After an exhausting all day drive, we followed it up with an equally exhausting all day cleaning spree. Jane and the kids had each done yeoman service during each of their brief stays, but the cabin still needed a thorough cleaning. Then there is this year’s rodent issue. So I cleaned the cabin’s downstairs, while Anne tackled the loft where red squirrel(s) had taken up residence this last winter.

My job really wasn’t so bad, just wet rag dusting, followed by sweeping. There was still a fair amount of powder-post beetle dust about. I’m not sure how recent it was, because I mostly found it in out-of-the-way spots, mainly on the windowsills. There was a thin layer of dust on some of the furniture, but not the little piles, suggesting that those surfaces had already been cleaned, but the beetles were still being active.

Anne worked a lot harder collecting a waste basket full of whole Pinecones (destined to become fire starters) and a shopping bag full of Pinecone debris mixed with pink insulation. Anyway she got the loft cleaned-up. This effort should help us figure out if the squirrel is still coming inside or not. No idea yet about how the squirrel is getting inside. The place where the boys spotted it earlier this year is so far inside the cable that I don’t think that it is really relevant. We’re going to checkout the trapdoor in the master bedroom and look for squirrel signs above the insulation.

And after all of that we managed to stay up late enough to see the comet Neowise. It was about eleven when the sky became dark enough to see it. At first you needed binoculars to see it, but eventually it became naked eye visible. Above is my first attempt at photographing it. The scene was shot out over the lake towards Canada. The red windmill and navigation lights are visible along the bottom. There is some light pollution in the lower right corner. The Big Dipper is in the upper center and below it is a short white streak that is the comet.