Jeanine and Maya helped Marie find an outfit for her son’s July wedding in Galway, Ireland. The trio disappeared for much of the day, returning triumphantly with their mission accomplished. Our whole family is looking forward to attending the wedding, the first of the next generation of Calabrias.

Jeanine, my brother Mark, my sister-in-law Maire, and I enjoyed a visit to Ferjulian’s Farm, where we visited their tulip field and picked a couple of dozen. The photos do little justice to the vibrance of the colors or the number of flowers, more than a quarter million.

After our tour, we looked at their donut-making operation before a brief visit to the Minute Man Air Field (my brother is a former commercial airline pilot). A short hike on the Heath Hen Meadow Brook Woodland Trail helped build an appetite for our dinner at the Less Than Greater Than speakeasy in Hudson.

My brother Mark and his wife Marie arrived this evening and will be staying with us over the weekend. Jeanine picked them up from the airport while I was playing soccer under the lights in a make-up match. We delivered a sound 5-2 thumping to the only team that has beaten us in recent history. Mark and Marie are looking down the road to building a new home for their retirement years, much as we have. While looking online at potential properties, we discovered this aerial view of an adjacent lot, which I found fascinating. If I had to guess, I would say that the tracks were made by a large excavator used for clearing lumber.

Normally, I am not happy when a tool I own stops working. Pictured above is the cordless pruner I have used for the last week while clearing the yard of trees, saplings, and downed limbs. Our local composting facility will accept such yard waste if it is less than 4 feet long and 4 inches in diameter. A twenty-foot 4-inch diameter tree requires about 10-20 cuts with the chainsaw and several hundred with the pruners to meet the requirements. Multiply by several dozen trees and hundreds of smaller bushes. I have little doubt that I made more than 5,000 cuts with the tool in the last week alone and who knows how many during seasons past. When it stopped working yesterday, I was surprised only by how long it had held up to the relentless use.

Today, I took some time to figure out the failure mechanism and see if I could effect a repair. The brushes in the DC motor have reached the end of their service life and are not available as a replacement part. You have to replace the entire motor, which is half the cost of a new tool. Although there is still some usable brush material remaining, the angle of contact with the commutator is out of range for proper operation. Also, the pruning blades are quite well worn.

I did not hesitate to pick up a new tool (on sale, luckily) and am back in business. I hope that this tool will get a brushless DC motor upgrade in the future.

Maya will be moving to a new apartment in September. She will continue to room with her current flatmates, Fiona and Luke, and will be joined by Fiona’s boyfriend, Ben. The third floor, 4 bedroom, 2 bath apartment is located near Inman Square, a mile from her work and half that to her dance club. It has a front and back porch and a large backyard. Best of all, she will continue to live with Fiona’s sibling felines, Walden (brother, left) and Kurt (sister, right).

I was so tired after my soccer match yesterday that I took a 4-hour nap and missed the town-wide remembrance ceremony for the 3 seniors we lost last week. Today, Jeanine and I swung by the high school entrance to pay our respects.

My soccer match overlapped with this year’s Bionic 5K, but the rest of the family was fully represented. Jeanine womanned the Merch Tent. Kyle showed up with his entire running club and placed 28th overall in a field of 712 and 4th in his age group. Maya pulled in Owen, Fiona, and a few Formlings (people who work at Formlabs). Nico had a PR shaving more than 2 minutes off his best time.

My team managed a 12-0 shellacking of Medfield in our first home field match. By the end of the game, however, injuries had reduced our roster to 11, and I played far more minutes than I would have preferred.

Guess what our country stores in this facility. Read about it here.

Jeanine shared this picture of her sister celebrating her 73rd birthday. Apparently, after seventy, you get really tall candles on a very short cake.

Jeanine returns to Concord tomorrow. It remains to be seen if we will get to sample this yummy-looking cheesecake.

