skip to main |
skip to sidebar
7:58AM: Halloween is not starting out on a positive note. It is raining. It has been raining all night and continues into the morning. Even if it stops for the evening, it is going to be wet and sloppy out there.
The good news for me is that I may not even have to bother with the Flying Ghost. Wetness is the enemy of the Flying Ghost. We shall see how it goes.
11:37AM: Progress is progressing slowly in the yard. The rain stopped and it's not as wet out as I thought.
I have successfully achieved a working flying ghost, although it has been paired down to single flying ghost between two posts rather than three.
Susan had to run in to work for a couple hours this morning but she has returned and she and her cousin, Louise and prepping food. I'm getting out ladders and some of the decorations.
3:00PM: Everything is coming together.
We are operating smoothly and we will be ready for the throngs by 4:30.
10:07 PM: The evening is over and the total number of haunted visitors is somewhere between 17 and 18 hundred. The discrepancy comes from two houses that keep count with a clicker and the times they quit giving out candy. Let's just say we had a crap load of little ghouls relieve us of hundreds of pieces of candy
In the meantime, here are some pictures.
I'm going to bed!
One sure sign that Halloween is only days away is that inevitably, it will start to rain. The rain started yesterday and as of this morning, has not let up.
That means that tomorrow, I will be raking (not blowing) very wet leaves in preparation for Wednesday night.
We've gotten started on getting Halloween set up but still have a long way to go. This weekend will be busy and I'm taking Wednesday off in order to fine tune everything.
However, I have much to get caught up on prior to discussing Halloween.
The main thing is an update on our 2018 batch of Petite Verdot wine. Last Monday, I went to Jim's Home Brew to rent their fruit press.
For the past several years I have gone through the long and futile task and squeezing the juice out of my grape pulp by hand. When I realized that Jim's had the press available, I jumped on it. Best $25.00 rental I've spent.
So I set everything up in what appeared to be the most efficient way to move the pulp out of my primary fermenter and into the secondary.
I placed my mesh bag into the barrel of the press in order to make removing the pressed pulp that much easier.
I then began ladling the pulp into the barrel until I had it full. At that point, I began to turn the press and clamp down on the berries as the pressed juice flowed out.
I had an unfortunate accident as I got a little bit too carried away in my pulp transfer. When I was finally able to lift the primary and pour the pulp and remaining juice through the press, I forgot that the catch tray has a very low lip. That caused me a little extra clean up that I had not counted on.
All in all, it took about two hours from start to clean up and I had just over six gallons and pressed juice to ferment.
The must is currently bubbling away in the kitchen. I'll check the gravity tomorrow but I think it still has a way to go.
Fall has definitely hit the Inland Empire and it is a beautiful Autumn day out thar.
Susan is working Disney on Ice all weekend so she has a very limited window in which she can get stuff done.
And since I accomplished so little in the area of Halloween decorating last Monday, it is up to me to get stuff done.
I'm starting with the front porch with a small easy project, putting up the lights.
But first, we have to get stuff down from the Carriage House.
Okay, the stuff is down and Susan has left for work. In the time that has passed since the last paragraph, I have visited Jim's Home Brew and had our grape juice tested. It has too much acid in it and to solve that problem, I mixed 43 grams of Calcium Carbonate into a cup of luke warm water and added it to the must barrel.
With the wine squared away for the day, I'm going out to hang some lights.
4:41PM: Finally, I got the lights up and I am good for the day, Here are some pictures.
The Cougars of Washington State are playing the University of Oregon Ducks and they've just been intercepted and Oregon has the ball waaaaay down on the Cougs 5 yard line.
I'm going to go get a burger and watch the rest of the first half at the Hub.
8:45PM: The Cougars are victorious! They beat the Ducks 34-20. They held them to zero points in the first half. Oregon made it interesting in the third quarter but the Cougs managed to hold them off.
Me drink beer now!!
Last evening, we returned from our annual trip to the Yakima Valley Region in the great state of Warshington. We go down and buy grapes for our quasi-professional wine making hobby.
This year, we made it down for "The Crush" weekend, a yearly festival of wines and wine making and most importantly, wine drinking.
Both Susan and I made an extra special effort to not drink too much thereby causing one to return to the hotel room by 2PM and nap for the rest of the day. I did a lot of spitting.
I think we visited 7 or 8 wineries between 11:00 and 5:00 on Saturday. We spent the first part of the day roaming around the region known as Rattlesnake Hills. We went to many wineries that we had been to before and at least two that were new to us. We ended up in Prosser, which seemed to be the epicenter of all the Crush activity.
