Busy week.

Jill came home on Tuesday. She and Tara had a wonderful time at a couple of resorts in Vail, CO. It was the off-season, so they got really good rates and stayed in some luxury lodges. It is good to have her home.

Wednesday, I drove to Monmouth again and completed some plumbing projects for Pat and Katie. They got the gas turned on at their new home, and the water heater pressure relief valve was bad, so a lot of water went down the drain. I had Pat shut off the burner and the water when he called on Tuesday. On Wednesday, when I arrived, it took me about 10 minutes to remove the old valve, and after going to True Value for parts, it took me about another 10 minutes to replace it with a new one.

On to the master bath sink. I had picked up a new sink at George Morlan plumbing. It took about half an hour to install the sink and the fancy new faucet the kids picked out. They look really nice. On to the guest bath faucet. This was about a 15 minute job.

The bugaboo was the guest bath toilet, which had bolts holding the tank onto the bowl that were so rusty, I had to drill out the centers to get them free. Once that was done, it didn't take long to rebuild the "guts" of the toilet. That left me enough time to install new towel bars and TP dispenser.

I forgot to mention that job 1 was to remove the door locks so we could take them to the locksmith for re-keying. I made a trip to the locksmith at 9:00, 10:30, 12:00, 1:00 and 2:00, before I found the locksmith at home! Turns out he had had three emergency calls to the WOU campus, where some co-eds had locked themselves out of their rooms. The bottom line is that we did get the locks re-keyed, and now the kids have one key for all five of the door locks. Pretty neat!

Thursday morning we joined our friend Steve for the pressing of the cabernet sauvignon grapes, which will become wine sometime between now and next spring. That was followed by a visit to our favorite pastor at Rolling Hills Community Church.

Friday was a pretty open day. We went to the gym and the rest of the day we puttered around the house. Saturday, however, we got busy and attacked the back yard. At this point it is pretty well winterized. That is a good thing, because it has done nothing but rain since then.

Sunday, we visited Mom. Nephew Alex had been visiting for the weekend and doing a lot of projects for Mom. So, the four of us had dinner together and a nice time of family reunion.

That brings us up to today. Jill had a coffee date with her pal Connie. Meanwhile, I got out our decrepit old carpet shampooer and did some work on our carpets, which were pretty disgusting. Now they look a lot better. Jill was pretty impressed. When that job was done, we had lunch with Perry Mason and then I spent the afternoon working on my blog, Marching as to War.

That is the latest from the old pilgarlic. Hope your life is filled with blessings, too.