The All of It: a toast! (actually four)

In the real world, only two of these toasts mean anything, but we thought we'd add two that are actually sort of frivolous. So first, the two that are serious.

A TOAST! to Mr. C! This week marks the end of the Tonsil War and ten years of being cancer free!

Mr. C taking refreshment in Paris, 2016. To your continued health!

A TOAST! to Gwen Ifill, the sine qua non of reporters. She spoke truth to power without wavering. I had great admiration for her and will miss her every evening at 6 PM when she isn't at her desk on the News Hour.

A TOAST! to the new kitchen floor. We have had a terrible crack in the floor almost since we moved in 35 years ago. We have redone the floor twice but it keeps coming back. In fact, that fissure runs through the whole property, through the pool (more later) and into our neighbor's property. We've lived with it getting progressively worse for about 6 years but since we're not here much of the time we've just tried to ignore it. This year we had had enough. Problem: the tiles we have on the floor are no longer available so it called for new thinking. Solutions: completely new floor in the kitchen but the entire house is tiled with the same product; take up tiles in places they don't show like closet floors and hope we can salvage enough to cover cracked area; do something completely different. I opted for t#3 and went off on the great "tile rug" hunt. Issues, however, included the thickness of the tile so it would all be the same level and the size of the tile so there wouldn't be a lot of cutting. I found some spectacular Moroccan tiles but they were much too thick. Mexican tiles, too, were too thick and too small. But here's the "tile rug" idea I had.

Most of the crack runs down the left side of the rectangle (you can't see it; it's covered by the tiles.) This just shows the area we had to cover. The Mexican tiles are NOT ceramic; they are bara, a very porous clay. Not for the floor. But it would have looked fantastic all mixed together. Tyler the Tiler managed to salvage a few of the original tiles, cleaned up the floor, and repaired the crack with some sort of rubber filler and a very thin membrane meant to stabilized the floor in case of new cracks.

After two months of looking for tiles in person and online, we finally settled on a pattern/color mix that we could live with.

We are very happy with how it looks and, mainly, no more crack. We'll see how it "winters over".

A TOAST! to the pool that we had repaired and refinished to deal with the above-mentioned crack and the very badly stained stucco finish. The pool is 16 years old and looked it. But now it looks gorgeous. Re-stucco'd with a acrylic-based stucco that will not stain, refinished with fiberglass that also will not crack, and repaired the lights.