At the end of the day, we returned to our Bed and Breakfast town of Sunnyside and went to dinner at Snipes Mountain. This is another regular stop for us, as they have really good wood fired pizza.
We returned to the room and watched "The Road to Perdition". We had seen it before, although Susan swears she had not. For me, it was much more enjoyable the second time.
We always stay at the Sunnyside Inn, in part because they give us a great breakfast. That was the case again this year on both Saturday and Sunday.
We began our Sabbath wine tasting adventure at 14 Hands. Susan bought a bottle there to start us off for the day. Our next stop was one of our favorites, DavenLor. We always return with a resealable bottle which they switch out for a full bottle of Recovery Red.
By then, we were starting to get burned out on wine tasting but we still had some places to visit. We always go to Kestrell because we are in their wine club and always buy a case of "Lady in Red". It a good wine that ends up costing about eight bucks a bottle.
By then it was 1:00 and we decided it was time to go pick up our grapes.
I haven't mentioned that we were accompanied on this trip by Susan's friend Ellen. We got Ellen involved in wine making several years ago and this will be her first attempt at making wine from scratch. In other words, from grapes rather than a kit.
We are buying from a new source this year since our old source, Patricia O'Brien, retired and sold her farm.
We ended up buying from her nephew, Chad. We agreed to meet at 3:00 for the pickup. We were hoping we could arrive early. On the way, we decided to stop at one last winery, Barrel Springs, because this was another new one for us and it was on the way.
It was a very nice place and they paired up a bunch of cheeses with their wine. They also had a feature that caught my attention enough to take one of the few pictures I took this weekend.
They had a piano bar similar to mine and it was for sale for about $2,000.00. Theirs was different from mine in that they left the harp in the piano, which make it substantially heavier. It also cuts down on the room you have inside to store bottle.
But it also had a beautiful wine rack built into the bottom of the piano. It was very cool and the workmanship was excellent.
From Barrel Springs, we drove another four miles out into the plains of Prosser to the O'Brien Farms location where we were to pick up our grapes.
We got there about 1:30
We arrived to an empty farm. Nobody was there. We decided in the interest of time and in order to get Ellen back to town that we would load all our luggage into Ellens car in order to make room for all the ice chests we needed for the grapes.
Then we all drove to one last winery, Terra Blanca. This is a winery with ridiculously over priced bottles because they have to pay for the magnificent building they have erected.
We went in for a tasting because it was part of the passport we purchased and then we sent Ellen on her way back to Spokane.
Susan and I returned to O'Brien Farms only to find it still empty. We decided to wait for half an hour for Chad to show up. It only took five minutes.Chad arrived and I wrote him a check for $200.00. We transferred the grapes into the various ice chests and where on our way.
Then we drove to one last winery because Susan wanted to use the bathroom. This was another favorite of ours called Chandler Reach.
It's located right off the freeway and is really a nice place.
During our tasting, we discovered that they may be willing to sell small batches of grapes. I got the card of the General Manager and will contact her in the next couple of days.
We got in the car and began our two and a half hour return to Spokane. Ellen had stopped at the house and dropped off all our stuff. We had the grapes which we will be crushing on Wednesday.
It was a great weekend but boy was I beat! That's why we only do this once a year.
If you are playing the Boiler Game and you picked today as the day we would turn on the heat, you loose.
It might be the earliest end of the Boiler Game in the competition's 12 year history.
I filled the system on Saturday morning and almost immediately ran into a disaster. I closed the valve on the boiler and started filling the system. After 20 minutes, I realized the leak in the Dining Room had resumed. I charged upstairs and closed the valve on the radiator in the upstairs bedroom.
I could not believe my stupidity for allowing it to happen again but I was equally mystified at how quickly the system filled. Especially on a trickle.
I was pissed! Susan was really pissed!! Fortunately, the leak subsided and no damage was done.
The other concern was leaks in the TV Room where the pipes for the temporarily removed radiator have been capped. All was well in there as well.
So, with the system filled and free of leakage, I lit the pilot light on the boiler on Sunday evening. Only one person guessed September 30th.
Congratulations to Eldon Fanortner of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Mr. Fanortner will receive a package of cheese curds and a Gift Certificate for 15% off an oil change at any one of the 5 local locations of Spokane Lube and Oil.
We fired up the Grape Crusher again tonight.
I was put in contact with Nate by James at Jim's Home Brew. He was the first guy to contact me about renting the crusher.
Consequently, I quoted him a really low number for using the Crusher. $10.00 per 100 pounds.
I have since raised it to $10.00 per 50 pounds. I think we may also add a cleaner fee of $25.00.
