South Dakota

This weekend Sara and I took the Jetta down to South Dakota for her brother's Confirmation. It's a long drive, over 350 miles, and the Jetta TDI delivered nearly 39mpg even though our average speed was over 75mph. It was raining the entire way there, and most of the way back. There were some points where the rain was so fierce that I really wanted a third, faster, speed for the wipers. Passing 18-wheelers at some points was really taking your life into your own hands. The spray from their wheels was nearly impenetrable and they always seemed to edge into our lane at that point (it was quite windy).

We only had to fill up the tank at the beginning of the trip and about a hundred miles into the return trip. However, after over ten hours of sitting in a car seat over two days, not to mention sleeping on a hotel bed, I'm pretty sore and rather sleep deprived.

At this point I'm hoping that I'll a few weekends at home to myself so that I can finish up the basement. The biggest remaining task is to put in the return air ducting. I'm not sure how I'll do that. I can either cut into the main plenum with the vent and put it in the soffit, or I can put some ducting into the wall and run that into the return plenum inside the soffit. Just putting the ducting into the main plenum seems the easiest thing to do, so I'll first verify if that's allowable or not. I'm hoping it is. Once that's done, I bet I can finish up the rest of the work and be ready for drywall by July (though I'm shooting for June).