MIA with a side of food porn (pictures!!!).

I don't think I have shifted gears this fast in quite some time. We cut our vacation short by one day because we decided we should get home and start packing. The day before we left Napa we found that instead of packing we had some issues with the inspection made by the buyers. Since back it has been full on back to work, fixing house stuff.

Where I left off:

Napa was great!! The wine, the scenery, the food..all excellent. I would have liked sunshine but it was still good enough in rain.





Grace and Gnocchi

I do not remember what she had with the salad.

A nice Napa wine


Gone :)



David's dessert..Profiteroles, ice cream and chocolate



a delicious Lemon Passion fruit Pot de Creme.

After several minutes of picture problems I got these up. They are all from our dinner at Bouchon. I will include a few over the next few posts-tomorrow (or later this week) will be winery pics.


Saturday Morning woke up and after checking the road conditions we found that again the pass over Mt. Shasta was reporting chains required. David did not want to risk being turned back so we took off directly north of Napa and headed up the coast road We drove and drove and drove while listening to Malcolm Gladwell (books on CD). We listened to the tipping point (good)..and Outliers (GREAT!!!). I highly recommend listening to a book on CD while on road trips and recommend Malcolm Gladwell too. We listened to Grace's selection during the drive down (The mixed up files of Mrs. E Frankweiler).

We got home around midnight Saturday night. On Sunday my grandson came over for the day while Nichole studied for her exam (she took it Friday) and looked over the inspection report. It was BAD! They said we needed a new roof, new siding, new plumbing, new windows, had 'biological material' growing in a part of the attic, had pipes that did not exit the house, needed to add insulation..on and on. The buyers despite low-balling us on a selling price and our accepting this price wanted us to pay for all of the repairs. David was Mad..I sat down with the report and read it carefully with a pen in hand.

1. the inspector broke our closet doors and inexplicably bend our toilet roll holder in half (I don't even want to imagine what he did on our toilet to do that!!). The report from my thankfully nosy neighbor was that he was in our house unsupervised from 10 in the morning until 4pm. Imagine our surprise in coming home Saturday night to find dirt all over the hallway, broken closet doors and a limp toilet roll holder in our main bathroom.

2. The roof was installed 10 years ago but sadly has somehow lost its grit and will need to be replaced. We are offering to pay half.

3.The inspector is full of crap on the siding. It is fine (must have vision problems). We said NO.

4. The inspector was freaking blind as he has pictures of our NEW plumbing running right alongside the cast iron plumbing he complained about.

5. He reported that we had wooden sash windows. We have some vinyl and some original aluminum double paned windows in our house (???).

6. He correctly identified that we had some missing insulation over the kitchen that we remodeled a couple of years ago and never replaced. yesterday we spent the day in the attic and fixed up all of the stuff of there that needed it as well as blew in insulation. It was agony and fun at the same time.

7 The 'missing' vents were right where we left them and working just fine :) Again he seemed to have some vision problems.

7.The biological material was an old vacated bees nest. I belly crawled across a piece of plywood and with a hammer and stick pulled the thing off the wall and into a garbage bin (it was old and no living beings were involved). I actually found two others that the blind inspector missed and cleaned those out as well. They are HUGE and really cool!! I was also quite impressed with myself...I actually crawled around in an attic and did commando belly crawls all over the place.

When the buyer's agent received our counter proposal (basically we said we would fix a bunch of the smaller stuff but only pay half the roof-it is a 7600 dollar price tag. She left an angry message on our agents machine calling us cheeky...sheesh I think cheeky is coming from her court!! After the agent calmed down she called back and suggested that her buyers would up the price by the other half of the roof cost in order to get the sale to go through.

Hopefully that offer will be formalized and we will have a new roof on this started this week. Next weekend the plan is to 'do' the crawl space like we did the attic this weekend. We will clean things up and fix some fallen insulation but not add any more.

My workload this term is pretty heavy. I have data piled up all over the place at my first job and we are having to analyze it and get it ready for sharing it with the participants (Tuesday and Wednesday). I now have three students who want tutoring help and I am teaching two classes at my local community college. Right now the community college job and tutoring are by far my favorites but I know the research is good for me :).

On top of all of that I am already behind at work and had to go in for today in preparation for two meetings next week. David will be out of town for a few days (in direct conflict with my meetings)...eeeekkkk.

On the food front I gained for the first time (that I remember) on vacation post band. I was back up to 170 when I got home. I definitely think I deserved it after Napa and the drinking in San Francisco. I have noticed this 180-164 cycle seems to be becoming a pattern. I made a fill appointment for tomorrow but I think I will have to cancel it because I have yet more work to finish in prep for our meetings next week :(.