We greeted the year with Bryan’s uncloaked Clicquot empty on the table as

2025, first day, came up Chilean gray [chilly ‘n’ gray]

and though the sun shown on the last of the panettone at lunch and

reappeared on the second it didn’t last

as by the third it rained with some seriousness

through the morning though

cleared after noon, an afternoon in which I found it more difficult than ever making it up

the slight slope to home where Cal-Bay was yet again on the roof trying to sort out the impossible and gratuitous complexities of the new multi-thousand dollar NOX compliant Made-in-America-by-Trane heater in all its nonfunctional digital glory…they’ll be back after the weekend when the engineers back east will talk to them. Compliantly we hope.

So it was the first weekend of the year, with the last season [14th] of “Vera” on the telly,

traffic on the straits

and tentative progress on the Project.

Monday first thing the Cal-Bay tech who was “taking it [the heater’s recalcitrance] personally” was back on the roof all morning, finally determining we needed to get PGE out here to recalibrate the gas lines…Yeah well, why didn’t anybody know this in the first place?

Maybe because Mr. Made-in-America’s engineers neglected to tell them…

The straits were hazy on the sixth* and being our anniversary we celebrated most happily down at Gabby’s…our 29th [furniture!].      Furniture?

As in like “Hey, babe, we’ve been together 29 years so I finally bought you…a bed”?

*Also to be forever enshrined as National Patri-riot Day; but we’ll always have Gerlach.