Christmas day was quiet up on the mountain. I’m not sure we have done less on any given day in the recent past. We mostly sat around and listened to the rain. The only time I went outside was a quick trip up the road to let Zeke take care of his business, and a couple of even quicker trips around the house to let both dogs do their business. The rest of the time we stayed inside, and did nothing and saw no one.

We had been having egg nog every evening since Thanksgiving, so Thursday night when we realized we had run out of egg nog before we ran out of Southern Comfort, I went back down to the grocery store for more. They were sold out. I checked a couple of liquor stores, and they had run out, too. I stopped at a convenience store and they didn’t know what egg nog was. So we didn’t have egg nog for Christmas night.

We had another foiled Christmas tradition. Leah has made it a custom to give the guy who makes our eyeglasses a spiked fruitcake every Christmas. We prepared the fruitcake and took it by his office on Tuesday, only to find out that they had closed their office until the Monday after Christmas. I think it will be okay to deliver on Monday; I’m pretty sure it has been properly preserved.

Late in the day Leah started preparing Christmas dinner. We had deep-fried turkey (store bought) and cornbread dressing (home made, and very good) with turkey gravy (let’s say half store bought and half home made). It was good, so I ate a lot. Leah says she ate a lot, but she really didn’t.

A few days before Christmas we had given in and put a couple of decorations in the living room, but we didn’t put up a tree. That was OK, since we had each bought our own presents weeks earlier.

All in all, we both thought it was a pretty decent Christmas. We hope everyone had at least as good Christmas as we did.

The most memorable features of Christmas here, as well as most of the East Coast, were rain and extraordinarily high temperatures. A lot of places west and south of us had much more rain and much worse weather than we did, but we had a lot of rain. When I went outside Saturday morning, I could hear the dull road from the rush of water in all the streams flowing down the mountain. The rivers and most of the larger streams around Rome were at or over flood stage, although there was no severe flooding. We don’t know exactly how much rain we had on the mountain, because our rain gauge is broken.

Saturday morning we saw sunlight for the first time in days.

A little later it looked like the clouds would disappear.

And then a little later than that, it looked like it would rain again.

It did rain, but only a light mist that didn’t even get me and the dogs wet when we went up to look at the house. The house weather tight now, but someone left a window open before it started raining, so the floor sheathing was wet in some places. I wanted to see if a particular place was wetter. It wasn’t, but it also wasn’t dry. I don’t know whether it’s a leak, or maybe someone just dropped a water bottle.

We had a rough inspection on December 23. It covered plumbing, electrical, heating and air conditioning, and framing. The inspector left me with a list of eight things that need to be addressed before he will sign off. Two are fairly serious framing issues. The ridge beam needs more support for one thing. That should be straightforward. The other issue is a butchered i-joist where the plumber cut away some of the upper part of the joist to get the master bath shower drain in. When I saw that a few days earlier I knew it was going to be a problem; I just don’t know why the plumbers didn’t know that. I have to call the framer to see what we can do about those two issues.

The plumber also missed a few places that need metal plates to protect pipes from drywall screws and nails. I also don’t know why they missed those, but at least all those will require is a metal plate and a few nails.

The inspector found no problems with the electrical or heating/cooling system. That’s good. He also said we can proceed with insulation, since that won’t cover any of the required fixes.

So insulation is the next big project, and I intend to do this one myself.