Today is the last day of work before the long weekend. I’m hoping that it will be quiet and that I can leave early. I need to stop at the pet food store on the way home for cat food and I will be swinging by my parents’ house, too. This evening there will be some organizing and packing to do. In the morning, I’ll pack and load the car for the drive. I will need to get up fairly early since I need to get some reports posted for work, though I could probably even wait until the evening for that, once I get the network set up. I’m not sure that I will be wanting to work after eating some turkey and stuffing, though!

I like short work weeks and this is one of them. Thursday is Thanksgiving and we’ll be visiting Pennie’s family. It will be fun to see Amaya, who I haven’t seen in 2 months.

On Saturday as I was clearing what I hope is the last of the leaves from our yard, I passed Pennie’s car in the driveway and noticed that her left front tire was flat. It was getting late, so I left it until Sunday. In the morning, I pulled out the donut spare and pulled off the tire. There was a screw embedded in the flat of the tire, so a plug would have handled it quite well. Unfortunately, the tire was pretty bald and there were some cuts and a quarter sized chunk of rubber gouged out. These were probably from the accident she had a number of months back and they should have replaced both tires and not just the passenger side front tire. I headed down to my parents’ house to clear leaves there and noticed that the tire place by BJ’s was open. I stopped in on the way back and got a price on the replacement. I put away the mower and headed back out with the flat tire. I had to sign up for a BJ’s membership, but I figure we’ll make good use of that over the next 14 months as they do have some pretty good prices there. I put the new tire on and feel much better that it is taken care of. It is actually good that she got the flat as that tire was just not safe!

Other than a load of leaf clearing and the tire, I didn’t do much else this weekend. It felt pretty relaxing, actually. I decided to stay out of the forums all weekend, so I’ll be playing catch-up today and probably the rest of the week, unless traffic is light in them. I had wanted to upgrade the rest of the network this weekend, but it will have to wait a bit longer. And I still need to get the Thinkpad to the final of Windows 7 as it is still running the RC version. I can then get the Office 2010 beta on that machine. I’m also planning to swap out the hard drive on the HP Tablet and put Windows 7 on it. I’m not sure when I’ll get around to that task! Looming ahead is a task I’ve been putting off for years, but now needs to be taken care of soon. I’ve been running Microsoft Money forever and the database file contains some corruption that doesn’t cause any issues with the numbers, but causes an error dialog for every entry and navigation and causes a real slowness of the program, especially at startup. Since Microsoft is ending all support for Money, causing the online bits to stop working, I’ll be switching to Quicken, but first I need to go through a lengthy process of exporting the data and rebuilding the Money data file from scratch so that I can upgrade it to a more recent version and then import the entire file to Quicken. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Not!

I stayed up entirely too late last night and I sure paid for that this morning!

Yesterday, a Facebook poll making the rounds riled me up and I could not ignore it, even though I didn’t take it. It showed up on my feed from a few other people. I won’t bother with the details here, but I commented and I suppose I was a bit harsh in my rebuke. Before heading to bed shortly before 11 I composed an apology and posted it, but tossed in another zing or two to make my point. By this time, I had already been removed from the target’s “friends” list. Apparently, the discussion ensued, so the entire string of comments and the original poll was deleted. No problems – except that I got less than 4 hours of sleep.

I also installed the latest version of MSN Explorer on one machine earlier in the evening and had an email dialog about it with my MSN contact. The upgrade is a bit stealth right now in that the new version is available from the member page, but no reference to its being a new version is made. Upgrades are being staged for a very limited window of time each day until they feel comfortable that there are no issues to deal with which were missed during the beta. The changes are mostly under the covers, but the new version fixes a bunch of defects.

