So Sad

A sad story out today, that started on our local news stations, but is now getting national play.  Tragedy has that effect.

Sand collapse kills 9-year-old girl at Oregon beach

My gosh.  What parent hasn't had a kid declare that they are going to dig a hole to China while playing at the beach?  And you giggle, and watch them dig away.  As long as they wait half-an-hour after eating before they go swimming, and put on sun block...how much trouble do you think your kid is going to get into digging in the sand?

Yet...it's the third 'sand cave-in' related fatality this year! 

And yeah...I gave my kids a big hug after reading this story.  My heart goes out the family in this one. 

It's a challenge.

I don't talk finances too much around here, other than trying to promote a low level of personal fiscal responsibility. 

A week or two ago, my wife and I had to sit down an have a fairly serious discussion about finances.  Without talking numbers, I feel I make good money.  It's enough to lure me away from a cushy federal job, and allow my wife to concentrate on home schooling.  If you had told 25 year old newly married me, living off E-5 pay in the Navy, that I what I make now is 'not enough', I would have thought you were crazy.

Before I bring the mood down too much and you think I am throwing a pity party...luckily, my wife and I are having this conversation not because things are going badly, but more because they are not going the right direction as fast as they should be.  We intentionally bought less house than we could afford(or, settled for 'enough' house instead of getting more than we needed), with the intent of using the money we weren't spending on a house to get land at some point.

One thing we kind of overlooked though, was that the right thing to do first was get out of debt. Once upon a time, when we moved out of Western Washington, our home we owned there spent 22 months on the market before selling...and even then, sold for 20K less than we paid for it.   Sad Story...and over that time, we(I) allowed one of our credit card balances to creep up, and up.

We are not full on Dave Ramsey followers, but I like a lot of what he says, and so we are following his route to clearing our debt...pay off the smallest loan/debt first, and work your way up.  It's working...I only have three payments(or one lump check) left on my used F-150.  After that, it's 6-9 months on clearing the student loans we took when my wife worked on her LPN license(crazy...school we could afford, it was the child care that killed us)...and then, the credit card. 

It's just, that while follow that path, the finance charges on the credit card hurt, eating into the other money I was hoping we would start building towards a vacation property down payment.  Basically...we were trying to follow only part of Ramsey's method...in his world, you put every red cent into debt reduction...we were trying to play both sides of the fence, and finally admitted to each other that we aren't going to get there.  Time to put the 'vacation property' idea on hold for a year or two.

Sigh.

But hey, look...fresh bread!

In an effort to jump start us in the right direction, my wife issued some kind of 2-Week No Spending Death Challenge.  Basically, all we are supposed to spend money on this two week period is gas so I can get to work, and milk.  We originally had bread on the allowable expenses list but I said, hey...I can make bread(came out okay...only got about 75% of the rise I was hoping for, but it slices good and holds up well) and that will save an extra $6-10.  However...I did NOT offer to drink powdered milk.

Are we actually going to save any money?  Yeah...I think by cutting out 'impulse' buys, and my tendency to always buy something more than I meant to whenever I hit the store on the way home...we will spend less money this week than most other two week periods. 

It's also good because it is forcing us to use stuff form the pantry/freezer we not usually use. Yesterday for dinner, I did a corned beef that I bought back in March and forgot about. 

Once this is over, we will need to restock some things...but luckily, we are in a position with food storage that we can be patient, and wait for sales.  Plus, I already told my wife we will hold off on stocking up on meats.  Hunting season is a month away, and we will wait an see how that goes before spending too much money on meat.

I will hunt them down...

So there I was, minding my own business, when my daughter comes into living room, and tells me 'Dad...there is a lot of water on the floor in laundry room...and it looks like it is spraying down from the ceiling'.

Well...that gets a reaction.  There was a lot of water on the floor in the laundry room(and seeping into the family room carpet)...but the good news is that it was coming out the plastic tubing running to the ice machine, and not from some other more horrifying source.

That is where the good news stopped.

I followed the tubing back to it's source...and yay!  there was a valve! 

