We have Sherlock Holmes and a Princess this year. God bless you!
Happy Halloween!
Monthly Archives: October 2007
Blessed with an Artist
I am so glad that we have the opportunity to homeschool Max. Lucy will be along for the ride in a few years (she’s such a sponge, she might be doing fractions before we actually start teaching them). I get to have a few mornings a week with Max alone, while Lucy goes to preschool and dresses up like a ladybug or princess, paints and swings to her hearts content. So Max and I do Bible story reading, math, phonics, etc in our time together. And I can say that even on a bad day, I still love it. A lovely part of it is that he LOVES to draw and color. We’ll read a story, then talk about it, then I ask him to draw a picture or color a page about it. For example, we read about Bach the musician (history and literature), then listened to the CD that goes with it (music), then he colored a picture that came with the DVD Rom (art). Yea!! Sometimes he just blows our mind with his drawings, like this one today. Enjoy. 🙂
Pirate Ship 10-19-07
Toby’s Mishmash
How do we love thee, Ginger dog? Let us count the ways? Bub reported below on her eating a whole through the non-diet food that is Petey’s. So she ate herself silly on one occasion (distended belly, crazy lethargy), but we thought that was isolated. Alas – she nosed her way through Matt’s barricade of the bag, and managed to eat for several more days before we caught her. Ugh. Months of dieting and dragging her behind the bicycle all lost. She literally got wedged in the doggy door repeatedly- you could tell it was a painful squeeze. And then she pooped in the house. BLECH! So then something happened Wednesday that was SO GROSS (that wasn’t Ginger’s fault, but it was her food bag, so she gets the blame indirectly). We keep her diet food up high in the utility sink, sitting in a black hefty bag. There was a strange smell from over there – and I didn’t know what it was. I noticed that the whole outside of the bag was wet – then figured out there was a leak from the sink nozzle, trickling down. So I put my hand inside the bag to see if the food was wet farther down. My arm came out – COVERED WITH MAGGOTTS!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! Do you feel like yakking your dinner? I sure did. The lovely plumbers who were working inside, kindly threw away the (expensive) bag of food for me, and man the smell in the sink was so very bad. Blech again. We do love Ginger, she has those totally expressive eyes (which basically tell you she’s hungry 24/7). She also loves to rub into your lap with her behind, and somehow thinks she’s a teensy lap dog.
Third Time is the Charm
I have taken 3 sets of panorama shots of the front of the house this week. Previously, all the panoramas have been from across the street or on the outside of the hedge, and you couldn’t see thew whole front, just the top half. So, I am trying to get a *whole* shot. I am taking the pictures in the morning to reduce the ‘washed out’ spots where the sunlight lightens one area but not the other. I take a bunch of pictures and then use my screaming fast computer at work to build the panorama. But there has always been something wrong with images. The picture below is not perfect, but is the best I have got, so enjoy.
Whole front
You can click on the image to get the whole big picture.
Mishmash
- The siding guys are about 94% done with the siding. They took some time off from siding to build the partition walls on the inside for the plumbers.
- Lucas is doing a great job on the roof. He is doing little bits at a time. He has probably done 15% of the roof so far. I think though, that he is anxious to get this done. Once we get the vents cut into the roof (my job) he says he can blow through the remainder of the roofing and be done.
- Ginger ate a hole in a dog food bag that was stored in the garage and proceeded to gorge herself. I put some stuff in front of the bag to block access, but she was able to get into the bag a second time. I bet all our dieting efforts are now nil because of these 2 binges. After the first incident, Toby said that Ginger could barely walk and just laid in the house all day. Her belly was hot and distended. She perked up the next morning and was ready to eat again.
- Max has lost his second front tooth. He now officially has the gapped tooth grin. Lucy checks her teeth frequently to see if any of hers are ready to come out. She is convinced that a top tooth is loose.
- Some stinking jerk stole 3 of my orange barricade cones out from in front of our house on Saturday night of the Avocado Festival.
- I am very happy with the plumbers (Joey Steffan and Larry Hasbrouck) that are working here this week. They are able to take the initiative and to make decisions on their own within the parameters that I have defined. Their work looks good and is not sloppy (as far as I can tell). Even at the end of the day, they still have a good attitude. They are from Colorado, but I would be happy to refer them to anyone for any plumbing project.
- We will be running 1″ copper trunk lines for the water under the house.
- Trench digging is no fun. The plumbers determined that with all the appliances that we are putting in (2 furnaces, 2 water heaters, 2 washer / dryers, an oven, a stove, etc.) the BTU requirements were for 660,000 BTUs. That means that diameter of the natural gas line coming into my house had to be increased from 3/4″ to 1 1/4″. So dig, dig, dig for me this weekend. I dug out a new trench across the front of my yard to accomodate the new gas line. The plumbers were able to use a plastic tubing for the gas line instead of cast iron so it makes the job a bit easier.
- Second worst question about the house project : Aren’t you / you must be so excited?
- Worst question about the house project : What is the estimated completion date?