The year began with a trip to Palm Springs where we stayed in La Quinta for the Palm Springs Dog show. The desert is great in January and I got some nice bike rides in and around the region.
We came home to an atmospheric river event that showed us where some new engineering would be needed for our grave paths. The storms also dropped a huge douglas fir onto other trees blocking our route, power and internet for about a week.
When the weather is reasonable, I try to get 2-3 20 mile rides per week with about 1800’ of elevation. Mostly my route is from Felton to Santa Cruz to check in on Mom. That route allows me to ride down Highway 9 and come back over the campus. I’m riding a Gazelle Medeo T10 outfitted with panniers, so I’ve got assistance making that climb up to the house.
If I’m headed to the Eastside, I’ll ride over to Scotts Valley and drop down Glen Canyon or El Rancho Dr and loop out to do a surf check at Capitola.
It’s kinda like when I was in high school and playing water polo. You’d be looking over at the football players sweating away and wonder, why?
When I see the golfers in this shot, I wonder if they’d like to come for a ride. For me, it’s just more fun.
It almost felt like spring. We had some 80 degree days and we’re back to rain and high 40’s this afternoon.
I'm prepping the greenhouse for the season. We did well with overwintering a few hot peppers. Green onions and leeks are being harvested; tarragon, oregano, thyme are all putting out new growth. Fall saffron is dormant. Potatoes have just broken the ground.
We finally replaced the water pump 3/27/24. We bought a 1 hp pump from Harbor Freight for $209 and another $30 in parts.
I got into home automation with an environment known as SmartThings when I read about them on Kickstarter back in 2013. As you can read here, over the years we went from just SmartThings with its proprietary UI and migrated towards Apple Homekit in our ever expanding home Applesphere.
We've finally abandoned SmartThings in favour of Hubitat Elevation. My objective was to get better and more consistent behaviour from our Zwave devices using Apple Siri voice commands.
On my 2013 911.1, I have had a couple of opportunities to wonder why the HVAC wasn't blowing any air. After reading this thread on Rennlist, I found an answer.
Both times this happened, the car had sat for a week or more. It turns out the fan can stick. An easy fix is to open the frunk, and remove the air filter box. When the box is open, you can see the fan. Give it a turn, put things back and start up the car. Should be working.
I’ve already written some about 2020. So, I’ll link them all together here.
We started the year off going to our first NFL football game.
We took a short vacation to Santa Barbara.
The world locked down. Homeschooling began.
We adapted, summer vacation.
In April 2022 we started to sense the septic system wasn’t working quite right. We had pooling water in the leach field and the accompanying smell.
Since it had only been 10 years since we had faced this situation we thought, it can’t be. Yeah, well, it was. In the picture below you can see a whole drilled into the line that has roots that have filled the line.
2021 began with a trip to Palm Springs for our first dog show. Lynda and Leo were competing in confirmation, rally and obedience. The trip was successful and we all learned a lot about the difference between the movie and an event.
Due to the pandemic and home schooling and TKD via Zoom, we decide to permanently park the cars outside and change out the flooring from hard plastic tiles to rubber mats style tiles. This would give some extra give for workouts and TKD. By this time Lynda was also participating in TKD.
