It is great to be back in Centralia for at least three weeks. We read in the newspaper there would be a brilliant full moon (there was) coupled with serious meteor showers (there might have been, but we were in bed. Still the views were spectacular. This picture does not really do it justice. We had made arrangements for our lawn service to get rid of the vegetation and put a layer of gravel on our “RV pad” which is just really another driveway parking area that terminates above the house. More than anything it was just great to be home.
A day after we arrived (today) I found my wallet was missing. What a joy. Fortunately, no one had been using the cards, but unfortunately we had to cancel everything and only found out an hour ago that we have one card that still works until the other stuff is replaced sometime in January. All good, though–with the best “bank” in the world (Sunset Science Park Federal Credit Union–I HIGHLY recommend them), the internet and some nice customer service people, everything is canceled and on its way except the drivers license which I don’t really need so much anyway. Lorena squires me around Washington and I take Uber’s in Boston.
Christian captured this picture of our Bald Eagles yesterdays. This is the first time they landed on a tree other than the one with a dead top. They soared around in circles for four or five minutes, settled in only for a few minutes, then flew away. We have finally decided we need to get a Nikon F mount to T thread adapter so we can take better pictures. Christian took this one by just holding his camera up to the telescope after removing the eyepiece. It is better than the images we got by snapping shots through the eyepiece with our cellphones, but it is still not so great.
It was really nice to get back to Washington this morning (at 11:30) even though we had to drive through a rain storm filled with a couple of bad wrecks and construction on the freeways. We were pretty tired when we got to bed at 1:30 AM, but were, as always, grateful and amazed when we woke up this morning to a spectacular fall view with the leaves changing out into the distance from the deck. I have to turn around and go back to Boston in a week, but even that is getting better. I found out that I have earned “Lifetime Platinum Elite” status at the hotel where I stay, because I spent so much time in a hotel in Prescott, Arizona when we lived in Raleigh. That means they will give me high priority in reserving a room along with a few other perks. In addition to that, I am five flights from that same kind of special status on the airline I currently use to get to Boston. That means that after the first of the year, I will start getting bumped to first class sometimes and I will able to get on the plane before everyone else. Not so bad, but it will be even nicer when I do not have to fly to a far away place every other week.
We had a power outage for about an hour this afternoon starting at about 3. We have been so busy lately that if we had not had one, we would not have seen our eagles. And, this is the first time we have been able to take a half-way decent picture ourselves through Bob’s telescope. The backdrop for the picture is, of course, Mt. Rainier, with the diagonal white stripe at the center top of the image being the slope of the mountain. We really need to stop and smell the roses more frequently. This is life affirming stuff.
Kelly is coming home this afternoon for a few hours to wash some clothes and get some work done. Lorena made up some quiche out of leftovers from the party. We are planning to do nothing but get stuff done today–we will see if that plan actually works. Hopefully the plan will include a practice run on a new way to cook tri-tip. Well, it is new to us. I think everybody and their grandmother has done what we are going to try, but Lorena thinks she is really bad at stuff that she has not tried before. With respect to cooking, that is almost certainly 100% wrong these days. If it was ever true before, it is certainly not true now.
Before the big party the other day, I moved my office from one of the top floors of house to the basement. This was my view on the first day I worked there. I think this was a good move. There is a good view of the mountain and I am close to things on the ground. The deer come to the back yard to clean up the fruit on the ground. There are a good number of fawns included in their number. I have been trying to get a picture of the neighbor’s cat who comes and visits at the door on a fairly regular basis. All this is really quite peaceful and I am looking forward to the time when I can be down here working on my bean project at a leisurely pace if I ever get to retire.
Lorena finally threw me out of the upstairs. We have visitors coming and she firmly believes, after over a quarter-century, I am too much of a slob to have my office anywhere close to an area where visitors might visit let alone spend a night or two. Actually, we are planning to do some remodeling downstairs in the near future and were hoping to do that work before I moved everything down, but there are too many visitors planned and the timeline keeps stretching out, so we decided to bite the bullet and make the move. I REALLY like it. It feels a lot closer to nature on the bottom floor and I can still see Mt. Rainier when clouds/fog/smoke/haze is not blocking the view.
I enjoy going to Boston a lot, but it nice to get home. We have deer and other littler animals in the yard all year long, but this time of year they come in droves to eat the fruit that has fallen out of the trees. Because we pruned the trees this year, there is a lot more fruit on the ground than last year so we have lots of visitors. This one is cleaning up under the plum tree. Actually, it is nice to have them, not only because we like to watch them, but because they clean up the rotting fruit that would make a mess otherwise.
I am on the plane flying to PDX from Boston. Lorena worked frantically for the last week getting the house ready for an influx of twenty-somethings. Fortunately we have a couple of friends to help us as the hired servants. Actually, we look forward to it all and are looking forward to meeting a few new young people and to hang out and talk about life with old (in both the “we have known them for a long time” and the “they are getting past middle age” senses) friends.
Lorena checked the apples in our trees in the back yard and found that we probably could have (should have) been harvesting them for a couple of weeks now. She bought herself the business end of an apple picker pole and attached it to the end of the very long pole, Carolyn C. give to her as a gift about a decade ago. I have to tell you that has been about the most useful gift she has ever gotten. She has used it for a gazillion things and now it is receiving double duty both for apples and 
dusting of very high places. Now she is a state of high applesauce production mode. We need to get Bob over here soon because we have entirely too many of them. I think the pruning we had our yard crew perform in February really did the trick. So far we have gotten peaches (crazy sweet), pears–really small, but tasty, and now the apples. We really need to get set up to put a garden in which mostly just means we need to level out a spot, put up a really high fence to keep out the deer, and maybe put in a raised bed.
Lorena bought a fire pit at Ace Hardware yesterday. We checked out the ones at Walmart, Home Depot, and several other places, but this was the best we could find for how much money we wanted to pay. I think it will work well. We are hoping in inaugurate it sometime this coming weekend. Maybe even roast some weenies. We have not decided yet whether we want to put it on the deck or just use it on the concrete pad beside the kitchen. Probably the latter–we have a hose right there in case anything gets out of hand.
Slowly but surely we are getting stuff done at the house. Today, the asphalt repair guys came and fixed up the driveway. They were nice guys and did a great job. We had a little bit of a setback with the house painting because the painter fell off the roof of our house while we were out of town. He is a great guy and a great painter, but he busted himself up pretty well. He will come back as good as new, but we are feeling pretty sorry for him right now.
Every time Lorena visits Christian in Tempe, she washes all of his unwashed clothes, irons and/or folds them and puts them away, does a deep cleaning of the entire house, but especially the bathroom, buys him more bottled water than he could drink in three months (you need to stay hydrated in Tempe), makes a Costco run because Christian does not have a Costco card, and generally is an organizing/cleaning whirlwind for the entire time she is there. The thing my very sophisticated and world-wise older cousin Merle said about his dear older sister is that “the mothering instinct in that woman has gotten way out of hand.” This, I think, is certainly true of Lorena–in a good way (of course)!
Lorena planted a little garden this year. We are pretty sure we will lose most of if to the deer, but plan to put a deer fence around a small garden in the next year or two after we finish getting the house to where we want it to be. It is pretty gratifying, though, to see some results. Lorena only planted squash, cucumber, and tomato this year.
