Hammerin’ in the Delta

Wednesday

We have gotten most of the flooring done. Here is the livingroom when we started. It was where most of the loose stuff wound up.

This is how the livingroom looks now.

Work continues on the floors, but now we are now working on staining and finishing wood trim and cabinets and framing windows.  This is an area that I am pretty picky about because I actually know something about staining and finishing wood.  Some years back we worked on a house that was near completion.  The crew that came in before us were not as careful as we were, and the kitchen cabinets were terrible!  I took them all down, sanded them down and refinished them.  They still did not quite meet my standards, but they were much better.  So today I delayed lunch a little while I put one more coat on a louvered door.  I hate louvered doors!

Here are Charlotte and Ed cutting wood to be used for trim and baseboards. We will be doing a lot of staining and finishing in the next couple days.

We frequently take an afternoon off and find something fun and interesting to do.  Today we went into nearby Tunica to visit the Tunica River Walk Museum.  It is a lovely place, and we were pretty much the only people there. 

Here is the Mississippi River. It is big. It is muddy. Andy really likes it.

The museum was pretty much empty, which is a shame, as it is a lovely museum.

This is on the wall just by the entrance. There are a lot of these throughout the museum.

This was one of my favorite exhibits. Since the river often changes course, trees and roots frequently find their way to the middle of the river. These obviously present a significant navigational obstacle, so boats like this would go out and haul them out of the river. The wood was then used to fire the boilers and keep the boat going.
This is a pretty cool map. The lighting in the museum was not ideal for shooting pictures and you cannot use a flash for things behind glass, but I took this one anyway. The different colors show how the river changed course over the centuries. Some of those different colors represent periods of decades, others of centuries.
And here are some seriously ugly fish! Andy can tell you what kind they are. I just know that they are ugly.

It is really a very nice museum, and I would recommend it for whoever comes down this way. Unfortunately, not all that many do. For a while, Tunica enjoyed a bit of a boom when casinos opened. There were a whole string of them right down the road from the museum. Then just about every state legalized gambling and the casinos mostly went away. Such is life in the Mississippi Delta.

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John M. Baker

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