Gingerslum 2007

The annual Gingerslum party was held a couple of Fridays ago (please forgive the delay, with the upcoming wedding, upcoming kid and making room for Rebecca to move in next year, it was a very busy holiday break this year). This year Terry, Kristi and Karine provided much appreciated preparation and creativity in helping to bake a majority of the buildings this year.

The theme this year was "Ginger Ballard". Representing the traditional Ballard was the Ballard Locks (including a boat passing through the locks, and a fish ladder), the Tractor Tavern (with a very efficient looking bouncer standing outside), Hattie's Hat, the train bridge that is near the locks, and a church. Representing the new Ballard, we had a towering building crane and an unfinished condo (which was on fire).

Thank you to all that attended, it is great to see all your friends during the holidays. And now for the pictures.... (everyone was very patient during the group photo while I figured out the remote shutter release)(you would think I would have it figured out by now, after several parties).

Here is the raw gingerbread pre-getting smothered in candy...



Here are some of the ginger construction workers...



Here are the rest of the gingerworkers, along with their pregnant ginger supervisors (Kirsten on the left side of the photo, and Rebecca on the right side)...



And the group photo...



p.s. Lance (the poodle) and Ruby (the black Lab) were very well behaved throughout the evening and only ate the food gifts from Jet and Finn (dogs love little kids, they are always very generous).

Banff film festival

I haven't been very good about updating the blog lately. Rebecca and I went back to Indy to visit my family for the holiday, and to get engaged. Hopefully you have heard the news from us in person, instead of reading it here on this blog. You don't realize how many people you actually know until you start trying to get news out to everyone.

In other news, we went to the annual Banff film festival this year. Rick was nice enough to take everyone's photo. We know the people in the picture that are looking at the camera, the other people are strangers (but they had nice candy).

Rebecca's sister's wedding in Tucson (and missle silo)

Rebecca and I attended her sister Katheryn's wedding in Tucson, AZ this past weekend. Kathryn was married to Chris by her father. It was a beautiful wedding held in a bed and breakfast in the older part of downtown Tucson. Rebecca went down early in the week, and I followed later (the morning after the pumpkin party).



Here is a photo of the happy bride and groom....



Here is Rebecca and her sister. Her sister generously picked out very nice dresses for her bridesmaids, Rebecca and Mead.




The wedding was held in the side garden, and the sit down dinner was held at the same place in a large, bricked atrium area. This photo shows the seats for the wedding ceremony. It was a very personal ceremony, led by Rebecca and Kathryn's father. The couple wrote their own vows and included their family and friends in the ceremony.



There was a fountain in the middle of the courtyard that the ceremony was held in with flowers floating. Here are some artsy pictures....




There was a very mellow and friendly cat strolling about that was a resident of the bed and breakfast where the wedding was held.




As a side attraction in the trip to Tucson, Rebecca indulged me and agreed to visit the decommissioned Titan II missile silo south of Tucson. The Titan II was a 9 megaton nuclear missile, and there were 50 or so of these silos scattered around the U.S. This one is the only one remaining and offers tours daily (except Thanksgiving and Christmas).

The tours start out in the visitors center where a 10 minute video presentation is shown. It talks about the history of nuclear weapons and the strategy of having the capability to blow countries off the planet.



After the video, there is a 20 minute tour led by a speaker where you walk around the facilities above ground and try not to get sunburned or step on a rattlesnake.



Then you descend into the below ground facilities where they do a pretend launch where two tour visitors sit in the command chairs and simultaneously turn the two keys required. Everyone then watches the lights on the control panel march towards nuclear winter.



Here are mannequins dressed up in the protective suits doing a maintenance activity on the rocket. This worker seems to have a broken leg.



Here is the rocket itself (no nuclear warhead is in it any longer).

Pumpkins 2007

The annual pumpkin carving party was last Thursday and was a great success. No blood was spilled, and the house didn't catch fire due to too many candles going at once. And, I successfully woke up in time to catch my early flight to Tucson the next morning. All evenings should go this smoothly.

Pumpkins seem to be getting bigger every year, many people walked in the front door claiming happiness that they were able to park near the house because they didn't want to carry the beast they have brought any further.



Everyone did a great job of keeping the pumpkin goop restrained and resisted the urge to start a pumpkins innards throwing war.




Here is the group photo (missing Rob, Sally, Sally's mom and their daughter).

ACL Austin City Limits Festival

Rebecca and I spent last weekend down in hot Austin, TX attending the ACL (Austin City Limits) Festival.



We stayed with Kurt (my high school and Purdue friend), who has a house on Lake Travis. The next three photos were taken on Kurt's deck looking out over the lake. The first photo shows the neighborhood dog, Sadie. Sadie likes to fetch rocks.





Kurt is a professional ACL attendee and has the whole process fully refined. We arrived every day a little bit before the gates openned at 11 a.m. with chairs and blankets ready. Every day, the PA system would start up with openning bars from the Star Wars theme, sending shivers down your arms, then transition into the theme from Chariots of Fire, as the concert goers streamed in and started running to be at the front of their chosen stage. The fields would be relatively empty early in the day, as shown in this picture.



