Only You...

Guess who wanted to help while I was working on the front hall?

International Fame!

Rosie and our cat ladder are now officially internationally famous! They've been posted on the Cat-Ladder blog, which shows homemade and commercial cat ladders from around the world. The blog itself originates from Sweden.

With Fronds Like This...

bat star, ochre star
and hecka anemones

I'd like to say I've been busy on the kitchen, or that I've been super busy with other stuff that's been keeping me from working on the kitchen, but neither of those is true.

One thing we have been up to recently was camping. We've camped frequently in mountains and deserts across the west, but neither of us had camped on the coast before. We got the idea because we didn't have a large block of time, so we wanted someplace closer, but still wanted to "get away". And we wanted to stay in a state park, because the govenator has been threatening to close the parks in a misguided attempt to balance the state budget. Most state parks don't pay for themselves completely via collected fees, it's true. But when people have less money, they tend to take cheaper vacations like camping, and they still spend money doing it, generating sales tax. Close the parks, and more people will stay home.

So searching the many California state parks, I came across Salt Point SP. It's about 100 miles and (because of winding roads) 2.5 hours away. Being on the coast, it can get fairly windy, but we were prepared for that. It's a beautiful park on a beautiful section of the California coast. We spent a lot of time just watching the ocean and marine life. Amongst other things, we saw seals, sea lions, brown pelicans, a black oystercatcher, three osprey that were hunting, and all sorts of things in tide pools. Part of the park is a marine preserve, which made me wish we knew how to scuba dive.

Today K is back at work, and I'll work on the kitchen this afternoon. A special thanks to our friend Melissa for staying with the kitties one night. Rosie was definitely happier for it, and Star probably was, too, even if she wouldn't admit it. And yes, our cats are spoiled, but after all, they're in charge.

south of Salt Point

osprey

tafoni formation

A Day of Rest...Mostly

Rosie inspecting the work

After a couple of days of intense work on the kitchen, today was mostly a day of rest. Except I had to be up early to meet the countertop crew coming to make a template. Getting up early isn't easy for me under the best of circumstances, and I was up late last night getting ready for this morning. I had to re-install the sink cabinet over 1/2" (thank you, non-plumb and square walls of an old house), and had to plane a little off the back of the last lower cabinet to get it to fit in the corner. Designing with small tolerances means little wasted space, but doesn't leave much room for error. Fortunately the blind lazy susan cabinet requires a small spacer, so I was able to make adjustments by trimming that, but it was still a close fit. Rosie was kind enough to inspect my work, and approved not only of the cabinets, but enjoyed the boxes they came in.

countertop template

This morning the countertop crew showed up and made fairly short work of creating the template. They'd clearly done this a bunch of times before, and confirmed where we want a backsplash, which edges of the cabinets are flush and which get finished edges, etc. But they puzzled over where to put the seam -- the material comes in 8' lengths, so there will be at least one. After measuring and pondering (sounds familiar), they settled on a plan. The template was marked up for the seam, backsplashes and edges, and off they went. They'll be back in about a week to install it. Wahoo!

Where the Deer and the Tabby Cats Play

smash!

Yesterday as the sun was going down, the deer that had been sitting and grazing in our yard decided it was time to play. There's a family / herd of 5 (mom, 2 from this year, 2 from last year, we think) that we frequently see in our yard. Mostly they eat plants, eat birdseed, poop, and sit around. Yesterday we saw 4 of them, doing their usual. But the young ones started running around, up and down the hill to the neighbors on each side. Then the others started getting in to it. Occasionally one would stop, breathing hard, and then join back in. It was, in short, hilarious. When not chasing around with the others, one would occasionally just hop in the air. It was almost as much fun as watching birds bathe in the birdbath.

Today I worked more on the kitchen. I spent a while puzzling over the plumbing (made more difficult by the foundation changes needed because of past problems), then went back to work pulling out drywall, bits of framing, etc. K was working at home today, so Rosie had someone to entertain her. Mostly. In the late afternoon, K had a video meeting, and Rosie showed up outside the plastic into the dining room. I went out and carried her to K's office. At some point while I was carrying debris up to the carport, she snuck past the plastic, up the back of the chimney, and into the attic.

who, me?

I was picking up bits of drywall, and heard a rustling noise from above. I called her, and saw her peering down, looking innocent. She wouldn't come down, so I went up the access ladder, and she jumped down the way she'd come up.

