The year began with a trip to Palm Springs where we stayed in La Quinta for the Palm Springs Dog show. The desert is great in January and I got some nice bike rides in and around the region.
We came home to an atmospheric river event that showed us where some new engineering would be needed for our grave paths. The storms also dropped a huge douglas fir onto other trees blocking our route, power and internet for about a week.
I got into home automation with an environment known as SmartThings when I read about them on Kickstarter back in 2013. As you can read here, over the years we went from just SmartThings with its proprietary UI and migrated towards Apple Homekit in our ever expanding home Applesphere.
We've finally abandoned SmartThings in favour of Hubitat Elevation. My objective was to get better and more consistent behaviour from our Zwave devices using Apple Siri voice commands.
We began 2022 with a drive south to Palm Springs for the dog show. This was our first big dog show. Lynda and Leo competed in confirmation, rally and obedience. They got some good learning opportunities and experience. We hadn’t been to the desert before and now we totally understand why it is such a draw especially in winter.
2021 began with a trip to Palm Springs for our first dog show. Lynda and Leo were competing in confirmation, rally and obedience. The trip was successful and we all learned a lot about the difference between the movie and an event.
Due to the pandemic and home schooling and TKD via Zoom, we decide to permanently park the cars outside and change out the flooring from hard plastic tiles to rubber mats style tiles. This would give some extra give for workouts and TKD. By this time Lynda was also participating in TKD.
In 2017, we started the year in Australia. Lynda rented a home for Gunnar, Courtney, Mom and I in the Darlinghurst neighborhood of Sydney. We used this as our home base to enjoy the city sights especially the New Year’s Eve events and fireworks.
After thinking COVID was the big story for us in 2020, the fire started. Early on 8/16/2020 lightning strikes north of Santa Cruz set off fires that eventually coalesced into the CZU Complex Fire.
We watched the reports and were fine for the first few days. By the 19th, we were seeing lots of ash and large, burnt tips of oaks land on our driveway and cars. We had been preparing to bug out as the news worsened.
As the world locked down, we adapted. Sure there were a few accidents (broken arm, cut forehead).
The world (ours at least) turned sideways in March of 2020. We went from having a grandnephew in first grade at Baymonte and dog training classes in Capitola to starting a home school at the dining table and Tae Kwon Do classes in the garage via Zoom.
In May 2019, we began the installation of a new roof that would support solar panels. We had some sag in the garage headers that needed to be corrected before we could get the panels installed. We got bids from the local roofing companies. One of whom required us to get an engineering solution to the sag. After getting a bid from an engineering firm (about 3k to fix), we checked back with Moriarity Roofing who said they could address the sag in their work.
In late 2021, we began a terrace project to our lower hillside. We had come to find through a property survey that we had approximately 100' of slope to manage. In an effort to comply with Firewise principles (brush cutting, defensible space), we figured that grading, retaining and adding astroturf would give us more space for kids and dog training. Along the way, we built in some additional steps and planter boxes.
The project finished just prior to the Winter of 2023 and the heavy rainfall we had. We some minor damage to gravell paths but that's fixable.
Here's some shots.
