Liralen's Adventures Through Life

Monday was supposed to be less than half a day of work, with everyone cleaning up the very last details on all the projects on the site. I wandered about helping various people with the ends of all their projects. One was fixing the fact that one of the beams had been set a fraction of an inch too low compared to all the joists, so we had to nail a little bit of wood to the bottom of every joist. Someone had ripped a 2 by into equally thick shims, and there was a team of two trying to put them up on everything. Jenny had a methodology that included presetting all the nails, so I did that while she and Sue's husband, Jim, nailed them over their heads. It's not a comfortable job to do, as you have to swing a hammer up. You can't really use the weight of the head with gravity to really nail, and beginner hammer users always have a tendency to do little hits without being able to really get it in well because they lack the confidence to hit it harder. So I had a little trick, o...

 Once the roof on the fourth house was up, there were a lot of things that started going into motion. Getting the windows and doors into the house, finishing the front porch, and planning all the framing for the loft and walls in the fourth house. The other houses still needed work. Following the plumbing and having to move various walls, the floors had to be pulled up while they were doing the work and they all had to be re-lain, sometimes recut to follow the new contours of the rooms or enclosures. Both House Number 1 and 2 had had the flooring done in the spring for the whole loft and the bathroom, and a chunk of that flooring had been pulled up. There were a number of "final" coats of paint to be put up, more battens that could be secured where we had siding, seams to be caulked, and lots of screw holes to be filled. So yesterday, and today, everyone scattered and did the things they could do. And in the midst of all the activity, a lady and guy showed up and did their pa...

I decided to enjoy a sunset and a campfire tonight, so I'll probably write about today tomorrow....

 A little background about the whole of the National YMCA Alumni Service Project. So it turns out that all the camp directors, managers, organizers, and even the cooks that work for the various YMCA camps all over the United States all get amazing pensions. They also organized as alumni, and the alumni organization wasn't all that active and was starting to die off. Some of the folks in charge of the organization decided to try and do a national service project, and a bunch of folk got really excited about it. They solicited ideas from various Y's all over the country and ended up accepting the proposal by the YMCA of the Seven Council Fires in Dupree. It is the only Y on a Native American reservation, and the idea was to build four houses for single mothers that were looking to get out of generational poverty and multi-generational homes that had problems supporting them appropriately. So these four homes are set around what is going to be a Medicine Wheel, with a common area ...

I spent most of the morning caulking. I'm not entirely sure how to convey the depth of history that goes underneath that statement. Let's start with the fact that in a great many volunteer construction projects, that caulking is usually given to the girl with the least experience who just says okay when someone, usually male, asks her to please do the caulking. It's oddly considered by many volunteers as "make work". It's something that's not nearly as fun or fulfilling as using power tools, putting up a wall, building actual framing for rooms, or nearly anything. It's the low man on the totem pole work.  And not a lot of people jump up to do it. Then, in Biloxi, while we were trying to reconstruct an electrician's house while he volunteered, in kind, I got into Gabriel's finishing crew. Gabriel's dad was a building inspector, and, for a few years, Gabriel had done professional finishing work, and the most laborious part of it was putting i...

The interesting problem of blogging about construction work is that I rarely have the time to take pictures of what I'm doing. So it's rarely a complete look at what I actually got up to. In this case, however, John was kind enough to take a break and actually shoot some photos. I also shot some photos yesterday of the site just as it looked when we got there, so that I'd have something to compare against at the end to really figure out how much progress we'd made.   A single day. One of the beauties of this particular service work is that the YMCA feeds us. They provide the food and the kitchen for breakfast, and Frank, the cook for the whole of the YMCA of the Seven Council Fires, cooks for us for lunch and dinner. This is the man who, through COVID, fed thousands a day in the same tiny kitchen he uses to feed all the local kids takeaway dinners and then feed all third odd of us. Frank is a fantastic man, moving back here because of family, although he'd qualified...

 We started the morning with a Quest. It was to get to the Dignity of Earth and Sky, a statue that John had found when he and I were looking with Linda K. into the tradition of Star Quilts in the Lakota tribes. The hotel didn't really have breakfast so we made do with a banana we'd bought the day before and the toasted oats I'd brought for myself.  She is in Chamberlain, South Dakota, right in a rest area! I was so surprised by that, but she was also a lot larger than it looked from the photos in Google maps. Most of them didn't have a person in there as someone to compare against, but the photos made her look like she was about the size of a real person instead of being nearly seven times as tall. There are LED lights built into her star quilt, into the blue panes of the star, and there was a lot of care taken to have her represent her people as three different Lakota women were used as the models for her. The rest stop had a little museum, and along with that was a sm...

  As we leave home, I have this habit of saying good-bye to the mountains that we see every day. It's a good ritual, reminding me that I will be back, that it's never forever, and that I do love where I live. That said, nearly the moment we actually left the house, I fell asleep. John was driving, of course, and as those of you who know me well from this blog, I had a ton of things leading up to the moment of leaving, including, of course, all the preparation, the packing, and all the things that we had to finish before we could leave. I have also been wrestling with nearly six months of having my hands and forearms hurt at night, whether I played games or not. Even when we were out on trips for a week or more, my hands and arms continued to ache at night. And some part of me took that as a sign that I was going to have to cut back yet again on the things that I did and I'd had enough of that. I was down to just about two hours a day of play, and having to watch computer us...