The Saga of the Hot Water Heater.

Xena and Caitlan bought a water heater and brought it home in the tiny car. Gently. I heard all about shopping at Home Depot in high heels. Caitlan wondered, "Why was everyone calling me 'Dorothy?'"

A couple days later while unboxing it I saw the bottom was crumpled, as though the unit had been dropped from a great height. It had been purchased on Caitlan's debit card, so I called her away from spending the day with her boyfriend. She brought him and his van. The box fit much better in that vehicle than in our Geo Metro.

At the store I explained it was damaged. "Not a problem. Go find a replacement and we'll swap it out." We could only find a different model. They didn't have a replacement; this damaged one was the only unit. They couldn't swap it, and I didn't want a different model.

"When will you get the next shipment?' I asked.

They checked. "We can't tell. But there is an identical model at our store down the freeway. Here, let's credit you back this purchase." We drove to the other store, picked out the unit, talked our way into the same great price that Xena had gotten on the first water heater, and went to pay for it. The card got declined, since it takes 24 hours for the reimbursement to process. "Don't you have another way to pay for it?" Not then we didn't!

I dropped into a really crummy mood, but I made sure the kids knew I was very grateful for their help.

More time passed, without hot water in the kitchen.

Our tax refund came in. I rented a truck, drove to the hardware store (no project is complete until I've been at least three times) and bought the unit. I couldn't get them to give me the $90 discount that Xena and Caitlan had managed. On the same excursion I picked up a mattress and box spring from my friend Nika. "How's it going?" she asked.

"Well, I have a funny feeling about the water heater I'm installing tomorrow," I confessed.

The next day, rusted-solid pipe joints yielded to WD-40 and stern words from Xena. We got the old heater out and immediately drove it over to the scrap metal yard and then returned the truck. All day long my wonderful neighbors kept offering to help. "Is it time yet? Do you need help?" The project was so linear that I didn't, but it felt great knowing that if I needed something they would be there for me. I got the new unit in position. I went to hook up the gas and realized I'd left the connector in the other water heater. I drove back to the scrap yard and unscrewed it.

Back home, the cold water pipe (with the shut-off valve) couldn't quite align with the parts I had. I went back to Home Depot and got a longer flexible copper connector. There on the warehouse floor was the damaged unit I'd returned, with the box very definitely the worse for wear! They had also received new identical models! Oh, well.

Back home, everything all connected, I pressurized the system. A few minor leaks appeared. A quarter turn here and there and the pipes seated nicely.

I read the lighting instructions. Cool! It's got a piezo-electric igniter! I fired it up. Nothing. "Continue clicking the igniter until the pilot lights. Do not attempt to light by hand." Fine.

Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.

Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

"OH FOR PETE'S SAKE! XENA!" I roared. "IT'S YOUR TURN!"

"What's wrong?"

"THE DAMN THING WON'T LIGHT AND I NEED YOU TO TAKE OVER RIGHT NOW!"

In an extremely reasonable voice she asked, "Isn't there a phone number you can call?"

But I was beyond reasonability. "PROBABLY, BUT IT'S UP TO YOU NOW. I CANNOT DEAL WITH THIS EVEN ONE MORE SECOND!" I stormed away.

God bless her, she let me go. Betsy asked what was up. I felt so much better now that I wasn't in the same room as the water heater. "Oh, I've installed it and it won't light. So I've asked Xena to take over."

"That's pretty great, that she is doing that. Once, not too long ago, it would have been your job and she'd have told you, 'Just march yourself right back down there and take care of it!'"

I've got to agree, this was much better. I'd have burst an aorta if I'd been unable to hand off the project at that moment.

Xena and Nicholas fussed with it for a while and couldn't get it to light either. Xena came back upstairs and I went down to hang out with Nicholas as I was feeling much better. He and I fiddled with it for a few minutes, and it lit!

As far as I know, he and I didn't do anything unique or different. But it lit. Random elements at play, as they have been for some time, in my life and home and family.

So now we have hot water in the back half of the house again. There's been something of a rush on washing dishes. "Oh, it's so nice to wash dishes in warm water!" everyone keeps saying. I predict the novelty will wear off before i even finish typing this post, but it's fun to hear people excited to wash dishes instead of dragging themselves to do it.

A final footnote: Xena has found that the next model larger is now $10 cheaper.

