the white pelicans are back and as usual i keep trying to get a good close-up. this one on october 16th wasn’t too bad. the problem is that when i walk down to the water they start to quietly glide away.
Kevin bought and assembled another component for our kitty condo and now it’s wider plus goes farther out into the room. his hope is that more kitties could lie there without hating each other. it’s really only sweetie who abhors having anybody else next to her. so here she’s happy as riley is sleeping peacefully at a good social distance. as I’m typing this, riley is giving himself a bath as he lies in the middle section so a lot of time it’s just an expansive condo for one.
i spent quite a lot of time cleaning out the former hot tub room, which we ended up calling the hot tub room because of habit.
when i was cleaning a window i saw a praying mantis who looked like he was on the outside of the screen. when kevin came in to look at my progress i showed him the little guy and luckily Kevin realized that he was actually on the inside, trapped between the screen and the window. He put him on one of the plants inside and i took this photo of him.
I kept checking up on him to see if he was surviving but the next day i couldn’t find him anywhere. as i cleaned yet another big wad of dust from the bottom of a shelf, there he was! a big dust clump was attached to his back leg and i carefully pulled it off and put him up in another plant.
i hope he’s doing ok in there. now that it’s filled with so many plants hopefully he found a nice home.
on the morning of October 21st Glenn came over to steer kevin’s sailboat across to the sailboat launch to get it out of the water. in years past he’s helped us step the mast, which means lowering the mast, but because he’s been so crazy busy with work kevin and i did it by ourselves. that process went well except i was anxious about it, fearing that somehow the mast would get away from us and crush kevin. but we did fine.
because i haven’t ever steered the sailboat s we agreed we’d need glenn’s help. we tried to figure out some way that kevin could drive the truck to the launch and then sail the boat over but we concluded it would be a little impossible.
it would also be good if i was able to back up the truck with the trailer into the water but i think i’d be more likely to be able to motor the sailboat since the last time i backed up our van with the trailer i ended up breaking the trailer because i hadn’t put the van in park. i have a fear of managing somehow to plunge a vehicle into the water so it’s best left to kevin.
it was a chilly morning but a smooth crossing.
it all went smoothly and now our boats are securely parked in the driveway.
and you can see the sailboat parked behind the truck. Kevin bought his truck used a few years ago and boy were the sellers rotten. shortly after buying it he had to plunk down a huge amount of money to fix critical things that were wrong with it. since then the truck has many problems that aren’t worth it to fix. however, because kevin is excellent at repairing vehicles he decided to replace the bearings. bearings are behind the tires and behind the brakes and here he’s giving me a detailed explanation of what he was doing.
I think he described what he was doing and what the bearings do at least three or more times and I tried to 100% focus and tune in and grasp the concepts but to me it sounded like “the bearings do blah blah blah and i’m going to yadda yadda yadda.” my brain firmly rejects car maintenance understanding.
kevin’s ipad is here on the lower left. he used it to follow along on how to replace truck bearings. he’d replaced bearings on many VW bugs he’s owned but i guess it’s more complicated with a truck. the process took longer than he thought it would but he finally successfully replaced the one bearing.
today he tackles the next one.
ok then,
mrs. is it really already november here in the pandemic hughes.