Yes, I realize it was 2 weeks ago. This is pretty quick for me! We praise our Lord for the blessings of family and friends, and especially for His gift of new life.
Max is very excited to be going to Legoland in a few weeks. To prepare for the vast amounts of Legos he wants to buy, he has been collecting cans and bottles and recycling them after smashing the cans. We generally go once a month after church to the recycling station. Today, we went off schedule because we won’t have any other opportunity before vacation. We got there right after the station re-opened after lunch. We were behind a bunch of other people who all had multiple huge bags of cans and bottles. Being a small station, everyone queues up and goes one at a time. It took us about an hour of waiting for all the gigantic loads to go in front of us. Where other people were loading up multiple 50 gallon trash cans with cans and bottles, Max only filled the bottom 6 inches of the can with his aluminum cans. It was pretty funny. We came out of there with a chit for $4.67, which we then cashed at the local Albertsons. I gotta figure out a way to get my hourly rate up.
In our weekend, in this phase of our lives, Saturday is a full construction day. Thankfully, Sunday is Family Day. Sometimes much of it is spent catching up on other tasks (we hope to regain our full Sabbath in a year +), but we try, TRY, really hard to do something fun with the kids. A couple of weeks ago we went to the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum. This time was extra cool because Max was on a little treasure hunt to find certain exhibits, then draw a quick picture of it. The giant squid, the Chumash baby, etc. It was a nice day.
I don’t like wearing wet clothes, but you get wet when climbing a ladder on the roof (to get to the second story roof) in the rain at 6:30 in the morning.
Turn up the sound on your computer to get the full effect. ] The early morning rain brought snow to the local mountains.
I am thankful that the rain didn’t start until 5:30a. I am thankful that the rain stopped (temporarily) at 9:30a. I am thankful that today is Friday and Toby wasn’t here alone. I am grateful for Austin’s True Value Hardware store being so close.
April 11-15, 2007 (Thursday – Sunday) It was time to put the roof over the new construction. Greg, Pop and Mark came up on Thursday (I still had to go to my day job) to work on setting up the roof beam and the rafters. One of the big questions had always been How are we going to hoist the 30 foot long, 600 pound paralam up 7 feet into the air? Well that was solved with a mechanical lift (whose maximum weight was 650 pounds. whew!) Thursday was very windy. So windy, that the ladders and other stuff were blown off the roof in the 40 mph gusts.
Thursday — This is what I saw when I drove home from work in the evening. Take a look at the palm trees in the background to see the effects of the wind.
Friday — Greg brought Buddy and we continued to put up more rafters. The front of the house is what was mostly worked on.
Saturday — Greg decided to bring in the big guns for the rest of the roof. He recruited another of my Dad’s neighbors, Kevin, who is a general contractor specializing in roofs. God does provide. Kevin works almost as fast as Greg and got an amazing amount of work done. Our neighbor Gracie baked a cake for the working crew. The joke was that she was celebrating not having to look at a complete eyesore anymore.
Sunday — Kevin, Greg, Buddy and Mark were back again. The focus was on the back of the house. We wanted to finish the low roof over the office and get the plywood over the shed roof above the loft. We almost made it. The loft roof is finished and the rafters are in on the low office roof. We didn’t get the office roof plywood on and there is a bit of plywood missing on the east side, but all in all, it was a very productive weekend.
