Coastal Anniversary

I ran across the pictures from our quick anniversary getaway weekend this morning and realized I hadn't posted any, so here they are.

It was a gloriously sunny fall weekend, so we headed up through San Francisco

with a brief stop on Hawk Hill to enjoy the view and look at the migrating birds,

as well as to admire the lighthouse at Point Bonita.

We eventually wound our way up the coast and found our way to the Osprey Peak Bed and Breakfast, up a crazy-steep driveway near Point Reyes.  The place was perched up on top of a hill with lots of big trees to admire from the back deck.

What you can't see in the above picture is the sheer number of hummingbirds that hung around the back yard (due to their being about a dozen feeders).  The sound of fifty hummingbirds right outside the window is actually entertainingly ominous.

Naturally, most of the weekend was spent riding our bikes :)

We headed out to see the lighthouse on one day, did what was supposed to be a 30-mile loop that turned into a 50-mile loop the next, and explored the northern part of the peninsula in the thick fog on the third.

In between, there was lots of good eating, poking around galleries, and mead tasting at the local meadery.  A fine weekend escape!

Happy Thanksgiving

 I love watching the Halloween pumpkins evolve.

Nim did some evolving this week too, with her new haircut.

She manages to look much more edgy than I ever do.  It's a good cut, despite only costing $12 at the independent local haircut place downtown.

We were invited over to Todd and Sarah's for Thanksgiving this year, leaving us free to goof off and ride our bikes earlier in the day.  Since Nim was seeming strong I suggested Mt. Hamilton.

!!

Hamilton is about a 4500 foot climb.  Kiddo wanted to ride under her own power rather than on the tandem.  We opted to drop Chad off at the base of the hill, and she and I started at Joe Grant County Park, about a third of the way up, as she really wanted to make it up to the top and figured that a mere 3000 feet of climbing might be feasible :)

Cheery kid at the start.

Tired, but still cheery kid reinflating her energy with cookies from the vending machine at the top.  Despite going into death march mode and gritting out the last mile on sheer determination, she made it up, and was an entertaining person for me to talk to all the way up (i.e. goofy and interesting rather than complaining).  Yay kiddo!

Later that evening, she ran around maniacally with Todd and Sarah's kids and still had the inclination to give Chad a hug :)  A big turkey dinner and multiple pieces of pie must have helped.  Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Existensial Musings

Hello, world. Today, I discovered a particular interest in musing on the fundamentals of human existence.

And, oh, yeah; I got my hair cut.

Happy Halloween

Yes, we did Halloween, in a half-hearted last-minute sort of way.  Monday afternoon found me trying to clean things up a bit, cook dinner for us and Sarah and her kids, and frantically start scooping out pumpkins at 5 pm with a hand that was still a bit sore from the previous week's yard carnage.  Needless to say, the pumpkins were not as carefully designed as they have been in previous years, but they were still properly Halloween-y.

Normally, after Halloween, we move the pumpkins onto the back patio so that we can enjoy them during dinner for the next couple of days, and then watch them rot/melt over the next couple of weeks.  This year, they clearly aren't scary enough to repel the squirrels; we get to watch the pesky critters *eat* them this time around.  I've seen up to four at a time, and probably should just give up and toss the pumpkins in the compost bin.

(Kids did go trick-or-treating -- Nimue and Cathryn used little Scott needing an escort as their justification to extort candy from the neighbors.  Recycled costumes from last year, and I just now realized that no one bothered to take pictures of the kids!  Clearly everyone is growing out of it.)

New Glasses

Nim recently started complaining that she was having a hard time seeing well when she reads or works on detailed art projects.  I assumed this was just a return of her far-sightedness, so made an appointment with the eye doctor.

As the eye exam progressed, it became clear that it wasn't that simple.  She's not particularly far-sighted.  She's not at all near-sighted.  What she does have is a "fixation disparity" -- in other words her eyeballs don't always track perfectly together.  The difference is slight; you can't see that they aren't pointed together, but it does make it harder to focus on things, especially at the end of the day when one is tired.  Fortunately, there is an easy fix for this with the right glasses.  So, fancy new glasses with a prism correction were ordered.

What was really funny was her reaction walking around downtown Mountain View after picking up the new glasses.  I expected the general "Whoa -- everything is in focus!" reaction.  What I didn't expect was the further description "No, I mean everything, really everything, is in focus, and not just the stuff in the plane that I am trying to look at.  There's no double vision in the background. It's soooooooo weird!!!!"

Apparently the kiddo has had doubled vision in the background, or in planes other than what she tries to focus on, basically for as long as she can remember.  She thought it was normal.  Bad mom never sussed this one out...nor did the eye doctor until now....

Yard carnage

The grass in the front yard is dead.  I didn't like it much in the first place, and just stopped watering it during the drought-induced water restrictions with a vague notion that I'd eventually get around to replacing it with some combination of drought-tolerant and native plants. 

With the wet fall planting season now upon us, and some house-project momentum, I decided it was time to attack this project. Take the shovel out to the front yard, dig up the grass, and loosen everything up so it is easy to put new plants in.  It's only about 400 square feet.  How hard could it be?

Oh, the woe of magnolia roots....  I suspected there might be a few, but the situation is ridiculous.  Basically, under the top centimeter of dirty is a layer of densely matted, tangled, snakey roots throughout the entire former lawn.  Not just small roots either.  I swear some of them are braided, and others tied in knots.  Recall that the city contractor who replaced the sidewalk in front of our house a couple of years ago referred to these roots as "anacondas".  Don't even get me started on what they do in the vicinity of the broken sprinkler head.  Clearing them is not an easy task.

