Our Arizona Story

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(Updated August 23, 2006)

"I make myself rich by making my wants few." -Henry David Thoreau

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And while we are chuckling .... Read Off Grid Technology on page 5

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09:08 pm - Damn ... I love being RIGHT! ;)

Published on Wednesday, May 2, 2007 by The San Francisco Chronicle
The Hippies Were Right!
Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good? Time To Give The Ol’ Tie-Dyers Some Respect


by Mark Morford
Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that’s happening right now in the newly “greening” America and don’t say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women or endless vile unwinnable BushCo wars in the Middle East lasting until roughly 2075 because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored sardonic optimism. OK?

I’m talking about, say, energy-efficient light bulbs. I’m looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I’m talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins and I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and non-phthalates dildos at Good Vibes and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation’s oddest status symbol. You know, good things.

Look around: we have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth” and even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, “it’s the right thing to do” (read: It’s purely economic and all about their bottom line because if they don’t start caring they’ll soon be totally screwed on manufacturing and shipping costs at/from all their brutal Chinese sweatshops).

There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing (albeit fitful, bittersweet) pro-environment sea change now happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along. Oh yes they did.

You know it’s true. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMA seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it’s about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.

Here’s a suggestion, from one of my more astute ex-hippie readers: Instead of issuing carbon credits so industrial polluters can clear their collective corporate conscience, maybe, to help offset all the savage damage they’ve done to the soul of the planet all these years, these commercial cretins should instead buy some karma credits from the former hippies themselves. You know, from those who’ve been working for the health of the planet, quite thanklessly, for the past 50 years and who have, as a result, built up quite a storehouse of good karma. You think?

Of course, you can easily argue that much of the “authentic” hippie ethos — the anti-corporate ideology, the sexual liberation, the anarchy, the push for civil rights, the experimentation — has been totally leeched out of all these new movements, that corporations have forcibly co-opted and diluted every single technology and humble pro-environment idea and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone and Odwalla smoothie to make them both palatable and profitable. But does this somehow make the organic oils in that body lotion any more harmful? Verily, it does not.

You might also just as easily claim that much of the nation’s reluctant turn toward environmental health has little to do with the hippies per se, that it’s taking the threat of global meltdown combined with the notion of really, really expensive ski tickets to slap the nation’s incredibly obese ass into gear and force consumers to begin to wake up to the savage gluttony and wastefulness of American culture as everyone starts wondering, oh my God, what’s going to happen to swimming pools and NASCAR and free shipping from Amazon? Of course, without the ’60s groundwork, without all the radical ideas and seeds of change planted nearly five decades ago, what we’d be turning to in our time of need would be a great deal more hopeless indeed.

But if you’re really bitter and shortsighted, you could say the entire hippie movement overall was just incredibly overrated, gets far too much cultural credit for far too little actual impact, was pretty much a giant excuse to slack off and enjoy dirty lazy responsibility-free sex romps and do a ton of drugs and avoid Vietnam and not bathe for a month and name your child Sunflower or Shiva Moon or Chakra Lennon Sapphire Bumblebee. This is what’s called the reactionary simpleton’s view. It blithely ignores history, perspective, the evolution of culture as a whole. You know, just like America.

But, you know, whatever. The proofs are easy enough to trace. The core values and environmental groundwork laid by the ’60s counterculture are still so intact and potent even the stiffest neocon Republican has to acknowledge their extant power. It’s all right there: Treehugger.com is the new ’60s underground hippy zine. Ecstasy is the new LSD. Visible tattoos are the new longhairs. And bands as diverse as Pearl Jam to Bright Eyes to NIN to the Dixie Chicks are writing savage anti-Bush, anti-war songs for a new, ultra-jaded generation.

And oh yes, speaking of good ol’ MDMA (Ecstasy), even drug culture is getting some new respect. Staid old Time mag just ran a rather snide little story about the new studies being conducted by Harvard and the National Institute of Mental Health into the astonishing psychospiritual benefits of goodly entheogens such as LSD, psilocybin and MDMA. Unfortunately, the piece basically backhands Timothy Leary and the entire “excessive,” “naive” drug culture of yore in favor of much more “sane” and “careful” scientific analysis happening now, as if the only valid methods for attaining knowledge and an understanding of spirit were through control groups and clinical, mysticism-free examination. Please.

Still, the fact that serious scientific research into entheogens is being conducted even in the face of the most anti-science, pro-pharmaceutical, ultra-conservative presidential regime in recent history is proof enough that all the hoary old hippie mantras about expanding the mind and touching God through drugs were onto something after all (yes, duh). Tim Leary is probably smiling wildly right now — though that might be due to all the mushrooms he’s been sharing with Kerouac and Einstein and Mary Magdalene. Mmm, heaven.

Of course, true hippie values mean you’re not really supposed to care about or attach to any of this, you don’t give a damn for the hollow ego stroke of being right all along, for slapping the culture upside the head and saying, See? Do you see? It was never about the long hair and the folk music and Woodstock and taking so much acid you see Jesus and Shiva and Buddha tongue kissing in a hammock on the Dog Star, nimrods.

It was, always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie crap no one believes in anymore. Right?

© The San Francisco Chronicle

Current Mood: quixotic

10:53 am - Given up on waiting for Ajay to update!

Sorry folks, this isn't going to be up to Ajay's standard ... but we do need an entry that explains what is going on in our lives now.

Nick joined us in Arizona in January 2006, having made the decision to transfer to U of A from Binghamton University. Getting the promised "money for college" out of the US Army was proving very challenging. We eventually had to enlist the help of Sen. John McCain, who did help a lot, but we are still owed for tuition. Nick decided to get a job and had intended to start at U of A in the Fall of 2006. Andrew is serving in Iraq and hopes to attend the U of A when he gets out.

Life and love has a way of changing plans though ... and Nick became engaged to a lovely lass from New Zealand. We met Natalie in April 2006 when she visited the US. They got engaged, and in December 2006 Nick flew off to New Zealand. Where they will ultimately settle is fluid at the moment ... they have some issues to sort out before they decide.

Way back in March/April 2006 none of this was predictable, and we took a look at our rapidly dwindling bank account and decided that we'd be better stop being "retired" for a while if we planned to help put our sons through university.

Ajay took a computer consulting job at Arizona Mail Order ... a nationwide mail order company handling orders for Lane Bryant, Fingerhut, and other catalog companies. We moved to Tucson and spent a few months in a rented apartment. This taught us to spend as little time as possible in rented property! AMO offered Ajay a full-time position which he accepted. A less-than-optimal lifestyle at the apartments and the job offer were the impetus to get out of rented quarters. We are banking on the housing market to give us a better investment than leaving our money in a CD ... so we sank everything we had left into a tiny house in Central Tucson.

