Who lives here Spring 2016

John

Michelle

Odin

Freki

Zarah

Vinnie 

Tearza

Amacus

Wi (the chicken)

And ...

Lucy our new barn kitty!

Springtime

Despite the drama with insurance claims, the sun has been shining, the grass has been growing, and the flowers are blooming.

We let the horses into the west field today. There was brief excitement, then the animals headed back to the comfort of the barn.

Re-remodeling

Recently we finished remodeling one of our bathrooms. It was mostly done in January, and finishing touches were done two weeks ago.  It came out great.

The past few weeks we noticed an off aroma in that area of the house. It smelled a little like earth farts, or escaping sewer gas.

 This weekend we decided to install a new laundry room floor (for cosmetic reasons), and also investigate the source of the aroma. We found some not too great things. Namely the cause of the odor, and evidence of rodents. 

Two pinholes in a water supply line. 

The bathroom today.

The bathroom (left) and laundry room (right).

We are on the road to a solution. With the help of our insurance company we have a plan, and some great people doing the work. They will be back tomorrow to remove more sub floor and dry out the rest. The rooms involved are all part of the converted garage (no crawl space access). The flooring was all removed today and tomorrow hopefully we will see the extent of the damage.   Then new flooring!

The other side of Adventure

Last weekend really was a great weekend. The RV incident was not ideal, but we had so much support form everyone involved, that it was not an ordeal. We did what we had to do, then let the insurance people figure it out from there. 

We did lots of this:

Or, passive recovery in the sunshine after skiing hard. 

John dusted off his snowboard for the first time this decade. 

There were pictures with "The Mountain".

And corn dog auto portraits. 

And loads of buddy time. 

The adventure continues . . . or all's well that ends well?

Odin was on spring break last week and our friend Beth was in from Hawaii.   The plan was to go skiing Fri-Sun (heading up on Thurs).  Beth and another friend rented a condo up at White Pass and we were planning to stay in the RV.  The forecast called for warm sunny spring skiing.  You might say the stage was set for fun!  So after loading up Thur. morning we headed out.  It was as hot a day as I've ever driven in the RV so I was watching the engine temp gauge, especially once we started up the steep part of the pass.  Two miles up and the temp was good, but then the carbon monoxide detector went off.  We figured the batteries had gone bad, because the windows were open.  As Michelle got up to turn it off I noticed smoke in the rear-view at about the same time Michelle noticed smoke coming in around the engine cover. . . that's when I noticed the flames licking around the edges of the hood. . .
Yikes! I got to the side of the road.  Michelle got Odin, the dog, and a fire extinguisher out the side door.  I popped the hood, crabbed a water bottle and my phone and jumped out and went to work.  It already looked like a lost cause, but after the fire extinguisher (lesson learned, next time I'll buy a bigger one) three large water bottles and some help from an exploding coolant hose we had the upper hand.

Long story short, our lodging and transportation for the weekend was no longer available (insurance is now sorting out what will happen with to the Chev Chalet).  Thankfully, Beth and her friend were just a mile in front of us and they had room for 3 extra's in their condo.  But not much room in the car, so we set out for Olympia to retrieve one of our vehicles (5 hours round trip) finally arriving at White Pass at 12:30am.   Wow, what a day! 
Thankfully, the next three days made up for it with some fantastic spring skiing.

Odin on his first backcountry ski hike!

Yep, all's well that ends well!