buses in the CD

 

The buses in our new neighborhood are better than we realized, with the significant exception of getting to Jack’s office.   Multiple bues run to the Mount Baker light rail station, which is great for getting to our parents’ neighborhoods.

Portland 2016

 

In July we visited friends down in Portland.  We ate outside, played a game and went to the zoo!

experiencing the details

Now that we are living in our house we are up close and personal with all the design decisions we've made over the last several years. Mentally I separate these into three different categories as follows:

1) visions made into a satisfying reality

2) design mistakes
3) construction mistakes 

Considering the massive amount of decisions we made I'm happy to say that most fit in to category one.

Category two is relatively small. The biggest are probably one window that is way too low and needs a safety fix and for me (but not Jack) a lot of other windows which meet code but feel low when open.   There are also two faucets out of seven which aren't really working for the sinks they are in. 

Category three, on the other hand, consists of the kind of things that are easy to fixate on and I'm trying to let them go.  Examples are the height of some custom bookshelves in the kitchen and the overhang of the kitchen counters on one side which requires opening a drawer in order to wipe the counter into your hand. The planned blocking in our closet is also not where it was meticulously planned out to be. The tile colors in our bathroom weren't done right either, though some have been corrected.

99.9% isn't bad though

sailing success

On Sunday my dad and I carved out time for a two-handed (Jack and Jill) race out of Shilshole.  This involved a three hour motor up from Des Moines starting at 7 am on Sunday and my mom helping with the return voyage while I went back to work.  Jack spent a somewhat taxing day on his own in our disheveled house with D.  What a great family I have.

It was my fist two handed race, which actually means having four hands, funnily enough.  We did not finish last.

To elaborate, we were 31 of 37 overall and 5th of 6 in our class.  We had a good finish, a start with very light wind and a period without any wind mid race as the weather shifted from a south to a north wind.  The main strategic discussion centered on going close to shore where the tide was helping us versus heading way out the center of the channel where the wind might have been better.

After we crossed the line we kept the spinnaker up and breezed into Elliot Bay Marina, past a parade of departing cruise ships.