The plan is to live here for about 10 years, renovate this house and saving madly. Then sell ... hopefully for a profit ... and head back to Greenlee permanently.

Our straw bale house is still being built ... we have not abandoned our dreams ... but of course progess, when building part-time, is a lot slower.

We have also decided to go back to college ... both of us are persuing teacher's degrees through Pima County Community College, and then U of A.

That's all folks!

Current Mood: contemplative

07:09 pm - Monday December 26 ... well, that's when I started this letter

Hi there



I had planned to send this out before New Year (2006, if you were wondering) but never quite got it finished. Now it's already February and the next letter is almost ready to go.



Lessons learned while building bale walls

• Bales above the 3rd layer weigh 10 times as much as bales on the first layer


• Bales above head height contain lots more loose straw than bales lower down


• The Law of Selective Gravity (aka Intelligent Falling - a way superior theory than Newton's childish attempt to explain why and how things fall.) plays weird tricks with loose straw. Very few pieces actually fall to the floor - most go into your hair, your ears or straight down your shirt.


• Loose straw does not go well with cookies, lunch or anything else.


• The sum of 2 half bales is definitely less than the whole - there is always a hole in the wall that has to be stuffed with loose straw.


• Strawbales bought from a local farmer are just as sharp and prickly as bales bought from an Apache Reservation. (I had hoped that the first lot was some subtle form of revenge.)


• A broken bale contains many times the volume of straw of the same bale when still whole.


• It may be true, as advertised in straw bale literature, that no animals actually eat straw - but pack-rats sure enjoy burrowing in it.

Current Mood: mischievous

08:48 am - Thursday -- December 8. Early morning & too cold to work outside

Hi there



It took 33 bags of cement, 11 truckloads of sand and stone from the wash, more 55 gallon drums of water than I took note of and 12 days of mixing - but the concrete floor was finally finished on Saturday. Not really an anti-climax - we were very nervous that we had left it too late and that the cold, frosty temperatures were going to prevent us from finishing. Various experts (unpaid, fortunately, otherwise they'd be "consultants". A hated breed if you've been involved with the computer programming industry. Just in case ... if you're a computer consultant - then obviously this doesn't apply to you) have given us their doom and gloom predictions of what we've done: "No expansion joints ....it's gonna crack and break your tiles!" "You should never use unwashed sand - the stuff you used has clay in it. Weak concrete!" "You didn't wet the concrete every day. It's not going to be strong" etc. etc. Thanks for your expertise fellas - I'm sure you're absolutely correct. That said, the floor is level (mostly), stable, easily strong enough (we hope) to support the roof and tile will adhere to it very nicely (or we'll find something else to blame).



One morning we interrupted our concrete activities to watch Angus the bull moseying through the 3 foot gap between trailer and shed, dropping droppings along the way, to drink water from the 20 gallon buckets set up for easy access while pouring concrete. He was absolutely intent on getting the water and completely ignored Mojo's increasingly frantic barking, but an unusually accurate stone pinging him on forehead eventually caused him to break off and reassess the situation - to Mojo's relief. I signed an agricultural lease with the rancher so the cows can graze wherever Mojo doesn't chase them - but I'll be buggered if I'm hauling water for his stock as well.



Temperatures have dropped into the teens overnight with winter well on its way (nothing like Yellowstone at minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit) but the days are sunny and pleasant - provided you're in the sun and out of the wind. It is somewhat ironic that I have built the roof so that I now can't work in the sun and, not having built the walls, can't get out of the wind either. The cold, dry air really does a number on the hands (ably abetted by the cement dust) and we've been through more skin lotion in 2 weeks than we normally go through in 3 seasons. It doesn't help much - my hands are still so chapped and dry that the cement dust has coagulated in the skin cracks and nothing short of amputation appears to be able to get them clean again. At least it's honest dirt, earned the hard way.



When I framed the shed walls in March/April this year, I framed in 48" wide openings for the windows. Seemed logical - I was planning to buy windows 48" wide. Bad me, the windows were exactly 48" wide, which meant that they required openings 49" wide. Cursing steadily and wishing that manufacturers would advertise their products accurately - I redid the openings. Having learned that lesson, I created openings 37" wide in the house walls, planning to buy 36" wide windows.... but I bought them from a different company and these windows are "nominally" 36 inches wide - meaning they require an opening 36" wide. For crying out aloud!! Bitterly regretting my wishes concerning accurate advertising but repeating all the expletives from 6 months ago, I spent 2 days redoing these openings to shrink them an inch.



The doors and windows were delivered last week. "Delivered" means being brought in as far as the top of THE HILL. The driver took one look at it and, without even getting to see our uphill, muttered "No way". So we loaded them all onto the trailer and very slowly (45 minutes for 3 miles) drove them back to the house site. Only one pane of glass was cracked (not by me) and the company has promised to replace that one.



The next step of the building process is the walls, including the doors and windows. Before moving any bales (a BIG day, rapidly approaching and much anticipated) the "toe-ups" have to be bolted to the floor. Our original plan called for single lengths of treated 2 by 6 to be laid down 24 inches apart, so that the bales rested on them ... for very valid, but totally forgotten, reasons we changed that plan to one that has three 2 by 6's laid on top of each other to achieve a 4½" toe-up. So I've skinned my knuckles and have splinters all over my hands and wrists (don't know I manage it - my theory is that the splinters jump from the wood toward the nearest piece of exposed skin and then burrow in) but I've made quite a bit of progress. I wonder how many bales it will take before I'm heartily sick of them.



Till next time



Regards,



Ajay

02:26 pm - Sunday, November 20 2005

Hi there



I spent a week preparing the floor area -- installing the plumbing and bringing in truckloads of fill in order to level the floor -- prior to pouring concrete.



After all the procrastination and delay that happened for digging the trenches, the plumbing was installed amazingly fast. Our friend Rush spent a couple of days with us and he had that plumbing sorted out in no time at all. Bev and I had driven into Safford earlier - mainly for the bits of pipe and various angles, joins and connectors that would be needed. We only missed out on one that I didn't realize was available and didn't know that I needed it.



I started with a large pile of fill, about 6 truck loads, all in the Southeast corner of the house, and wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load, started leveling the floor area. Ever noticed what a large gap a wheelbarrow load makes in the pile you're pulling from and what a negligible effect it has on the area you're leveling -- Murphy's corollary to the law of the conservation of matter! I alternated from despair that I needed yet more fill to despair that I had too much fill and would have to remove some. Eventually I got to the "ahh stuff it" stage and declared the area level. Large amounts of concrete were going to be mixed and poured over this so what difference did it make?



