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.