The Happiest Days of our Lives
Well, here we are, just the three of us. (That’s you, me, and the news.) Yeah, I really hate reading the news lately.
Anyway, this will be my last post for a while. The end of the year is here, and with it come many obligations, a deep need for rest, and my mother. (Hi, Mom!)
Here’s this week’s summary…
- For the moment I am no longer bandaging the dog across the street. Yay! He’s been given the green light to go without bandages for now. His owner is still using a spray bandage on his elbow to toughen up the skin a bit, but he’s pretty good in that regard. However, he’s still an older boy, and his energy is missing lately. No clear reason for that has been found, though. We’ll see.
- Despite the lack of need to bandage the dog, I am still over at the neighbour’s house regularly. Recently I’ve shown her how to use her blood pressure meter, worked on figuring out the source of the water on her garage floor, and there are a couple of simple repairs that need to get made. (Some of her doors don’t latch properly.) So now I am Mr. Fixit and a walking consultant on too many things. But she appreciates it, and none of it is hard.
- Anne and I are getting organized to do the annual holiday letter. Once again it will be delivered by email because it’s too late to deal with actual cards. I wonder if I will ever get back to doing cards? It seems unlikely, but I can hope.
- We had the contractor over to discuss the upstairs reno in a bit more depth, and it all looks good. There is one place where we cannot be certain if the desired solution will work until we do the demolition — it’s a question of how the plumbing will interact with the floor joists — but we’ll probably be OK. With that consultation complete, we’re working a bit more diligently on the plans and making design choices. It sounds like we can get the project going in late January or February.
- There’s another issue of the community email to go out on New Year’s Day, and I need to get as much as possible of that together before my mom arrives. That’s yet another time sink.
- I’ve added to my fleet of recording thermometers, so now I can keep an eye on the temperatures throughout the house. Here’s a recent chart:
The dark, dashed line at the top shows when the boiler was running. All in all, things look pretty good. The conservatory (aka a family room full of plants) gets colder than anywhere else, particularly at night, but it’s at the end of the radiator line, it’s got a skylight, and it has a slew of windows without curtains or blinds. Anne says the plants like it that way in any case, so it’s fine.
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That’s most of it for now. I’ve probably missed things, but as best I can tell, that covers the last week and the coming three.
On the humour front, Anne recently sent me this, claiming it shows a man after my own heart:
If I may, I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who reads these posts. I know the topics wander all over, and lately they haven’t been all that exciting. I hope to get back to doing more creative stuff once the next reno is done. The timing might mean building a garden shed and an enclosure for the garbage carts next, but we’ll see.
Regardless, I still have readers, and I thank you. Seriously. If you weren’t there, I would stop writing. But instead I have a reason to put something new together every Friday. That’s all down to you folks, so again, thank you.
I’ll be back in the new year with the next update. Probably on January 9th.
In the meantime, I wish you all a very happy holiday season!