With tractor, trailer and Mule I hauled in 5 truckloads of wash sand (which is a natural course sand and stone mix) calculating that each load was close to 2 cubic yards of material - hence 10 yards which was required for the floor. All calculations were good - except that I ran out of sand at the halfway point and will have to spend another day hauling in another 5 truckloads. With 5 full 55 gallon drums of water ... we were ready to go!



So we spent a week mixing and pouring concrete -- working most mornings and setting up for the following day during the afternoon. We're still only half way there!



Last Monday, Angus the bull decided that he was really interested in our building operations and that they needed much closer examination. At around 6 we (Mojo and I) chased him away from under the house porch where he was taking an interest in.... concrete? -- there is nothing there for him to eat so we have no idea what he thought he was doing. Mojo started barking at about midnight - so I let him out. Angus was standing in the shed about 6 feet away from me -- I'm not sure who was most startled, Angus, Mojo or me. We saw him off and went back to bed - Begorrah, he came back again. At about 3 he was bumping around in front of the trailer. This time he got another stone on his butt and was chased quite a distance away.



That morning, I couldn't understand what had happened to my work boots until I realized that Angus had licked the inside of my boots, pulling the inner sole completely out. Bev theorizes that he was after the salt. Meanwhile, bullspit in my boots -- Ick! But for one letter, that could have been a whole lot worse!



Mojo likes licking my feet after I've had a hard day's work - Angus likes the inside of my boots.... maybe I could market this stuff. Bottled foot sweat - keep your dogs and bulls happy. Guaranteed to ... okay, that's a problem because I'm not sure what it's guaranteed to do. But maybe it would sell on E-Bay.



The high-desert temperatures have dropped rapidly in the past 2 weeks with our first frost occurring on Thursday morning. That's the end of the squash plants - they really don't like frost. Still, we've got a fall/winter crop planted and we're hopeful that we'll get some greens that the bull won't eat. Unfortunately there is this rabbit/hare that is raiding the veggies - I haven't seen it yet but the tracks are fairly clear. I'll line the bottom half of the fence with plastic mesh as soon as I get some - that should keep him out. Unless it's not a rabbit/hare and is a rock squirrel which is simply climbing the fence...



If "vegetarian" means "really poor hunter", what is the word for a vegetarian who can't grow vegetables? Biafran?



Regards



Ajay

Current Mood: mischievous

11:54 am - Sunday, November 6 2005

Hi there



Despite Mojo's valiant efforts, the 2 large bulls that wander around have been camping out closer and closer to the homestead. Mojo, after some encouragement from us, is turning into a very effective cow-herder and is now more than happy to chase the bulls. It's a pity that I know nothing about the specialist training for a working dog because he's quite receptive to it. Anyway, the bulls. I named them "Black" and "Angus" but could never really tell the difference between them ... they all look alike. For the past week or so, Mojo has helped me chase them from the immediate environs of the house. One evening, we chased Angus out of the vegetable garden but not before he had sampled some produce - casually destroying 2 cauliflowers that had taken months to grow and were just starting to form heads.



The following night we traded the fall growing season's worth of green, leafy vegetables for 3 lumps of bull shit. Not a trade I would normally have engaged in, but, grateful as ever for small mercies, I philosophically dumped his payment for the vegetables into the compost heap and now optimistically look forward to the vegetables that the compost is going to help grow. It's interesting that he ate the cauliflower and kale (he meant collards but whatever!) but, other than something to sleep on, he ignored the squash. Squashed them, but ignored them.



As a result of this minor debacle it is easier to tell the bulls apart -- Angus has a large stone embedded in his butt! (He's kidding of course!)



I spent the remainder of the week building a fence around the remains of the vegetable garden. We always knew that the garden was in danger from the wandering "hamburgers" but the urgency of finishing the roof delayed the building of the fence. We had gathered about 50 pallets from the copper mine which were stacked, to the absolute delight of the rock squirrels, in 3 piles about 8 feet high. The fence consists of 32 pallets, has 3 gates - one of which is big enough to allow Mule through - and involved the digging of 32 holes, each a minimum of 20 inches deep. These holes are dug with a rock bar ... a hand powered rock bar! If you're wondering why I'm emphasizing this - it's called a rock bar, not a digging spike, and there's a reason for this! The fence looks very "Wild Westish" -- sort of OK Corral on the cheap but without the gunfight or any of the characters -- although my neighbors didn't seem too impressed with its looks. But the price was fantastic -- about $10 in all. (I paid for some of the hinges and the fasteners.)



The steep uphill road leading to the property claimed one of my tires this week - shredded it right down to the steel casing. I had been bragging that I could drive the hill without needing 4 wheel drive - it just took "technique". Now, with less hubris, a smaller bank balance, 4 new tires and a whole new understanding of the dangers of spinning tires on a bad dirt road, I'll hit 4 wheel drive every time I try that hill. How's that for technique?



I finally installed the 4 new PV discount "cosmetically blemished" panels that I bought about a month ago for about half their retail price. Our system was doing fine, we seldom had to cut back on our electricity usage for lack of sunlight, but I wanted a bit more generating power in reserve for winter cloudy days and the capacity to run power intensive machines like a concrete mixer ... or popcorn maker. I definitely want to be able to run the popcorn maker!



After several weeks spent building the roof, I felt that a week or so on the campsite wouldn't go amiss - but now it's back to working on the house again. I dug the trenches for the plumbing (which are amazingly long for such a small house - who put the kitchen and bathroom at opposite ends of the house and why?) and am getting ready to mix and pour the 11 ¼ cubic yards of concrete that it takes for the 4 inch slab floor. We investigated an earth floor, consisting primarily of oiled and sealed clay, as a "greener" alternative -- but eventually discarded the idea for a couple of basic reasons. Tiles don't adhere well to a clay floor - no matter how well sealed - and a clay floor is not impervious to termites. We reached a weak compromise with our consciences by deciding to use less cement in our concrete.



I always rave about the weather here ... okay, maybe not in the summer or winter, but at least half the time. Then again, Spring had bugs so I wasn't impressed then either. Hmm, maybe that "always rave about the weather" should read "Fall is definitely my favorite season". The nights are cool (high 30's and low 40's) and the days are mild (high 60's and low 70's) with very little humidity. The evenings and sunsets are beautiful. We've started sitting outside again with a small fire going (to the delight of the cat and the consternation of the dog who is scared of the flames) - watching the sunset and star gazing. Planets must really have confused the early star gazers ... if you don't understand why, then you need to study the night sky more often.



