I had an exciting Saturday night last night. I stayed home and did laundry.

The exciting part was that I COULD do laundry. The plumber was here on Saturday morning. He ran a gas line & hooked up the washing machine. Everything works. Except the hot water heater. I discovered this morning that there's no hot water in the house. I'm not sure if the pilot is out on the heater or what. Hmm. I'm going to give the plumber a call a bit later this morning & ask him what the likely cause might be.

We're taking a break from the usual warm & sunny California weather. There was a bit of a storm last night (rain & wind) & I knew it must be winter because the water pooled on the roofs of my neighbor's houses froze. It's thawed now. I wonder what the freeze does to the electrical lines running through the water on the rooftops. I wonder what my roof looks like.

The home improvement projects are continuing. I'm not sure where I last left the shower door adventure? The bathroom has a tub with a shower head but no shower door enclosure. I ordered a shower door enclosure from Goodman's Lumber down the street. They made me to & measure before they would take the order. I like this store. Timo happened by the day it arrived so he got to try out his test drive Landrover to bring the thing back to my house.

Last weekend, Kathy came by with her drill & we measured & filed & eventually ended up with six holes in the tile for the sides of the enclosure and the rest of the frame mostly in place. I had a bit more filing to do on my own. I'd never used a hacksaw or a metal file before. I don't particularly want to use them again. The fixative to hold the doors to the rollers had to set for 24 hours so we got that started and let it sit.

Then Monday night, I tried to hang the doors myself. It was 10pm on a Monday night. The doors really weren't that heavy. I lifted, put the rollers in the track and let go. The door wasn't set. The door crashed to the floor and shattered into a gazillion pieces of glass. I am very fortunate that this was tempered safety glass, not regular glass. Even so, I had a couple cuts on my right hand. And I suddenly found myself standing in a pile of glass...with no shoes. Well, I managed to get outta there without cutting my feet. I cleaned up the glass. Unfortunately, my vaccuum cleaner is still at the old house so I had to sweep everything and then wipe down all surfaces with wet paper towels. Glass fragments also went down the bathtub drain. I was standing over the bathtub drain (with shoes & gloves this time) using plyers to pick out what pieces of glass that I could grab before they went down the drain.

Today's adventure will start with trying to restore hot water. If the clouds stay away, I'll do another coat of paint on the garage door. And, if I get really ambitous, build a compost bin. There's some scrap lumber from the shelves in the garage that had to come down in order to make room for the garage door. With this yard, especially the figs & lemons, there's a lot of stuff to go in a compost bin. I like this yard...now. I can see a time when the yard could get to be very tiring.

Stacey