Nate did a one day trip to Walla Walla, picked 300 pounds of grapes from two different vineyards and then drove back to Spokane, arriving at our house at 7:30 to crush.
We set up in the garage with a tarp on the floor. I think we did the whole 300 pounds in about an hour.
It's my Monday off and the plan was to finish the dry walling. Which we did. I started about 9:30 and Phil showed up about 10:30.
We finished up in an hour and a half. I spent some time after Phil left working on some electrical issues I had to deal with. With that accomplished, it was time to try and clean up the porch. I did okay but the porch really needs to be hosed down and thoroughly gone over.
I loaded up the left over dry wall and hauled it to Habitat for Humanity. The rest will go the dump next weekend.
So now it's about 2:30 and I have accomplished my major goals. I'm going to try and do a couple of other things but I also may not do those things.
I'll leave this post open and update you on my continuing accomplishments or lack thereof.
3:53PM: I actually did some good. I did a little bit of organizing in the garage. When I say "A little bit", I mean a very little bit. However, my "little bit " was enough to make room in the garage for the new grape crusher.
I have a guy coming by the house tomorrow at 7PM to crush 300 pounds of grapes. For that, we will be paid $30.00. I have since learned that that is not enough. I quoted him $10.00 per 100 pounds. It should be $10-$15.00 per 50 pounds plus a cleaning fee.
Oh well, I'm learning.
The tour of homes was today and four houses were open on Corbin Park. Susan and I set up a booth for our Home Owners Association. We were just making an appearance and handing out a little pamphlete that is a walking tour of the houses around the park.
Our neighbors, Ted and Rhonda took over for us at 2:00 and we toured the houses. Only one of the houses was one we had not been in before so it was worth it to get in and snoop.
It turned out to be a little bit of a chilly day but it's the end of September. What do you expect?!
It is 2:30 and I am beat. It's not that we did that much. I just have very low stamina.
Nonetheless, we got the Carriage House painted on the alley side of the building where we scraped and primed a couple of weekends ago. So that project is in the books.
Then we went to work on the front yard to clean out the flower beds and make the yard look half way presentable. We can only do so much with what we have.
Hence the beatness of me. It doesn't take much.
The Spokane Preservation Society, of which we are a part, is having it's annual tour of older homes tomorrow and it's all here around the park. There are only four homes on the tour whereas usually there are six to eight.
But we thought we should clean up as best we can to show a good face for the neighborhood.
Now I'm going to get cleaned up and prepare to go to an OctoberFest celebration somewhere in the Valley.
Mmmmmmmmm, Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer!
It is my Monday off and today we tackled the drywall. Phil got here about 10:00 and we went to work on completing this project.
There were a few little obstacles that kept our progress from going through fluidly. But we overcame the obstacles and got most of the drywall up.
The obstacles all dealt with electricity. I had to change out a fourplex box of outlets that will be used for the TV. There was another outlet that had to be disconnected and then reconnected once the drywall was in place.
We ended up running out of sheets. I purchased 12 sheets for a total of about $150.00. I'm not sure we used the sheets as efficiently as we could have. But it's hard to parcel out the sheets when every sheet we used had to be cut down in some fashion.
I think I'm going to try and use up the small pieces of drywall I have and then Phil and I can finish up on Saturday.
We have some painting to do. Pictured above is the alley side of the Carriage House. We had it painted about five years ago and it was already peeling badly.
So Susan and I got out there with the scrapers and peeled a crap load of weathered paint off the siding.
Then we broke out the primer paint and slapped it up there. There was also another portion of the house that needed a little touch up.
This is on the west side of the house. For some reason, the paint on this bit of trim just completely pulled away from the wood and was hanging by a thread. What you see in the picture is after I have scraped away the bad paint and put up some primer. I'll get to the painting portion tomorrow. I hope.
Because of my new work schedule where I am working 4-10's, I am into day two of a four day weekend. And so far, productive it has been.
We just put up the last repaired panel in the Dining Room. Our support bracket is in place and we will have it there until tomorrow. Susan will do a little touch up on the woodwork and then we will never have to deal with that issue again. Cuz it's never going to be leaked on because of a dumb ass mistake.
I have completed my fourth phase of projects in the TV Room. Phase four was to center the light fixture in the room. I had to use a ceiling fan bracket that I happened to have in my collection of electrical supplies. There was nothing else to attach the can to in the area of the center of the room.
The bracket worked fine and now if anyone ever wants to hang a fan in there, they have the support to do it.
My car is still in surgery and the price has jumped another thou. Had I known that, I would not have gone through with this repair.