On that note, until next time



Regards



Ajay

09:55 pm - Thursday October 20 - post roofing session break

Hi there



As expected, we spent most of the last 3 weeks on the roof, making slow and usually steady progress. The hip corners were a new learning curve - the first one isn't something that we're particularly proud of but by the 8th and last one, we had the procedure down pat. Our next roof (!!) should be great. We discovered that I'm not the only one with no real skill with a tape measure (bite your tongue if you said "or any other tool!") - the "efficient" roof delivery system requires the delivery guy to measure correctly and cut all the required pieces. Ours managed to leave out 8 sheets! As each metal piece is very firmly crimped onto the preceding one, the roof building is a sequential process so this brought us to a halt. I tried to cut some from 2 long "spare" pieces, but they are both scratched and not really usable. Remember this roofing company? When we were building the shed - they forgot half the roof on the first delivery, delivered the wrong color on the second delivery and didn't give us enough screws when we drove to Silver City ourselves to fetch the missing roof panels. Here we go again!!



The gutters on the east side were a real pain, requiring a fairly significant rethink and redo. The problem actually lay in the foundation piers for the porch - it turns out that the southernmost foundation pier is about an inch lower than the preceding one - leading to the roof being an inch out of line. This was the part of the house that was designed by Bev and built by Nick ... it's times like this that make you realize why it's so important to get married and have kids. There's always someone else to blame! If George Bush were anywhere near here, I'd blame him as well. Meanwhile, I'll carry on taking down and reinstalling gutters.



It took 5 days before we finished the roof over the west side porch. It really didn't matter that this is the smallest portion of roof; the sense of accomplishment was great. We sat back, enjoyed a couple of frosties and admired the handiwork. Providing you don't know what you're talking about and don't look too closely (and preferably, you're quite drunk) the roof looks good! The weather did a real number on my ego on Saturday night though - thunder, rain and wind rolled through all night. Of course, my roof was still there on Sunday morning, but the tar paper on the as yet incomplete pieces of roof had shredded and blown all over the local cactus bushes! This was going to be a horrible mess to sort out.



Lesson for the week: When building a roof, do not put all the tar paper down at once. Put it in place and then cover it with roof sheets that don't mind getting wet and won't rip off and blow away.



Deep thought for the week: If you have a "typo" and a "thinko" - how come you have an "oops" and not a "do-oh"?



The mess with the paper wasn't as bad as feared. It did have a light hearted moment when I was trying to nail down a replacement sheet and a gust of wind blew up out of nowhere. I ended up spread-eagled on my sheet of wildly flapping paper, desperately clinging on while yelling for help from my hard of hearing (and then hysterically laughing) wife. Why do women find situations like that, which involve their husbands, so funny?



We went gangbusters that day - installing metal sheets on most of the southern side. It was only that evening that we realized we hadn't installed in the sky-light and had given ourselves a difficult and messy redo. At least the paper wasn't going to blow off again!



So here are, 10 days later, and the roof is in its final stages. Hip ridge covers, gable rakes, gable walls, some guttering and a messy redo are all that's left. I should finish this weekend.



Which leaves me the prospect of mixing 12 yards of concrete for the floor next week. I'm going to look back on the never ending roofing as the halcyon days of building each time I stretch the kinks out of my back. Twelve yards - that’s 35 bags of cement, 8 truck loads of wash sand, 400 gallons of water and lots and lots of callouses, sweat and cursing. Sounds like fun!



There are many things that I really love about this part of Arizona - the climate, the scenery, the wide open spaces, the friendliness (and relative lack) of the locals ... but this week I found another one. Bev went into "town" one day (you know, Clifton, population 2,600. That's fewer than attended my kids' New York high school.), picked up the mail and the annual tax bill for our 40 acres had arrived. She paid it in cash and received change back from a 5 dollar bill. This you gotta love! In New York even the homeless pay more property tax than that!



Till next time.



Regards



Ajay.

Current Mood: content

01:05 am - RIP Jan Berry

Our dear friend, Jan Berry, passed away today. She died of a brain tumor (glioblastoma multiformae) ... the most malignant, aggressive, and invasive of all the brain tumors. It was inoperable.

She collapsed on Monday, October 10 .... went into a coma ... and never regained consciousness. :'(

Our deep and sincere sympathies to her husband, JD and daughter Shay.

Current Mood: sad

08:51 am - Sunday, October 2 2005

Hi there,



Wedding rings, I have found, can be dangerous to your health ... those contemplating getting one should take heed! After sitting on my finger for over 20 years, mine turned on me. It caught itself on the edge of the ladder's step as I jumped down. Fortunately, the ring broke, leaving my finger mostly whole - bleeding but not broken. The remains of the ring are now in the truck waiting for a trip to the jeweler but I think it'll wait till after the house is built before I wear it again. I have the strangest sunburn on that finger.



It's obviously Rattle Snake Roaming season. I'm not sure if they're looking for new territory, a good place to spend the winter or just out cruising for a good time but I've caught another 2 in the last week. Little ones, but they still have teeth and a bad temper when trodden on. Last Tuesday night I caught one in the pile of off cut pieces of wood that had accumulated next to the saw. He was chased into a bucket in a hurry and the wood pile has been hastily removed. So, with the snake safely in a bucket, I sat down to relax with a tube of the golden good stuff and begorrah, a scorpion, tail up and aggressive, wonders across the shed floor about an inch from my bare foot. Dead scorpion! Muttering about poisonous creatures, thorns and other similar desert things, I settled back to nurse on another tube of golden delight when a Tarantula wandered through the shed. He was too far away to reach so I just kept a wary eye on him. Nature, it appeared, had come to visit. I went inside.



The house contains 184 hurricane ties -- little bent pieces of metal, about an inch wide, that are used to attach the rafters to the supporting beam. Each hurricane tie is fastened down with 10 1½ inch nails. I am, to my extreme chagrin, an expert on removing and repositioning hurricane ties. I do it so well that I no longer even bother to curse when it has to be done. Of the 184 ties, I repositioned about 150 of them - some 3 times. Talk about how not to read a tape measure! By the way, that's 1,840 nails just in the hurricane ties - an error percentage of 0.1% can mean a really sore thumb....



Speaking of which, I fully understand, support and endorse the sport of Hammer Throwing! My hammer, which used to be a mild, well mannered tool, has turned into a vicious, nasty brute. It manages, without provocation or warning, to smack any digit that strays within an inch of the target nail. Yesterday it managed to flatten my already bruised thumb (the one with the big blood blister from a previous encounter with said hammer) when my entirely innocent thumb was at least 2 inches from the target nail. I threw the damn hammer so far off the roof that it took me 15 minutes to find the little #@%&er in the mesquite bush. It's been behaving itself since.