However...when I shut the valve, the water didn't stop.  First off...the little needle valve was tough to turn...I actually put a crescent wrench on it to turn it...and when I reached the torque point where I started to worry that I was going to snap the valve body...I stopped torqueing, and started looking upstream for another valve to shut.

There wasn't one...other than the main shut-off valve coming into the house. 

Some idiot(I'm assuming it was the previous owner), installed a self-lapping saddle valve on a portion of piping that there was no other way to isolate.

I didn't know it was a 'self-lapping saddle valve' until I got to the hardware store with my pictures to find a solution to the problem.  The short-term solution was closing the house shut-off valve...which I did when I found out the needle valve didn't stop the flow.  Long term...well, I was hoping I could replace the valve, but...when I got to the store and saw how a saddle valve worked, that didn't seem like a good plan. Instead, I went with plan 'B'...disconnect the fitting where the tubing goes in, and cap that off. 

Mission successful.  I restored water to the house, and the kids got to brush their teeth before bed time. 

It still looks like there is no long term solution...I will just have to check the cap I installed every so often to make sure it doesn't start leaking.

What a stupid design. 

Even Wikipedia tells you to stay far, far away from saddle valves.

Not sure about those railroad guys...

So, if a few days ago was a rant about the emotional side of my weekend train ride, this would be a review on the actual train ride, and it's associated museum. 

For those of you asking yourself 'what they hell is he talking about', this last weekend my dad, brother and I got our families together for the first time in over 18 months, and to pass the time, we decided to ride the Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad, which also includes a visit to the Railroad Museum in Mineral, Wa.

The train ride itself was less impressive than it's name would lead you to believe.  There are a few peek-a-boo views of Mount Rainier and some of the foothills, but there are just as many unscenic views of rusted out singlewides and RV's parked on some of the rural lots lining the rail line, and you get to see them coming and going, because you just run the same 11 mile stretch of twice between Elbe and Mineral, with a 45 minute stop or so at the cute little museum.

I actually got more out of the museum than I did the train ride.  It's a train/logging museum, and I got the learn things, like the origination of the word 'flunky'.  While the word actually originated in Scotland, it's also what they called the girls that were brought in to run the dining rooms at the logging camps...and they did not have an easy life.  A camp of 70 men would be supported by two women, who did all the cooking and dishwashing for all those men...and one could only guess they pumped a lot of food into those lumberjacks at the turn of the century.

Also impressive was the sheer amount of IRON.  Growing up in an age of increasingly skeletal metal/composite frames covered by foamed plastic, the mass of metal making up one of these steam engines is AMAZING...190,000 pounds in some of them.

Of course, although I'm approaching 40, I'm still a 12-year old kid inside...and I think the same can be said for these railroad guys.

 

Rod.  Climax.  'Unit'.  You can almost imagine the Beavis and Butt Head giggle I kept whispering into my wife's ear.

 

One other interesting take away that my dad had: On our way out, we poked our head into the machine shop at the museum(which also functioned as their repair depot), and my dad observed that the machinery in their machine shop looked just like the stuff that had been in the machine shop on his first ship back in 1970.  I do know that the lathe they had wouldn't fit in your average home shop.

 

 



Family Gathering

This last weekend, we got together with my dad and my brother, and their family.  It's the first time since November of 2012 that we got all of my dad's granddaughters in one place.

It shouldn't have been that long...but, well...family.  My dad lives about 4 hours from us...the same general distance as my mom, whom we see every 8-10 weeks...but, even when we lived on the other side of the mountains, and we were less than 2 hours from each parent, we still saw my dad 33% as often as my mom. 

Many reasons, and none of them good.  Just...my dad is different than my mom, and his situation is different.  For the last few years, he has been fighting to get official custody of my step-brothers kids, something that finally happened earlier this year...so, he is not a gentleman in his mid-60s raising an 15 year old and an 11 year old. He is retired from the Navy, but still runs his own flooring business.  He is busier than he should have to be at his age with work, and dancing classes/girl scouts for the girls.  When he does get a day off, he feels he has earned the right to spend some of his remaining time on himself golfing, instead of driving 4 hours in a car with kids to visit us, I guess. 