We had a bit of worry, because in addition to all the debris she could hurt herself on in the kitchen, there's plenty of stuff in the attic, too. K took her outside to eat some grass in case she'd eaten anything she shouldn't, but she seems fine now. Her usual goofy, playful self.

Oh give me a home
where the house cats roam
and the skies are cloudy some days
Where some times is heard
an unpleasant word
because Rosie has decided to stray

Home, home of deranged
where the deer and the tabby cats play
Where some times is heard
an unpleasant word
because Rosie has decided to stray

Behold...the Kitchen of the Future!

the kitchen of the future

Sure, you were expecting rotating refrigerators, dome top cookers, and levitating frying pans. No, our kitchen of the future is a little more down to earth. It'll be split between the dining room table (which is in the living room) for prep and cooking, and the bathroom for cleanup, with the occasional foray to the deck to use the grill.

Rosie the explorer

This week has been cleaning out and packing stuff from the kitchen so I can demolish things on Monday. Rosie was happy to help, if by 'help' you mean explore empty cabinets and drawers. K is busy making lasagna for tonight's guests in what will be the last use of the oven and stove for a while. It'll be...interesting...to live without a proper kitchen for a while. Wish us luck!

The Cats Have Won

wretched excess?

As I've written about before, we've included some kitty-friendly features in our addition. We were inspired in part by The Cats' House, but we'd never go that far (we say repeatedly to reassure ourselves.) Well, someone else would. They've done their own Cats' House in a sleek, modern style in Japan. TreeHugger considers it wretched excess, though besides the heavy-duty grill to fence in the balconies (which is good for preventing your little darlings from decimating the local bird population), the incremental cost for the various steps and shelves is very low and isn't taking extra space. I don't read Japanese to know all the particulars, but it hardly seems wretchedly excessive or un-green to me. Maybe the house is 50% bigger just for the cats? And lest the goggehs...er...doggies feel left out, the same builder has a house full of dog-friendly features, too.

Fun with Facial Hair

For some reason, I decided yesterday to shave off my beard. Maybe it's all the cleaning K and I have been doing in the house. I've had a beard, a van dyke, and no facial hair in a random sequence dating back to college. I've had the full beard for quite a while, so I enjoyed K's reactions to the various styles as I removed the beard in pieces. I've never worn just a mustache (at least longer than it took to take this picture) because unlike my hair which is brown, my mustache always comes in much lighter in color. So for now it's back to the clean-shaven look.

We are not amused

The kitties don't really care one way or another, though they'll miss the "beard brush". Star doesn't like being brushed, but she does like it when I rub my beard against her head. She's been known to briefly groom it, too. Cats are weird.

Spaghettiful Electrical

me fighting with the 1 1/4" conduit

One more quick trip to Home Depot (the nearest hardware stores don't carry the larger size conduit or fittings), and then with K's help I pulled the fat wire from the main panel to the new sub-panel. I hadn't done much with conduit before, metal or PVC, and I learned why people love the flexible armored cable so much. Working with conduit is more difficult than working with cable, and the PITA factor goes up with the diameter of the conduit because there's less give when lining things up. Because I was running 4-3 wire (which doesn't bend very easily) to the sub-panel, I needed a larger conduit. For comparison, the Romex you normally pull is at most 12-3 for two 20 amp circuits; 4-3 is quite a bit larger and less flexible. But with both of us pushing and pulling and temporarily undoing a few things to get a bit more flex, we managed to get it pulled. Then I fed the end up to the main panel outside the house, hooked it up, and it was time to test!

I was mostly replacing existing circuits, but the one for the water heater had failed a while ago with a bad neutral. Circuit for the water heater (it's a gas-fired tankless, but requires electricity for its brains and to ignite) -- check. Circuit for the furnace (it's gas-fired, but we have an electrostatic filter) -- check. 240V circuit for the dryer -- check. New outlet for the washer -- hmm. OK, I mis-wired the GFCI. Hey, it was dark in the basement! A quick re-wire -- check. I still need to pull armored cable for a new circuit for the lights and some outlets along my work bench, but we're back to having a working laundry room, and heat when we need it.

a lovely sunset over the bay viewed
from our chairs on the hillside

Lately it's been much warmer than than normal. So fortunately it wasn't a big deal to not have heat for a day. Unfortunately we need a lot of rain (and snow in the mountains) to make up for the last two drought years.