The roof arrived on Tuesday. It's a very efficient system of delivery; a relatively small truck tows a trailer carrying the roofing material on 2 big rolls and a metal bending and extruding machine. The pieces of roof are extruded on site and are made to measure. It took about 2 hours and the area that had once been covered by wood and that I had celebrated as being clear, was now totally covered by piles of metal sheets - 3,309 square feet of them. Sheets of metal waiting to be put up: 157 -- Sheets of metal installed since the roof arrived on Tuesday: 0! We're still working on the preparatory stuff and have managed to install a whole 46 pieces of fascia cover and drip edge -- only another 60 of these non-roof-sheet pieces of metal left to install! Did I mention the 1,700 clips that need to be screwed down? At this rate it'll take another 5½ days just to prepare the roof before we even start to cover it! Good thing I don't have a boss.



By our standards it's been a busy social week with several neighbors dropping by unexpectedly. Our trip to town on Friday revealed why. The plywood decking on the roof is easily visible from the road and all were dropping by to inspect the progress. The green metal should blend a lot better with the background though -- not creating a sore thumb (!) but having a home that blended with the surroundings was the original design idea. This makes us stand out from our neighbors, many of whom have skyline invading apparitions as homes.



Till next time.



Regards,



Ajay

Current Mood: sore

09:15 am - Sunday, September 18 2005

Hi there,


Our internet connection was down last weekend (we think a technician bumped an antenna on the mountain on Friday afternoon) so I didn't get to send the weekly garbage. I don't have that excuse this week so here goes.



Lessons learned:

• When 3 men lift trusses onto the beams, no-one gets a black eye


• The back axle of a Ford pickup has to be removed in order to check the brake pads. What a great design!


• Doing finish work on the house frame takes a lot longer than expected.


• If building a house was easy, everyone would do it.


• When the foundation is a half inch out of square, so is the roof.


• Gravity also works on fat flying-squirrel-wannabes.

Current Mood: amused

08:12 am

Hi there


Some lessons learned this week:

• Playing with a skunk earns the dog a lonely night in the shed.


• America is not on the metric system - a 14 foot 4 inch gap is not covered by a rafter cut to 144 inches.


• A truss that has been lifted to 9 feet and a ½ inch above the ground is not yet resting on a beam that is 9 feet 1 inch above the ground.


• Gravity still works


• A worm's eye view of a rapidly descending truss can induce temporary paralysis.


• Vegans have no traditional method of treating a black eye

Current Mood: optimistic

08:16 am - Sunday, August 28 2005

Hi there,



Lessons learned this week:

• Moving stuff from building to building is repetitive, redundant and done way too often


• It's a good thing that most of my carpentry is hidden in the walls and roof of the building,


• Concrete mixing is still hard work - it didn't get any easier.


• It takes 5 days for a ½ inch splinter to work its way out of your thumb

Current Mood: energetic

08:11 pm - The long awaited update .... Tuesday, August 23 2005

Hi there,



Back by unpopular demand (my wife was nagging ... very demanding, very unpopular) is this edition of the "weekly" journal from Arizona. It appeared to me that the journal was becoming a long, puerile saga of not very much of anything - so it became more of a pain to write than anything else. Does anyone actually read this crapola?



We have, in the past month, learned a few painful, if very obvious, lessons:

• It gets hot in the desert in July.


• Swarms of biting midges are very unpleasant outdoor companions


• It takes a long time and a lot of energy to mix concrete and pour foundations.


• A 12 foot long piece of 4X12 lumber is heavy and difficult to lift 8 feet when working solo.


• This is a desert - anything that doesn't have thorns has a sting or is poisonous.


• Solar panels just can't cope with a teenager's super PC.

Current Mood: hopeful

09:17 am - Sunday, July 10 2005

Hi there,



We finally have our strawbales - 221 of them, weighing in at an average of 78.5 pounds each. That works out to a fraction over 18,000 pounds - 9 tons - at $85 per ton which is $3.35 per bale and slightly less than I paid for bales last year. I was very happy with the price. Of course, there is always the inevitable catch. These bales were lying in the field and had to be collected! It took 3 trips to Safford to get them - 4 Suttons in a truck, not to mention the dog. Bev drove the trailer up and down the field while the boys and I loaded bales 5 high - this was easier on the farm in Queenstown when I drove the tractor and a team of laborers made the bale lifting and stacking look easy. Mojo had a great time, sprinting from the trailer to the next bale and looking very pleased with himself when the bale was loaded. But herding stationery bales isn't too much of a challenge, so when he got tired after 10 bales, he climbed into the truck and lay there, panting. 76 bales for 2 loads and 69 for the last load - 68 is such a meaningless number that I couldn't resist the extra bale! (Teenage sons roll eyes in weary disgust.)



The bales were finally stowed on the concrete slab that will soon be the west porch of the house, with the last load being housed in the shed. (Unlike the dog, who sheds in the house.) The posts and beams for the west wall are up as are the rafters over the porch. It didn't take long to nail up some Ondura roofing sheets to cover the tops of the bales - well, most of the tops anyway. I didn't have enough Ondura on hand to cover the whole 8 foot of bales - just 6 foot. Although the monsoon season is approaching, we have had only 3 spatters of rain, not amounting to an inch, since February and the weather forecast said 0% chance of rain for the next few days - so, naively enough, I wasn't too worried about it. We left for our overnight trip to Tucson without doing any serious weathering up of the camp or building site.



I really do wonder about the weather gods' sense of humor. Tucson was blistering hot, Phoenix even hotter; but as we approached Safford on the return trip, we were treated to a grand view of a lightening storm on Mount Graham and had our first inklings of concern. Low thunderclouds and rainbows up ahead caused us to ditch our plans for a leisurely Chinese supper and we pushed on home at best possible speed. Sure enough, a thunderstorm pelted us through Safford and had me pushing Mule ever harder to get home. The rain started as we were inching our 2.5 ton load down THE HILL - have you ever tried to race while in low ratio 4 wheel drive? It doesn't work very well - leads to lots of revs but not much speed. The rain let up for 15 minutes until we got home (after all, we were in the truck and wouldn't have got wet) but the heavens opened again as we pulled into the driveway. We ran about like wet chickens without heads - covering the load on the trailer, unloading the vulnerables from the truck, moving tools and equipment into the shed, covering any exposed strawbales with plywood and then stretching tarps over both strawbales and plywood. Nick did an especially heroic crawl though the 10 inch gap between the top of the bales and the bottom of the rafters, spreading a 40 foot tarp behind him. He emerged from under the final rafter with a triumphant, straw covered grin that belied the difficulty of just belly-crawling on the straw - let alone spreading the tarp as he was going. A frantic 45 minutes later, everything was covered or stowed where it couldn't get wet ... and the rain stopped!



