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IT'S FRIDAY, MY FAVORITE DAY!!

Once again, I'm cheating a little. It's really Thursday because we're on the road and won't be home until the first of the week, so this gets posted a day early.

With all the family down over the Labor Day Weekend and celebrations of Dave and Ashtin's birthdays, it has been quite a week.

Before everyone descended upon us for the weekend, Dave and I got busy trying to finish the walkway to the back door. We finally got all the pavers in place and then proceeded to put the "poly sand" between the pavers to secure them in place. The poly sand didn't quite work out the way we thought it would. We thought it was supposed to form as a grout. Instead where we placed the poly sand between the pavers, it was looser than we expected. We're supposed to get quite a bit of rain on Thursday, we'll see if that helps pack it in. We have sort of put a hold on the project and will remove the forms, back-fill and add fresh gravel when we return from our steamboat trip. We needed to get the boat ready.

So on to the next project. We cleaned up the steamboat for our mini-meet at 10-mile lakes. The first thing we did was to take the boiler dome off and vacuum the soot out of the 80-some tubes. We hate this part and it really needs to be done annually, but it's been at least two seasons since we last tackled the job. It is a messy and a two-man job. Dave uses a drill with flexible shaft and a long brush attachment. He pushes the brush in the tube to loosen everything and then I stand by with the vacuum hose and suck out the soot. It takes a couple of hours and we look like chimneysweeps when we're done! After that, we wash off the soot on the inside of the boiler dome and Dave paints it. We also cleaned out the smoke stack and he painted that too. When he got that all done, I scrubbed the canopy and the rest of the boat. I was going to give the brass some polish but as we drive down Highway 101, the salt air takes the shine right off the brass and it is a waste of time to polish it.

The family started arriving on Thursday evening. Lara and Greg with their three girls came first and they had a great time at the beach with sunny weather. Leslie and her two girls arrived on Saturday night. Since Ashtin turned 14 on August 29th and Dave celebrated his birthday on September 3rd, we had an in-between birthday party. I had gotten a dozen Red Velvet cupcakes from Costco and stacked them on top of each other then put candles on each one. This way, everyone got their own cupcake. It was great.

All the granddaughters could talk about was starting school. I think everyone was ready to get back to school to see all their friends and meet their new teachers. All the girls are in school now. Ashtin is a freshman and started high school, her sister Paige is in the sixth grade, Jadyn is in the fifth grade, Jaysa is in the third grade and the youngest, Jordyn started kindergarten. Lara was a little nervous about getting everyone in the routine of getting up early and being on time but she didn't have to worry. Her three girls were ready at 7:00 a.m. and wanted to know if it was time to go to school yet? I don't know if the rest of the week was that way but they were sure anxious to get to school on day one.

Everyone left here on Sunday to avoid the Labor Day traffic rush. So everything has pretty much settled back to normal around here. We left on Thursday for 10-mile lakes which is about a 4-1/2 hour drive south on Hwy. 101. We will meet with about seven other steam boats on this lake and just enjoy steaming together. We are keeping our fingers crossed that the Captain Bell will perform better than at the annual meet at Port Orchard. Dave didn't have time to launch the boat to see how it ran but hopefully cleaning out the tubes in the boiler will help.