I know it’s been too long since I posted here, but there are several reasons for that lack of publishing. Most importantly, I’m getting older, and it suddenly seems much harder to get things done.
It doesn’t help that our house is apparently aging as well, resulting in me having to spend an unusual amount of time working on home projects. First, our relatively new Kohler shower started dripping steadily and needed to be fixed. I really like the faucet setup, but it’s new enough that I had no idea how to repair it and ended up spending time on YouTube figuring out what parts to order for my model. It turned out to be relatively simple, much easier than I had anticipated.
That problem was barely solved when our Craftsman garage door opener decided it had had enough. I wasn’t about to tackle that on my own, so Leslie talked to someone who had worked around the house before. He said he had installed four of his own, and said he worked on it if I would help him since it was a two-man project. We worked on it most of the day, and still didn’t finish it, but it works well enough we can charge our electric vehicle.
Once I’d finished those jobs, I set out to ensure that our drip-irrigation system had survived the winter. It had, but as usual, parts of the system had to be repaired. What was unusual was that the part of the system that runs under the patio wasn’t working, and that was a bitch to fix, mainly because the screws that hold the deck down would come loose. Several were stripped, and others just plain wouldn’t move. Eventually, I discovered that the mice had chewed holes in the lines, and I replaced one of the lines. I never could find the other line and finally had to route it over the top of the deck.
The hardest job, though, was digging out a flower bed in the front yard and replacing the soil with sand and rocks, really heavy rocks, too heavy for an 84-year-old who is still recovering from Rheumatoid Arthritis.
The actual time spent on these projects wouldn’t have kept me from posting more often than I usually do, but by the time I had finished them I wasn’t up to spending hours at the computer working on polishing photos and trying to write something that made sense of them.
Luckily, part of the problem is that I think I got the best shots of American Avocets that I have ever gotten before. After hours of editing, eliminating the obvious, and not-so-obvious mechanical errors, I still have 38 shots that I need to narrow down to 12 or so pictures. They’re good enough that I didn’t want to just paste them randomly on my blog.