I went out the following morning to check the rain gauge - 8 dehydrated flies and 2 dead moths. No moisture what-so-ever. Dust and dead bugs - that was all! The weather gods' idea of a very funny joke ... but at least the forecast was right. No rain.



As you may have gathered from the previous paragraphs - some progress has been made on the house. The concrete slabs are already in use as bale storage, tool home and workshop. With the boys' help, the posts and beams went in fairly easily and the rafters were up in no time at all. I'll finish covering the area today with some temporary roofing and will be back to working in the shade. The next couple of weeks will see more concrete being poured for the footings and some areas being built up with gravel fill. With great timing, Andrew managed to escape the fun stuff on the blister end of a shovel.



I made my life a lot easier and my woodwork a lot more accurate with my latest toy (ah, that should read "serious tool") - a chop saw. What a lousy name for a good tool! It's actually a compound miter saw - there, much more expensive. It has a 12 inch blade that easily handles a 4X6 (even a 4X8) piece of lumber and not only swivels left or right for standard miter cuts, it also tilts for a compound cut. The joy of screwing 2 pieces of wood together that actually fit is indescribable to the layman. You have to have experienced the sneaky guilt of covering up a bad joint with a gusset to understand my raptures.



Dropping Andrew in Phoenix on Friday was our third trip into town in the last 6 weeks. We went in a day early, saw a movie, spent a night in Tucson, did some more shopping, hauled our heavy trailer up to Phoenix to drop Andrew and, finally home. On the first of the three trips into Tucson (to pick Nick up from the airport), I placed an order and paid for the lumber for the house beams. Huge (to my mind) 4X12's - 142 linear feet costing about $1,000. "Oof," said the bank account, "Ouch!" So I redid my calculations, cursed the (now fired) architect's slightly idiotic assumptions, called Lowes and changed the order to 4X8's instead - thereby lowering the price to $500. Much better. On our second trip - this one to pick Andrew up - I collected the lumber from Lowes, spent an hour getting my refund, and hauled the load home. When the first of the beams was already trimmed and in place on the posts, I noticed that they were a lot wider than all the other lumber - so I measured them to find that I had the 4X12's that should have been cancelled. A $500 discount - cool! On this last trip, we went back to Lowes for yet another load of wood - this time the 4X8 boards for the roofing, when the lumber department manager called me over. "Uh oh - busted!" I thought. Nope, he wanted to know if I had an extra length of 4X12X8 - he was short of one in his inventory. With only the faintest twinge of guilt, I told him I'd check and call him.



This route home, via Phoenix and Globe, involves climbing the Queens Creek Pass. Being Arizona, the pass doesn't rate a mention on the map but it certainly has its challenges. Mule sweated out the 2,000 foot high, 8 mile uphill at 20 mph, groaning and cursing all the way up. The outside temperature at the bottom of the pass was 110+ degrees and Mule's temperature gauge was going up as fast as the gas gauge was going down - so we had the A/C off and the windows open - sweating along with Mule. What a pleasure to crest the hill and coast down the far side -- especially for 20 or so cars and trucks caught behind me without a passing lane!



And now on with the rest of the day.



Regards



Ajay

Current Mood: cheerful

07:43 am - Sunday, June 26 2005

Hi there,



After 4 mornings of dragging Nick out of bed before 5:00, the 3 of us have finally finished pouring the concrete for west and north porches. Technically, we haven't actually finished pouring concrete for either porch as we hadn't prepared the whole porch area for concrete -- but we have finished what we wanted to get done and now have a firm, level area to work on in order to build the trusses. It's also a very exposed, unshaded and hot area -- so I plan to buy some "cheap" roofing sheets when we go to fetch Andrew from the airport in Phoenix tomorrow and will build a temporary roof over the porch.



I learned some dramatic and, in retrospect, obvious lessons this week:

1. Sometimes it's easier just to load sand onto the truck with a shovel.


2. Mule's emergency brake only works on the back wheels.


3. Gravity never stops working.


4. When driving the tractor onto the trailer, the tractor is heavy enough and the trailer is long enough, to lift Mule's back wheels off the ground.


5. Sliding 75 feet down a hill on a tractor, on a trailer, behind a skidding truck with no-one driving, is quite scary.


6. Pressing the clutch doesn't necessarily cause the tractor to run backwards off the ramps.


7. Reverse gear is quite hard to find when transfixed by the rapidly approaching drop into the wash.


8. A severely jack-knifed truck and trailer can be the best outcome in some circumstances.


9. The edge of the trailer is harder than the side of the truck


10. Trailers bend but don't always straighten.


11. A better way to load a tractor onto a trailer is on level ground with some blocks under the back of the trailer to prevent it hitting the ground, thereby keeping the truck's back wheels firmly on the ground.

Current Mood: excited

09:45 am - Saturday,

Hi there,



A quick, but short, progress report on house. We reset the forms, leveled (sort of) and set remesh on 550 square feet of porch - then we started to pour concrete. It took a lot of sweat, cement, sand, did I mention the sweat, to pour less than 80 square feet. (Only 470 square feet to go before we start the footings -- and then there will be the 1,000 square foot house slab!!) Fortunately for us, the concrete mixer lost a small screw which caused it to stop working -- so we did to. It was hot that day, 98 degrees in the shade. Since then we've managed to find all sorts of reasons not to go back out there, but each morning next week (I'm determined) will see us (me) doing another 4 or 5 hours of concrete mixing, from 5 a.m. until too-damn-hot-to-continue.



The tractor has worked hard; very slowly, but hard. The tractor has 4 gears on the left, 3 gears and reverse on the right. The left's 4th gear is broken and can't be used - which is okay because it simply stalls in the 3rd gear anyway. (The engine is only 1700cc, smaller than some motor bikes!) It manages a very steady, if very hot and very smelly, walking pace on any slight incline. I did get up to a slow trot on a downhill once, but got scared that I'd develop a speed wobble, so decided to slow down. The memories that it brings back though -- aah, the smell of a boiling radiator, the black cough of a reluctant diesel engine starting, the bicep building lack of power steering, the ham-string straining clutch, the seat - so uncomfortable that if it were used as a toilet seat, it would instantly cure constipation.



I've moved rocks from all over the homestead to a central "rock garden" and only once have had to resort to pushing a rock along that's been too big to fit in the bucket. Next time you see an operator pick up a load of dirt or rocks in a front end bucket, have some respect -- it's not as easy as he makes it look. Okay, so it's not as difficult as I make it look either - but it still ain't easy!



