Missives from the 6th Floor

The highlight of the weekend has been a trip to "Wibbley's Gourmet Hamburgers" over in Bellevue for lunch yesterday. Good burgers, good fries, and really good onion rings. We've heard their shakes are killer, too - but they'll have to wait for another visit. The decor in the place is very "pub-like" - and I kept thinking that the "Century Burger" (bacon, blue cheese, sprouts, tomato, and their sesame-based sauce) would have been even better with a nice pale ale, or IPA.

On the home front, late last week I installed a hot water recirculation system to solve the "it takes forever to get hot water at the kitchen sink" problem. Our local Costco was carrying the unit, and I figured for under $200 it was worth a try.

Installing a new 120V outlet was made easy by the fact that the water heater is in the basement/crawl-space - and I was able to accommodate the unit with the existing output plumbing from the water heater - the total install time was about two-and-a-half hours.

So far, it's working well, though we haven't gotten the first energy bill - it's a trade-off between wasting water and wasting energy to heat water that would otherwise cool while sitting in the pipes. The unit has a dial-type timer on it, so it can be set to recirculate only during "useful" hours, so there's some control over how much energy is wasted.

There's a sink-side "sensor valve" that had to be installed as well - went in easily under the kitchen sink. Since our hot water line branches pretty much immediately out of the water heater, I'll have to buy and install additional sensor kits if I want other sinks to be similarly improved. One of the two sinks in the master bathroom is a candidate, as would be the second upstairs bathroom, if it was used more than occasionally.

In other news, the next few months are looking sorta travel heavy for us - we'll be in Cabo San Lucas for a week in April, and we booked tickets yesterday to head to the north east (NY/BOS) for a week in late May/early June to celebrate my paternal grandparents 65th wedding anniversary.

While we're in the neighborhood, we're going to do our best to hook up with friends we don't get to see nearly often enough, and have a meal or two (I'm voting for two) at one of my favorite restaurants anywhere.

It'll be the first time I've seen my grandparents (and my uncle) since my brother's Bar Mitzvah in '93. It'll be the first time I've been back to New York since I worked for Disney and spent time in our NY office (c. '95/96).