2017 was not such a bad year

For those of you who are too lazy (sorry, of course I mean busy!) to look through the other posts, this is a summary of happenings on the team powell front. The links take you to a more detailed post, usually with a bunch of photos. Like this one, of family photos.

Adam and Dana moved from Fergus (where he was commuting about an hour each way to his job) to Freelton, really close to where he works and a lot closer to us as well, and we had a number of visits back and forth this year. In July, we had a joint strawberry jam making session. Adam purchased fresh berries on his way here from our favourite farm, and between the four of us we made short work of making enough jam to keep both families supplied for the next year, and still had time for a swim. Later in the year, it was nice to have all the kids with us to celebrate our wedding anniversary in September.

Anna is still working at the local Metro (supermarket) and for a while was working in the bakery department, which was a change, but stressful as she wasn’t able to complete all of the tasks in the assigned time, which I attribute to her being too conscientious in her clean-up routine. She also got a few floral shifts, and took it upon herself to pay for and attend a three half-day workshop on floral arrangement. This was interesting, as Mary-Jo was brought up working in her aunt’s flower shop. It seems things have changed in that time – a lot more emphasis on turnover as opposed to design! However, in the weeks after her classes, Anna has twice purchased some materials and made an arrangement from scratch, which both looked pretty darned good to me! Now we just have to find a way to convince her to beat her own drum at Metro and get more floral hours.

Mary-Jo got her second knee “done” in March, with the same hullabaloo as last year – bringing the bed downstairs, teaching David to shop, cook, chauffeur and remember appointments AGAIN, and keep Mary-Jo on track with the exercises.  This time Mary-Jo was smarter with the pain drugs and found the right balance between managing pain and avoiding creating a dependence. It was also nice to have Adam help me move the bed back upstairs afterwards! Nine months later, she is fully mobile and going to two “recuperation from surgery” classes each week. No one goes from 15 years of being sedentary to running a marathon in just a few months, but she is progressing nicely and should finally be able to participate in walking shore excursions when we go on a cruise next year.

We didn’t see a lot of Travis while Mary-Jo was recuperating, but he did come just before his birthday. We gave him a new kind of scooter which goes around corners like it’s on tracks, and everyone had a great time watching him circle the house and even trying it out ourselves. With the summer weather, the pool was enough incentive for Victoria to bring him for some quick visits, and he had overnight stays again starting in late August. He loves to ride his bike and found out (despite my shouted admonition to slow down!) that going down a steep gravel track is not like a sidewalk, with a spectacular wipe-out. However, while in previous years, this would have meant a premature end to the outing, this year, after a few tears and a quick wipe-down of his knee, we were off again.

He also loves to help Grandma cook (especially cookies) and to make things in the workshop with Grandpa. On his last visit, Travis and I cut out a tree shape in thin wood, sanded it and primed it and then Travis painted it while Mary-Jo gave some advice and painted a bell shape I had cut out. With the paint dry, some glue and glitter finished off the ornaments. The tree ornament went back with Travis and the bell is on our tree, added to the ornaments that Travis views as “his” and gets to add each year. You can see photos and videos of our activities with Travis in the “Travis Visits” post.

I had a fairly productive year doing projects around the house, especially outside. The big one was replacing the wooden beams that run under the shed, forming its foundation. The originals had rotted where the outer cladding was in contact with the soil, and in some places a full three and a half inches of wood had disappeared! Of course, I couldn’t just put in new wood, because the whole shed was sitting on what was left. The interesting part was that I couldn’t put any lifting device under the wall directly, because it would block the new beam. I came up with the idea of screwing a piece of wood to the sides of the shed and placing a car jack under that. To begin with, I could lift each side in turn, and put a temporary block underneath, but for the final beam insertion, I had to use two car jacks, one at each end. Unfortunately, once everything was replaced and the shed lowered, it wasn’t in quite the same place, and the brick paving which had been fitted right up to the shed would not go back in the same space. A quick internet search suggested that it was possible to cut the bricks with some of the tools I already had, and with fresh wood stain and paint and a new flower box, the shed is looking quite spiffy.

While I was feeling confident, I also tackled two other projects that I had been avoiding because I wasn’t sure how to tackle the heavy lifting. One involved removing the huge flat stone atop our waterfall, to stop the water flowing in the wrong direction and emptying the pond, and the other was a four foot concrete wall section at the top of a retaining wall that needed to be taken up and re-glued, to stop it rocking. In both cases I went slowly and carefully, using levers and incremental blocking where necessary, and crossed two more projects off my list.

Indoors, I replaced a bunch of smart switches which used outdated technology, so they would be more reliable (read: turn on when you press them). The only interesting part of this was when I was working in a box with three switches, each on a separate circuit. This required turning off three breakers, of course, and I knew two of them. The third controlled an attic fan, which had a built-in thermostat, so switching it on or off didn’t necessarily make any difference. No problem, I had a brand new magic gizmo that injected a tone at the switch, and had a second part which detected said tone at the circuit board. So down at the board, several places gave a 50% feedback, and then one circuit lit up the dial to 100% buzzed loudly. So I turned off that circuit, which I knew was connected to nearby lights, so it was a logical candidate, and went to replace the switch. All was well for a while until I was moving some wires to fit everything back and there was a sudden flash and sharp crack sound. Back at the board I found a different breaker had flipped. That’s when I discovered some more instructions in the gizmo documentation that said it sometimes gives false readings, and the thing to do is flip the breaker with the wand still in place and check that the tone cuts off. Oh. I’m always very careful around electricity, working with insulated tools and mostly with only one hand anywhere near the work, so this was a shock, but not shocking, if you see what I mean.

Photographically, I’ve been having lots of fun taking photos of the wildlife attracted by our bird feeders. Along with the more common birds, we’re now seeing a couple of kinds of woodpeckers, juncos and nuthatches – none of which I could have recognised a year or so ago. Yesterday, I happened to look out and saw a young hawk land on the deck railing. I wanted to explain that the purpose of a bird feeder was to feed birds, not to provide birds to feed on, but I was too busy taking photographs. We also love the antics of squirrels, chipmunks and, for a while, a mother raccoon, all trying to get at the bird food (and often succeeding!)  Anna gave me entrance tickets to the Toronto Zoo for my birthday, and so I had a great time taking photos there, especially the new ocelot cubs.

So here we are, with the Christmas lights up, a new tree decorated in our family room and Mrs. Powell swears she has finished shopping – time to sell FedEx short. Unfortunately, Mary-Jo is fighting to get rid of a persistent bout of bronchitis and is now on her second set of antibiotics, but we have high hopes that she will soon be better – or at least well enough to make some cookies.

This site tends to get updated all in a rush at the end of the year unless it’s something special, Facebook (mostly) and Instagram (somewhat) get more timely updates. Links to my social media details can be found here.