In any event, I was pleased to get that work done. I then proceeded to start removing some of the old wiring. The water heater and furnace circuits are just a few years old, so mostly what I did was shorten the runs to go to the sub-panel instead of the main panel. But the washer had never had its own circuit, and it wasn't GFCI protected although it was right next to the laundry tub, so I was pleased to fix that.

scare!

The real scare was with the old dryer outlet. I'd always known it was a bit funky, i.e., right next to the laundry tub, outlet a bit loose, runs from the panel, through a fuse box(!), then behind the laundry sink. When I started removing it, I realized just how bad it was. There was no clamp on the box to hold the flex cable in, so it was relying on the wire and screws to hold it. No clamp also meant that any movement of the cable would rub at the wires themselves. But the crowning glory was when I went to remove the plug. There were no slots in the screws! Closer inspection revealed that they weren't screws, but a pair of 16p nails (galvanized, thankyouverymuch) holding the outlet and the box in place. No wonder the thing was a bit loose! I was very pleased to get rid of that.

Star was again unimpressed.

Final Framing

After last weekend's concrete had set, I laid the new subfloor, and framed the last wall of the remodel where the old front porch had been. Not much of a wall, but challenging to put into place because of the existing house. I built most of it on the ground, but left out the headers and top plate until I'd lifted it up over the bolts (one a regular J-bolt; the other a length of threaded rod that's glued all the way down into the old foundation). You may notice the mis-matched headers, one a 4x4 and the other a 4x6. 4x4 would have been plenty for either, but I had scraps left over from other headers, so that's what I used.

Some house wrap, some shims (matching the existing floor means the whole thing isn't quite level), and some self-adhesive flashing, and the last windows were in. The siding will take a while longer, since I'm going to demolish part of the front walk before proceeding with that. And because I may not have enough salvaged scraps of the 1x12, so I'll have to mill some of my own.

I pulled out the old front door, and salvaged most of the glass block that was along side it, and demolished the wall they were part of. Suddenly we have a bigger space that even looks like part of the house instead of some weird little closed with large windows. Yet another step closer to demolishing the kitchen.

Star was unimpressed.

It's Our Cats' House

Nate and Jen of Milwaukee Back House recently asked if there were pictures of some of the kitty-friendly features we'd designed into the addition.

We were inspired in no small part by The Cats' House. Alas, their website has been pretty slim for a while now, but you may be able to find a copy of their book at your local bookstore.

The loft that we can use, too, is one of the obvious features, with a sisal rope-covered ladder to make it easier for the cats to climb leading to it. They love to use the ladder to climb to the upper window to look out in the morning when the blinds are closed (since the picture was taken, I've added a little shelf from the ladder over to the window to make it safer and easier for them) as well as the loft. You can see the loft in the plans and 3D renderings here. There are a couple of less obvious features we all like, too, like the double-pane windows, extra insulation, passive solar heating and the radiant heating in the bathroom (though they'd probably prefer we left that on 24/7, and put it all over the house.)

If you look carefully in the plans, you'll notice that the new bathroom was going to be at the same level as original house, which would mean another loft above it. I ended up changing it to make the bathroom at the same level as the new bedroom, i.e., +2 feet from the original house. That made the loft above it only 2' high, so not really useful for us. (Though the part that's inside the closet makes a great place to store our camping gear, which needs a clean, dry place, but not necessarily frequent access.) But I still built the loft, and included the planned window for light and ventilation. And since the cats are considerably shorter than us, the limited height was no big deal for them. So I built a walkway between the two lofts, just for them. Using a design I saw described at The Cats' House, I routed out a groove in the top, and put a small piece of carpeting in. The groove means that you can't see the ragged edge of the carpeting, except a small section on the end (with more careful routing, that could have been avoided.)

They sometimes look out the window to see who's coming up the path, though they know they can get a better look at us coming down from the carport from the window in Katarina's office. But again inspired by The Cats' House, as well as by a design feature common in convents(!), I added a peephole from the loft out into the front hall (the one place in the addition with a 12' ceiling; the bedroom is 10'.) Rosie is our token extrovert in the household, so she's more likely to run down and greet who ever comes in. But when appropriately bribed with food, she'll look out the peephole, too. Star, being older, wiser, and considerably wussier ("Wuss in Boots"), has used the peephole in earnest a number of times. She has looked out with fear upon the marauding horde known as my nephew Jimmy. Eventually the hole will be covered with something more decorative, maybe the outline of a cat's paw, or like in The Cats' House, the outline of a cat's head.