The good news is that the whole top end of my engine will be rebuilt so I'm hoping that will get me a few more years of mileage.
In the meantime, I've been riding my bike a lot. I'm going to go to the General Store a bit later to get some stuff I need and I'll be on the bike for that trip.
In the meantime, it's noon. Time for a beer!
Later: The rest of the day has been lazy. We took a nice long nap and I fixed a couple of items with help from the General Store.
Now we are waiting for Mark so we can go downtown to Pigout in the Park.
Much Later: We made it down to Pigout and enjoyed food, drink music and friends. We stayed for the first part of "Too Slim and the Taildraggers", a local well known blues band.
About half way through the show, we headed for home where we lit a pit fire and toasted some S'mores while watching Raccoons try to eat up our grapes.
A lovely day!
I woke up this morning on my day off to wonderful rain. I guess about a quarter inch fell over the night and into the morning. It's the first rain we have had since July 27th and that was a minuscule .02 inches.
Whatever the amount of rain that fell was, it knocked the smoke we have been inundated with out of the sky. I could see Mt. Spokane this morning.
We made some progress in repairing the ceiling panels in the Dining Room. Susan did what she could do to the panels and now it was time to get them back up. We used a whole tube of liquid nails on Panel Number One and got it up on the ceiling. However, we had a major problem in that the panel was kind of bowed and it did not want to stick up.
So we improvised a support beam. I grabbed an extension pole we use for paint rollers and extended it as far as I could. We placed a short 2x4 up against the panel and them propped the pole up against it to keep it in place.
Susan them built up a base of 2x4s on the floor until it reached the pole. Then I fine tuned it with shims until the support held itself in place. That is one Mickey Mouse piece of engineering.
We are leaving it in place for 24 hours and we shall see how it holds.
Arnie and Rob are two of my oldest friends that I still have regular contact with. We've known each other since Kindergarten. Arnie lives in San Francisco with his wife, Haley. Robba lives here in town and recently retired...so we hate him.
A month ago, Arnie e-mailed to Rob and I and said that he and Haley are planning a trip to Spokane where we will all go out to Rob's lake place and enjoy a long weekend together.
So we planned and worked the numbers and set this past weekend for the festivities. We would all go up on Friday morning and stay until Sunday afternoon.
Rob has a great lake cabin at Coeur d'Alene lake that his Dad built in the 60's. It's very comfortable and sleeps about 90 people. It has all the comforts of home except TV and the Interwebs. TV is available if you have a DVD.
So the stage is set for our wonderful weekend.
Arnie and Haley flew in to town about 7PM on Wednesday. I picked them up and brought them back to the house where Susan was preparing a lovely dinner.
We sat around and ate and drank and chatted but we were all in bed by ten.
I had to work on Thursday and so did Susan. So I left my car behind for Arnie and Haley to go out and adventure around the area.
Thursday night was a trip to Spokane Indians Baseball. They won!
Friday morning we had a leisurely breakfast and finally got around to heading for the lake around noon...with a stop at the Hub.
We arrived at the lake about 1:00. We got ourselves unloaded and into our rooms and then set out for the dock. Many beers were consumed while we sat on the dock and occasionally jumped in the water.
At 5:00, we went up for cocktail hour. Rob made margaritas and we prepped a fabulous dinner. The drinking continued into the evening as the sun set and darkness enveloped the deck.
Our wives all went off to bed about 10:00 and that left the boys and a bottle of whiskey all to ourselves.
At some point, I believe Rob said, "Let's go skinny dipping." Without a thought, we threw off our clothes and dashed down to the dock and jumped in. It was fabulous!
To get back to the cabin, one must climb a long flight of stairs.
It begins here.
As we stumbled back up to the cabin, I climbed up on hands and feet to just short of that bench. Then I lost my balance and rolled to the right. That vegetation at the top of the wall is a thorny bush. I rolled my naked body right through that bush and six feet down to the beach...landing on my ass.
Here is the scene of that bench the next morning. I sat there for quite a while. I finally hiked up to the cabin, leaving a small trail of blood all the up.
I have a series of many scratches from just under my left armpit, wrapping around to my butt and on down my legs.
It was a wonderful weekend.
I have done a horrible job of updating our progress on the TV Room. Nor have I waxed on about life in general here in the Summer of '18.
We are in the middle of a hot streak as far as the weather is concerned. The official high temperature yesterday was 102 but I saw as high as 104 on a couple of signs.
I have noted before that we have the best neighbors. Neighbors with cars, trucks, tools and pools. We have made great use of our neighbors pool this summer and especially during this stretch of heat.
