End of my long break.

I'm watching a beautiful orange sunset on the last unstructured day of my nice long fall vacation. I'm reminded of just how very lucky I am to get to even have time off. Many of my friends don't get that. 

I'm calling this one: the long fall vacation filled with invisible projects. That's because I spent the better part of a week trenching in underground secondary wire to serve various projects that we want to accomplish over time around here. A good trench job looks like you were never there when you get it done, hence: invisible. It's great to get it done. We've had a really dry fall, and pretty warm. Most years it would have been impossible to do anything like this in late November/early December. But it's done. 

It's much the same thing with yesterday's gutter prep project. We're having a local fella put up seamless gutters. Wouldn't you know it? Our soffit board was rotted for 40' on one side. SO for a day I took off all the metal, replaced the bad board and put the metal back up. When I was done? It looked exactly the same as it did before I started. OK, perhaps a little bit more straight and tight, but to nearly everyone that sees it? Exactly the same. 

It was the same with the battery maintenance I did. Being off grid means that a few times a year you open up the giant battery box filled with thousands of bucks worth of flooded lead-acid batteries and top up the distilled water in them. It's kinda tedious and not much fun but now I don't have to worry for the rest of the cold-to-come part of the winter. 

Now my invisible projects are done. The batteries are maintained, the soffits are ready for the gutter man, and I can finish the above ground part of my wiring project a few minutes at a time, at my leisure. 

You really can't put a price on that. 

Along the way? I kept the house clean, took care of our chickens, alpaca and llamas, and cooked a good bit. We made a trip to La Junta in there, I went to Denver for an E-board meeting with the hall, and stayed up all night to get some Stranahan's limited edition Snowflake, Mt. Bierstadt whiskey. 

I go back to work on Thursday. Tomorrow we run to Pueblo. I gotta see a doc and we'll look at some cars (we're about to get a new one before I retire) and perhaps we'll get to do some holiday shopping. It'll be a nice end to a long respite from work. 

I wish everyone got the same thing.