I didn’t spend much time on the Office 2010 beta which I installed to one machine on Tuesday and fought with for a bit until I cold get it activated. The removal of the Technical Preview build from the machine seems to have left lots of junk behind and this caused headaches for me. I wasn’t asked for a key at install, and it designated itself as a MAK version on install. Since I don’t have an Activation Server, activation would fail, of course. I finally ended up resolving it by removing a bunch of TP registry keys and reinstalling the beta – twice. After the second try, I poked around to find the cached setup file and ran it again. This time, when it launched, it offered me choices – repair, remove, change, and change key. Finally! I entered the key, it chugged along for a few minutes and when I launched Word, I was able to activate. I would like to spend some time poking at the suite, but I haven’t had time for that yet. I should have poked at it rather than poking on Facebook.

Coffee does help overcome the lack of sleep, but I can’t stay up late again tonight or I’ll pay again tomorrow.

Well, maybe not half, but I made some progress on upgrading the home network this weekend. I removed 3 switches upstairs and replaced them with 8 port Gigabit switches. It appears that I might need to replace some cabling, too, but I won’t know that for sure until I replace the switches and router in my office. All of the switches I picked up are power saving units, which are reported to drop power consumption when it isn’t needed. I also pulled out the old Shuttle PC from the upstairs computer desk. I had stopped using that PC for any testing almost a year back, but finally pulled it on Saturday. The next steps are to swap out the router and switches in my office and I’ll also move the old Gateway Media Center machine from my office to upstairs. If I don’t get to that this coming weekend, I’ll do it over the long Thanksgiving weekend.

Due to the rain we had on Saturday, there was no leaf mulching to be done on Sunday. Our yard isn’t bad at all, but my parents’ yard is loaded with leaves again and will take a few hours to clear. Hopefully, it will be dry next weekend so that I can get that taken care of.

We don’t have a belfry, nor is the title a reference to any nuttiness, but we do have an attic. Yesterday evening I was riding the exercise bike when there was a fluttering overhead and a bat flew past my head. It flew back and forth a few times before disappearing into the rafters at the other end of the attic from where I was riding. Bats are actually very tiny, so I was unable to locate it when I checked the rafters where it had disappeared. I got back on the bike and finished my workout.

When we first moved in the house 11 years ago, it was August and we didn’t have air conditioners other than our bedroom. There were two ventilation fans in the roof that are controlled by thermostats. We had the attic door open to pull air through the house and we were sitting in the living room watching television when something swooped overhead. Yes, it was a bat. It flew around a few times and headed back into the attic. I went up there, turned on the light, and opened the windows and screens, hoping that it would leave. Well, it didn’t, but unbeknownst to me, our cat, Nikki, decided to climb out onto the roof, but that’s another story. We found her on the roof the next day. I found that bat in the rafters and in my efforts to catch it for release outside, I ended up killing it – they are not only tiny, but also very fragile! I figured we were okay at that point. Later (I don’t recall if it was the same evening or not), Pennie was at her computer desk, which was in the room leading to the attic. I was downstairs in the kitchen. Another bat flew past her and downstairs. This time I didn’t end up catching or killing it, but we closed the attic door. The next day I picked up a screen door at Home Depot and installed it.

The bats managed to get in through the eaves. Where the rafters extend out over the edge of the floor is capped with fascia boards all around and beadboard on the underside, but there are gaps where you can see outside if you pull the crappy insulation aside. A project that I’ve been putting off for a really long time is to close up the ends of the rafters at the top of the wall and seal any cracks. All of the flimsy foil backed insulation that serves little to no purpose needs to be removed and some nice thick insulation needs to be installed throughout. That should stop the bats from getting inside, even if they still decide to take up residence in the eaves, which is where I expect the roost during the day.

I don’t mind bats and actually like that they fly around outside at night to catch bugs, but I draw the line with bats living inside our house! I guess its time to start thinking about sealing things up – to keep the bats out and to keep the heat inside. I’m sure that there’s a whole lot of heat escaping through the roof in the cold weather. So, even if I don’t build out the knee walls or actually finish the attic space, I need to get the first part of the project going soon!

