Catch Up - The Lost Weeks

BABY HANNAH AYANE
We went down to Phoenix two weekends in a row. My husband (who I am now calling, The Fisherman, in this blog) had band practice, we attended a beautiful wedding at a real live western ranch, and we got to see our nephew, his wife, and my little grand-niece. Our trips were too short - because of the basement which is still drawing in water. (Speaking of the basement, it's much better now and we can last about 4-5 days without pumping or vacuuming. And when we do, we get much less.)

 

 
The Fisherman and our nephew love talking about the Bible together.  They mostly talk about prophecy and end times stuff.  They went at it right away and spent into late night hours talking about things.  I love this photo of Jonathan holding his baby daughter and gesturing with his hand to a passage in his open Bible.  Little Baby Girl seems like she might grow up to "talk with her hands", too.

For some reason, I loved how these turned out using the Black and White feature.  Her little polka dots were pink, turquoise, and lavender, with little socks to match.  So cute.

She is one cute little bundle.  Almost three months old and only weighed 10 pounds.

I love this photo of Baby Hannah and her beautiful Asian mom.

I haven't figured out if they are really going to call her Ayane like we initially heard because during our visits we heard them call her Hannah a number of times. Either way, I think both are pretty names.

And here's a color one just so you can see her little cuteness in living color.

Here's Baby Hannah with her namesake, my niece Hannah (13), who is Baby Hannah's aunt. 

With it looking like they might be going to call the baby Hannah after all, now we have two Hannahs in the family to distinguish between.  "Baby Hannah" is fine for now but "Big" Hannah is not a fitting name for the original Hannah because, well, she's quite small. She's always been very petite and cutely small - though she has hated it.  Her father can't even remember where one of his favorite nicknames for her came from.  He calls her Little Bean, or Hannah Bean, or just Bean.  So...he immediately christened Baby Hannah, "Baby Bean."  Too cute.

GETTING POLITICAL
We came back on a Monday morning from the last of our two weekend trips visiting family and friends and arrived in our nearby town just in time for a "Town Hall" meeting with an Arizona candidate for the U.S. Senate, J.D. Hayworth. Lots of good questions were asked and he had lots of good answers. We're leaning toward voting for him over the incumbent...who has been in Washington for 28 years...and who I always thought I liked but have since learned is not as conservative as I'd like.....and who, well, recently ran for President.   Oddly enough, before I finished writing this post I received a recorded poll call asking whether I was thinking favorably toward McCain, who I was likely to vote for in the primary and what I considered the most important issue of this Senate election to be.  I always wondered who actually participated in all these polls I hear about.  This one, however, was not an objective poll.  It was conducted by the McCain campaign itself, taking the pulse of where he stands.

NEW SCREEN DOOR

We have been busy trying to get caught up with things around here. Winter is finally over. The last tidbit of snow from the roof slide off our garage/workshop (seen here) finally gave up it's grip and melted away into the ground a couple weeks ago. I almost took a photo of it, to show the last 12" x 5" mound of winter clinging to our land.  There is, however, still snow on the north side of our surrounding hills.  That's fun to see.

We've had some beautiful weather lately. We 've enjoyed a couple 70 degree days. Gorgeous. We put a screen door on our front door. We love our wood front door and hated to cover it up with your basic ugly "security door" but it will be SO nice in the early summer heat to get a cross breeze going like has been absent to date.

ROAD UPDATE

I know you're all waiting with bated breath wondering how our road is looking these days, now that things are drying out. With deliberate efforts at driving over the high spots for several weeks, we managed to smooth it out pretty well. Our neighbor, who saw my photos on the blog and then ventured up himself a couple weeks later to see it's horrors for himself, was amazed at how relatively normal the road had become after our targeted driving. It was still uneven and in some spots with slants either to one side or the other, but we are very pleased it's not trenched and rutted.

If you haven't seen the photos of how this winter's 90+ inches of snow affected our road out here in the country, you can take a look at February's Snow Road post. It was pretty bad. We were snowed in for a week or more. We parked our van a half mile away at the end of the road and it stayed there for over a month. We could only use our 4WD truck to get in and out.

