A very noisy day

Hi all.

First off this week: Tinkerbelle. She had another vet visit yesterday, and all her numbers were in the normal range. As a result, we’ve finally discontinued the prednisone completely. Now she’s just taking the cyclosporine, and we’ll evaluate again in a month to make sure that dropping the extremely tiny dose of prednisone makes no difference. Assuming she remains stable, the vet visit after that will be three months later.

Honestly, she will be depressed about going to the Biscuit Palace (aka the vet’s office) so infrequently, but she will be alive, and that is all we can ask.

The home renovation continues. I apologize, but I still have no new pictures. It remains pretty much impossible to tell what has changed. But things have changed! We passed the rough-in electrical inspection yesterday, and the electricians are no longer darkening our doorway at 8 am every morning. We can sleep in a bit longer as a result, which we appreciate.

Today the plumber is back, and two of the contractors are helping him install the water lines for the radiators. This is a big job, requiring a lot of drilling holes and hanging PEX pipe at the right height. That’s the noisy stuff mentioned in the title. I will share photos next week showing what they have accomplished.

Note that the radiators themselves are still on a boat. Somewhere. We think. In fact, I need to go ask the seller if he has tracking information for them. That would be a good idea. One moment, please...

OK, I am back, and an email has been sent. With luck, I will get some kind of tracking information and figure out where the radiators actually are.

Anyway, last I heard we were hoping to get the plumbing rough-in inspection soon, but I don’t know when it will actually happen. Next week, maybe? It needs to happen before the framing inspection, and then we can get started with insulation, which really needs to get done. Things are now starting to fall in a particular order:

• plumbing rough-in inspection
• framing inspection
• insulation
• drywall
• flooring

and so on. Those last two might swap positions, I suppose, depending on who is available when, but we’re basically at the point where one thing has to finish before the next thing can start, and that means we’re at the mercy of everyone’s schedules. Keeping things moving is the dance of the contractors.

This week also saw the upload of all our tax documentation. Tax time is here, and it’s huge barrels of fun for US citizens living in another country. Getting all the documents organized and figuring out all the required information is a major pain. But it’s done for yet another year, which is good.

The weather doesn’t make for great content, I know, but it’s still amusing to look at the coming forecast for our location:

That’s right, the ten-day forecast has rain of some amount every single day. What’s not clear from that image is that this weekend is supposedly an atmospheric river, and we may have a lot of rain from it.

That’s it for this time. Next week, photos of hot water heating lines. I promise!