In which I confess

I don't like gardening.

I am programmed to think I should get up before dawn each lovely summer's morn (which is almost all of them here in Utah) and enjoy the peace, quiet, and cool as I pull pernicious weeds endangering my precious, thriving vegetables. My heart tells me I should devote several hours a week to raising all the produce a family of nine can consume, and I should take great pride in doing so.

My brain says, why? The grocery stores are full of the stuff, and a buck for a huge bunch of spinach certainly isn't my biggest grocery expenditure.

We Mormons have a pretty advanced sense of guilt. It's pretty common to feel really crappy for things we aren't doing, aren't doing well enough, do too much of, etc. We even tend to feel guilt for things other people do or don't do, if we can in any way tie their actions to our behaviors or deficiencies. And as I said before with the programming, we Mormons are Gardeners. We believe in being proficient at raising our own food and being able to care for ourselves. It isn't dogma, but it's certainly part of the culture.

Except, if I'm getting up pre-dawn on lovely summer mornings, which I am, I want to be outside running. I'm not a gardener, I'm an exerciser.

I don't have pride in a well-organized garden plot, I don't feel a sense of accomplishment from neat rows of carrots and cabbage, and when the weeds overtake the crops I think, "Oh well, I don't feel like pulling them."

But I totally want to lift weights, to jog, and to walk briskly up steep hills. This gives me a sense of well-being, accomplishment, and, yes, pride. To be almost 40 and still improving my physical condition! That's worth 20 bushels of home-grown spinach to me.

If only I could release the faint sense of guilt that whispers, "But the garden is the worthier pursuit."

In other news, I've totally revamped my exercise program. (Instead of gardening.) I feel great. But I've decided I can't weigh myself more often than fortnightly, perhaps even monthly. Because after a hard week of working out when I see the needle in the same place or (horrors!) even half a pound up, I think GAH it isn't working it doesn't matter what I do and then I eat whatever I want. Counter-productive. Solution: no weighing. Yay!

And no gardening.

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Now playing: Ludovico Einaudi - Andare
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Sixteen years ago today

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Now playing: U2 - All I Want Is You
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Ahhhhhh

Had a lovely shower this morning, very warm 'til the end, despite the fact that I was simultaneously running the dishwasher, and with no constant upwards temperature adjustments necessary!

Brandon left here at 12:30 a.m. Dishwasher ran last night. Lee hot water is once more in business. :D

The luxuries that are necessities

Our ability to heat water, as a list:

1. Last week: Blaine walks downstairs into furnace room, and goes splish-splash. The water heater was leaking. It's a relatively new thing, the last time we went down all was dry, but it had been going on long enough to soak some things at floor level and do a little damage to the wood crib we were fixing to give away.
2. Time to shop for a new water heater. We've always wanted tankless! We both used them in Japan and they rocked. *research research*
3. Despite good experiences in Japan, installing tankless water heaters in a house like this, with hot water needs sprawled all over (two baths, kitchen in opposite corner, laundry room sort of in the middle, future plans for another far-flung bathroom) would not be economical, nor would it be able to give us the "endless" hot water supply the promotional literature claims.
4. Friday night: We decide on tanks. Two of them, 40 gallons each, connected in series. Which means that the cold water goes in first, and then the hot water output of the first goes into the cold water intake of the second. So in the best of circumstances, like first thing in the morning, we have 80 gallons of hot water. (Our old heater is 30 gallons, so 80 feels like an ocean.) In the worst of circumstances—after a long day of laundry and dishes etc.—we should still have 40 gallons because the one heater will preheat the water for the second heater, cutting down heat time.
5. We find a willing neighbor. God bless Brandon Hendricks, seriously. He grew up doing HVAC and has installed, in his words, "hundreds of water heaters." Including his own in the house he built for his family last summer. He said, and I'm not joking, "I'm tired of working on my house. It will be a nice break on my day off to work on your house instead." Is this man not a candidate for sainthood?
6. Today, 8:30 a.m. Blaine runs to hardware store to buy one thing Home Depot didn't have Friday night.
7. 11:00 a.m.: We take out crappy old 30-gallon water heater. Good riddance! Emma and Christian drain it bucketful by bucketful.
8. Blaine and Brandon make two more trips to the hardware store.
   
9. 2:30 p.m., the serious work begins with the vent, which needs a little upgrading since it will now be venting two water heaters in place of one. Here's where it gets really interesting. :D
10. The vent is in pieces in an old chimney, not even connected to each other. (Thank heavens we didn't all die of carbon monoxide poisoning, since it wasn't being properly vented!) It takes them the better part of a day, like six hours, to pull that vent apart in pieces and drag it out.
11. And then the new venting won't go in.
12. Several hours of panic ensue, in which we try to divine why the brick chimney winds and turns this way and that, and give up hope of ever getting the venting installed. There is serious talk of breaking through the walls on two floors to feed the vent up, and serious talk that that's the only way the original venting was installed.
13. After a few hours of hand-wringing (my hands more than anyone's) B makes a little two-brick size hole in Christian's bedroom, and miraculously finds The Blockage that is preventing the venting from fulfilling its duties. He clears out a brick and some thisnthat and with a hefty shove of a PVC pipe (venting what?) and some tugging and shouting, the water heater vent goes up!
14. Just as it is getting almost too dark to work, the men are on the roof doing the bird-proof cap on top. Voila! A regulation, code-compliant vent from basement to roof, and almost no crumbling interior walls I can't afford to fix!
15. Moments ago: Blaine and Christian have just finished carrying down the two massive water heaters.

I suspect running the pipe and getting it all functional will still take hours yet, and it's 10:18 p.m. But there's no more talk at least of ripping the house apart to install vent, and about this I am grateful and relieved. I've got my fingers crossed that I can take a hot shower tomorrow, and perhaps run a load of dishes in the dishwasher tonight. Though I'm not holding my breath about that last one.

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Now playing: Marty Robbins - Cool Water
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"Summer" Vacation

It's the penultimate day of school for kids around here, and our schedule is going to lighten up considerably starting next week, too. So: yay! Celebration!

What do the kids want to do today? Play outside.

In the snow. You can see the trees are leafing out, that our hose is hooked up and we've been actively sprinkling the lawn, and that our neighbors have tomatoes already planted in their garden, surrounded by those green wall o' waters. You can see the trampoline, too, just waiting to spray powder over anyone willing to jump.

Here's another view of the back yard, with the heavy, gray clouds hanging over everything and obscuring the not-too-distant mountains from view. What didn't come over so well was the snowflakes actively falling right then. And right now, for that matter.

And just two days ago the temperature was in the 80s and absolutely gorgeous. All the  windows were open. The grass and dirt were dry, hence the need to use sprinklers. :) Here are pictures from last week (13 May) when Jackson, Ethan, and Kyrie went outside to play in their PJs before bedtime.




Christian just went out to rescue the as-yet-unblossomed lilac bush from its heavy burden of snow. Barefoot. He came back in saying, "Brrrr!"

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Now playing: The Brian Setzer Orchestra - Jump Jive an' Wail
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