Limb for limb.....

 7:29 am - Friday - December 6th - TWW - 36° F, humidity 56%, wind 6 mph out of the east......crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 61° F.  On this date in 2019 TLE and I were in Riverside, CA enjoying the Mission Inn Festival of Lights, an annual event....

The nights have not been too cold lately, and I know that cold is a relative term, but we've acclimated pretty well so far to the climate here at 5,500' elevation, and when we see forecast lows in the mid to high 30's were are happy.  We have an electric blanket we use when it is cold, and when the weather first began to turn colder we were setting our individual controls to # 3, or 4.  Now we are using the L, for low, setting (#1) for the same overnight low temps.  Surprisingly, the electric blanket does not draw a lot of power from our Bluetti battery bank.  Typically, when the lows are in the mid to high 30's we still have 70-78% left in the battery bank.  Now, when the lows get into the 2o's, and that time is rapidly approaching, our electric basement heater will come on during the night again, and that will be the acid test, so to speak.  The few times the heater has run at night our remaining battery power has dipped into the low 30 percentile range by the next morning, and that is concerning, but we are working on a solution.

TLE and I spent the first part of the morning picking up the stuff I had pruned off the trees on each side of the new walking path, and hauling them away in the Yamaha Rhino (has a nice dump bed) to a future burn pile site.  Then we began helping Charles and Phyllis do some major pruning on the juniper trees on the east side of the house.  TLE had spotted this unusual juniper tree, and had suggested we could make a bench out of it, so we did......

....using one of the Stihl chainsaws (the one with the 16" bar) I limbed up the tree, then began to smooth the sitting area, or 'bench.....it turned out pretty well.....

....doesn't TLE make a good model?  This tree had a lot of dead wood in it, so we spent quite a bit of time removing that dead wood, and cutting it up for future use in the wood stove, and the 'sunset fire deck'.

I spent more time on the exhaust system for the Honda EU2000i generator by widening the hole through the back of cedar shed to the point where there is now about 1/2" of space between the cedar, and the exhaust pipe.  The exhaust pipe vibrates, as one might expect, when it is running, and sometimes the generator will move just enough so that the pipe begins to vibrate against the cedar, so I stuffed steel wool into the 1/2" gap around the pipe, and that is keeping the pipe from moving at all, so it does not touch the wood now.

By the time I finished with that it was getting close to 3 pm, so I put away my tools, and took a nice, long, hot shower.   While I was so engaged, TLE was preparing Kung Pow Chicken for our shared meal with Charles and Phyllis.  We headed over to the house around 3:30 pm for our communal dinner, and conversation, which is always the highlight of any day here at TWW.

It was little breezy, so there was no sunset fire, however I was able to memorialize Thursday's sunset....

....thanks for stopping by!