All the challenge and fun of removing a cactus plant has gone the way of the clean, quiet air. The initial summing up of the plant - will it be possible to uproot it without getting smacked by a pad full of glochids or does this one have to be tackled pad by pad? Are there hidden pads, just waiting for the unwary hand to get too close? Which set of pads is safest to remove first? Where will the counter-attack come from? The final satisfaction of getting the root out and muttering - "Got you, you prick you". When you're one-on-one with a giant prickly pear, you're definitely forced to respect its defenses. The tractor makes it too easy and just overwhelms the poor plant. Pad, spine, root and the rocks they're anchored to simply get swept up by the tractor's bucket. Almost unholy, really.



Monsoon, from Arabic meaning season, is defined as a seasonal reverse in the direction of the wind, bringing rain. Arizona picks up the northern fringe of Mexico's monsoon and heavy summer thunderstorms provide most of our annual rainfall. The earliest the monsoon season has started is on June 15 but local lore has it that the monsoons start on July 3, probably because of all the Fourth of July barbeques that get destroyed. The weather service determines when the monsoon has started - it takes 3 days of the dew point being above 54 degrees. I think I'll just wait for the thunderstorms and will declare that the monsoon is underway. This otherwise useless piece of trivia is definitely on my mind -- I've been calling my straw-bale supplying farmer continuously for a week or so -- and to my horror he hasn't started to harvest the wheat yet. A wet straw bale is useless for building and there's a 10% chance of rain for 2 days next week - so I'm working my way into a panic about the straw getting wet. I'm in the process of building an additional "shed-sort-of-thing" to house about 70 bales that won't fit into the shed. They would have fitted quite easily - but the shade is too pleasant to give up as living space so a new shelter (or 2) has to be built. When the house's straw bale walls are finally built, this shed will hold the wood that we retrieve from the mine each week - a big improvement on the mish-mash of wood-piles that we currently have.



We hauled a truck and trailer load of bought timber back from Tucson this week - the first of 3 shopping trips for the house frame. Not a bad trip for me - I spent the whole day in Lowes while Bev and Nick drove around stocking up on food. Tucson's temperature was 105 that day and Mule's air conditioner was on the fritz. I got to Lowes at 8:00 in the morning and finally left after 5:00 -- 9 hours in a store. Usually 9 minutes is too long for me so 9 hours is almost unbelievable. Our friend Rush spent the day helping me - otherwise it would have been 15 hours and I still wouldn't have finished! Hopefully, next time won't take anywhere near as long!



Saturday, June 25: I've just got back to my letters folder to find that I hadn't sent this. Seeing as I'm ready to start the next letter, I'd better send this.



Till next time



Ajay

Current Mood: cheerful

03:07 pm - Sunday, June 5 2005

Hi there,


I am now the proud owner of a 1/3 time-share in a tractor - a Ford 1700, get-off-and-push, with a small bucket on the front and a combination scraper-come-plough like device on the back. Rocks will no longer defy me!! The front porch of the house has a chance of being built on level ground! I also look forward to the many hours of clambering over/lying under the tractor attempting to fix whatever is broken/leaking or just bugging me. One of the other owners is a preacher, so this will have to be curseless maintenance -- I'm not sure that I'm capable!



There were no earth shattering discoveries this week. We finally broke ground with the footing trenches for the house - hard work but not as frustrating as the shed was at the same point. I learnt some lessons and had the forms in place before the digging was started. The process has stalled a bit though as the house plans are being tweaked and absolutely must be final before I cast the concrete.



The "tweaking" process is very painful -- arduous hours spent in front of the computer doing nit-picking detailed work. It almost felt like I was a computer programmer again but, thank goodness, I can go outside and do some real work when I get too frustrated. I paid an architect way too much money for a base plan for the house, which has been changed so much that I often wonder why I bothered with him in the first place! I lowered the height by removing 2 layers of bales, expanded all porches by 2 feet, rationalized the beam spans (why on earth would I use a span of 10' 8" when standard lumber comes in 10' or 12' lengths?), rethought the footing trenches to have less digging, less concrete and easier forming and raised the house 8" by adding in a couple of rows of concrete blocks between the footing and the bale wall. Most of the doors and windows have been shuffled a few inches in either direction or resized to reduce the amount of wood needed in the frame; the window and door posts can do double duty and also serve as supporting posts - eliminating the need for an additional 4X4.



Raising the house hasn't been easy on the plans ... and definitely isn't going to be easy to do. But I'll add extra rebar into the footing to anchor the blocks, overload my poor truck and trailer to get the blocks here and then strain my back off-loading and moving the darn things. They weigh 40 pounds apiece and we're talking 365 blocks. When all of that is done and the blocks are in place, I'll head off to the wash and bring back 7 more loads of sand to act as fill (at 30c per shovel load, the tractor is paid for!) - which has to be watered and pounded down. That means more trips to haul the water and to and from Safford a couple of times to rent the tamper. Why all the kvetching about the blocks, you ask? They were Bev's idea - I'm making the most of it.



Our vegetable garden, such as it is, is coming along. 4 raised beds and 2 old tires (for potato planters) and huge piles of rocks, dug up and moved out of the way - but tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, peppers, cauliflower, carrots, various squashes have all been planted and get watered faithfully every morning -- which is my "gray water" system. Most are doing well - there was a panic when we discovered some large, green horn-worm caterpillars on the tomato bushes, but we simply removed them and the tomatoes seem to have recovered. We add our own lettuce to salads but have yet to harvest anything else. Potatoes and onions should be here soon though. This garden will keep expanding - I have big ideas ... peanuts, peas, beans, garlic, sweet corn, asparagus, maybe even some soybeans ... cold-frames, green house. Big plans and lots of time.



Our neighbor, at Bev's "invitation", helped us out by doing some soldering that I couldn't get right on a solar water heater. It did my ego good to note that he didn't make it look easy and it took 2 attempts to get it right. But it's now fixed and not leaking and while we don't have instant hot water on tap, we can now get hot water fairly easily at just about any time of the day. A huge improvement. Unfortunately, I can't leave the panel permanently attached -- there is no release valve or heat control mechanism - so the water will boil in about 10 minutes, build up steam pressure and, fairly soon, blow a hole somewhere. I'm working on improvements to the scheme but haven't really come up with anything worthwhile yet.



I'll end off for the week on that note,



Regards



Ajay

Current Mood: energetic

06:27 pm - Monday, May 23 2005

Hi there,


We followed our first "industrial accident" in a year with a second one in the same week. While sawing a piece of wood (a bought "clean" one, not a nail impregnated piece of copper mine salvage) with the circular saw, a small piece of metal (from the blade?) managed to fly under the safety goggles and lodge itself in the cornea, dead center on the pupil, of my right eye. Five hours later I was sitting in the emergency room in Morenci enduring a young doctor who, after quickly removing the metal splinter, insisted on drilling into my eye with a low powered, dentist drill like device in a failed attempt to remove the last bits of "rust". My eye felt vaguely like ANWR is going to after the Republicans get through with it! It took a fairly expensive trip to an ophthalmologist in Safford to get the last bits of rust removed - but, after a couple of days of decidedly blurred vision, my eye seems to have mostly recovered.



