Well, she was actually 2 on May 10, but you know, life is a little nuts! (Especially right this minute with a backhoe in the yard!) We had a super party at Jan and Jeff’s – a great co-celebration with cousin Nathan (3 days Lucy’s elder). We’re enjoying our sweet girl so much – she’s an amazing smart, funny and animated gift from God. 🙂 
Toby and Lucy 
How do I get this stuff off?
2 days work for a 1 hour project
We are making ready for the external footings to be dug in a couple of weeks. One of the tasks was to remove the back porch. The porch was made of poured concrete, so we couldn’t have it in the way of the footings.
We had built a temporary set of stairs from wood so that we could still use the back door. Both my dad and I estimated that it would be a fairly simple, relatively quick task to break up the concrete and to install the temporary porch. At most, we thought, we would need to go to the rental yard and get a full sized jack hammer.
We started to work on the porch with the Makita Rotohammer, but went to the lumber yard and quickly got the Bosch Brute demo hammer. We even told the rental clerk that we would probably have it back in less than 2 hours.
Our timeline was way off. We eventually got the cement porch out and the wood porch in, but it was much bigger than a 1 hour project.
3
hours into our 1 hour project 
The
rubble from the porch filled the entire bed of the truck 
The
temporary porch and happy smiles 
Palm Springs Pictures
WOW! What a delay in getting these up – just despicable, really. We’ve been an over-the-top kinda busy. Enjoy!
The
whole gang at the Palm Springs Street Fair 
Nate
and Lucy flying high 
Max
loving the water slides at Soak City 
Toby
and Max at the Palm Springs Desert Zoo 
Feeding
the giraffes 
Max
and Lucy getting jiggy on the tribal drums at the zoo 
Max
and his new best friend 
Toby
and Jan 
Max
and Chuck E Cheese 
Lucy
on a Barney ride 
Max the Archeologist at the Children’s Museum
Saturday, 20 May 2006
After VS Live, we had a single work day on Saturday. We did a bunch of little projects that needed to be done (like finally remove
the story poles). Don and Camille were still at our house, so we had an extra pair
of hands. One of the projects we did was to add some siding to the new garage wall.
We used some of the left over siding from Uncle Ted’s addition, so we didn’t have
enough to complete the side that day. Before 
After 
VSLive 2006 – Day 3
Tuesday was the first day of the really good technical stuff. Most of the day had high quality content and I think I learned a great deal. I have even begun planning how I will use the knowledge back at Salem.
Tuesday night has a tradition of Midnight Madness where the attendees play games, see more demos of software, raffles, etc. Totally geeky stuff. It is fun when I have attended in the past, but I was just wiped out so I skipped it to go to bed.