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...

Jet came home from Nashville on Saturday morning. He left for his flight at 5am, and we picked him up at DIA at 8am, and so started a very dense five days.  On Saturday was the graduation of a dear friend of both Jet and myself. Jet met them during high school, I've really gotten to know them better in the last year, as they and I made more of an effort to see each other and really talk and listen to each other, as we're both involved in the restorative justice practices of the Longmont Community Justice Partnership. So it's a natural mix of people who like asking each other open questions and really listening to each other.  They're finishing at PhD, with some really rough spots with an advisor that has not been the most available for them. It gives me a lot of gratitude for Jet's advisor, who is nearly always available to him as he navigates his early years through his program in Bio-Medical Engineering.  Having several young researchers in my gaming group has ex...