wind storm

Last Thursday night, we had a big windstorm - made a bit of a mess ... couple of trees blown over, broken branches all over the place, several trees snapped off at the top like this one...




... yes, that's the roof over the earth oven. I'm thinking I'll just leave it and repair the roof around it - it would make a nice "natural" touch. I'm not sure I could dig it out anyway - that was a long ways to the ground for a big chunk of wood like that. The tree it came off has a history of breaking at the top. A large chunk broke off a couple of years ago. Near the top, the tree is forked from previous breaks (two since we've been here). This particular tree is our only grand fir - all our other evergreen are Douglas firs. Except for sending huge masses hurtling to the ground at high speed once in a while, it's really a beautiful tree.

Here's the area around the cabin - another tree top fell on the cherry tree and took off a chunk of that, too (just to the left rear of the shed):


... and that was just the wind. We've had a lot of rain, too. And I'm just talking about this month. Last month (November), we had record rainfall, snowfall and low temperatures. Good thing we live in a relatively mild climate!

When we built the house, we put it up in the open area where large projectiles can't fall on it every time there's a little wind!

We're in!

The mattress was delivered last Wednesday. That night, we slept in the cabin for the last time.

Thursday night, Betty slept in the house for the first time while I stayed overnight in Bothell for my current job. Since then, we've had to re-oriented ourselves to living full-time in a real house - which has been more work than you might think ... but we're catching on - and we like it.

The dogs seemed a little confused and upset staying in the house - I think they would rather stay in their den (the cabin). They're getting better, however. And once we get a fence around the house, they'll be all set.

This Friday, we'll have company for the first time. Carol is coming out from the east coast for a few days to visit her daughter, Kate, and they'll both be here for a couple days. Unfortunately, our 2nd bedroom is not set up for anyone to sleep in, but luckily, there is this great little cabin which has recently been vacated. Indoor plumbing will be totally accessible, however!

In July, Kelly will be here for a few weeks. She is going to work on getting the cabin ready to use as an artists' retreat. Near the end of her visit, Keith will be here for a few days. Kelly will drive him back to Bend on her way back to Chicago in early August.

Near the end of August, Betty's parents and sisters will be here for a visit. It'll be the first time here for Eileen and Donna.

So... it's looking like a pretty busy summer. Besides all the company, we're still busy with jobs and projects (new and old) around the place.

Our summer guests aren't going to get to experience the masonry woodstove, but our winter schedule is wide open, so start thinking about making your reservations now!

34 years

We were married 34 years ago today. We talked about going to Downrigger's in Port Angeles for an anniversary dinner, but decided we would rather have breakfast at Gwennie's.


I'm thinking about giving Betty a custom Gentoo Linux MythTV HDTV PVR for an anniversary present. But it's a little late to throw that together now. Maybe for our 35th.

And we'll probably go to Downrigger's anyway.

can't believe I just mailed 40 lbs of dirt

We got up kind of late this morning. I was pretty tired after getting home late the night before - I'm working over in Bothell these days and the Friday evening commute back to the world via the ferry is long and hard. (I could tell you about the Friday when the ferry left the dock with hardly any cars on board - they couldn't load it because the railroad crossing gate was stuck closed ...but that's another blog entry.)

We didn't make it to Gwennie's for breakfast until after 9. I got a newspaper and Betty brought her book, but we didn't read. We just talked about what's been going on the last couple of days and what all we need to do this weekend. We also couldn't linger, because Betty had to go to Legacy to help with a training class.

When we got home from breakfast, the floor finishing folks were already here. They were supposed to show up around noon, but I guess after working on this floor for almost 2 weeks, they were tired of explaining to us why they weren't done yet and when they might be if everything went ok.

I had paperwork to do, but before I got into a paperwork catch-up mode, I put my Linux "apartment server" to work updating itself. I really like this Gentoo distribution of Linux. You just type " emerge -uD world" and it downloads and installs updates for everything on the computer. While that was working, I did my bookkeeping, read the newspaper that I bought at Gwennie's and made a crossover ( i.e. PC-to-PC direct) network cable.

Before Betty got back home, I put the v-belt on the Toro. One of the mower belts broke a couple weeks or so ago. We actually ordered a replacement before it went (we saw it coming), but the order got lost. We re-ordered and when it finally came in, it was the other mower belt - not the one that broke. Meanwhile, the grass is really enjoying this warm weather and rain stuff. Before I left for my twice-weekly trip to Bothell last Wednesday, I gave Betty the part number for the v-belt along with a picture and she took it to the Toro place and they got her the correct belt within 24 hours. The rain has let up, so I knew Betty would be wanting to do some mowing.

The floor guys put on the third and last coat of urethane. They said that we would be able to walk on it after 5pm.

So, Betty comes home and gets on the mower. I've got no excuse to hang out in the office and surf the web, so I went out to take care of a little chore - digging up some clay soil and sending it to Kelly...

Kelly has a project that requires some raw clay ("Sequim Gold") from our place. If there's anything that we have a shortage of here, it's not clay soil. I didn't even have to dig for it. As you may have read from previous blog entries, we recently built a house. One of the side-effects of that is large mounds of dirt from excavations. It turns out that there were some great concentrations of clay in the soil from those excavations. All I had to do was go out to the berm with a bucket and look for those distinctly grey clumps of hard clay.

I collected about 40 lbs of it - pulverized most of it in my hands, but left a few of the better clumps whole so Kelly could have a few "nuggets" - maybe put them in a gallery or something.

This stuff wasn't even very wet - even though it's been raining a lot for about a week. Just to make sure it was the real thing, I took some of the pulverized clay, added water and mixed. Yup - pure gold.

I boxed it up into two Amazon boxes and took it to the Staples UPS store. I thought that they might want to look at the contents, so I brought in the boxes unsealed, but they didn't seem to care to see what was inside. Each box was almost 20 lbs. Good thing this stuff wasn't very wet.

I left Staples and went next door to QFC to buy some wine for dinner. I got a bottle of Australian Red Knot Syrah - it was $6 off for QFC members and it was still more than I usually spend, so it should be good. Betty says we're having shishkabobs for dinner.

On the way out of QFC, I tried to buy a lottery ticket, but they were having some kind of problem with the lottery machine - they were on the phone with tech support trying to figure out how to reboot the machine. I overheard them say that everybody was having the same problem and that it would take about a hour to fix - must be one of them lottery viruses that's been going around.

On Monday, the floor should be dry and hard enough for us to move some furniture in. There's not much - dining table, chairs, bed frame (but no mattress), dressers, some odds and ends. Should be easy.