The day to day aspects of life: what is happening around the house and in our family
It is Christmas day. We are still “snowed in” here, with another 20 – 30 cm since last night piling up. The snow is beginning to slow down, and may be turning to rain soon.
Irene got her main Christmas present a few weeks ago: Coco, who makes cat #7 in our house: you can click on Coco to see the rest of our Christmas pictures.
The deck construction is almost finished. Almost… a slippery word, that can often mean “never”. Since the last posting on this topic, here is what has been completed:
It looks pretty good, actually, and is “done enough” that the things remaining feel rather minor. The roof has turned out really nicely: Solariumsplus did the work, and I’m really pleased with what Pete, Curtis and Randy put together for us. Some pictures…
We just had another power outage exceeding an hour in duration here at our house. That makes about six this year here after perhaps one per year of that duration during the seven previous years. You could argue, I guess, that I live in a suburb, and so perhaps the occasional power outage is to be expected. However, at my workplace in the heart of the corporate district in Burnaby, with BCIT on one side of the road and Telus/IBM/etc on the other, there have been three multi-hour outages this year as well. I know it is an exaggeration bordering on the insensitive, but I’m beginning to feel like BC Hydro has degraded lower mainland British Columbia into a third world power district.
My elbow, or more accurately the area just on the forearm outward side of the elbow, has been sore lately. If I pick something up it twinges, or if I hold the arm straight and make a fist it hurts.
It has been painful, but not debilitating- like a lot of things that happen with my joints since I turned thirty, I more or less just have been living with it. After some poking around on the internet, I found some references to tennis elbow and concluded that this was the most likely culprit. I decided to give it a couple of weeks and, if treating it like tennis elbow with cold packs and compression improved it, to assume I was on the right track.
It took a bit longer than planned due to some delays with the arrival of the composite decking material, but now our deck surface is complete!
Here is what the framing looked like:
Our deck and spa replacement project has sort of been in “standby” mode since my initial post. Since then, the concrete spa pad and deck supports were added, but not much else could be done until the spa itself arrived. That day was today.
Irene and I spent the last five days over on Vancouver Island in Victoria for the Tall Ships Festival. I had a good time, and would particularly recommend seeing the Tall Ships to someone who has a moderate to strong interest in the age of sail. So what did we see? Well, a lot of ships, of course 😉
My vacation started on Friday. Well, technically, the days off work start on Monday, but on Friday I realized I’d already worked 50 hours for the week by about noon, and I was feeling beat… so I set up my out-of-office email auto-responder agent, changed my answering machine message, and shut down my work laptop at around 2:00 PM. I’ve had some stress at work the past couple of weeks, mostly good stress, but tiring nonetheless.
I turned in my beer bottles and decided to put the windfall towards a new deck. Step #1 is: destroy the old deck.