Yardwork remained the order of business for me today. There is a small window during spring when clean up and pruning are easiest (before trees leaf out and undergrowth pops up). Today, I focused on gathering and stacking wood and brush piles. The brush will go to the Concord compost station, and I have offered the logs to anyone in the neighborhood looking for firewood. Pictured here is but one of a dozen brush piles, and a small one at that.

Hearts are heavy in Concord as we mourn the loss of three 18-year-old seniors who died in a Florida car crash on Monday. A fourth is hospitalized in critical condition. The four were on spring break when the SUV they were driving collided with a tractor-trailer making a U-turn on the highway. Such loss is incomprehensible and a reminder to hold our loved ones close whenever we can.

Jeanine is in Burlington, VT all week to celebrate her sister Susan’s 73rd birthday (on Friday). She is pictured here sitting on the “healing rock” at The Carving Studio & Sculpture Center on the grounds of Vermont’s historic West Rutland marble quarries, source for many Washington, DC monuments.

I spent another long day taking down small trees and saplings at the front of our lot where it borders the road. I consistently underestimate the amount of work to section and clean up each tree. Thankfully, fatigue has served to moderate my enthusiasm. For the rest of the week, I will shift my attention to cleanup.

In the evening, I drove into Medford to help Kyle with a plumbing project. The toilet we installed three years ago during the renovation of his basement has started to malfunction. It is an uplift toilet designed to pump waste up to a drain pipe. It recently started to flush continuously. We isolated the problem to a solenoid valve that controls the water supply line. We observed it malfunctioning, took it apart, found it clogged with a ton of rust flakes from corroded pipes, cleaned it thoroughly, reassembled it, and tested it. We were 100% confident that we had identified the root cause of the problem. When we reassembled the toilet, an arduous and time consuming task, we found the problem had not been corrected. After much deliberation, we concluded that it made more sense to replace the entire toilet than try and order replacement parts that might of might not address the issue.

Before leaving for Vermont to visit her sister for the week, Jeanine casually asked me to clear a new section of the front yard. Six hours later, I was halfway done with the job, finished for the day, and covered in dirt. I was able to pull many of the small saplings from the ground, roots and all. Apparently, shaking the dirt from the root ball left some of it deposited on my head. I did not notice until I came in for lunch, and am now left to wonder what the neighbors I spoke with as they passed by the house must have thought about my appearance.

Left to my own means for preparing dinner, I opted for a healthy salad that I purchased in kit form. The meal was not really photo-worthy, but I thought Jeanine would be impressed that I was not eating junk food.

In the 22 years we have lived in Massachusetts, Jeanine has never watched the Boston Marathon in person. Today, we rectified that situation. I took her to Wellesley, arguably my favorite spot to watch the race. It is just shy of the midpoint, and the eventual winners are generally among the lead pack. Once again, I managed to photograph the men and women winners of the elite and wheelchair divisions.

Pictured above on the right in the light blue shorts is John Korir of Kenya, who won his first Boston Marathon in the professional men’s division, joining his brother, Wesley, who won it in 2012 (the first siblings to ever win).

Below on the far left is Sharon Lokedi, also of Kenya, who won the professional women’s division in a course record time, defeating defending champ Hellen Obiri, who finished second.

Marcel Hug of Switzerland won his eighth Boston Marathon in the men’s wheelchair division, and American Susannah Scaroni won her second championship in the women’s wheelchair division.

The Wellesley supporters never disappoint with their enthusiastic encouragement.

I was back on the pitch this morning with my Concord United team for the first time since the fall season ended last year. I did a 50% rotation at right wing and had a solid game with no ill effects from the 10 miles of walking I did yesterday. We managed a total of 7 goals. 5 for us and 2 own goals for them! It was not our prettiest game, but we got the job done. Several of my teammates were missing, so I will be taking another photo later in the season.

The kids all had other plans for Easter, so we invited our good friends Irene and Eric over for dinner to celebrate the holiday.