Low-angle sunlight on reddish stucco wall

The one redeeming view we get from our bougie upscale suburban monotonous landscape is when the setting sun illuminates the trees in the preserve behind the house. It's arresting, but it seldom makes for a good photo. After trying anyway, I stuck my head out the front door to see if there were any clouds that might be interesting. No. But the light on the wall got my attention.

Cropped from 4:3 to 3:2, otherwise SOOC from the little Pentax MX1 (to be confused with the M1X).

It's a bit weird, we've been kind of struggling a bit to find a comfortable interior temperature. I usually find 77°F the sweet spot for me, but Mitzi finds it too warm. Since we've been back from New York, there have been times when it's too warm for me, too. So we've been kind of hovering around 75°-76°, which was just about at the dew point yesterday. Got some slight fogging on the lens when I went out back, cleared by the time I got around front. Seldom, almost never a problem when the house is at 77°.

When I came in from getting the mail yesterday, the house felt absolutely frigid at 76°. Go figure.

The pod idea for moving stuff to the other house, which we haven't figured out what, exactly, to call yet, is making even more sense. We have two folding extension ladders from combining two households. Seldom use even one, so we'll pack one of them up to go north.

There's going to be a lot of additional expense in getting the place set up for (occasional) occupancy, but it will get some of the extraneous stuff that we otherwise can't bring ourselves to part with out of the house. I find myself eating off of new flatware because our old flatware has been packaged up to go north and Mitzi's using a used bargain set she got off some online marketplace.

The inflatable kayak did arrive on Friday. I set it up in the garage Friday evening. The only negative experience was placing the little keepers over each of the valve connections. They recommend you warm them up with a hair dryer or soak them in hot water for 15 seconds to make them more elastic. I didn't have a hair dryer or a bowl of warm water in the garage, so I pressed on without doing so. My thumbs ached so much Friday night, I ended up taking some Tylenol in the middle of the night. Still sore this morning.

But, I inflated the thing and let it sit overnight and it seemed to hold air just fine. Tropical storm, likely to become hurricane, Debby is going to make the weather crap for the next few days, so a "maiden voyage," isn't on the immediate horizon.

We also put together the cabinet I mentioned last Friday. Went pretty smoothly with one exception, as seems almost inevitable with these sorts of endeavors. The bottom panel had two pre-drilled holes that either went at the front of the cabinet, or at the back. Fifty-fifty chance of getting that right, eh?

One hundred per cent chance if I'd read ahead in the assembly instructions! But no, I was in a hurry, so I got to take the thing apart again to turn it around. "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."

That's going in the laundry room on Monday as a laundry sink. I hope these guys know what they're doing, because it looks a bit awkward in there. The drain hose from the new washer just barely reaches the drain pipe, so it would seem to make more sense to put the sink on the side without the water fittings, but there's a dryer vent that may preclude that.

As it stands now, if the sink goes where originally planned, we're going to be looking at some sloppy hoses, which I guess we should have foreseen anyway. We'll see how it goes. Mitzi is excited about having a sink, so maybe it doesn't matter how it looks, even though she ended up going with the more expensive cabinet and sink.

The problems of the privileged.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:24 Sunday, 4 August 2024