We ordered 60 yards of gravel for the road. What a "yard" is, I'm not exactly sure. I just know that our local cinder company has "15 yard" trucks and trailers.  The guy came out with his dump truck (15 yards) pulling another trailer (another 15 yards).  When this amount didn't make it as far as we wanted, we went whole hog and ordered another 30 to go all the way up our driveway almost to the garage (which was built as a studio-workshop and doesn't actually house any vehicles nor does one fit very well - unless you call 2 inches clearance on either side of the doorway a fit).


Here comes Mr. Cinders with his first load...actually this looks like his second load because the road ahead of him looks too nice.

When he gets to the right spot he stops the truck, gets out and goes to the back where he props open the back gate a couple inches at the bottom.  Then he gets back in the cab, raises the "dump" part of the truck and somehow he knows just how fast to drive away so the cinders will spread evenly behind him as he goes.

Here's where he stopped after his first load ran out.

He then turns around, goes back out to "The Big Road" where he parked his trailer full of another 15 yards of "Number 2 Red" cinder gravel.  He unhitches the empty bed, hitches up the full one, and comes back to pick up where he left off.

While we were waiting for him to go all the way to town (to the cinder pit just outside of town) and load up again, we decided to do a little raking in the driveway.  I unearthed my "elephant".  There was a tree right in the middle of what we needed to be our driveway so before we began building the garage The Fisherman cut it down, taking it as flush to the dirt as possible since we'd be driving over it.  One day I realized it looked just like an elephant face.  See?

Well, Blogger has done it to me again.  It's rotated a horizontal photo into a vertical format.  (Argh!)  Sorry about that.  Guess you'll have to turn your head to try and see what I see in this stump.  When I first discovered it, the elephant's "trunk" was much longer but it has since been broken away.  The trunk portion used to extend well beyond that little cinder sitting on it at the right edge of this unfortunately now-vertical photo.  Do you see it?  Kind of reminds me of the cartoon elephant Babar.  I had never taken a picture of my elephant stump so I figured I'd better get my camera out before a whole bunch of 2-inch cinders got dumped all over it.  I imagine it will remain hidden for years now.

Anyway, here's more photos of the cinder truck doing it's spreading/dumping thing.  Around the corner, making the turn from our Driveway to the Driveway Road, driving his way out.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Ahhhhhh! Nice new road.

We still have some raking to do.  There's only so much finesse a large dump truck can manage.  We still need to rake down some highs and pull into some lows.  This will provide an excellent base when the summer rains come.  We were down to dirt in many portions of the road.  We definitely needed something down before the rains made the roads solid mud again.  We've found that these larger two-inch cinders create a very stable base.  When rain makes the ground muddy again, they squish down in but don't get lost in the muck, they don't wash away and they pack in firmly.

Well, I think you're about all caught up on the major happenings from The Lost Weeks of my blogging life.  Time to get some dinner and settle in for a movie tonight.

Snow Road 2010

Here's what we've been dealing with as goes our road.

It's definitely a 4WD experience: rugged, rough and bouncy. You have to stay in the tracks or, in some spots, you'd get pulled into and bogged down in the deeper stuff. The snow in many spots is iced over and very packed. The hard packed trench walls remind me of those antique cars at Disneyland. They had a metal guard rail running down the middle under the car to help keep you on track. As a kid, of course I didn't know how to steer real well. I'd go rolling along steering wildly, and my tires would bounce into the guard and then back again. That's how it is for us boucing against the snow track walls.

This is near the corner turning onto our property. That is, turning onto "Our Driveway Road" from "Our Road". ........ Just wait. It gets worse. See that big bush sticking out into the road?

This spot is right at that bush. Pretty nasty.

Here's the same spot with the rest of Our Road heading out to the The Big Road.

Looking back.

Another view looking back from past the bush.

Here's more of the rest of the road as it reaches out to the big road....where our van is parked... because it can't get in. No way. No how.