Short Attention Span Day

I started a group on Facebook, "Short Attention Span" day.

Xena and I planned to paint the ceiling in our bedroom. It's an oppressive smoggy pink, a sort of intestinal mucosal membrane color. Short Attention Span to the rescue! Instead, two leather love seats, a handful of ottomans and a few sacks of craft supplies came home. Instead, we drove out to Napa and bought a 22' travel trailer. Instead, I did laundry and vacuumed. Instead, Karl and I caught bees (I got a small sting). Instead, we scheduled to go look at a vegie oil Mercedes. Instead, I babysat our chiropractor's lovely daughter. Instead, we partied with an impromptu bar-b-que. Instead, I foraged urban lemons. Instead, we began moving stuff into the attic.

So what's the progress on painting? We bought paint (yes, it's the enviro-friendly zero VOC kind!), we did some room prep, and Xena scrubbed part of a window's trim with TSP.

Heating and Energy Use

Last year we had housemates running electric heaters in 4 and 5 rooms. The electric bill was $800 per month. And still no-one felt very warm.

"This house is so cold!"

"Wear a hat. That's the number one thing you can do for the environment to keep from heating your house too much."

"We have to have heat!"

There is a forced air furnace, here; unfortunately it was installed to heat 3, southwest facing, upper story rooms. And that's all. Those three rooms got plenty warm from sunlight alone, while bottom floor, northern rooms stayed cold.

I'm changing that.

Liz asked me this morning, "Did you make holes into the inside of the house? Am I breathing stuff from inside the walls?"

"Yes, I did. No, you're not," I told her.

"It's just that last night I heard some crazy stuff like right through the walls and that big duct you put in."

"Oh, that was me working."

"In the middle of the night?"

"Yeah, I sorta lost track of time. I knew it was late, but I didn't know it was midnight." I had cut holes in walls for ducts until possibly 11 pm with a battery-powered saws-all. It was really noisy. Then I pulled ducts through walls, taped them up, and finally fired up the system and set off a smoke detector, probably because I'd dropped sawdust down into the fire chamber. I owe everybody an apology for making so much racket past bedtime.

"Geez," She said. "Well, are you done?"

"No, I still have to go through two more walls and a floor to get heat into your room."

"Is that hard? Will it damage the value of the house?

"It's hard, but it won't damage the house."

"I have some of that plastic film to go over windows, too. That would help my room stay warm, wouldn't it?"

"Yep."

Once again I find myself at the intersection of using the existing infrastructure while also trying to minimize consumption of non-renewable resources. Natural gas is a way better choice for heating than electricity, and in this north-south oriented home I can't retrofit a passive solar heating system into it. But I can certainly eliminate 15 to 20 kWh of electricity used for running heaters!

I'm aiming to have a household of 11 people using about 18kWh per day. Or less.

A Good Work Party

What a fun day. Not only did we accomplish many tasks, but we had great fun getting them done (or not getting them done and just being together). Last night I ditched the bonfire and walked with Liz and Karl to a pub and saw a decent band, danced a little, and on the way home enjoyed Liz's rant about going out versus staying home by the fire. I can't share it with you, sorry. Rolling in to bed at 2 am, Xena asked me, "Don't you have a work party tomorrow?" Yes I do, but Karl is foreman, and he's out late too, so it'll all be good. I woke up still giggling about what Liz said.

Task one is to clear the driveway for 4 cubic yards of drain gravel. Xena ordered it while I was at Home Depot scratching my head over parts for the heating project. The vegie-oil bus had to move. Betsy and Jori are pros at getting that thing down our makeshift ramps, now.

Yes, Jori is a staff member. Our only staff member. 'Cause he's got the shirt.

Falling rock. Nicholas successfully avoided getting buried. We paid the guy with our ATM number and lemons.

Then we had to put the pile where we wanted it.

Liz and Christine got busy in the kitchen (make sure you use every pot, pan and knife, ladies!) getting dinner ready . Nini fed us lunch and kept us hydrated. Other people kept children busy or out of the way, helped move the furnace, lit pilot lights, shoved furniture around, re-varnished a weather-beaten door,and what all else I don't really know. I wasn't in charge at that level. I finally get to be the vision guy and the skilled labor guy, and leave the job of coordinating to people who excel at it.

