So it's Spring here. Flowers are up and blooming. Days are consistently reaching the low to upper 60's F. It no longer freezes at night. Most mornings when I come out the door for work the sun has been up an hour and its 40'F. Sometimes warmer. I am still enjoying long slow cups of coffee and a gentle rise and shine at my own pace. This is very nice.
Yesterday I took care of an irritation: buying a Dustbuster(tm) to clean up dust piles and such around the house. Sadly, the instrument did not come with the traditional charging mount, just a cheap wire plug you have to manually insert. This was not acceptable so it went back, along with a couple other things. Dad will buy a better setup from Walmart next week. Later I took Mom to the garden store down the road and bought her bulbs and some sprouted lettuce plants, something I'd promised her before xmas as her gift. I finally got to give it to her, along with some good potting soil. Very affordable too. Lots of people garden here. Its a good place for it, so long as you use raised beds or pots since the native soil tends to be full of arsenic, iron, and other metals (naturally, it IS a mining town after all).
We had a huge rainstorm pass over head last night. Not a drop fell here. Its finally little spatters now. I went walking in it with my mom. She's a little stronger today. We went a couple hundred yards at a normal pace before she slowed down and had us turn back, pips of rain falling every once in a while. The pavement just soaked it up and the rest evaporated again. The sky is grey overcast, of course.
Work itself has been lots of computer work, and simulated packing runs, to verify how to actually do it. We're getting closer and closer to the day the inventory arrives. OT that weekend, most likely, followed by shipping and bottling. I think it will be fun. I'm all set for that. Looks like the first half of my day will be shipping, with the second half spent bottling the oils for inventory. We're working up bottling schedules etc. It's going to be very interesting because neither of us is sure how much work that will be, and how stressful. We hope that having two of us there to divide the labor will make it far more manageable. The outsourced shipping company in Colorado seemed to have trouble keeping schedules. I won't speculate as to why. The bottled product looked nice enough. And they did ship. Just lots of dropped balls. I'm glad to have the job.
Now it is wetter outside, with visible standing water and wetness but drops are still few and far between and it remains relatively warm.
A little shout out to Snerdy who is sipping ales at Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma today. Petaluma is the south end of Sonoma County, and only about 15-20 miles from where I grew up. Petaluma hosts the site of the former pathway of the Sacramento River, which prior to the opening of the Golden Gate (the strait, not the bridge) hosted the outflow of the interior of California's central valley waterways north to Sebastopol and the Lagunitas de Santa Rosa before reaching the Russian River and turning west through that narrow and often flooded canyon system. Imagine, if you will, that once there was no San Francisco Bay. There was a lake, and a strong ridge of chert and granite a mere 10 miles wide. But it was a critical 10 miles. One day an earthquake broke that spine and the lake flooded out into the sea through the Golden Gate, ending the detoured outflow through the Llano de Santa Rosa and allowing the "laguna" to fill in with local vegetation and dirt until all that remained were stagnant ponds which sometimes flooded in the winters. Geology is fascinating, folks.
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