And for any of you linguaphiles out there, Katarina and I both remember there being a word or phrase that describes this feature in a convent. It was designed to let nuns look out and see visitors without being seen themselves. While both our cats are chaste (and when Jimmy is around, chased), neither of them is very nun-like except Star's black-and-white clothing. But neither of us can remember what the word or phrase is. Anybody out there know? It's like the age-old question: how do you look up a word in the dictionary if you don't know how to spell it?

Painting!

As previously reported, Katarina was growing tired of the unpainted addition. To be honest, I was getting a little tired of it, too, despite the, um, loveliness of primer gray and white. So after finishing off some bits and pieces of trim, we painted. And painted. And painted. Between the rustic-V siding, the ins and outs around the windows and doors, and under the eaves, the painting goes slowly. The fact the ground around the house isn't level doesn't help much, either -- setting up a ladder takes some doing. But despite the recent heat (it sure doesn't feel like June), we've managed to get 3 sides as well as the rebuilt wall where the doors onto the deck used to be painted.

I did a little demo work around the old front door, too. I recovered as much of the 1x12 siding as I could for reuse later. And I bashed at the stone step for a while with a sledge and chisel, but I'm going to have to rent the jackhammer again to take it out.

And here's your gratuitous kitty shot, with the Rosie and Star admiring the weed-whacked and raked yard. Yes, it's fire season again, only earlier this year because we had a dry spring. I had the yard in compliance ahead of schedule because of it, but I think a lot of people have gotten more urgent reminders from all the fires we've been having in California lately. A recent one here in the Oakland hills started very near the origin of the massive Oakland Firestorm of 1991. If that wasn't enough to motivate people to clean up their property, I don't know what is. The firefighter who came around to inspect said it gets a little easier with inspections every year, but that doesn't change the fact that state-wide more and more people are living in a wildland interface, in areas prone to fire.

A Cat House

I've started physical therapy for my shoulder, been gobbling ibuprofen, icing my shoulder, and doing some simple stretching exercises the physical therapist gave me. But healing has been slow so far, and I still have sharp pain when I reach the wrong way. Which is to say I've made zero progress on the house lately. Today seems to be "cats day" on houseblogs.net (1, 2), so today you get cat photos here, too.

Star hard at work:


Rosie enjoying the afternoon sun:

Saving Water

The tendinitis in my shoulder is keeping me from much progress on the house, or from doing a lot of things like driving without some pain and further damage involved. So I've been researching various things for the house on the web. There are so many great ways to save energy and water that it's all kind of dizzying. The cats are happier when I'm sitting at the computer than making construction noise, so they like the research, too.

Given that California frequently has droughts, and by nature has dry summers, saving water makes a lot of sense. Of course, what we could save is a drop in the bucket (hah!) compared with gets used for commercial and agricultural uses. And agricultural uses are a drop in the bucket compared with what gets used for raising and processing meat, which is particularly water-intensive (especially when 143 million pounds of it has to be disposed of -- ugh!). But it still makes sense to save what we can.

Some ways of saving water are too simple to pass up, like rain barrels (unless you live in Colorado, where collecting rainwater is illegal.) For less than $50 you can get a food-grade barrel and some fittings, and collect 55 gallons of rainwater, perfect for watering plants and gardens. We've got 7 downspouts around the house, plus one from the roof of the carport, so we could easily collect more water than we could use (at least until we plant a garden again or actually take care of the plants in the yard.) I'm envisioning a system of two or three barrels, with pipes draining them leading to a spigot in the back of the house near the current hose spigot. It's low enough that gravity would give it a pretty decent flow, and be near the backyard where most of our watering needs are.

At the other end of the complexity scale is adding a graywater system to collect the water from bathroom sinks, showers, and the laundry, then using that water to irrigate or for flushing toilets. It would involve not only a storage tank with a way to deal with overflow, but a pump to drive the system, and a way of using EBMUD water if the storage tank is empty. It would basically be a second DWV system, plus parts of a second water supply system to go to the toilets. A lot of work for limited payback, and it's not legal in all areas.