"No foolin', we grew potatoes this big when I was a kid. In the planter box outside the kitchen window. Call my mom, she'll tell you."

"So is a hole twice this size, twice as heavy?"

We dug a sort of cistern, lined it with geotextile and later filled it with rock. It'll fill with water that used to run into Karl and Nini's and saturate the soil here, helping nourish the plum and willow. Eventually we'll tap into it and feed the raised beds.

Worms can be a girl's best pet.

Aaron keeps his hands from getting crushed as Karl loads in drain rock.

I cut holes in walls. I also answered questions, but mostly I left managing to Karl and Xena. They were brilliant. I've got an air return almost all the way to the furnace. Tomorrow, heat in the downstairs!

Giles and a neighbor planted raspberries. It's fun to go wilding and forage berries in the world, but it's also fun to grow them yourself if you are lucky enough to have a strip of soil with concrete on both sides. The berries will be forced to behave. I hope.

After dinner we sat in the living room and fed anyone under twelve rootbeer floats. I took a great pic of Liz with the cat, dog, three little girls and two adults all snuggled up together, but the camera ate the picture. I remember seeing it, but now it's gone. Odd. We watched "Schooled," a well-intentioned dram-entary about Free Schools; partway through Christine exclaimed, "Now I understand Aaron!" None of us is sure what she meant by that, but we all thought it was tremendously funny.

Then to settle our own selves we watched Super Troopers.

Waste

It's about this stage of a toilet project that the permie in me just wants to tear a hole in the outside wall and make the thing into a composting toilet. Or at least use Steve's idea and flush with reclaimed water or untreated well water. It's just crazy to use potable water for waste removal. Maybe it's crazier to realize that doing so is crazy, and yet going ahead and building it in anyway.

I bought the bulk-pack of wax toilet seals.

In Which I Find Another Project and an Answer, too.

We were hanging out in Karl and Nini's kitchen. I excused myself to use the restroom. This is the water closet that I did all that extensive work to run a 4" waste line that didn't go up and through the footing like the one that came with the house, and I love how great the new plumbing and fixture works.

My eyes wandered about the little room, and I noticed the ceiling in the back looked sort of water damaged. "Hmmm," went the little curious part of my brain. I picked a likely looking spot and poked the ceiling. My finger pierced it easily and water ran out. Now the rest of my brain had something to do, so the curious part took a break.

Karl poked his head in. "Whatcha doin'?"

"Making a problem."

"Oh, Bob. What did you do?"

"I found a leak." Karl started to laugh. "It's not funny, except in the most tragic way. Do you realize this means I'm yet another project behind?"

"Or," he says, "maybe you've caught it in time and it's still a small project."

Yeah, that's likely. I went upstairs and pulled the toilet up. A little sleuthing, and here's what I found:


The previous owner installed the retention ring without actually attaching to the drain. In fact, there is a 1" gap and here you can see a bit of downstairs through the gap. It had been filled with material from several wax toilet seals, but this eventually failed. In order to attach the ring in this manner, they had to take the mounting adapter off the ring and drill through the tile in 6 places with a masonry bit to attach it to the floor (when it should attach to the pipe).

Of course, the floor is rotting. Water does that to wood. I should probably mention the squirrel nest I found between the joists, too.

On the plus side, I caught this before anyone doing their business fell through the floor onto someone else doing their business below. While that would be a funny story, the liability just makes my flesh crawl.

On the other plus side, finding a problem like this in the first couple of months of living here would have been very demoralizing. Now, two years after replacing nearly every door, fixing plumbing left and right, laying carpet, finding compatible housemates and all the other challenges, a job of tearing up the floor and subfloor, replacing the rotted wood, plumbing in the correct kind of fitting, and installing some sort of pleasant marmoluem floor and finally putting the toilet back seems like a task I can get done in a day.

Being supremely unwrecked, I went to work today and had a great day.

The previous owner stopped over next door for a visit. We chatted about the election's big winner. No, not Obama, but all the rest of us who don't sit on a board of directors or happen to be CEOs of a large money-lending institution.

"Say, Hussein, tell me about the downstairs toilet."

He said, "Are you ready to sell the house back to me?"

"No, of course not. We're having too much fun. But I am curious why you ran the waste line up and through the foundation."

"Oh, I did that for earthquakes. You won't have any trouble with that toilet."

"Except that it didn't flush. The water just swirled around and slowly drained down, never actually flushing."

