Wet, One
Rain has been the dominant weather pattern pretty much the entire holiday weekend. In a practical sense it is a good thing, our area has been very dry and more selfishly I just had 10 pallets of sod laid down so all the rain allows it to get a head start. From a fun perspective the rain definitely limits your options.
Despite the weather I kept busy outside for a good portion of Saturday. On our Home Depot stop we grabbed dirt, sod for the chicken area, and pond stone to fill in the stone landscape border near the one patio door. A few times I forgot I was supposed to be protecting my injured shoulder and paid the price with a quick shot of pain. Luckily the pain was short lived. Later in the afternoon I decided to weed whack the property despite a light rain which at one point got hard enough to make me stop for maybe 20 minutes before I finished it up. Luckily the weed whacking position did not seem to irritate my right shoulder much.
On Saturday evening Deb visited again for the third or fourth consecutive week. As usual the night was filled with fun and good times. We discovered the app called House Party which allows geographically distant people to get together easily to communicate and play games.
Today is DJ’s actual birthday but yesterday was pegged as the day to to hold his virtual party so others could attend the Zoom broadcast of the event. As usual Cindy had taken on the lion share of the responsibilities for the party, creating two cakes and trying to coordinate the attendance of other family members.
We headed over to Katie’s house early for two reasons. Cindy had the two cakes and DJ’s presents to drop off and I needed to get the Prius running again. Katie had been leaving the smart key inside the car for extended periods of time when the car wasn’t being used. When the smart key is near the car it energizes certain parts of the vehicle. Some of these parts evidently draw power from the 12V battery which was dead.
I had to first access and pop the manual release for the rear hatch since the battery is located back there. Once I got down awkwardly crawling around in the trunk I got access to the battery. I brought my portable jump starter/energy center with me. After hooking it up to the battery the car woke back up. I hit the accelerator to turn on the gas motor so it could begin charging the battery again.
Just to make sure the battery had some juice in it I drove the car to the gas station and back. As I was driving the red triangle of death came on which is not surprising. When the car is dead it is unable to manage balancing the cells in the hybrid pack as it should. I had brought my ODBII reader/scanner along, anticipating this happening. I cleared the error and the car seemed to be running ok, ok for a 235,000 mile vehicle.
DJ,s party was fun although getting people into the Zoom meeting turned out to be more challenging than we hoped. DJ had fun digging into his “smash cake” which is designed with the intent of it being destroyed by the baby sitting in front of it.
The main cake that Cindy constructed was a painstaking reproduction of “coco melon” a cartoon series that DJ loves so much. The inside of the cake looked like watermelon but tasted delicious, albeit both Cindy and I felt like we had a sugar overload afterward.
Before we left we assembled the large water playground toy that we got for DJ. He loves everything and anything having to do with water so hopefully he will get a lot of entertainment out of it.
Cindy felt relief once we got home as the last 24-48 hours were mostly focused on party/cake related tasks. It was still raining when we got back. I split my time between the 3D room and playing some WoW.
Today Patrick was supposed to be visiting as he is doing project work in Melbourne Florida for a couple months. He texted me last night about the near 100% chance of off and on rain all day. He said he would take a rain check, literally but will be sure to visit before he heads back north. As predicted it has been dreary which sort of sucks but again in the big picture the precipitation was needed. It seems insane that I have not gotten out to ride a PEV a single time so far this long weekend. I may try to sneak a ride in later in this afternoon but that all depends on the doppler radar.