I’m hanging out downstairs with the dogs, who are all sleeping on the couch and chair. Pennie is down south for the weekend to visit Amaya and will be returning home tomorrow. The dogs have behaved themselves very well since she left on Friday, although I didn’t get much bed space last night.

This past week was fairly uneventful, which I suppose is a good thing. It was fairly quiet at work and also at home. The week started on a sour note when I called my father and got into another junk mail argument, but I decided to not dwell on it. I call him each day and I do my best to keep the conversation pleasant, but he has a habit of bringing up his mail – mentioning either the volume of mail or that he did some correspondence, or something else that gets me started. Unfortunately, his junk mail is the primary focus of his life after Mom. I was successful in keeping the calls light the rest of the week and also Wednesday’s visit.

Yesterday morning I took him shopping, as usual, and also avoided discussing mail. I simply tossed everything he had not yet dealt with and intercepted Saturday’s mail delivery.  

It was Halloween yesterday and we had very few trick or treaters stop by. I answered the door a few times around 3 PM, but then got the idea to set a bowl outside with the bags of pretzels that I had purchased to hand out. I put a sign in the bowl wishing them a Happy Halloween and suggesting that they not be greedy. I didn’t have to answer the door at all for the rest of the day and I still have tons of pretzels left. The lack of little goblins was likely due to the weather most of all. It rained on and off all day and in the evening it rained quite hard. It was pretty warm, though, so when there wasn’t a shower, the kids were able to go around in costumes without jackets. One tradition that I kept up was to place my noisy door mat out. The speaker box was hidden behind a broom leaning in the door frame and when the kids step on it, it screams, scaring the smallest kids and making everyone else chuckle. I took a few photos of the setup on the front porch.

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Because of the rain, I didn’t get a chance to address leaves today, but I managed to get many cleared up on Friday evening before it got dark. The front yard is mostly clear, but the big maple next to the house and the others in back are still dropping leaves like crazy. One clear day isn’t enough to dry the big leaves out to let me use the Snapperizer to crunch and bag them. I did, however, dust the basement thoroughly today, including the baseboard molding. The dogs were quite interested in what I was up to.

And then, of course, was the time change. I hate Daylight Savings Time and find it to be a pointless exercise to have to adjust all the clocks twice a year. I didn’t bother setting the clocks until I got up this morning – early since the dogs have no clue about changing clocks.

I was out the door at 8:30 this morning for my drive to Hoboken and then the short PATH train ride over to the Christopher Street station and a walk down Hudson Street for the Windows 7 Launch Event in NYC with Steve Ballmer giving the keynote. The first thing that surprised me on entering the hall was that it was such a small space. I immediately recognized some fellow MVPs and enthusiasts in the small crowd and managed to catch up with most of them during the event. The keynote began as scheduled at about 11 am. Introducing Steve Ballmer was Kylie, famous for her “I’m a PC and I’m 4-1/2” commercial. Steve presented her with a pink notebook PC before giving the first part of the keynote. After a demonstration of some of the Windows and Windows Live capabilities by Brad Brooks, Steve moved to the back of the room to an area that had been concealed by a curtain. The area was set up with lots of hardware to display Windows 7 and show of some of the PCs and devices that work with Windows 7. After the keynote, it was basically mingle time. I headed home at about 2 PM with my swag, which included a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, a T-Shirt and some of the same items that were sent to those hosting a Launch Party. It was an interesting day and I am grateful to have been on of the fairly small group in attendance today.

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I’m on vacation this week.

I was originally planning to take off next week, but switched it first to straddle this coming weekend and then to be this week instead. I made the latter switch because Pennie and I were going to be out late on Sunday. That didn’t happen because the flu nailed her on Saturday, unfortunately. She’s doing much better now, 5 days later, but she had a rough weekend.

