one more phase completed

The sliding patio door is in, caulked, and weather tight. I need to paint the trim, but right now I'm tired. I know professionals could have put it in in a couple of hours, but I'm not a pro. We worked on it eight hours Monday, about eight hours yesterday, and three today. What a project! I thought about it for days before we began, dreamed about it every night and woke up with it on my mind, and now it's finished. For me, the hard part of remodeling is trying to install something that is straight and square into a house that is not. Remember that little ditty about a crooked man who built a crooked house? This is the house that he built. It could be that levels and squares had not been invented when the house was first erected. Or maybe such technology hadn't made this far back into the woods.

I know what your thinking. When am I going to build a deck level with the door?

quote of the day

When I compare
What I have lost with what I have gained,
What I have missed with what attained,
Little room do I find for pride.
I am aware
How many days have been idly spent;
How like an arrow the good intent
Has fallen short or been turned aside.
But who shall dare
To measure loss and gain in this wise?
Defeat may be victory in disguise;
The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Dorothy's brother Bill, and my neighbor, Mike Wolf are dismantling a window and pulling siding off the wall to make a patio door shaped hole in the wall. Honest, I helped. I just stopped from time to time to take a picture.

The door is in, but as you can see, the sun is going down so we buttoned it up and we'll continue squaring it up tomorrow. When we started it was 38 degrees outside. It warmed up to 50 and then began a down hill slide. I'll be glad when the project is finished.

quote of the day

Find peace with yourself by accepting not only what you are, but what you are never going to be.
-- Anonymous

a big hole in the wall

I've been absent from the blog recently because of the busy-ness of remodeling, piano lessons, and caring for my grand daughter, Tara, who endured an emergency appendectomy last week. I have a new patio door that was delivered last Wednesday, but I haven't been able to install it because of the weather. Tomorrow, the temperature is supposed to rise all the way to 50 degrees so I'm going to jump at the opportunity to cut a 72"X80" hole in the wall to accommodate the new door (photos forthcoming).

i want my chair back

Lizzie, the dog that lives at my house, is a mean and spiteful dog. She won't get out of my chair. She's old and deaf and won't respond to stern language, but then again, she never responded when she was a pup. I can't hit her with a stick or the animal lovers would have be put in prison and tortured for years and years. Even if I went to the trouble of tilting the chair and dumping her out the chair would still smell like her. I can't win. I usually just sit in Dorothy's recliner, but then she complains that her chair smells like me.

• I went to the store today for Dorothy. As I was walking between two cars, I heard a click and then something hit me in the back of the head. I looked around as one of the cars back out and drove away. There was a man sitting in his car who looked puzzled. I told him I had just been hit in the head with something. He told me a little boy in the car that drove away had been playing with a toy pistol. That little twerp was a pretty good shot. I hope his mother took the toy away from him. Little kids don't need to be shooting people with toy guns. It just gets them used to shooting them with real ones.
• Our ESL lesson this week was about ordering food in a restaurant. I asked my students if they are comfortable ordering from a menu. One student said she just asks the waiter if he can speak Spanish and if he says no she orders from the buffet.
• I've been so busy on the remodeling and my piano lessons I haven't had the time to post to this blog. I'll have some photos of the progress posted here soon, and maybe I'll upload an audio file of a song I've mastered, that is if I ever master one.

hunter on the trampoline

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quote of the day

We are where we are, as we are, because of what we are.
-- Earle J. Glade

remodeling progress

Dorothy's brother Bill is helping me on this phase of creating a dining room. This old house has very uneven floors so we're leveling them.

jenna the blues pianist

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marley's baptism

Marley and Kelly have their picture taken before the baptism.

The youth minister, Jason Kelly, explains to the congregation that Marley has made a commitment of faith and is now publicly demonstrating her personal identification with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

quote of the day

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."
-- Charles Schulz, Peanuts cartoonist

tara's birthday

It's Tara's twentieth birthday and as she attempts to blow out the candles on her cake she gets lots of help from her younger cousins. As per our tradition the birthdayee (I just made up a word) gets his/her choice of cake and dinner. Tara chose a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and for dinner we had tacos.

This is my new keyboard. I'm slowly and haltingly playing "Happy Birthday" as we all sing for Tara.

quote of the day

"Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits."
--Robert Louis Stevenson