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In late 2021, we began a terrace project to our lower hillside. We had come to find through a property survey that we had approximately 100' of slope to manage. In an effort to comply with Firewise principles (brush cutting, defensible space), we figured that grading, retaining and adding astroturf would give us more space for kids and dog training. Along the way, we built in some additional steps and planter boxes.

The project finished just prior to the Winter of 2023 and the heavy rainfall we had. We some minor damage to gravell paths but that's fixable.

Here's some shots.

Sure, we had rain (20" ?). That brought out flowers! Lot's of violet purples this season.

The image above was from a harvest yesterday, 12/1/23. There is at least one more pack of peppers to pick.

So, I may not have picked a peck, but I've had a pretty successful harvest this season. These were Costco pepper plants (Jalapeno and Fresno). They got fertilized and watered when dry. Plenty of 100+ days in the greenhouse this summer. My strategy was to do fewer plants spaced further apart. It seems to have worked.

The Santa Cruz mountains took a lot of rain this season. I know I dumped my 5 gallon bucket at least twice. We saw some erosion on our new pathways that will have to be fixed.

In this shot, we see the beginning of a 5 day outage where one huge douglas fir took out more douglas firs as well as the power and utilities coming up hill. We did ok on solar and batteries for a few days but given the weather conditions and position of the sun, we fell back on to our dual fuel generator.

Lynda bought me a new bike for my birthday. I did a lot of research and test riding. I landed on this Dutch made bike and have put about 1200 1700 miles on it so far. I've been working on sections of the Santa Cruz County Cycling Club's Mountain Challenge to see if we can tie a 50 mile section together. 

I've had a chance to put the bike on the Jeep and take it to some of the dog shows we've been to this past year including Napa, Palm Springs and San Francisco.

We've been using Smartthings since I got into a Kickstarter for their products. Over the years, we've used the ST hub to control a lot of GE light switches, dimmer switches, and zwave devices. In 2021, I read this articleabout running Homebridge under Docker on our Synology NAS.

At some point in our home remodeling project, we were about to lose our concrete guy due to weather. It was a El Nino year, so of course we were grading and pouring during the winter! 

So we got a thought. Instead of losing our concrete guys, maybe we should expand our scope. So we had them grade what was already a pretty flat and unused section of side yard and pour a 20x20 pad. We figured at some point we'd install a greenhouse.

Having driven a 1966 VW bug, 1969 van, 1972 bug, dasher, 72 van, in my early years, then Lynda and I drove the van and Penelope till we got Goldie.  Then Goldie died and we got snowball. Later we bought shadow our most expensive car to date.  Shadow and Goldie served us for years till we got hit heading to La Verne. That lead us to Lexie. Lexie served is well until a furlough Friday when her transmission failed.