The good news is it was completely routine, and I’ve made myself a note in my task tracker for three years from now to have them come out and do it again. Where exactly the septic access is was a bit of a mystery to me, but the septic guys found it right away, in a vault buried a couple of inches down in the bed outside my window. It turns out this is a rather common way to hide the things, and so they scraped it clear, pumped it clean, and covered it up again.

Amusingly enough, in the last few months I had that bed cleared out and replanted, and had a sprinkler circuit added to water it, and both groups of diggers completely missed it — although one of the ferns was planted literally 3” from the side of the vault, but nobody actually ran into it.

We also ran into a problem getting the irrigation systems fully operational this year; the controller refused to go online and talk to the cloud and the app; to my amusement as a nerd, even a factory reset didn’t fix things. This led to a few extra visits by the sprinkler folks to spend some time poking at it and cussing a bit. Ultimately, after a few rounds with tech support, they were able to clear out the problem data up in the cloud and re-initialize everything, and we’re up and running find for the summer. But because I needed to be around to run the sprinklers manually or in case they needed to pop by or want me to poke a button on the grumpy controller, I never really had a free spot of time to take those couple of days off and head out for a bit. And them suddenly it was Memorial Day. I might still try to sneak in a couple of days, but if I do, it’ll be the last week of June, so effectively, we’re up again July 4 holiday already, and into high season crowds and prices, and I’ve missed the spring migration I was hoping to go bird during. Oh well.

Welcome to the wonderful world of owning a home…

Oh, and while I trying to convince myself I was done with house projects, we came up with one more, to add a sprinkler circuit that will let us put containers up on the deck, and add a few downstairs here outside the office. Oh, and when we pulled out the back lawn (well, moss) and replanted, that meant that area was now being over-watered, and since we’re adding in the new circuit source where all of that is controlled, we’re fixing it. Current schedule for that digging and installing to happen is early July, although it wouldn’t surprise me to see that pulled into that last week of June.

And then we’re done. Really. Honest. No, I’m serious this time.

Quick health update: when I was first starting treatment for the migraines, I was told it might take weeks or even a few months for things to fully take effect, and that’s more or less what I’ve found to be the case. May was overall an incredibly quiet month with very little drama, and I’m starting to recognize the signs of things acting up more reliably. Overall, this is starting to feel like just part of my daily routine, and not part of an on-going drama I have to manage. It’s also been just under a year since I first reached out to my doctor to suggest we needed to start digging into it and figuring it out, and I can say pretty confidently we have.

I am happy that I can finally sit down at the computer again for an extended session without starting to feel uncomfortable; I’ve for the last couple of years often needed to take breaks just to let things settle down, which is, of course, a bit of discouragement from sitting down and starting if there’s not a paycheck involved…

On the horizon? With the weather shifting to a warmer and drier spring, getting out of the house more reliably and walking more is on the docket; I need to get out to Port Townsend to the lumber dealer to pick up the wood for my first non-shop project and get started on that. I keep reminding myself I want to write more on the blog, and I keep finding other things to do instead; we’ll see if that changes. Honestly, I kind of like how things are going right now, which wasn’t exactly where my head was a year ago. Let’s hope it stays that way for a while…

I am due for a new set of wallpapers; I’ll try to get those created and released for next issue.