Last weekend of the year

We saw Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse this weekend and really enjoyed it. We also saw Bird Box on NetFlix which Treese heard everyone talking about at work, and it was fine. Not sure what all the buzz was about, we didn't think it was super amazing or anything. When it ended I head questions (spoilers ahead!).... why wouldn't the creatures go inside buildings? How did the group know that the creatures wouldn't go inside buildings, like the giant supermarket where they all took off the blindfolds once they got inside. If Gary was already infected when they let him into the house, why weren't his eyes all freaky and why weren't the birds totally freaking out like they did in the supermarket? When the rapids were approaching, why didn't they get out and walk the rest of the way. It's not like they had to keep going down the river for miles and miles after the rapids, their destination was right there. So yeah, liked it but wasn't in love with it. We also binge watched the TV show Titans this week which we enjoyed.

Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone had a good holidays! We spent this Christmas with my family. My Aunt Terri and Uncle Dean were in town so we got to visit with them a bunch which was really nice. Two days before Christmas we went out to dinner with Dad's side of the family at the tasty Black Bear Diner though the table was so long and we were on the end so didn't really get to visit with everyone there, but we did get to visit while we stood around in the lobby waiting for the table to be ready. On Christmas eve we went to see Bumblebee with my mom and oh my gosh it was actually a good live-action Transformers movie! We opened presents Christmas morning, then went to my cousin Tedd's new house which I hadn't seen before and I got to hold their little baby Zayne. He was so cute! And he shares my hairline....

My parents got us a unique gift this year, a land donation in our honor for The Wild Animal Sanctuary's new 9,004-acre Wild Animal Refuge that's being build in Southern Colorado. Mom had told me about her visit to the existing animal sanctuary and showed me a video of it and the new one larger one that's being built. Seems really cool where there are really long walkways built high up so you can explore the park and see the animals with them still being able to roam completely free. I'd urge everyone to check out their website and watch the videos: www.wildanimalsanctuary.org/.

Repair Complete

It was cold this morning but I still went out and finished fixing the main water line for the backyard sprinklers. I cut a small piece of 1" PVC and glued it to the union connector to make a little pipe extension, then glued that to the other end of the screw on connector. After allowing that to dry for a few minutes I then glued the open end of the union connector to the existing pipe. After about 5 hours I turned on the water and checked leaks. Success! I'll check it again later and probably once more tomorrow morning before filling the hole in with all the buckets of dirt I excavated.

Busted backyard sprinkler pipe

We heard running water last night outside my office window, the sound like when the sprinklers are running, but the sprinklers were off so I went out to investigate. I traced the sound to the back lawn where I found water rapidly bubbling up out of a spot in the grass. It was the general area where I had repaired two broken pipes eight years ago. I shut off the valve to the water line that runs back there and this morning went out and dug up that whole area. Once I got down to the pipes and cleaned them off enough so that I could get a decent view I discovered that one of the union connectors I had used in my previous repair was cracked. So I had to take a trip to Lowe's. I looked at various options but eventually bought the same union connector as before. It was one of those expansion ones with adjustable length slide-action. Only the non-sliding side of mine was broken but they didn't sell just one side so I had to get the whole thing. I also had to get a simple union connector so that I could make the pipe longer to account for having to cut off the old cracked part. By the time I got home and got the pipe cut it was getting too dark to do any gluing so I'll have to do that tomorrow.