We haven’t made a lot of progress on the house lately, with Sarah on a heme-oncology block last month as well as lots of fellowship interviews.  We are still planning on tackling the upstairs bathroom very soon, but I wanted to finish out the basement shelves to get the last of the clutter organized before we do so.

Yesterday, we had a pretty huge windstorm with 50–60 mph winds around Puget Sound.  From upstairs, you could even feel the house wiggling when the bigger gusts hit!  It seemed like another good day to stay indoors, so I headed down to the basement and finished up the shelves.  I had taken out some cabinets from the shop area of the basement to make room for another work table, so I started by mounting those to form the start of a third wall in our storage area.

Then I added shelves on the far side, in-between the cabinet and the shelves I built last month, and also added shelves above the cabinets.  Now we have a place for our skis, tennis stuff, and biking and running gear.

After the wind had calmed down a bit we decided to walk over to the library (and to pick up our monthly wine subscription from Madrona Wine Merchants, our awesome neighborhood wine shop who specialize in super delicious wines at crazy low prices, and awesome puns.  Yesterday they gave me a free t-shirt that says “Bordeauxing on insanity!”).  When we left the house, we saw that the wind had gotten ahold of some of the shingles on our very steep roof…  so we’re going to have to add roof repair to our TDL.  You can see the shingles flapping away in this photo:

In other news, last week I was reading in bed and while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.  After many attempts at sticking my head out the window to see where it was coming from, on Friday I finally saw the culprit—not a raven (where would you have gotten that idea?), but a woodpecker, trying to bust into the attic from just under the peak of the root.  Sarah’s been doing some research on how to deal with him, but in the meantime, we’ve also added “deal with woodpecker” to the TDL.

We really are going to get started on the bathroom this week.  We’re also going to be hosting my family for Thanksgiving, so we’re planning that, and I’m going to try to work on our cranky old stove a bit.  I’ll at least level it, and probably look into cleaning the burner jets as well.

We only had two trick-or-treaters for halloween, but we went to dinner during the peak hours so we’ve concluded that Madrona is a trick-or-treat friendly neighborhood.  We’re looking forward to handing out more candy next year.