Liralen's Adventures Through Life

The last time we came to Kaua'i was in 1993, right after hurricane Iniki. It was pretty sparse back then, as the whole island was rebuilding, we stayed at one of the few hotels that was still whole, and we ate at one of the very very few "fish" restaurants and the waiter there thought we were remarkable as we were dressed like a native, but no native would be eating fish at a restaurant. Everyone had plenty of fish off their boat or their uncle or cousin's boat. They wouldn't be paying money for fish. It's very different now. We've also been to Hawaii a few times, including a trip to the big island after Jet graduated, so that he'd get a trip to Hawaii under his belt before he left home, and then another to Maui to look for whales. We love the Big Island a lot, but memories of little, old Kaua'i with it's perpetual rain storm at the top of the island prompted us to come back when we were thinking of how to escape the winter cold of Colorado. I

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