Why did it take 5 hours to get to the emergency room, you ask? Well, it took a while to decide that the irritation wasn't a piece of sawdust that would come out by itself -- and to change Mule's tire. He thought it would be funny to have a puncture when I couldn't see. Jackass! He followed this up by snapping a fan belt on the way into Safford which meant we lost power steering and the A/C. Fortunately Nick was driving so all I had to endure was the continual complaining about how heavy the truck steering was. He's young and fit and needs the exercise anyway!



This forced another delay in actually finishing the shed. Imagine what my left thumb would look like if I had tried to use a hammer while having impaired depth perception. My attempt to install the electricity was also put on hold. Old one-eye trying to insert a bared wire into a plug box was laughingly ridiculous. I couldn't judge where the hole was in relation to the wire and working by touch took forever. As I write this, most of the shed electricity is installed, the walls are complete, door and windows are in. I still have some additional electrical work and the plumbing to do but I'm mainly occupied with building a table and some shelves so we can use the shed as an outdoor (shaded!) kitchen.



Spring has come and gone very quickly here in the high Chihuahuan desert - it took place on April 24. Seriously, that was the day we had a thunderstorm which deluged us with a ¾ inch of rain and hail in a dramatic couple of hours -- the only rainfall we've had since early March. The official start of summer is still 6 or 7 weeks away but all the grass has already seeded and turned brown - which makes walking anywhere off-road a stop-start affair to in order to remove grass seeds from inside shoes and socks. The hills don't quite look like a desert yet but are finally approaching it. The Mesquite bushes and Prickly Pears provide the only greenery (other than the shed roof) but there are lots of them. Our daily temperatures have rapidly risen - we had a very pleasant few weeks in the upper 60's and 70's but are finally starting to see 90's and the inevitable 100's. Hence the need for a shaded outdoor kitchen - the trailer has hit 100 by 9:00 a.m. for the last 3 mornings in a row.



We have a wake of turkey buzzards (Yup, that's the collective noun. I looked it up.) that roosts on the cliffs of Homicide Hill - about 8 of them. Absolutely fascinating birds to watch. They spend most of the day playing on the thermals or hovering in the wind. They very seldom flap their wings -- just hang on them, often motionless, for minutes on end while surveying the ground below. I've never seen them land in order to eat anything, but it's fair to assume that they do.



Jan and J.D. (and Freckles, their cute teddy-bear-like poodle) - friends from New Mexico, visited us for a couple of days. They picked the hottest, driest, dustiest, grass-seediest and buggiest week to visit someone who lives in a travel trailer in the desert. I thought poor Jan was going to melt -- especially after enduring a 105 degree day in now A/C-less Mule's back seat while J.D. and I walked over 3 of the last available lots for sale. Looking for afternoon shade and a more compact campsite, we had been planning to move the trailer to the east side of the shed. The record hot weather forced me to do this a bit sooner rather than later and I ended up moving trailers while our guests were here. They took it in stride though and J.D. was a huge help -- "swamping" Mule's winch cable over some rocks that had to be moved, directing the trailer into place (Jan hid in the shed; do I have a reputation for being bad tempered while reversing the travel trailer or what?) and using his van's jack to help level the trailer. After all that work, all I could offer was blistering heat, more bugs, dust ... and, of course, some beer.



Till next time



Regards



Ajay

Current Mood: hot

08:43 am

Hi there,



The shed roof progressed in fits and starts; delayed by missing pieces of roofing and wrong color pieces; over-optimistically scheduled; a longer than expected learning curve. But it is finally finished and actually looks good! From the time the trusses went up (which we thought was the difficult part!) till the roof was complete took over 2 weeks! The only part that went faster than planned was when my neighbor dropped by one afternoon with his nail gun and helped nail the plywood sheathing into place. Bev immediately fell in love with the speed and ease of the nail gun while Mojo nearly had a heart attack. When we were finally done and had turned off the compressor, he crept into my lap, curled himself up as small as possible and lay there shivering. Poor mutt. I had projected that the sheathing would take a day to do, but with the nail gun, we were done in about an hour. I did have to spend the following morning knocking out nails that had missed the trusses but it was a small price to pay for getting the sheathing done as fast as it was. It took at least 4 days to put up the fascia boards and build in the gable trim -- I thought this step would be quick but the detail work was both excrutiatingly slow and very painful. While standing on a ladder and hammering at weird angles, I managed to smack my left thumb so often that it bruised, then the bruise turned into a blood blister, which burst, got infected and burst again. It is now a scarred, flatter and more tender version of it's former self. Shouldn't hammers come with warnings? Mark Twain obviously knew about roofing when he quipped:



In certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.


The roof panels went up fairly fast except for 2 small problems. First, the roofing company managed to mess up the order and only delivered half the panels that were needed. Not as bad as it sounds, they also left the panels off the quote and, although I would have paid for them, decided that they would stick by the quoted dollar amount. So we got half of our roofing panels for free -- all right! They delivered the missing panels on Friday morning - but managed to get the color wrong. I wonder if this is the normal way to run a business in New Mexico!



The second delay occurred on Saturday morning: Bev and Nick were up on the roof, I was bending the panels into shape on the ground and then passing them up to Bev. One panel started to slide off the roof (threatening to bean me in the back of the head) so Bev grabbed at it. A tongue of metal sticking up off the side of the panel cut through her glove and sliced into her hand - giving her a nasty cut about an inch long and half an inch deep. So we drove into Morenci and spent a couple of hours in Urgent Care getting her hand glued back together.



Ah - I mentioned Nick. He arrived on Thursday morning in Phoenix having finished his first semester in Binghamton. Four and a half months "studying" in upstate New York left him pale and pasty -- but a few days helping out on the roof has already started to correct this. Recovering from the inevitable hangover and lack of sleep didn't do his color any harm either. Mojo has not enjoyed having a stranger in the house. After sharing a trip back from Phoenix in the truck with Nick, Mojo started barking at him as soon as they were both out of the truck. Mojo, the blunder-hound! Nick's first night here was fairly disturbed - every time he turned over Mojo started barking. This gets irritating in a real hurry! But things are settling down - although Nick still gets barked at, Mojo allows himself to be petted and happily (very happily) accepts jerky from Nick's hand.



I have now started this letter 3 times and have been editing it for over a week. Enough! Time to send it.



Till next time



Regards



Ajay