Maya shared several images from her hiking adventure in the Olympic National Park. It has been 40 years since I was last there and her pictures make me want to return again. Today she moved on to Seattle where she visited the Chihuly Glass Museum and shared another beautifully composed photo.

On the home front, Jeanine has fallen ill with severe chills. She will see the doctor tomorrow but I am guessing she has Covid although two rapid tests she has taken so far came back negative. Out of an abundance of caution, she is self-isolating and I have spent the majority of the day away from the house.

For several weeks now I have become increasingly unhappy with the performance of my dust collection system. I have been systematically locating and sealing leaks in the fittings hoping that would improve performance. Today, the suction became so poor that I convinced myself that there must be a blockage in the main duct. I used a camera snake to investigate and found no blockage whatsoever. I finally checked the filter not expecting that to be the issue given how new it is. I certainly was not expecting to find it completely clogged with dust. It took 30 minutes with my compressed air gun to remove all the debris. When I restarted the dust collector, the suction was so powerful that one of my blast gates struggled to open under the pressure of the vacuum. One of the features of my dust collector, is that you can easily reverse the air flow through the filter to keep it from getting clogged. I have been doing this once every week or two. Going forward, I will do this at the end of every day. It only takes about 15 seconds.