August 2, 20009

By comparison to last weekend, we have much less news to report. The week at work consisted of Joann being in Delaware for most of it. She had an HR leadership team meeting offsite - her boss has a house in Delaware and apparently that moved DE up to the top of the list of possible places for an offsite. A busy week for her with meetings all day and work in the evening with various members of her leadership team on projects. She came home a very tired puppy. I kept the home fires burning with the usual mix of work, exercise, and evening festivities (which is usually some household chore). We continue to have loads of rain and we officially had the wettest July on record something like 7-8 inches or so.

As the weather has finally warmed up a bit and the humidity moved in we finally used our air conditioner for the first time. Which, of course, meant having the service folks out on Friday to charge the Freon into the downstairs unit. The unit has a tiny leak somewhere - not big enough that they have been able to find, but big enough that over the course of the year to lose enough Freon to impair the efficiency. As they have been trying to find the leak for 3 years, I've pretty much resigned myself to recharging it every year. After that fun on Friday, Jo caught up on some sleep and amused myself with reading and some computer work. Saturday it was up for a 10 mile run to continue the efforts in getting ready for the Philly distance run. Then off to the gym for some lifting, the grocery store, and bank. We then hit the garden for - wait for it - actually picking some beans (YEAH) and weeding. As you can see over the last two weeks we have enjoyed a pretty good bean harvest - it seems to be the only thing we can actually grow. Although we did manage to pick a few onions and a garlic head as well. Jo spent the afternoon freezing packets of beans for the winter months, while I tackled powerwashing the house. I purchased an extender for my powerwasher so I don't have to use a ladder any more, but as I found out - while the extender makes it safer to clean the siding, it doesn't make it any easier. This is a big house that seems to get really dirty and moldy. I guess that is the fun of living in the woods and torrential rain every 2 days. Anyway, after a couple of hours of washing and coupled with my run in the morning I was beat.

For the evening we watched the movie "Australia" and enjoyed a homemade pasta dish with our freshly picked beans. After that day, I was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. Today we were planning on going to the beach after our yoga class, but the clouds are not cooperating, so we'll probably head home and get ready for next week by getting in some reading and napping. Although, I will probably try to get in another couple of hours of powerwashing, woo-hoo.