor's sunken mangled dock my Dad and brother and nephew salvaged, so I cleaned it up as a riverfront spot among the casuarinas, and sawed up the dock to use as trail bridges over marshy spots on the back of the property.