The change to straddle the weekend was because I’m going to NYC tomorrow for the Windows 7 launch festivities. I have no idea what to expect, but figure that it will be crowded. I’ll be leaving home about 8:30 or so and heading to Hoboken, where I’ll take the PATH train to Christopher street and then walk about 8 blocks or so south on Hudson street for the big event. Doors open at 10, so I think I’ll be showing up around the time that the doors are opening or shortly thereafter. It should be fun!

It was still hard to get up this morning, but much better than Tuesday. Tomorrow morning I get to sleep in a little longer since I have a doctor’s appointment at 7:45 and I need to fast as they will be drawing blood. So, that means getting up at about 5:45 to have black coffee and get the morning reports done remotely for work before a shower and the appointment.

Waiting for me when I got home yesterday was my 2nd 2009 MVP Award gift. Microsoft changed the beginning of the award cycles year this year. I was awarded last October for the first cycle of 2009. All awardees in October 2009 are once again 2009 MVPs. The January awardees will be the first group of 2010 MVPs in the first cycle of the new award year. The gift is quite nice. It isn’t much different than the one from last year, but I actually like it better. The only problem I have is that I don’t have a good place for the award. Both last year’s and this year’s awards are on my desk, but they are behind the 23 inch monitor, so you can only see them from an angle. With two laptops and the big monitor on the desk, it is already a tad crowded. I’ll figure something out eventually.

This evening Pennie is heading to the movies for a girls’ night out. I’ll be bringing the house plants in from the screen porch and the orchids will move to their winter home in the basement. Frost and freezing temperatures are predicted for tonight in advance of a very rainy and windy couple of days. Fall is most certainly here!

I went to bed a little before 10 last night, as usual, and slept decently, but when that alarm clock went off at 3:45 I was absolutely not ready to get up and moving. I managed to drag myself downstairs for my first coffee of the day and did well right through the drive to work. However, about a half hour after I got to work I was ready to go back to sleep. Fortunately, another cup of coffee at 7:30 was all that I needed to get over that hump and it has been quite a decent day since.

Pennie and I took a road trip yesterday to Sugarloaf for a crafts festival/street fair that was taking place. Sugarloaf is just past Warwick, NY and it was a lovely day for a drive. We took the back way over local roads and timed our arrival quite well, since traffic was just building up in the area. When we left a few hours later, parking was much worse than it was when we arrived. We had a great time, walking along the road stopping in the shops and browsing the vendor tables. Pennie got a really funky hat for herself and we picked up a lovely sweater/jacket for Amaya. On the way back we stopped at a hopping coffee shop in Warwick and picked up something to drink. On a whim, I stopped at a garden center in West Milford to buy some mums for the front steps and a pumpkin. Pennie picked out a neat one that has little “warts” all over it. All in all, it was a very enjoyable Sunday afternoon.

The evening was another story, though. At around 5 PM I thought that our neighbors were blasting music outside my office window. Actually, it was from the parish hall on the other side of the house, up the hill, and several hundred feet away. There was another one of the monthly dances/parties attended by the local Mexican population. The church really needs to get a handle on the groups that use the hall. The volume of the PA system was incredibly loud. When I went to bed at about 9:30, the volume was lower, but I could still hear it through my earplugs because the bass was thumping through the ground and resonating through every fiber of the house. Add to this that the loud family, who live between us and the church, were outside in the evening and the kids were wilder than usual, running around the house and screaming continually for an hour or more. Retirement to a farm in VA or anywhere were the neighbors are very far apart sounds really good about now.