We did have some extra curricular excitement on the first day, there was a fire in a beer truck. A few people were hurt, but they left the hospital after being checked out. The fire started small....



...but became larger (also note the number of people starting to fill up in the fields as the day progressed).



During each day, there were so many bands, that sometimes we would split up and each head out to see a band on our own. This picture shows Mario Matteolli (sp?), who I saw by myself. I had never heard of him before, but was wandering by this stage (there were 5 big stages and 3 smaller stages), and he sounded good so I stopped. I ended up liking his sound so much that after the show I stopped by the shopping area of the festival and bought his CD.




On a different day, Rebecca and I checked out the Kaiser Chiefs. A friend of ours in Seattle, Paul, had drug us to a show of theirs in Seattle on a school night. They were really good that evening, but didn't start playing until 11.30, which was too late for us. We only heard a few songs before heading home. But at ACL we were able to see them for a whole set. They really are as good as Paul said. Their lead singer might have been a little too excited, halfway through the performance, he was jumping up and down and came down hard on the side of the foot. The rest of the show he dig all his jumping up and down on one leg. The next two images are the same photo, taken when he was still able bodied. They show him climbing the stage structure, the first is the overall picture, the second is zoomed in on him showing him climbing.




The festival offered parking for bikes. Many people obviously took advantage of this. Austin is the home of Lance Armstrong and biking is popular.



The festival is 3 days long, starts at 11 a.m. and ends around 10 each day. To light up the area, they have lights provided. I liked this one, it is like a big UFO. These two pictures are of the same lighted balloon, but from different vantage points.




Being Seattle-ites, Rebecca and I are good candidates for massive sunburns. These pictures show that we were very good about putting on gobs of sunscreen and only had 3rd degree instead of 2nd degree burns...




The main entrance to the festival had a neat neon sign.






This last picture is the requisite "artsy" image.

Another day, another wall

These garage pictures are probably very hard to decrypt if you have never seen the garage. It is a small building, so it is hard to stand far enough back to take a good picture showing exactly what is going on. You will just have to take my word for it that it has seen better days, and the basic structure needed some strengthening.

Today's pictures show the work I have done on the side wall. All the previous work was done on the back wall to support the tail end of the rafters. The side wall has a support on it that holds a big cross beam for the roof. The roof is set up as two halves, the front half and back half. The back wall supports the tail ends of the rafters for the back half the roof, and this main beam holds the other end. The center beam also holds the tail end of the rafters for the front half of the roof. In other words, if the center beam fell, the roof would fold in the middle and fall into the center of the garage, onto my car, myself of anything else inside the garage. And this is why I want to support it better.

This first picture shows what it looked like before I started building the side wall. In the center of the picture is the vertical board that the center roof beam sits on top of. The bright pieces of timber are the beginnings of the new wall. The grey metallic horizontal thing is actually a long steel pipe that the previous owner had wedge in there to add support to the roof. It was a very innovative solution.



This next picture is a close up view of the top of the vertical board that holds up the center beam. It is difficult to tell, but the center beam is starting to compress at the end because it isn't as solid as it used to be.


This last picture shows the new wall I am starting to build. I will be adding another section on top of this base wall that will be right under the roof rafter and will support the main cross beam more solidly. My goal for today is to finish that section. Hopefully I will have pictures to show the complete wall soon.


After I get this wall complete, I will be pouring more cement. I need to build up the floor in the room that makes up the other half of this building so that I can work out its "issues" also. By the time I am done with this project, it might have been easier to just build and whole new garage. But, since the building actually sits right at the edge of my property, there is no way I would be able to build it in the same spot again.

first day of vacation garage work

This was the progress I made on my first day of working on the garage. I am taking this week off from work in order to make quick progress before the winter (and to get away from Boeing work for a week). The first picture shows the original back wall that is falling down. The picture doesn't show it well, but there was one horizontal beam underneath the roof joists. It is all that is holding up the roof. It is starting to lose the battle. That beam is what started me down this adventure, I wasn't feeling safe parking my cars in the garage anymore.




The concrete work a few weeks ago created a stable platform for me to lift the roof, and to build the new back wall on. This picture shows the new back wall with the set up I used to lift the roof. My neighbor, Chris, lent me his engine hoist (the orange thing) and modified it with a flange to hold a 4x4 timber onto the end.



These two pictures shows the right hand corner where I set up the static beam that I was trying to lift the roof final height to.





These next two pictures show the left hand corner where I was lifting from. This was the corner where the floor had sunk the most and the roof had followed it. The beam closest to the wall is actually two 4x4's attached together. The closeup with the red arrow shows the break between the two 4x4's. I started with the upper block out, then I lifted the horizontal beam up on that end using the engine hoist. Once the horizontal beam was level, I measured the gap between the horizontal beam and the top of the corner post, quickly cut a 4x4 section and pushed it in and put screws through the side braces. It was a little scary, the roof was making interesting sounds as I lifted it.





All of the above was without any of the new lumber set up for the back wall. I didn't take any pictures because I didn't want to leave the roof being held up by my contraption very long. These pictures were all taken at the end of the day (Sunday).

Yesterday (Labor Day). I made made lots of progress also, but haven't taken pictures yet.