"Y'know," he non-sequitered, "I didn't put up an Obama sign in my yard. I didn't want to provoke the neighbors."

A Full Day

Yesterday was on the high end of typical around here. Aaron and Jori tended bees, Karl smashed and organized, Liz cooked and played, the little ones played and fought, Nini and I shopped and got blessed by the Serendipity Fairy.

Karl went over to the beehives to peek in on Aaron and Jori's success. "We've emptied the observation hive completely, cleaned out the dead bees and drilled some more access holes. Now we're working on harvesting the first hive; we've got 5 gallons of honey so far." A guard bee zeroed in on Karl.

"Augh! It's in my hair!" He ran off a bit, swatting at his head.

"Huh, that's funny," said Jori. "We haven't got a single sting yet."

"It must be my bear-like nature," said Karl.

Karl pounded through a section of the concrete path, opening up the dam. Our backyard floods in the rains. The previous homeowner poured a path that ended up acting as a dam, creating a nice four-inch-deep pond. Now the water should drain away. We'll be digging some infiltration fields in non-travelled parts of the yard to let water recharge the soil.

Liz made an amazing amount of breakfast. Three fragrant herbal teas complemented the meal. I let the vapors waft over my face and the red clover and mate' blend spoke to me. I took a sip and burst out in goosebumps. "See? You're on the right path!" Liz said. "You took the one you should have."

We loaded up the van with stuff we'd used up and made a dump run. It's hard to throw away things that if they were made differently could be disassembled and used for raw materials, such as car seats for children. We did have a fair amount (30 pounds or so) of large recycle-ables. I tried to throw out a mildew-stained hammock. "Oo! That material is so nice looking!" Nini said. "Do you need to throw it out? May I have it? I'll make something with it!" Later, back home, Karl smiled knowingly and shook his head at me.

"If you'd cut it up like I told you to, you could have left it at the dump."

Nini and I detoured past the Wooden Duck furniture factory and scored two trash bags of small wood shavings, perfect for bedding for the chickens. And another 100 yards down the road we found a pile of tree trunk cuts. They were heavy and too green to burn this year, but I'll be getting a splitting wedge and breaking them up for burning next summer.

Next we went to Urban Ore and found a cabinet that looked to be a perfect fit for the new sink/countertop we're installing in Karl and Nini's space. I grabbed the loudest transport dolly. Banging down the aisles at at he decibel level of a jet engine, I stopped conversations cold.

Back home, Karl and I test-fit the cabinet. I got to work trimming it to fit around the foundation. Nini got to work cooking. Friends (Anders and Robin) showed up, and I continued to stop conversations by running the circle saw through the cabinet. At one point there was pizza coming out of the oven, people going upstairs/downstairs carrying water, phones ringing, girls eating, and sawdust flying. It was far too much activity for one kitchen, but about the right amount for the seven people who were in it. Anders slumped in his chair, smiled at no one in particular, and mused, "I wonder if this could become more chaotic?" Ten minutes later he was asleep in the spare room, utterly worn out.

Aaron asked if we wanted a nice sink. "I have a sink already," I told him. So he went to Karl and asked.

"Bob," said Karl. "This other sink is really nice."

Nini had a look at it. "I really like it." So I called the owner of the sink, who moved out over a year ago and left it behind, to ask if I could use it. No answer, and I decided that we could store it "in use" as easily as we could store it behind the house, so I dropped it into the cabinet.

Xena called from the grocery store. "What kind of beer do you want?" She and Betsy started to cook upstairs. I got a big bowl of coconut curry later.

Betsy and Jori invited friends over and started a bonfire. Liz and Joseph returned from the Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco. I hooked up the drain and tested it (no leaks!!) and Karl cleaned up. He'd already mostly finished re-organizing the storage shed: "Bob, it is clear to me this was an artist's storage space. Now, however, it's organized." I didn't feel judged.

Finally, day winding down, I sat around the campfire. Nicholas come out and played his guitar for a bit. When he went inside, I tapped the strings until I drove Marc crazy. "Give me that. I don't play much, but I know a couple of songs." I still didn't feel judged.

Much later, after typical bonfire conversation (sex, drugs, rock and roll, politics, belief systems) my bed was already filled with Xena, Nicholas and the cat. Snuggling in, I felt very content with the tapestry of the day.