Another fairly simple way is a hot water recirculation system. You've doubtless left the shower or a sink running to let the water get warm, and all that nice, drinkable water just goes down the drain. Hot water recirculation systems get water from the hot side, and if it's not warm enough yet, push it back down the cold side (a more complicated but more efficient variation uses a separate return line.) Some systems keep hot water circulating all the time, so it's available "instantly". That would waste energy keeping water hot whether you're using it or not, not to mention add unnecessary wear and tear to the water heater. And without a dedicated hot water return, it would make all your cold water lukewarm. Other systems like the RedyTemp or the Metlund D'MAND are timer, motion or demand-activated.

Our hot water use doesn't follow any set schedule, so we'd go for a demand-activated system: you push a button, wait a couple minutes, and voilà, there's hot water a couple of feet down the pipe instead of waiting for the water to flow, the tankless heater to kick in, and then for the cold water to be flushed from the system. Those systems and others are very easy retrofits if you've got an outlet near the fixture furthest from the water heater. Since I had a hot water recirculation system in mind, I didn't go as far as plumbing a dedicated return line, but I did stick a GFCI outlet in the vanity in the new bathroom.

Now the only problem is figuring out which is the right system for us. Tankless water heater manufacturers will reduce the warranty if you use the wrong recirculation system, because very high flow rates can erode pipes and fittings and put additional wear and tear on a water heater. Anybody out there in readerland have personal experience with one of these systems, with or without a tankless heater?

The Year in Review

Happy New Year! The last year has been a busy one. Not especially productive on the house, but we've gone from having to go on to the deck to get to the bedroom to having another 0.5 bath. (The other half of the new bath will happen at some point after I replace the old galvanized plumbing so we can get a decent amount of pressure on the cold water side to the addition. It's a daunting task, to say the least.)

The addition got gutters. Far too many people died, including Katarina's dad. I survived a back-to-back mission trip to Mexico and Habitat Build-a-thon (with the Random Acts fundraiser and creating a memorial video squeezed in for good measure). I was in an article in the SF Chronicle. The Thrivent Builds-sponsored house at Habitat for Humanity East Bay was completed. We got a new neighbor. The new bathroom got radiant heat. And now we have another 0.5 bath, which is especially nice for those early-morning ablutions in these cold months.

Here's hoping 2008 will be a happy, peaceful, productive new year.

Curiosity and Cats

The other day I when I was putting up drywall, I left the room for a few minutes. I came back to see Star peering down at me, meowing plaintively. True to form ("Wuss in Boots"), she'd climbed up the ladder and into the dining room ceiling below the bedroom loft, but was then afraid to come down. If you've ever tried to pick up a cat that doesn't want to be picked up, you know how difficult it can be. Put the cat into a small enclosed space so you can only approach the cat from the front, and the danger from claws goes up significantly. After puzzling over it for a moment, I finally climbed up the ladder, let her climb onto my shoulders, and then climbed down. So no cats (or me) were harmed in the making of this picture.

Life Goes On

I seem to be writing more about other stuff than about the addition and remodel these days. I knew when I started that there would be interruptions and periods when I couldn't work as much on the house as I'd planned, but I had no idea there would be so many of them.

And when you get enough interruptions, you lose focus and get less efficient. Back when I was in the software industry and starting to do more management and less programming, I read various books on managing people, because I didn't have the slightest idea how to do it. I read somewhere that it takes almost 10 minutes when you're interrupted at a task to get back to the level you were at before the interruption. Sitting in a cube writing a document or bit of code, and then the phone rings. Boom...10 minutes before you're back up to speed. It doesn't take a mathematician to see that a half dozen interruptions per day would seriously cut into your productivity, and half a dozen would be fairly few, unless you work alone, turn off email, and unplug your phone. And people still think they can "multi-task" and be just as efficient. Yeah, right.

Well, it turns out to be true on a larger scale, too. If you work at something regularly, say, building a house, you get into a groove. You get used to doing the different tasks involved, you get used to thinking about the types of problems that arise. But if you get regularly interrupted in that, you lose focus and get less efficient.

Lately there have been more interruptions than house building. And stress has come along with some of those interruptions. So I find myself incredibly unfocused and unproductive. Some progress is being made, nothing that's particularly photo-worthy.

