Beach Morning

I took advantage of my weekend days to do some longer dog walks with S. He enjoys swimming no matter where he is.

This guy had quite the kayak rig. Five fishing poles, depth finder, and SPF 200 clothing. Not sure when fishing turned into a hide-your-skin sport.

 

Owamni

After the museum, we hit Owamni on the riverfront for a light bite. Normally you'd need a reservation, but with everyone gone, we had no problem getting seats at the bar. CP was not onboard with the menu, but once the food came and he tried it, he appreciated it.

 

Mill City Museum

The city completely empties out on summer weekends, especially 3-day holiday weekends. We take advantage of it and play tourist. This time we hit the Mill City Museum. None of us were expecting much; we were blown away at how cool it is!

 

Memorial Day Weekend

Finally! The Bread & Pickle is open for business. The park dept. was doing work on the picnic pavilion and put off the opening by nearly a month.

 

1st Day of Work

We've taken pictures of the boys heading off for their first day @ work, so why not?

 

Pantry Completion

We did a final push to the end of my days of being unemployed by completely finishing up the kitchen floor project.

 We also refinished and reinstalled the baseboards. The only thing missing are the doorknobs.

 

Patented

I got a nice surprise in the mail: a plaque for one of my patents from my old employer. Rather than give out cash or have a big party or dinner for all the patent recipients, we each get a nice commemorative plaque to hang on the wall. I'm good with that!

 

Sunrise

I used to be able to hit the sunrise every day. Now that I've grown accustomed to sleeping in a bit and the fact that the sun is up before 6 now, I'm not seeing as many. Since this is my last week for leisurely dog walks, I'm making it a point to catch the sunrise as much as I can.

S doesn't mind going out on the fishing pier. He likes to pick at the fish scales and leftover bait stuck in the wood.

 

Front Door Flowers

This year, due to the unemployment situation, JP did her own arrangements in the front door pots. I pushed the cart and then got back to finishing up the details on the kitchen floor (reinstalling appliances, baseboards, thresholds, etc.).

 

Mother's Day

CP came over and took JP out to a fancy lunch for Mother's Day. He let me tag along, too.

The boys went in together and got JP a window unit for the kitchen. In the summer, the whole house AC can't compete with the western exposure of the kitchen. 

 

Flooring, Finally!

After we got back from Mississippi, it has been a full court press to wrap up the floor project before I start my new job. It two solid days to get the new tiles down. Half a day was spent adjusting the layout so that all the tiles around the edges would be adequately sized, and tweaking the layout so that it would line up with the tiles we already installed with the pantry project.

Done!

 

Puzzle Pieces

Every turn of the kitchen project has brought us new challenges. We had to re-wire some circuits where the unprotected romex had been run over floor joists between floorboards and we had to replace floorboards that had been cut up for who knows why. 

The space under the stove had the blower hard-ducted to its duct, a gas line, and the electrical connection. We were able to go around all of them with only two pieces of plywood cut into mating puzzle piece shapes. It worked out super slick!

 

Turkey Takeover

The turkeys have taken over our neighborhood! There are three toms strutting around with their tailfeathers out and wings dragging. Their favorite activity is to block traffic and gobble in unison when honked at.

 

Cornplane

We've all heard of Cornhole, but how many of you have seen a Cornplane?!? This was part of an art exhibit in the Atlanta airport.

 

MS Vacation

We had a great short vacation in Mississippi with Gramma & Grampa & GG. The weather was perfect, and JP had fun taking the boat up & down the river. 

The magnolias were just starting to bloom when we arrived. MB picked a flower from the tree in her yard for us.

 

Plywood Floor

Throughout the flooring project, S will only step on certain things. We used layers of tarpaper to shim low spots. He did not like that and refused to step on it.

We finished up laying down most of the new flat plywood on the shimmed and planed subfloor the night before heading off to Mississippi.

 

Floorboards be Gone!

As soon as the Gs left, we got back to the floor project. We moved all the appliances into the dining room and set to the task of removing the old flooring.

The flooring came up easily. The 1/4" plywood that was stapled every 6" was a different story.

We had nice weather and were able to work with some fresh air.

 

Tourist Activities

No visit to Minneapolis is complete without a stop at the falls.

We hiked down to the Mississippi and checked out the cave on the south side of Minnehaha Creek. The sides were full of modern petroglyphs, which makes you wonder if the old petroglyphs we find out west are the same sort of thing.

What goes down must go up. With no leaves on the trees, the stairs up look like the Great Wall.

 

Chilly Ballgame

The G's popped in for a fun weekend visit. Good thing that Twins Baseball is back in full swing!

We had our normal perfect seats above first base. Normally, we are glad to be out of the sun, but on game day, it was in the low 50s with a breeze. 

The girls abandoned us and made their way to the sundrenched sections out past third base. By the end of the game, our original section had emptied out, and the cheap seats in the sun were packed.

 

Morning Swim

S is still put out that the ice has gone away, but he is enjoying getting back to his morning swims.

 

Patch Job

We are expecting guests, so we can't keep up the kitchen floor project. We put some plywood and the old flooring down and covered it up with a rug.

 

Portrait Setting

In addition to the long exposure setting, the iPhone also has a nice "portrait" setting that uses its depth camera to blur the background. A normal camera does this by having a large aperture lens. The iPhone has a wide aperture (f/1.66), but because the lens is so physically small (6.9 mm), it's difficult to get a shallow depth of field so that the background blurs. The camera knows where, in terms of depth, the subject is, and the distance to everything else in the scene, and it uses the depth information to artificially blur whatever is not in the same plane as the subject.

 

R30

We insulated the external foundation wall with some rigid foam and then added 10" (R30) of fiberglass between the floor joists.

 

Coots

We've had a ton of migratory birds other than the normal ducks, geese, & swans this year. For a few days we had a large flock of coots that refueled while they waited for the ice up north to thaw.