Along with the heat, we are experiencing hazy skies due to forest fires from around the region. I don't think there is anything raging in our immediate region but we sure are smokey.
Tasks for today are many and varied. Susan wants to start cleaning the house a bit for friends who are visiting later next week. But first she is trying to repair the dining room ceiling panels I so effectively destroyed several weeks ago.
For my part, I'm trying to run a new phone line and re-run the cable line to a different wall in the TV Room.
Last week, I was able to add two new outlets to the room. I'll update this later.
4:15PM: Both Susan and I have done well today. Susan seems to be somewhat satisfied with her work fixing the ceiling panels. I think they look pretty good.
The panels are drying for a while. We are in no hurry to put them back up until they are ready.
I was most successful in moving the cable line, which I have proved that it is in working condition. I also was successful moving the phone, but it has not yet been tested.
To do the work, I had to climb into the hole shown above and crawl back to the space under the TV Room.
It is a dark, foreboding space with only enough headroom to crawl, kneel or sit. It wasn't terribly difficult to deal with the cable but the phone line offered a number of challenges. I had to fish a lot of wire through the width of the house. I left a string behind in case I ever need to fish something across the span again.
I should finish up and check that the phone line works but I'm fairly confident it will and the pool is calling. It's time to get a couple of beers and head for the pool.
I finally found a new mirror to replace our decimated one at Fred Meyer. It was listed at $99.00 but I got a discount and paid about $85.00. I presented it to Susan last Thursday (her birthday) and we hung it today.
I am very confident that this one will hold for a long time.
We added an update to the history of the mirror on the wall where it hangs.
Pictured above is the one wall remaining to be stripped of lath. We are going to tackle it today.
Please make a note of the wall pictured above. Before we installed the door shown on the right, we suspected that there had been a door into this room on that wall. This would have been a sitting room. We were surprised to find no door framed in when we removed the plaster and lath.
But you will notice that that appears to be a door framed in just to the left of the door. The only thing is, that door would have been right smack dab at the bottom of the stairs. It is a mystery that we will never know, I guess.
Once we complete that final bit of lath removal, I am ready to do my rewiring. I'm not doing much. I'm adding one outlet and moving the TV cable to an inside wall. I'm also going to run a new phone line, updated and modern like, to accept the electronic doodads of the Interweb.
7:58PM: We worked until about 3:30 and we can now say we have successfully completed Phase One of the remodel.
After the work was done, it was off to our Neighborhood Country Club across the street for a nice cooling swim.
I made use of my lazy Saturday to return to the TV room and resume work on the remodel. We only had a small amount of plaster to remove and I was determined to complete the job. I ended up filling five garbage bags of plaster. However, I learned my lesson from the last go round.
These were not full bags. I learned that by filling them about one third full, they were much more manageable to load in the car. Consequently, they will be much more manageable to unload.
Today, we took on the lath. We decided we will take on one wall a night and get the damn thing done. Lath removal was much easier than plaster removal and much cleaner. However, we still ended up with a great deal of plaster mess and dust. Little chunks remain behind in the lath and lots of plaster falls into the wall and down to the bottom of each cell between the studs.
I don't know how much we will accomplish in the coming week as each evening has some activity going on for one of us.
As for now, it is a hot summer day and it is time to take advantage of our neighbors with the pool.
We have made great progress over the week and as of Saturday, we are nearly finished removing the plaster. Just a couple more hours and the plaster will be gone. I made a couple of dump runs on Saturday to get rid of the plaster. That cost about 45 bucks.
The next step will be removing all the lath and neatly stowing it away. Lath makes great kindling.
We got everything cleaned up and we are done for the next week.
We are hosting a dinner for my Mom's birthday next Saturday with a gaggle of her friends and Susan wants to spend the week getting the house cleaned up. Plus, in the middle of all that, we have the Fourth of July, which apparently has something to do with celebrating the birth of our country by blowing a lot of it up.
So further destruction on the TV Room is on hold for this week.
We put in some more time in the TV Room. We are making progress but we are still a long way out.
Part of the problem is dealing with all the plaster. We've filled four 30 gallon garbage bags and haven't even completed tearing down one wall.
We are taking the bags of plaster and loading them in my car. I'm going to take them to the dump on Thursday. But five bags is going to be the limit I can haul at one time in my SUV.
But, we are progressing.
It's opening night of the remodel and we are officially underway. We are doing what we do best...destruction!
We got a good start on two different walls. We also got the radiator out of the room and in the course of doing that, we did some pretty good destruction of our nice wood floors.
I hope we don't have more mistakes like that.