Since last Wednesday I’ve been having issues with the AT&T connection for the laptop. I have a USB device called the Quicksilver that plugs into the laptop and lets me connect to the Internet pretty much anywhere that there’s a cellular connection. At work there is now a decent 3G signal, so it is worthwhile using the AT&T connection for daily use. The connection started having big problems at around 9 in the morning on Wednesday. I was planning on joining a Live Meeting at 11, so I poked at it a bit, until I decided that it wasn’t going to work and figured that it must be a network problem. What happened was that I’d have a connection and usually was able to browse and check email for a minute or so, but then all network activity would stop, despite having a strong signal showing. I used my office LAN to attend the Live Meeting and then called AT&T support after the meeting. The tech had me reinstall the client software, reinstall the drivers and even use the connection manager provided by the device manufacturer, but nothing worked. He decided that it was a hardware problem and a new device was shipped out. I stopped at my parents’ house, as usual, on the way home Wednesday. My sister had provided a link to some photos of her family at Disney World, so I figured I’d try to connect from my parents’ house to show them to my father, since I actually believed that the problem was not hardware, but a network issue. Sure enough, the connection was perfect.

On Thursday I had no issues at all. The replacement device arrived at home, but I figured that I’d be sending it back unused. Fast forward to Friday morning. I was unable to get a connection, it threw a generic error 635 that I had not seen before. I called AT&T again. I worked with a tech for another hour and after some further troubleshooting steps, we were able to get it working again. Unfortunately, what we did was switch devices. I was now using the replacement unit, but we had done a number of other things, too. That was, however, short lived. At about lunchtime, the connection failed again. This time the signal strength dropped to 0 bars first and when I disconnected and tried to reconnect, I was greeted with the 635 error repeatedly. I tried the other laptop and it also threw the same 635 error. Another call to tech support and more troubleshooting. Finally, the tech was able to open a network ticket because we could make a 2G connection, but never a 3G connection with the Quicksilver. I was able to make a 3G connection on my PDA phone, though. When I got home on Friday, I tried connecting and got the same error. I tried again on Saturday and Sunday, with the same results.

So, this morning I’m fully expecting to be tethering to my phone or puttering along at 2G speeds until they fix the network problem. I tried connecting anyway and was met with the 635 error on the first attempt. I switched the card to 2G only and connected. I then disconnected and switched to 3G only and it connected. It dropped a little while later, but I was able to get reconnected immediately. We’ll see how this goes or I’ll be calling AT&T again to check on the status of the network ticket. Isn’t technology fun?

Last week, while we were down South celebrating Amaya’s 1st birthday, my cell phone rang. It was the Saturday caregiver from my parents’ house. I had offered to go grocery shopping for my father Thursday evening before we left or Monday evening when I returned, but my father insisted on going himself on Saturday. Unfortunately, while backing out of the driveway, she sideswiped the parked car belonging to the caregiver. My father had already told her that he’d pay for the damage and she told me that she wouldn’t bother going through insurance for it. I saw the damage on my father’s car on Wednesday. The passenger side was scratched and creased from the back corner to the mirror and the mirror was cracked. The mirror itself was still firmly attached, at least. Well, on Saturday I got to see the other car. As soon as I looked at it, I estimated close to $2,000 in damage. Her SUV had a light crease in the rear door on the driver’s side and a large crease and some scrapes on the rear quarter panel. The bumper and tail light were intact, at least. Sure enough, she had gotten two estimates. The first was for over $2,000 and the second was for slightly less. That was an expensive shopping trip for my father. On Wednesday I asked him if he was going to admit that he was no longer fit to drive or was I going to have to fight him over this, too? Of course, he responded that he was fit to drive and that he would relinquish the keys when he decided he was unfit. I’m not ready to fight that battle with him.

I’m still having trouble with his junk mail obsession. The pile of mail that I have to go through each time I’m there is incredible. The only positive thing is that he doesn’t send as much money as he did. There is the occasional check going out, but a week can often go by with none being sent. I’m hoping that the warning about his Visa and Discover cards has sunk in. If he used them for responding to any of the junk mail in the past month I will be contacting Visa and Discover to cancel both cards. And that’s not something that I look forward to dealing with as I’m sure that it will mean sending a copy of my POA and filling out forms and such. Plus, he’ll be very upset about it, of course.