But there are certainly things in my life that are photo-worthy, so I share one of them with you now. I call it "Still Life with Flowers":
It took her a while to find, but once I opened the window a bit, Star spent the entire afternoon there. As part of the re-organization in the basement, and to give me a place to work once I start wreaking havoc on the kitchen, I moved an old workbench into the dining room (it was my friend Donald's desk when we were in college at Berkeley; he and his dad built it.) Where there was space for it was near the new dining room windows, which happen to get a lot of afternoon sun this time of year. Sun, fresh warm air, and a comfy bed...irresistible to a cat.

P.S. Fundraising for the Habitat for Humanity build-a-thon is going along nicely. I'm at 13.5% of my goal, and Katarina is at nearly 22% of hers. Thank you to all who have donated!

And She's Climbing a Stairway of Sisal...

Not much progress to report. Since moving into the new bedroom, I've been super busy with other stuff like Habitat for Humanity, Oakland Firefighters Random Acts, church media -- the stuff that usually keeps me only a little busy so I have time to work on the house.

I have managed to do some stuff like finally stain and finish the dresser that sat in our old bedroom for a couple years, hang the mirror, and most importantly (from the standpoint of the cats) build a ladder for access to the loft. Katarina and I had been using a stepladder for the time being, but the cats didn't much like the slippery metal under their feet. Rosie because she has no front claws and almost no front toes, and Star because she's "Wuss in Boots". Now we can all use a nice custom-made ladder, with sisal on the steps for gripping with kitty claws (for thems that's got 'em). Star still slides her paws down the side rail one step at a time, but Rosie has become quite comfortable with the ladder, the loft and a few other places we hadn't quite counted on.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

After a stretch of particularly mild weather, we've been having rather unusual weather for the SF Bay Area. It's not unheard of to get some snow on the local peaks (the peak of Mt. Diablo is 3849 feet; Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose is over 4200 feet) every once in a while. We've even gotten snow here a couple times at about 1100 feet over the 12 years I've lived in Oakland. But this set of storms has had thunder and lightning, hail, and snow as low as 500 feet (resulting in a nasty accident over in Marin). Weird stuff. We've gotten mostly rain, but some hail and snow and freezing rain, too. Sonny Eliot probably would call it snail, or maybe freezing snail. Sleet, really ("neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor dark of night..."). But sleet isn't a word you hear much in California. It just doesn't do that very often here.

Sonny Eliot was a TV weatherman back in Michigan when I was growing up, and used to scrawl smooshed-together words on his blue and green chalkboard of Michigan as part of the weather report. Snow + hail = snail. I'm not sure how accurate his forecasts were back then, before Doppler radar and sophisticated computer models, but he certainly entertained folks. I Googled for him, expecting he'd passed away, but apparently he's still doing weather reports on the radio back in Detroit. What I didn't know back then is that he was a B-24 pilot during WWII, was shot down, and spent time in a POW camp. Funny the things you never know about people.

Like one of our neighbors. He's house- and cat-sitting for one our neighbors, and we've talked a few times. Very interesting guy, I thought. Polish emigrant, raised in Uruguay, well travelled, diverse background and interests. He even skied as a youth in Bariloche, an odd resort town in the Argentine Andes. (Amazingly beautiful area, by the way, but Bariloche is very touristy these days.) Katarina and I visited there during our trip to Argentina a number of years back, but most people have never heard of it. During our most recent conversation, I found out he spent several years bicycling around the world. He showed me a scrapbook with newspaper articles from all over about his trip. Part of his claim to fame was that he was a pioneer in mobile computing. He had a bunch of free gear from companies, including an HP 100LX, a modem, one of the first civilian hand-held GPS units, and kept connected even in parts of the world that hadn't seen the Internet yet. All that plus camping and cycling gear, strapped to a bike.

The topic came up during a conversation about our backgrounds. I hate the question "what do you do?", as if people were defined solely by their job. I probably hate the question in part because I can't easily answer it. I create media for our church. I run audio for the worship team on Sundays. I volunteer with a number of different non-profits, mostly doing tech stuff and some photography. I spend much of my week working on the addition to the house. But I don't have a "job" per se. But even if I did, it wouldn't be who I am, any more than Katarina is a technical writer. But Roberto can't easily answer the question either (and with a non-U.S. background, finds the question odd as people in much of the rest of the world do), which is probably why we're getting along so well.

