My Pedal Head
Amelia's riding has been improving day by day. She has been writing for about 2 weeks or so. The culminating achievement of this week was riding around Green Lake. She made it the full 2.8 miles around the lake all on her own. Monday she is scheduled to start her Pedalheads bike camp. We originally had her enrolled as a beginner with no previous bike experience, but since have had to increment her level by two to keep up with her progress.
Unfortunately though, Amelia is currently sick, so she might miss the beginning of camp. Jonny has been home sick for over a week, with his first major case of day care crud. We're not sure if Amelia got it from him or picked it up from Little Explorers, but she has also been sick for a couple of days now.
Last week we had our first major forest fire smoke even in Seattle. We finally jumped on the bandwagon and purchased an A/C unit for upstairs to provide some relief from the heat when we can't have the doors and windows open. In theory our central heat pump is supposed to provide this service, but the placement of air intakes and vents (designed only for heating) makes it pretty effective outside the extremes.
I was also pleased to see the Ikea air quality monitor I purchased earlier in the year works. I would highly recommend this to everyone living within the blast radius of wild fire smoke. It is simple enough that Amelia will go close the doors when she sees it go to yellow.
We are also supervising a small home improvement project this week. Our yard had an upper patio, which I think was a DIY job by the previous owner. It served its purpose, but the bricks they chose were hard to maintain and clean, and parts had become a tripping hazard. We're having it replaced with a new patio. A top consideration though was the healthy of our giant western red cedar, which has roots that extend under the patio. We couldn't dig down to place new bricks as it would severely damage the root system and dramatically reduce the capacity of the tree to gather water, which given the weather extremes we've been having recently could be fatal to the tree. The solution recommended by the company we hired was to build up so that the bricks would be above grade. The pavers are also water-permeable to allow rain pass through to the roots.
Speaking of trees, there was a tree in the middle of the old patio. It was a good sized rhododendron, but it was smaller than its nearby siblings. Between the other rhododendrons and the cedar, it always struggled to get enough sun for itself and was contorting itself to squeeze into the canopy. Anyway, since it wasn't thriving, we decided it would be best to remove it.
I wasn't prepared for how devastated Amelia would be. The tears immediately formed in her eyes when she first looked out the window and saw the tree had been cut down. "We need the tree to clean the air," she said. She was heartbroken for a good part of the remainder of the day. The truth was that I didn't feel great about removing it either. It had been there for quite a while and had done quite well, given the disadvantage of its location. She wanted to know if the same tree would come back as a new tree. I told her I didn't know, but we could pick out a new tree at the nursery and plant it somewhere else in the yard.
Maybe something resilient to drought and heat.
That's all for now. Stay cool everyone.
Aleks