Mom’s condition hasn’t changed much in recent months. She’s pretty quiet most of the time and is generally healthy besides the Alzheimer’s reverting her to the mental state of an infant. I wish that my father would accept the fact that he needs more help than he is currently getting, but that’s a battle that I’ve been losing for a very long time now. At this point, getting more help would be to help him, not her. I don’t like that he’s alone with her for 20 out of 24 hours each day and 24 hours on Sunday. Until such time that he’s completely incapacitated, though, I will not change his mind.

On Thursday I received word that I’ve been re-awarded as an MVP for Windows Live for the 6th year in a row by Microsoft. It is a nice recognition for the time I spend helping people and Microsoft in the forums and newsgroups. With the release of the final version of Microsoft Security Essentials on Tuesday, the traffic in those forums has been quite high. Fortunately, my fellow moderators do a great job of helping out, too.

It’s Fall now and the leaves are beginning to drop. I mowed the yard at our house today and will probably need to attach the leaf mulcher to the mower next weekend to do our yard and my parents’ yard.  I normally love this time of year, but…. Let’s just say that life could be a bit better all around.

I feel rather helpless and that’s depressing. My lovely wife has been battling depression for some time now. When she’s in that bad place, there’s nothing that I can do to help.

The long weekend in Virginia was quite nice overall, despite the fact that it rained all day on Saturday for Amaya’s 1st birthday party. The day was still a whole lot of fun. Sleeping was not the best until Sunday evening, though. I had one of the two bedrooms in the house and had Ruby and Lily in with me. Finnegan stayed with Pennie who had the couch in the living room. Since Ruby is a bit of a nervous dog, she couldn’t get comfortable overnight and spent a great deal of time pacing on the wood floor. Sunday night was much better since she was getting more used to the arrangements and there were far fewer people in the house. Lily, on the other hand, was quite comfortable snuggling under the covers with me all three nights.

We left for home at about 11 on Monday morning. The drive wasn’t bad, though we ran into rain for a good portion of the trip. The dogs were incredibly well behaved in the car for the trip down and the trip back. It was quite funny how they seemed to know that we were getting close to home as they all started moving about in the back of the car when we got within a few miles of home. They happily ran into the yard when we opened the back of the Vue and all was well with the world for them. Pennie and I unpacked the car and settled in, while the dogs settled into their routine almost immediately. As I sat down with a cup of coffee to start synchronizing files from the laptop to the desktop and servers, the power blipped off for a moment. The UPS upstairs that provides power to the network switches up there didn’t fare too well with the interruption. The lights on the unit were flickering and no power was being provided to anything attached to it. I swapped it out with a new unit from downstairs. I need to swap out two more units in my office soon, as both aren’t supplying more than a minute or two of power, though a blip is still okay for them.

Since we were away on Saturday when I usually do the grocery shopping with my father, I needed to run out and get a few things to tide us over for the rest of this week. None of it was critical, but it was going to annoy me as I ran out of bananas, yoghurt, and apples within a day or two. Yes, I’m a bit crazy, I suppose. I also filled the car up with gas and stopped in at my parents’ house for about 5 minutes to say hello and make sure that all was well.

This morning I was up at my usual 3:45 to start the work week off. I discovered, much to my chagrin, that the cable was completely out when I sat down to check email and such while having my breakfast and coffee. It must have been down for maintenance, though, since it came back up at 4:30, just as I was about to call the cable company to check on the area status. TV and Internet were down, so it was a total disruption as opposed to a weak signal issue. Today looks like it will be one of those days as my AT&T data connection is acting flaky here at the office this morning, too. Oh, well.

We took a road trip yesterday, loading the mutleys into the Vue. We arrived in Virginia in late afternoon following a good, if not long, drive. The dogs were exceptionally well behaved for the entire 5-1/2 hour trip. Shortly after arriving, I set up a wireless network at my mother in law’s house so that we’d have Internet access for the laptops.

Today is Amaya’s 1st birthday, which is pretty amazing, actually. The house was full with people and dogs for the party.

