Sewer Fixed! Vehicles maintained, friends visited

Well Howdy!

I certainly hope that this missive finds you happy and healthy. Life has been a bit busy lately, which has put me off my regular updates, but I'm back. Since I posted my last missive, Tom, the owner of the boat I race on, has moved back to Broadview and is continuing to gain strength there, and it is awesome to be able to help him and Helen. Thursday was Tom's 81's birthday, and I put together this video of pictures I have of him over the past 20 years or so.

Catherine's Dad is hanging in there. Catherine gets up to see him about four times a week, and he has been enjoying the milkshakes that she has been taking him, and really enjoys seeing Athena (as do all of the other residents of the house)

The sewer is fixed

A couple of years ago, we had a basement flood, which led us to discover that roots were invading the side sewer through the joints in the concrete pipes. Well, we decided at the time that we would buy some time by flushing root retarder down the pipes every quarter or so. Well, that has run its course. We decided to get the side sewer fixed once and for all, so for about a week, we had a hole in the driveway while the plumber installed a cured-in-place liner. Now, we should (knock on wood) not have any more side sewer problems for the rest of the time we will be living in the home. That's a good feeling.

Events

There have been a couple of events these past couple of weeks. The Olympic Manor community club held its end-of-year social at Stoup Brewing, which was well attended. We do three of these a year to get the neighbors together - we buy the pizza, and everyone buys their own beer. I had the chance to see a show with my "Berkclub", which is some friends from my Tableau days. It's our book club, but we misspelled the name when we created the group chat, and it stuck. Soup night continues on Tuesday nights. Our friend Kai has been in town from Berlin, and he and his daughter Jule (who has been doing the exchange student thing at Ballard High this semester) have been showing up, and it's been nice to catch up with them. Thursday night happy hours have been well attended lately, as many of the happy hour crowd know Kai and Jule and use this as a chance to catch up with them. I've also been having the opportunity to catch up with several friends from my past, which, when I look back at how I've been spending my time since I retired, I realize I spend a fair amount of my quality retired life doing. It is nice to stay in touch with folks.

Vehicles

I've also taken on a couple of vehicle projects these last couple of days - starting with getting the "Kennel Cabinet" fixed up so that it can work as a desk again. I also installed a new stereo in my Toy Car. That was a week of work as I had to run a wiring harness from the trunk up to the center console, which involved me removing a LOT of the interior and the dash, and then wrestling with brackets and wires installed. But I got it done in just over a week, and it looks pretty good, and now I have modern features like CarPlay and a backup camera (and all the buttons work). And finally, I spent yesterday replacing the rotors and pads on all four corners of the van. That was a 7-hour project, but now the van is set to go for a good long time, as we also put new tires on it. I rather enjoyed both of those projects. It is nice to get into the zone and lose myself to work like that.

Thanksgiving

We will be hosting a few folks for Thanksgiving this week, and are pretty excited about that. And then after Thanksgiving, I'm getting in the van, and driving down to see mom, and then back up to California to visit my cousin Eric and some friends, and go racing in Sonoma with my close enough engineering team. My friend Mike is coming down to hang with me and George, and then he will road-trip back up to Seaside with me, where I will drop him off at his Oregon home.

Well, that's about it for this week's missive - Catherine and I are going to get the holiday lights down from the attic and start getting the house decorated. 😄

Love ya all

Dan W