Swimming

Look at this cute little surfer dude! Conan has been taking swimming lessons at the city pool. He's really not a natural water baby, but the lessons are really helping him become more comfortable with getting wet. We've seen a big improvement in bathtime, although he still does NOT like to get his hair washed. He now likes to lie down in the tub and show us how he kicks his feet, which was unheard of before the lessons. He may not be the best swimmer in his class, but he's certainly the most improved!



We are on break between classes right now, but they'll start up again in April. Grandpa Dave has volunteered to take Conan to classes on Monday and Wednesday. Conan is really looking forward to it, and he asks nearly every day if he'll "go swimming at swimming pool today?" When I tell him no, not today, he responds with "Maybe Monday?"

Saturna Island Wedding

On Saturday, July 17th my cousin Fergus married his longtime sweetheart Svea in a lovely beach-side ceremony on his "hometown" island of Saturna, BC. We traveled up to the island on Thursday beforehand, so we were able to help out quite a bit with the preparations as well as visit with the rest of our family and Svea's. Essentially, we had a three-day celebration of family, with lots of good food, beautiful scenery, and wonderful weather.
Conan had a lot of fun, first with riding the ferry over to the island and then with seeing all the people and reading books with Great Grandma Joy, Mammie (aka Grandma Debbie), Poppy (aka Grandpa Dennis), and anyone else he could get to sit and read to him. He learned the names Mammie and Poppy from his cousin Chloe, they are her names for my Mom and Dad. Conan and Chloe were very cute together, and she learned to say his name almost immediately. "Conawn? Conawn?" she asked, whenever she saw me without him.

The wedding preparations were intensive, as we had to turn the island rec center basketball court into a banquet hall, complete with a tulle canopy and hanging globe lanterns, flower arrangements both large and small, and of course keep everyone on the crew fed and watered throughout the whole process. It all came together seamlessly, a great testament to how much a motivated group of people can accomplish! It was neat to get to know Svea's family from Nunavut by working alongside them to prepare for the formal bonding between our two families. I really only had a vague idea about Nunavut beforehand, so I was fascinated by all their stories of life in the remote arctic.

Conan & Chloe of course didn't do much in the way of wedding preparations, but they kept busy going on walks an exploring the beaches, and cooling off in the afternoons playing in buckets of water on the deck. Cousin Odessa joined them for some play time as well, delighting in soap bubbles and romps through my Aunt Pam's amazing flower garden. I showed them how to roll down the small hill in the yard, which was entertaining for babies and grown ups alike.

After the wedding ceremony, there was a splendid reception, complete with a catered banquet featuring an 85 lb beef hip roasted to perfection, a delicious 3-tier cake, toasting and roasting the bride & groom, an open bar, and finally dancing into the wee hours with a fabulous 9-piece live band. It really was a night to remember! I found myself marveling at the wonder of it all: here I was, dancing in a community gymnasium on a small Canadian island to a rousing rendition of Disco Inferno with family and friends from Japan, the US, France, and all across Canada, including some really remote parts of Nunavut. And all of that while my baby slept in his stroller in the beer garden! Life is pretty amazing, when you stop to think about it.

Munchkin & Rinnai in the house

The Rinnai on-demand (aka tankless) hot water heater was intalled yesterday, as was the Munchkin boiler for the radiant floor. Both run on propane and are super efficient. It costs more up front to install these types of appliances, but the energy efficiency will be worth it in the long run. There is a little further hook-up still to be done, as you can see in this picture, the water hasn't been connected yet to the Rinnai:

Here's the Munchkin and its associates, various pressure gages, nozzles, valves, tanks and vents. I'm not sure what all the parts do yet, but at some point I'll get somebody from Barron Heating to go over the whole system with me, because not only am I curious but I figure as a homeowner I should know which valves to turn and other maintenence tidbits. There are still some wiring and other connections to make with this as well.
Here it is with the cover opened, so you can see all the "guts".
On the inside, the mudding and taping has begun, which looks like this:
Fortunatley the weather has continued warm, so the mudders aren't suffering any fall chilling while the heating system is being completed.

Utility Madness

On Friday Cary and I met Mark out at the site in the afternoon to go over the connections for the utilities, as well as some other items. Bruce, my neighbor and the head of the Water Association, also came over to see if he could help solve the big mystery: where the #@$&% IS the water line? You see, we have a faucet in the shop, but we've never been able to locate a shut-off or meter or any other clue as to how the pipe was laid that conncets that faucet to the main water association line. The main water association line follows the driveway, which goes along the north edge of our property, then turns south and runs along the west edge. Since the shop is located in the NW corner of the property, the connection line could come either from the north or from the west... or for extra fun, it might zig zag or run diagonally. There are NO records, and although I've hunted around in all the bushes many times over the last few years, we've never found ANYTHING to indicate where the water line was buried.

Locating the water line recently became a bit more urgent, and not just because we need to connect into it for the house supply. The real problem was that we planned to ditch through the area by the shop to collect the phone, cable, and propane supply lines, and it'd be a real bummer to find the water line by breaking it with a backhoe. Especially considering that without a shut-off valve, we'd have to shut down water to the whole neighborhood while we fixed it.

Well, we all walked around on Friday, and still had no idea where the line was. Mark and Cary even dug a hole where we found an old stake in the ground which might have marked something - nothing. So I volunteered myself and Cary to dig around by hand on Saturday and try to find it.

We started by digging about 20 feet away from the west wall of the shop, where the phone and electric lines were marked by the locator. Our reasoning was that if somebody was going to hook up multiple ulilities, they'd use as few ditches as possible. Also, the faucet inside the shop is right next to the phone jack. We found the phone line almost immediately, about 1' down. We kept going but the clay was hard and wet, looked like it had never been disturbed, and to top it off our hole started to fill up with water. Then the handle of the post hole digger broke. Gaah.

We widened our trench and continued digging, bailing the water out, but it was getting pretty miserable. We felt certain we'd gone down 24" (the standard depth for electric lines) but we'd found nothing. I started to doubt that the electrical line was where it had been marked. Not knowing where the water line is bad, but not knowing where the electrical line is worse.

So, we changed tactics. We moved over to side of the shop, right outside from where the phone, faucet, and fuse box are on the inside. The reason we didn't start digging there in the first place is that the shop is build on a 1-2 foot thick pad of pit run, and we'd thought that it would be more difficult to dig through all the rocks than it would be in the clay. However, we were pleasantly surprised to find that a combination of pitchfork and shovel made relatively quick work of the pit run - and we found not only the electrical line but also the water line! Hooray! Now we just had to establish that the water ran straight west, and didn't turn and head north 5 or 10 feet from the building. Back to that first, nasty, water filled hole. Cary said "I guess this is what makes us homeowners, and not renters, huh?"
Well, down about another 6 inches, and yessiree, there was the water and the electric line. The water was coming in fast, flowing right down the pipe. I had a bad feeling about that, but mostly I was just happy we'd found it...
And sure enough, Mark called this morning from the site, where they had expanded the utility ditch and found the crappy shut-off that somebody jerry-rigged with a regular faucet valve and then buried. Apparently it's leaking pretty badly, due to the fact that it's not the sort of valve that you are supposed to use as a shut-off or bury in the ground at all, let alone for 15+ years. We have to put in a new valve and a meter anyway, so it's not going to cause any additional expense, I'm just glad we found it now and not sometime next year!