I snapped a few photos in between being in charge of taking video during the unwrapping or presents and cake cutting. I uploaded a few of the pictures on one of the shorter clips. The cake was made by Pennie’s good friend, Lisa, and it not only looked great, but tasted fantastic!

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Pennie called me early on Monday to let me know that out sewer was backing up again. The symptom that we’ve come to recognize as a tree root clogged main to the street is water coming out from under the cabinets in the basement. Depending on when it is caught, it can be quite a mess. Fortunately, it was Pennie’s quick shower, so there was a bit of water, but not a huge puddle under the couch. When it happens to me with my long morning shower, it is a much bigger puddle. She was going to be away all morning and then had an afternoon appointment at the doctor, so the problem would need to wait until evening to be resolved because I needed to remove the inside back wall of the cabinet after clearing it out. Since I was caught up at work, I figured I’d run home and give the sewer guys a call. I was home by 9 and the guy showed up at about 10:30. I hadn’t met this guy before, but he’s the one that Pennie had dealt with back in February. I would describe him as brusque – just short of being offensive. He complained about the fact that he couldn’t use the large cutter on his snake. He started to work and I headed upstairs. When I heard water running I went back down, figuring it was clear and he was verifying that. Well, it was clear, but there was water running out from under the cabinets. It wasn’t coming from the cleanout, though, which is where it would be coming from if the line wasn’t clear. We got the garden hose and shoved it into the line and confirmed that the line was indeed clear.

The problem was clearly that there was a hole in the pipe.

He packed up his snake and I paid him the $155 charge – the 3rd time within a year. He suggested that I rent a jackhammer and replace the pipe section myself. That wasn’t about to happen, though it would have been the less expensive solution. My fear, besides the fact that I wouldn’t be able to fix it, was that I would then be facing a bigger problem with no plumber available. So, after he left, I set to work trying to confirm where the leak was. I set up a bunch of old towels and ran the water, climbed into the cabinet and peered around with a light. I spotted running water near the joint of the pipe heading out through the wall. I put on a latex glove and poked around, but could not feel a hole. It sure looked and felt like the breach was in a 2 foot section of pipe between the cleanout and that first joint. This made sense, too, since the old cast iron pipe was being beaten by the huge sewer clearing snake and cutter as it made the bed from the cleanout and headed down the line.

I called a plumber that I knew would be able to come some time the same day, albeit at a premium. Little did I know how much that premium would be!

I hadn’t expected to be away from the office more than a few hours, so I had to go back and get the laptop and take care of anything that had come up in my absence. I told the plumbing company that I’d be home after 2 PM. The plumbers showed up at around 4 PM and assessed the situation. They were going to remove the section of cast iron pipe, cut the house vent above the trap, and cut the main line past the trap, replacing the cast with PVC pipe and two Tees, eliminating the trap which is no longer needed with traps at each fixture in this century. About two hours later, they were done. As an added bonus, the cleanout is now much more accessible for the next time. However, now I’m afraid that repeated snaking will compromise pipe further up the line. I’m very pleased with the results of the work.

Here is a photo of the old piping. It looks pretty gross following the sewer cleaning, but I assure you that I washed the whole business with disinfectant before the plumbers came to take the old piping out!

And the next photo shows the pipe heading out through the foundation and the section of pipe in the foreground that was apparently compromised and leaking.

Here we are almost $1400 later - $155 for the sewer snaking and $1139 for the repairs.

I had to remove the studs from behind the cabinet to give them better access. I spliced them back in last evening, but need to rework the area in the near future. There’s a removable back in the cabinet. What I want to do is frame the opening so that there are no studs in the space and add a large hinged access door so that the cleanout can be accesses without removing the entire back panel.

I love our old house, but unexpected maintenance is a killer!

It has actually been a long while since I last posted. And the last post was a whole bunch of pictures of our grandbaby, Amaya.

