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Alaska was awe inspiring. I want to go back and if I was American, I would be looking to have a second home there. I found the people there warm and open and calm. It was great.

It is back to business for me today.

The saga with D's potential car sale continues. The person who is interested in his car is a friend and D is feeling awkward about that.

D had previous experience with buying a used car from a neighbour and the day after he bought it, the alternator died and ended up costing him $600. D is having some flashbacks about that and isn't sure how he would feel if his car did something like that shortly after it changed hands.

Before D's car can even be sold, the brake lines will have to be replaced. He was quoted around $700 or so for the job and it will be scheduled to be done this week. That was a surprise piece of news I did not expect to get when I got home!

On the other hand, we made a change last night for the better.

D is used to having a deep freeze in the basement. His mother always had one and it is filled to the brim with food. So, we have one too.

I did not grow up with one so it was a new idea for me.

I've been pushing for another one month experiment where we eat up the food in there and turn it off to see what affect it will have on our hydro bill. D was hesitant about it but we did it last night.

We didn't have to eat up everything. I managed to organize our refrigerator freezer to make it accommodate all the frozen meat we had downstairs. The only thing that was sacrificed was the ice maker (which I am not a fan of anyways).

It was surprising for both of us that with a bit of organization, our existing freezer can do the job of the downstairs one and we had been paying for 2 appliances to do essentially one job. Now that we are eating less and less meat, an extra freezer makes less and less sense.

One other thing D did when I was away was to buy a special waterproof concrete paint and apply it to the walls of our unfinished part of the basement. It is made to seal concrete and to help with keeping down any humidity there. I'm hoping that it will make a difference in the amount of time the dehumidifier gets used. Again, it is a compressor and (in my mind) uses a lot of electricity.