We went into town yesterday to meet some new friends for lunch. We didn't know if we'd be able to drive out in the 4WD or if we'd have to end up walking out to the van. My husband told me it was likely to be a rough ride as he wanted to maintain some speed so as to not get bogged down in any troublesome spots. Boy, he wasn't kidding. We were bouncing all over the road and inside the truck. The snow and tracks were throwing us all over the place and he was really exerting some effort to keep the steering wheel doing the right thing.

I said to him, "I can't believe people do this on purpose for fun!" Not my cup of tea.

However, we are thankful we could get out. We won't be taking any spontaneous frivilous trips to the general store or into town, but it's nice to know we can get out if we need to or REALLY want to.

Alaska Photos 7

TWO MEN AND A ROAD

Rusty scooping.

Watch your toes, Hon.

Our friend, Jerry, is doing the scooping here. They would take time out to scoop with the backhoe and loosen up a huge pile of gravel. Later on they used the bucket to pick up loads of gravel for spreading on the road.


Jerry the Pro

Ta-da! Done!

At least that half anyway. Next year, the rest.

The Squishy Spot

We think there might be some bad clay underneath this section. We're waiting to see how it firms up (or doesn't) over the summer. It may never work right and could cause us problems forever. We might have to dig it all up and start over in that spot. Not only the 18 inches of gravel we just installed, but we may need to dig up a bunch of the ground underneath and replace it. We have no idea what's under there that's not under the other portions of the road.

The Squishy Spot's location in the grand scheme of The Road.

Well, half of the grand scheme because it's about half way between our access road and the cabin.

Alaska Photos 6

CABIN
We put up tongue and groove interior boards on part of two walls.

Here's to show you not only what a mess the cabin is during construction, but also how small it is. That's the same window as in the first photo.

The cabin is a mere 16x20. 20 long and 16 wide. Our loft is 10 feet deep by 16 feet wide - just enough for some beds, a nightstand or small dresser, perhaps a chair. We'll be putting two twin beds up there that we can put together or take apart.

We couldn't wait to put some of The Fisherman's photos up on the new walls. Doesn't it look nice?! It may be small but we're excited to make it beautiful. This is the front; you can see "our view" through the window a little bit. I planted Mom's Forget-Me-Not seeds to the left and down the road a little bit. The road (driveway) runs between the cabin and the end of the dirt showing in this photo.

Note again the size...the door is all the way on the right side of the front wall and the window is the same one as in the photo above.

We've been noticing that 16x20 seems to be a very common size of Alaska cabin. It must be because it's manageable to build by yourself as The Fisherman did. But, much as I would like something bigger, we're very happy and grateful to have a cabin at all. We debated about where to put a bathroom, The Fisherman not wanting to take up too much interior room (I see his point) and me not wanting to sacrifice a real bathroom. He finally came up with the brilliant idea of putting a door in the back wall and adding on a bathroom of any size we choose! Excellent! In the meantime...we have plans for an outhouse and I don't know about showers. We'll probably first put in a shower but take "jug showers" until we get a water collection/delivery system up and running. Just like we did here in Arizona.

ROAD WORK

Before

This is actually where we got the truck stuck. Right in that little curve before the hill. It's all nice and smooth because we scraped over it with the backhoe after digging out.

During

Here's a shot looking north. It shows the Typar road fabric we laid down first.

I was sitting on the edge of the road when I took these photos. For this next one, all I did was turn directly west. That's how dense the woods are! Those trees are on our neighbor's property. The nice strip of grassy earth in front of the trees that looks like you could drive on it is the road that was there when we bought our land. An unsanctioned road that turned out to be 75% on our neighbor's property. He made us move it. So The Fisherman had to rip a new road through our property right alongside the old road. You can see the stake with the pink tape marking the property line. Although, I think we had to move the stake more onto the guy's property so we wouldn't run over it with the backhoe.

Now I'm looking south. Oh, nevermind the 4 foot table resting up against a stump in the background there. It's as far as we got with it until later that day when we took it to the cabin around the bend and up a hill.