School's Out

Tomorrow is the last day of school. My grocery bill will now double.

Beach

I joined thirty-five five year olds at the beach today. The weather was perfect, the kids were all well behaved and very fun. It was nice to be five for a day. I wish I had their energy and care free attitude every day.

Field Trip

First, here is an important article for you to read. Why is the truth so elusive?

Lettuce, spinach, and peas shown above. The lettuce is ready to eat. We've planted our peppers, tomatoes, cukes, and pumpkins. We tried some sweet corn this year too. The weeds are growing twice as fast as anything else. I always forget how much weeding there is to do.

Our new priest (came to us July 07) has been reassigned already. He'll be leaving in July. We were just getting use to each other too. We don't know who we'll get to replace him.

Our parish is working on a new directory. It'll have photos of most of the parish families, and names, etc. I've been shooting a bunch of odds & ends photos for it, like parish councils, events, and activities. I've included our priest in a bunch of the photos. He'll be gone before it's even published.

I'm taking the day off tomorrow to go with Madeline and her class on a field trip to Big Creek park. We're going to play in the sand I guess. Beats the hell out of working.

Peace-
Matt

Broken

Soldering copper water piping is a crappy job. It takes a long time, especially when you don’t do it very often like me. Sure, it’s kind of fun for a little while, but then it becomes work; too much work. When I put the new bathroom in the house, I changed all of our existing galvanized water pipes to copper. It was a lot of soldering.

Recently, I picked up a water softener from a friend. Our water is hard I guess. I never noticed it until we got that stupid dishwasher. It just doesn’t do a good job, and still bugs the hell out of me. I decided to try something different for piping the softener. There is a product called Propress, and it is a dream. It’s copper pipe & fittings, just like the regular stuff, but these fittings have o-rings in them. You slide them on the pipe, use a special tool (which I borrowed from work), and clamp the fittings to the pipe. It takes a minute. No cleaning, fluxing, heating, soldering; none of that shit. It can even have water running through it when you do it. No way you could solder with water running; that’s impossible. What would have taken me at least 12 hours to do with the solder method, took less than 3 hours with the Propress stuff, and that’s because I took my sweet time. Good stuff.

When I was working on the water lines, I pulled something in my shoulder. A serious pop and then pain. This morning while shaving, I pulled something in my lower back again; just like I did while brushing my teeth a few months ago. Between this stuff and my knee problems, I think there’s something wrong with me. It can’t be just age. I have a serious problem. I’m broken.

Peace-
Matt

Sprouts

My peas are looking good. I'm ready to plant the rest of the stuff. Is it too early?

Dust

A few shots from about 10 minutes in the garage. Haven't had much time to photograph lately. Spring sports have us running 6 days a week.

We got our passports in the mail yesterday. When we get our stimulus money from uncle sam, we'll be ready to go for our England trip in August.

Matt