Amaya was with us for an entire week, heading home with her mom last Thursday. Amaya was a joy to have around. Pennie was funny on Sunday when she commented that she doesn’t know how she did it with her own daughter and that she didn’t know how Melissa did it day in and day out. My role was the doting Opa, playing with Amaya, but I didn’t have the other responsibilities of getting her fed, changed, or ready for bed. Assuming that all goes well, we will be heading down to visit for her birthday at the end of the month. We’ll be taking the dogs along for the visit and will drive down on Friday and back home on Monday.

So far, and my fingers remain crossed, I have not had to go to Newark for Jury Duty. I checked in on the Friday before I was scheduled to start, as instructed, and the message stated that I needed to check back on Wednesday evening. On Wednesday, my instructions were to check back on Friday. Last Friday’s message was that I needed to check back again today, Tuesday, after 5 PM. I’m hopeful that today’s message tells me that I’m free and clear for the rest of the week. It would suck to have to report and then get picked for a trial that begins at the end of the 2 week standby term. So, my fingers are crossed.

There’s nothing new with my father or mother. I’m still having issues with my father and his junk mail obsession, but it is mostly under control. He still answers too much of it and he still sneaks out a payment now and again for both donations and scammers. Mom spends most of the day and night sleeping. My father is less and less capable of taking care of her and even himself, but I know that I won’t be able to change his mind. I continue to go over twice a week and do what I can. Last weekend I mowed the lawn and pruned back more of the bushes and plants. I’ve got a few saplings to take down in the back yard and much more to prune back all around. I’ll be attacking it a bit more as the Fall settles in with cooler weather.

I enjoyed the 3 day weekend that we just had. On Saturday evening we went to dinner with a couple that we met through a friend of mine a number of years ago. We had a great time chatting on our porch well into the night, too. Sunday was a lazy day for the most part. Monday started out kind of lazy, but then I attacked our yard, weeding all of the flower beds and pruning the shrubs out front. It felt good to get that chore completed!

Somehow I’ve managed to continue to do my workout routine throughout the summer. I generally skip Wednesdays and either Friday or Saturday most weeks, but I have been religiously heading up to the attic the rest of the week to ride the exercise bike and to use the SoloFlex on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. I must admit that it is much nicer to workout when the weather is cooler. Although the attic fan does a good job of keeping the attic at a reasonable temperature, when it is over 80 degrees, the bike ride is tough!

Pennie has been doing very well with transitioning off the medications she had been taking for depression. She’s been in a program for over a month that includes individual counseling and monitoring, plus group therapy sessions. The medication that she was prescribed a few years back wasn’t doing the job for her, but they were also addictive and difficult to stop using. She’s been cutting back the dosage weekly and dealing with the symptoms of withdrawal for a day or two at the start of each week. I’m really proud of her for taking the steps to do this. This week began her first without that medication. I expect that a new prescription will be given that won’t be addictive and she’ll be monitored closely to make sure that the dosage is correct for her. I’m very happy that she enrolled in the program and that she’s well on the road to recovery and a happier day to day life.

We had a lovely weekend babysitting our granddaughter this past weekend while her mom visited with a friend. I took many photographs!

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That’s our new neighbor above. The raccoon has apparently taken up residence in a squirrel nest in the tree right next to our screen porch. She/he showed up about a week or so back and startled me. I guess I startled back since I tried to take pictures a few times without success until last night. In the second photo, you can see that we have a corn feeder for squirrels there and the green box holds peanuts that the raccoon seems to adore. After I snapped the photo last night, the raccoon stuck around and continued reaching into the box to get another peanut. We were on the other side of the screen, just a few feet away. That was pretty cool. I imagine that our neighbor won’t stick around too much longer as they seem to move around a whole lot, making a new den every few weeks to months, taking over someone else’s abandoned home. Perhaps we’ll be neighbors for a while, though, as long as I keep the peanuts flowing!