Frank: It’s Wednesday and I’m supposed to be in Phoenix but I’m not. I’m still in Seattle (Kent) Washington as SOMEHOW the air ticket I bought to Phoenix is for this coming Saturday instead of yesterday. I truly do not understand how I did that as I have purchased tickets online before and not screwed up so. Oh well, it gives me time to do some work at our daughter’s house and it lets me be here today to supervise the installation of the Comcast HDTV & Internet service. It’s about Noon:15 now and the installer is supposed to be here between 1 and 3 PM. We’ll see. (Late update: He actually showed up at Noon:45 and you are reading this complements of Comcast Internet! We’re back on line!)
Here’s a catch-up. Last Sunday we met our daughter Kimberly and her kids, Rowan (11) and Hailey (6) at a “Pioneer Farm” about 30 miles south of Seattle for an afternoon of civilization decompression. The farm has a collection of actual cabins and farm building collected from the surrounding areas. For the adults there were the histories of the families and insights of how they survived in the pre-everything world. For the kids there were dozens of neat “let’s go back in time” activities like dressing up in pioneer clothing, touching and feeding farm animals, a ride on a horse, and best of all for both a grandfather and grandson the chance to operate a blacksmith’s forge and heat red-hot and pound on and bend some horseshoes! OK. I gotta admit that I had as much fun as Rowan did, maybe more.
Sunday we took the ferry to Vashon Island and had a laid-back afternoon at Michael & Shannon’s house. We took Peanut and Cleo with us and their two daughters Daalny (6) and Aine (4) had a ball “walking” the dogs and chasing them around. In the meantime their dog, Teak, a beautiful Golden Lab sat around looking bemused at the antics of the two little yappy-dogs.
Monday and Tuesday we went over to Stacie’s house and I got a chance to make myself useful for the first time in too many days. It seemed her sprinkler system blew out a section of pipe last winter (it froze) and sent water cascading out into her back yard. A neighbor crawled under her house and found the source pipe, cut it off and capped it nicely, restoring water service to her and her kids. So yesterday I learned the joys of “crawl spaces” which are great examples of architectural humor. Believe it or not the builder built the house about 18” off the ground (OK, maybe 24”) on pilings and called the empty space a “crawl space.” HA! Can you say “Slither Space?” Anyway I was able to slither in to where the pipe was cut, reconnoiter, and decide on the parts needed to repair same. Then I slithered out and did a Home Despot parts-run. I repeated this process three times and eventually was able to replace the pipe all the way from the source connector to the sprinkler valve box. That’s when I found that the original burst pipe was actually in the sprinkler valve box. I have no problem with the neighbor who cut and capped the source pipe because it would have been next to impossible to cut out and cap the broken section in the valve box. But now it is my job to replace said burst pipe. I’ll work on that part tomorrow. I think it’s gonna be “fun.”
Cheryl: There are many reasons for our lack of attention to the blog, but the biggest one got solved today. As Frank already mentioned, we now have High-Speed Internet access at the trailer though our TV cable provider, Comcast, (giving us 998 Channels of which we’ll probably watch 12),. Other reasons include laziness, going totally crazy on the Seattle freeways, and taking long languid walks with Peanut and Cleo in the various tree-lined parks in the vicinity of Circle K Mobile. Oh, yes, and playing Gin Rummy in Bonney Lake with my daughter, Stacie.
On Monday on the way to see said daughter, we saw a sign for the Meeker Mansion, so we stopped there only to find out it’s open Wed. thru Sun. each week. Hopefully, we’ll make an official visit before Frank takes off for Phoenix. Years ago, Frank stayed a night in Meeker, Colorado, while on a m/c trip with his buddies. I think he has posted this story before, so I won’t tell it again here. At any rate, we’re just interested to find out if there is any connection between this Meeker guy in Seattle and the one in Colorado. It appears not, as the little informative sign outside the Mansion tells of Meeker’s travel on and promotion of the Oregon Trail as his primary legacy. I also found the Neely Mansion on one of my walks down by Russell Road Park and hope to get a tour one day soon.
All in all, I’m loving staying awhile in this small suburb of Seattle called
Kent. The parks here have wonderful ball parks, playing fields, trails, dog runs, picnic tables, nice people and Green River running through them. An interesting aside: there are huge sandbag berms on both sides of the river because there is dam upstream that is about to fail and has been declared not repairable according to local doomsayers. Kent also has all the things a vagabond like me needs: Laundromat, BIG K, hair salon, MacDonald’s, Starbucks, and a Farmer’s Market every Saturday in old town. We’ve hunted down each one of them with our handy dandy Garmin GPS. It has a battery and we can take it in the trailer and program it with places we need to find next as the notion hits us. I’m set. The weather up here is delightful right now with lows in the 50s and highs in the 70s. SeaFair is scheduled for this weekend and the Blue Angels will have to fly in the rain and 68 degrees, but on Monday we’re back to sunny and the 70s again. Go figure.
I’m pretty sure this whole area runs on Espresso and Teriyaki chicken. There’s a coffee kiosk on every corner and a Teriyaki chicken take out behind every second coffee kiosk. Frank brought home two orders of Teriyaki chicken the other night, and we had at least 3 meals each out of it. This morning we followed “Jill Bitch” (back to her maiden name) to the local IHOP and had a terrific pancake breakfast (read here, two senior specials) at 10:00 a.m. This being retired shit is really groovy.
So long for now,
Slithery Sam, Gin Rummy Mamma and two pooped pups
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