They said it couldn't be done...

Or, rather, two contractors and a plumber told me that in order to "repair" the downstairs toilet, I'd have to hire them to tear out the wall, break through the foundation, bust out the old sewer line, and then rebuild everything correctly. I thought they were all wrong. Surely the correct course of action would be to leave as much of the house intact as possible and simply tunnel underneath the foundation? Notice the asbestos tiles all over the side of the house? C'mon, aren't you guys professionals or something?

Yep, we are, and the right way to do the job is demolition and reconstruction.

Hmm, I thought. How hard can it be?

So here's the problem that we bought with the house: a sewer line through the slab that for some reason effluent flows back up through. Room full of flies year-round. Note the "vent" that vents into the room. Sweet. Previous owner stuffed a plastic bag in it to cut down the odors. Maggots lived under the carpet. Ick. Way, way ick.

My first "solution:" put the toilet up on a pedestal. The extra drop provided the necessary pressure to force waste through the line. Unintended benefit (that's a permie term) was that I didn't have to aim at all; the bowl was that much closer. Not-so-good was the increase water use. This toilet takes 5 gallons or more to flush. A year later I am ready to tackle doing the project as correctly as I can.

Outside the house, the 4" line appears to pierce the footing, and has this odd "step" poured around it. "You know, Bob," said Karl, "You have to assume that the people who did this job in the first place were at least as smart as us. So if they did it this way, there had to be a reason. Maybe there's something big in the way, or the geometry of the curve is all wrong in order to make a straight shot to this outside line."

I dug a hole.

I busted off the concrete block. Nothing big was in the way. I saw that they'd completely broken through the footing. They plumbed the 4" line uphill. Small wonder that toilet wouldn't flush. Water and waste doesn't flow uphill so very well. I dug some more, up under the house. The soil is heavy compacted clay, so a cave-in wasn't high on my list of worries, but it was there nonetheless. I worked on pulling the old cast iron pipe out.

Here's the part of the job that nearly wrecked me. Pounding through the slab as I was feeling like God has given me too big a job resulted in 4 hours of work to chip out an area you couldn't pack a quesadilla into. Devastated, I took a time out, got my head right with my heart, and suddenly the pick started finding all the weak spots in the concrete. 30 minutes later, I had this nice hole. Thanks, God. Sorry about that whole despair moment.

Of course, a hole under your house, aligned with a break in the foundation by a previous owner, is a bad thing. So I quickly glued up the new 4" ABS sewer line (complete with a vent on the outside, set to go past the roof line), connected it to the outside pipe, ran it into the watercloset, and started re-packing the earth. My practice with cob and rammed earth came in handy here! Pound, pound pound. Mix clay and water and sand. Pound, pound, pound. Pound until the ground is shiny. Then add another 2 inches or so and pound again. Pound, pound pound. 4 pound sledge and 8 pound sledge. Pound, pound pound.

Shape the hole to provide the form so the new concrete I pour will tie the old foundation back together. Pound, pound pound.

I am really tired of pounding. I think that's the part that all the professionals were trying to avoid, with their massive intervention strategy. I can report, however, that this corner of the house is better supported, now. And no asbestos got introduced into the environment. I filled not only voids I made, but voids I found, too. Cleaning up, I caught a glimpse of myself as I came out of the shower. "Hey Xena, lookit! I've got muscles!"

"No honey," she corrected me, "You're just swollen. Muscles do that when they get overused. Four days of effort isn't enough to build them up like that. They'll go back down."

Dang.

The capstone to the project? Installing this new, ultra low flow toilet! Yay! We qualify for the EBMUD $150 rebate, now! Well, and also, we have a toilet that a 4-year-old won't fall behind in the middle of the night.

And I have a physique for another 24 hours or so.

Ritual, not routine

I'm taking a week to get my head a bit more together, but here's a couple of pics to tide you over. Above, we colored eggs together. Below, I helped Xena install a wood floor in one of the rooms we're pretty sure isn't going to flood anymore.

We got the floor second-hand from Urban Ore. Shopping at places like that seems a good compromise between Al Gore's message of "Shop your way into environmental responsibility" and sitting in a dark corner trying not to breathe too much oxygen.

Kachina Katrina

Julia Roll came over and helped introduce Kachina to the bees. It was raining, so they didn't do much. She might come back to help harvest some honey. Sorry about the crappy picture; my camera has started acting up.