Back when he was cycling around the globe with gadgets in the early 1990's, I was working at Geoworks helping create some of them (the Casio Zoomer, the HP Omnigo, and similar products from Toshiba, Nokia, and others). Back then I was largely defined by my job. Driven by it. I throughly loved what I did for most of the 9 years I was at Geoworks, but as the company was changing, so was I. Which is why I went from a high-paying profession to working in a brew pub (actually a brew-on-premises + brew pub, which is sadly out of business, so my time there was pretty short -- great job benefits though!), and spending most of my time working with non-profits. I felt there were better ways to spend my time and energy than "making toys for rich people" and trying to acquire more money and more stuff and more titles...

Oh, right. The addition. It's coming along nicely. During breaks in the weather, I've been putting on the siding. It goes pretty quickly except around windows, and I designed the addition with a lot of them. So overall it doesn't really go that quickly. When it's raining I work on the rough electrical and plumbing indoors. I figure another couple weeks and I'll be ready for the next inspections (rough electrical, rough plumbing, and final framing). Once I pass those, I'm in the home stretch -- insulation, drywall, flooring, plumbing fixtures. Still a lot of work to do, but it looks and feels like a house now.

Raising Abel

The trusses arrived yesterday, right on schedule. Thank you Anderson Truss, and thank you Tim G.

So now that I had the trusses, how to get them down from the carport and up to the roof of the addition? Truss companies will normally do rooftop delivery when possible, but given the trees, carport, and power lines, it was most definitely in the "not possible" category. I joked that they could do rooftop delivery if they had a helicopter, but even then I'm not sure it would be possible.

The answer? Follow the tabby cat (her name is Pouspous, which is to say, Catcat in French). Not the white rabbit...that leads to Wonderland or The Matrix. I came up with the idea a while back when I was working in the loft above the bathroom, and my neighbor walked by. We chatted a bit, and I noticed I was at about the same level she was. Our house is below the level of the street, but our neighbor's house on the east side is almost level with the street. And the downstairs in-law unit is right at the same level as the loft.

But even with a plan, I knew I'd still need help. I called Edis to see if he could work, but he had some work as a mechanic (which he's got some training in from Honduras). He paused and thought, and said "How about my cousin?" After some back and forth (how old is he? 18. does he speak any English? no. does he have any experience with construction? a little.), he called his cousin to see if he was available, and then called me back, and we set it up that I'd pick him up at Edis' house at 9am. I made a trip to Economy Lumber for some more OSB and some hurricane clips (they hold the trusses to the tops of the walls, better than just toe-nailing ever could), and then picked up Abel.

In Spanish, it's pronounced ah-bell, rather than the English ay-bull. The second thing I said to him (in Spanish, of course) was "My Spanish isn't very good. Please speak to me slowly." After that, communication wasn't a problem except for a few times I didn't know a word. He's hoping to go next year to English classes like Edis is. I started teaching him a few words, but we conversed in Spanish about family, how I knew Edis, how I'd learned Spanish, etc. The only thing I really had problems with was describing plantar fasciitis. I just said "part of my foot is a little broken" after I stumbled a bit and winced. Fortunately taking some time off, wearing shoes with better support, and Ibuprofen have helped.

So enter the solution to getting the trusses on top of the walls -- follow the tabby cat. I nailed a 2x8 to the outside of the wall, and we put a couple of extra pieces of rim joist I have as a walkway from our neighbors to the corner of the house. We simply picked up the trusses, carried them into the street, down our neighbor's driveway, and out the walkway. The two of us carried the trusses, placed them all at one end of the roof, then moved the boards from the corner of the addition to inside the south wall, so that one of us could walk on that to place trusses while the other walked on the bathroom loft. Worked like a charm. We had to take it slowly, of course, but it was the easiest non-rooftop delivery placement of trusses I've ever been involved with.

Abel and I also put some of the rest of the sheathing up, though there will be some small bits between the trusses. That just leaves sheathing above and around the front door, and around the back door, which is to say, not much.

All just in time, too...the forecast for Friday is rain. Hmmph. Doubtful I'll get roof sheathing on before then, but the tarp is in good shape, and well supported at a good angle for draining water, given the trusses holding it up.