August 2021 Island Trip – Day 6

I slept in this morning!! The day started at 8:30 with a call from our applicance folks with their delivery schedule. It took some light management from afar, and the new fridge precedes the remodel!

I walked up to our northern neighbor to share the mussel catch. He is just 9-days home from another hospital stay for cardiac problems, and was outside puttering around. This was wonderful to see. She and I caught up for about an hour. She needs space to be heard. This was the third time her sweetie had to be flown off the Island this year for medical emergencies. Medical specialties are a serious consideration for seniors living here. The Island hospital is good, but the demographic doesn’t support specialists, even though it seem like it should. So, my friends have to go off-Island to check in with his cardiologist next week rather than having a local person following him. I think there very likely is a market here, amongst the Islands, for a cardiologist and orthopedist.

Last night, while trying to figure out why the bathroom is periodically ‘whiffy,’ I discovered a leak under the bathroom sink, but not where it was coming from. It was late… Water was accumulating on top of the wheel housing, and the subfloor toward the back of the trailer was wet 😡. I dried the wheel housing, ran my hands up and down the ABS piping, where I found the water (revealing nothing), and then went to bed. This morning I removing insulation I installed last winter and was relieved to find the sink faucet was not the problem. Without geeking out too much on plumbing, the leak/seep was between the fitting that connects the PEX pipe to the stainless steel no-burst hose that services the sink faucet. I was able to hand-tighten it a half turn, wrap a twisted paper towel below the offending joint (to make sure the leak had stopped), and walk away. So far so good, and tomorrow, as suggested by our AN, I’ll take a tool to this joint to get another half turn on it. A fan has dried the subfloor. My shoulders are no longer at ear level!

Next up was to swap out the 8’ fluorescent light fixtures with 4’ LEDs. I got two of them done. The difference in light quality is remarkable. I can install the other two LEDs, but will need help removing the remaining 8’ fixtures. There’s a lot more stuff under them to work around.

Errands were next: Paint for the new pump room door, brackets for the lower barn interior framing, buying more LEDs to weed out the (hopefully) last of the incandescent bulbs, finding some serious adhesive, 2-ply RV TP (trust me, this is a necessity- I was down to the backup 1-ply 😳), a few groceries (tho there was no string cheese at the store for the ravens!)… After checking on my (dry!) plumbing, and unloading the procurements, I started weeding the slope below Stella’s pad. I find this very soothing. I wore my mom’s leather gloves, tho they’re too small, because the thistles can’t get through them as easily as my vinyl coated gloves. My AN came by to show me how the weather stripping works on the pump room door. We had a nice chat, and then I went back to weeding, and brought one load of rocks (from the pile in the garden) to continue the boarder around Stella’s slope.

I’’m enjoying two tiny lamb chops for dinner. A sense memory of when my parents raised sheep, and sent me lamb, packed in dry ice, from two states away. I’ll toss the bones on the wood shed roof since I wasn’t able to find string cheese or the ravens. They’ll love the pickings!