Kachina moved in about two months ago. She's been super flexible with her living arrangement. The back room of her studio is the community storage, which sort of sucks for her, but we've got plans to solve that.

She's just now getting her space set up so it works well for her. She's got that fun/funky design sense you might expect from a twenty-something who spent some time working with Portland's City Repair project. She vanished into the bowels of Urban Ore last weekend and came back with this gorgeous wall cabinet. Her friend Danny installed it. He will also help us put a new door on her studio. She really needs one; the current door is drafty, and it makes her room cold, and she gets cranky when she's cold.

Other than that, she's amazing, a bright spirit with powerful networking talents. She works for the Urban Alliance for Sustainability. She's my helpmate for planning the seminar series that I've been dreaming of having at the Home of the Future for the past two years.

She's also my number one cheerleader when we are at an event. I often find myself being grabbed and planted in front of someone while Kachina says, "Have you met my friend Bob? He's got a community, shared housing project where he's doing urban permaculture. You guys should talk."

More "green" home improvement

I wanted to fix up my house last year. I wanted to do it cheaply and I wanted to use high-quality products from renewable resources.

I could find very few materials that matched my criteria. So I either went without ("Bob! I am sick and tired of having a bedroom floor that consists of painter's dropcloths!"), improvised ("Lookit this, honey! I made an electrical receptacle from a coat hanger!") found it free on craigslist and paid the price later ("Yep, the refrigerator costs $100 each month in electricity, but at least it was free!"), or paid the price up front ("Bob, I bought the most expensive paint I could find. It's so non-toxic we could eat it for the minerals. And I'm taking the cost of it out of my rent payment. I'm sure that's okay with you. And I want you to help me paint my room. It's your house, after all.")

My newest housemates made it abundantly clear that I absolutely had to have their daughter's room carpeted before they moved in. We'd already messed up getting their bedroom carpeted (now they are living over the painter's dropcloths, darn it). And we'd made the mistake of showing their daughter the room when it was full of Caitlan's abandoned "I'm off to school now!" crap.

"Honey, this will be your room. Look at the nice pink swirls on the walls!" The little girl looked instead upon the dumpster-like effluvia filling the room and burst into tears.

Supremely motivated, and using typical male "I can fix this by building something" energy, I sped to Home Depot. The trip was fruitful in terms of realizing how much I didn't want to buy carpet there.

I went to Dick's Carpet One on Ashby, hoping to find a remnant at least 13x13 to lay down. I found a medium quality wool carpet with a jute backing, in bright magenta. It's a perfect match for the room's swirly accents. And it's from entirely renewable resources. And it's a leftover piece, and it's new!


After I bought it, I looked around the store a little. Linda Di Bona helped me.

"We're now getting green flooring product remnants," she said, showing me some natural linoleum flooring. "And I'm actively looking for FSC wood flooring." She told me about some vendors who are saying they are all green and certified, but they "don't quite have the labeling."

I'm looking at those rolls of flooring, and realizing that they are about 1/2 price, and that even though they are smaller than the room, it's relatively easy to make designs and patterns with them. I just might get to fulfill all my dreams of renovating my house with safe, non-toxic, earth-friendly products!

Shades of "The Money Pit"

Poor Nicholas decided to chase the cat around the attic, with somewhat predictable results.

Sigh.

As if I don't have enough home improvement projects going on already, from building a laundry room to leveling slabs, building out a shower stall, replacing doors and locks and carpet and painting and fixing broken handles in a bathtub, now I get to repair the hole in the kitchen ceiling.

Everything has a silver lining: repainting the kitchen (we love the yellow, but there's just so darn much of it) just moved forward in the queue.

Nicholas is fine, by the way, with only a pretty large bruise and some medium sized scrapes. "I had to save the cat!" he says. Xena and I are already laughing about it (in a rueful way, but laughter nonetheless). The mood was pretty tense for a few heartbeats as frustration, fear, compassion and love all battled for first position for the words coming out of my mouth.

I'm happy to report, the scolding was pretty minimal, while concern for Nick's wellbeing was very much in evidence. And of course, there was much good-natured ribbing the rest of the day, from us as well as from Liz, who witnessed it, and our new tenants, who were over to help out in the workparty to get the downstairs fixed up a bit.