After unsuccessfully clearing the first strip despite great effort, I stumbled back into the house and told Chad that I needed an army of Vikings to come hack the yard into small pieces.  He responded, "Do I need to get you a Pulaski?"

A Pulaski, for the uninitiated, is a firefighting tool that has a head that combines an axe and a mattock.  He used one back when he worked for the Forest Service.  Very good for creating firebreaks, or for digging out nasty horrible root-infested former lawns.  I had no direct experience with this tool, but after looking it up, decided it looked even better than the mattock that the contractor who had done a similar job on the neighbors' yard before they put it up for sale had used.

I suppose I *could* have hired someone to take care of it like a normal person, but it's more fun to get a new tool.  More satisfying to do it yourself, also.  Plus, you just have to love a spouse who says "Do I need to get you a Pulaski?"

Through the miracles of Amazon, the implement showed up on the front doorstep as I was leaving for a bike ride on Saturday.  It even matches my bike jersey!  Muahahahaha!

On Sunday,   I headed outside to try it out.  And boy, the Pulaski is a beautiful thing.  You can chop, dig, pry, and hack those horrible roots out.  It's still hard work, but is so much easier and completion of the task has moved into the realm of actual possibility.  I got a few weird looks, but there was one passer-by who made a point of stopping and chatting about the project.  She had done something similar a couple of years ago, and fully appreciated the evil of the magnolia roots.

You can see how dense the roots are along the edge of the cleared section.  This is what the whole plot is like.

Half the yard done.  Yard waste bin full.  Hands tired.  Time to stop.

I headed back out today to work on it some more after my bike ride, figuring that I was already all sweaty so a little more dirt wouldn't hurt.  I had just started happily hacking with the chorus from the witch scene from Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" stuck in my head  ("Harm's my delight, and mischief all my skill!"; it's been stuck in my head since rehearsing it among other things last night for some upcoming Halloween concerts) when a car pulls up in the driveway of the house next door that is up for sale.  It turns out that the driver is one of the people who just bought it.  She came over and introduced herself and seemed pretty nice, though I am now imagining her relating to her spouse that she met the crazed axe-wielding neighbor today...

Through the back fence

Our projects are small potatoes compared to the yard renovation that the neighbors behind us just embarked on.  They're basically taking everything that was previously in the yard out, aside from a couple of mature fruit trees.  Given that the previous configuration was a lot of patio, this is a big change.  

After a full week of near-constant jackhammering to remove all that patio concrete, the fence came down, giving me an up close and personal view of the project.

At about 4pm every day, the "privacy shielding" would go up, sometimes in a rickety manner,

and sometimes more robustly.

Somewhere in here, one of the other neighbors on our side of the fence started getting overly worried about the project; I spent several days convincing her that nothing abnormal was happening, no one was going to break into her house, and that everything would turn out just fine.  The neighbors doing the project are reasonable, have given lots of notice, and don't appear to be asking anyone to pay their half of the fence, so I have no problems with any of it.  Plus they bribed me by leaving cookies in our mailbox :)

It was a bit odd when the plastic came down at 7:30 in the morning while we were still eating breakfast, but I decided it was just entertainment.  We call that back window the "kitty TV", and there was definitely out-of-the-ordinary programming on kitty TV for about a week and a half.

Cute little tractors,

a most excellent hole-digging augur,

dudes putting posts up,

dudes finding old concrete where they wanted to put new posts,

and eventually the beginnings of a fence.

It was a see-through fence for a day or so, but as I expected, it was filled in with more boards.

Now there is a very solid, very new fence along the half of the back yard that borders that neighbor.

I'm back to hearing lots of small tractor noises pretty much constantly, but no longer can see the progress unless I climb up the fence and peek over.  Which I do occasionally...  (lots of new trenches and a hole that looks like it might be for a water feature today)

Heap reduction

In an effort to set things up so that everything has a home in the bedroom, we recently headed to IKEA before dinner one night a week or so ago.  We came out with a truckload of parts for a storage unit to replace Chad's old bureau.  He rapidly went to work putting it together with his cute little impact screwdriver.

One always has to consult the IKEA directions a few times during the process and interpret the pictographs.

The cat, as you might expect, was somewhat perturbed.

Well, make that VERY perturbed.

And worried.  Eventually she found the pile of packing paper and adopted it as a nest from which to keep an eye on us.

Meanwhile, Chad made good progress,

until we got to the last drawer.  See the little circle showing the contents inside this box?  Black.  Supposed to be white.  Argh...

After going back to the store (annoyingly on the weekend, which made Chad realize why I had done the original trip on a weeknight), we got the correct piece and he finished the masterpiece, which might just be big enough to contain everything we would like to put away.

I can use the shower tomorrow: Bathroom part 3

Yes, it's been a long time.  First, there was a long wait for the countertop people to come out and measure and then fabricate the countertop.  Then, there was an even longer wait for the shower glass people to do the same.  That was finally installed yesterday; I am just waiting for the caulk to cure before I use it.

So when we last left, the room was at this stage;

 Then we got paint,

drawer handles and countertop material,

and plumbing.

Ooh, a toilet!  Note that the tank is in the wall to save some space.

Better view of the shower plumbing after they cleaned up:

Eventually we got the electrical and LED light fixture installed,

and yesterday they came and put in the shower glass (ugly red tape comes off tomorrow)

and a great big mirror :)

Putting the big mirror in and knocking out that wall really made the room feel a whole lot bigger.  Plus, the wall is no longer rotting out behind the shower!  I'm really looking forward to using it tomorrow.