It's also tough because, for some other reason, there is 'no room for us at the inn'.  Despite the fact that my mom has been able to find room for my wife and I, and our daughters to crash at her two bedroom place for a night, there is not enough room for that at my dads 2400sf place, so visiting him would involve having to rent a hotel room...an added expense we can't always swing, and frankly, I get pouty at the idea of having to do that...so we don't(I never said I wasn't at least partway to blame for the state of things).

Even this weekend, we didn't go to their place...we met in the tiny town of Elbe(1 hour drive for them, 3.5 for us) to ride the Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad. 

It was a nice get together...a chance to visit, and catch up...even if it wasn't the chance to show off the life I am building for myself with my family(bitter much?).  True to it's name, there were even some scenic views of Mount Rainier(although, you also could have called it ''Rusted out Singlewide Scenic Railroad...there more than a few of those on lots lining the tracks).

It's not a perfect family...we don't see each other as much as we should...but we do still talk to each other regularly...which is better than some families do. 

I also got a chance to get an updated picture with me and my dad...which is going to mean more to me someday than it does now. 

Hope Springs Eternal.

There hasn't been a lot of 'garden boast posts' around here lately, because, well...there hasn't been a lot of garden boasting to do.  I've been getting vegetables, but the output, a handful of cherry tomatoes a  day, a few full size tomatoes and zucchini a week, and one nice initial batch of Anaheim Peppers, has not been bragable given the effort/expenses that were put into the garden beds. 

All is not quite lost yet.  My zucchini plants that I started from seed and allowed to get root bound in those stupid starter pellets are finally producing...just as the ones I planted from the store are petering out, so I should keep getting a few zucchini/yellow squash a week well into September.  I've got a steady stream of tomatoes, and a final batch of peppers that are setting, and well as a healthy number of tomatillos on those plants. Ideally, I'll have enough of those three things to justify canning a batch of salsa. 

I've also started a round of 'fall' vegetables...a few pots of kale and Swiss Chard, before ripping out some under-producing tomato plants, mixing in some new soil, and planting a few rows of turnips, something I have never planted before.

I'll probably leave some close together, for greens production, and thin some out for actual 'turnip' production.  

Not a bad opening act.

Last night, my wife went and caught a band at the Benton-Franklin Fair.

 

 

I like me some Montgomery Gentry.  They are rocking enough for anyone, but about 1.5 steps more 'traditional' than some of the current crop of 'country' artists getting their songs played on the country stations now.  Mostly, I feel the difference is that the songs Montgomery Gentry sing seem to be about something while current Top 40 seems to be a contest to 'Out Red-Neck' each other...the songs all seem to be about getting drunk and crazy around the bonfire. 

 

It's not our first time seeing MG...we saw them a few years ago at the Puyallup Fair. 

 

 

It was our first time seeing their opening act, though. 

 

Typically, in overly simplistic terms, an opening act falls into one of two categories: 'up and comer' or 'past their prime, but still enjoy performing, and willing to settle for a shorter set just keep experiencing the rush'. 

 

You could say that the opening act last night fell into the 2nd category, but he put such a great show, it's hard to think of him as 'past his prime'...Eddie Montgomery's younger brother, John Michael Montgomery.  At the height of his popularity in the early/mid-90s, he had the #1 selling country song two years in a row: 'I Swear', and 'I Can Love You Like That'.  In total, he had 5 #1 songs, and over 30 top 40 hits.

 

Things got rougher for him in the late 90's...vocal cord growths, a visit to rehab, and just the way country music shifted away from his sound.  He had a brief comeback in 2004 with a great song, 'Letters from Home', which made it to #2, but for the most part, he just seems to tour when he wants to, and sings where he can.  He played a great little 45 minute set, during which you knew every song.  I'm not going to say he sounded exactly like he did 18 years ago, but he put more feeling into his songs than I ever did.

 

In the end, you aren't going to get a chance to see an opening act with his resume very often.

 

It was a perfect night.  The last week or so, we have had some cooling...temperatures in the low 90's/upper 80's...and last night it was only 85 or so with a nice breeze when the show started.  Close to perfect.

 

And of course, country music has quite a reputation for attracting some attractive young ladies, and this concert was no different.

 

I was just lucky enough to bring the prettiest one there with me.