Wednesday - 229th

We start off with a brilliantly sunny mprning! Warm-ish too. Or, at least as warm as we'll get for the rest of the year. A day that begs for outdoor play. But that's not the game plan for today. Ed and I are concentrating on bringing big projects to completion. And they are indoor projects. In the basement no less.

But first, a heavenly morning stroll...

And breakfast...

And we putter a little, just to avoid doing that necessary final step of getting the installed new water heater rigged up and running.

My role in that process is really to do nothing more than to ask -- how's it going? every time Ed comes up for a pause and rest. Except I do have one big job: I need to help him bring down the old water heater which right now is perched on several cinder blocks, in a tight space, surrounded by pipes, some of them innocuous, some of them horribly volatile. For what seems like the whole day but probably is no more than 90 minutes, we shift the massive calcified piece of now junk, and remove supporting bricks and cinder blocks from underneath, one at a time (Ed holds up the water heater, I slide out the bricks) so the whole thing can be eased off of its perch and moved out of the way.

Phew! Nothing explodes, no pipe is damaged, mice turds from behind the monstrosity are neatly swept away by me. (Mice were a perennial farmhouse problem before the cats took charge!)

Here's our spooky basement. Old monster water heater to the left, nifty new on-demand water heater to the right, hung on the wall above the beyond ancient clothes dryer:

 

 

I come up for air and then hightail it over to Snowdrop's home for a distanced, masked meeting. 

 

We are so lucky with the weather! I mean, no rain, no freezing winds. Let's be grateful.

 

Toward evening Ed and I finally find a handful of minutes to spend outside, In our local county park,

Yes, the days are growing shorter. But the farmhouse is so warm and now our water heater promises a winter of hot showers. 

Luxuries. Such grand luxuries!