Notebook Blogging #10

Well, after several weeks of MIA notebook blogger is back, though this might be a short post. Doesn't it seem like the year is just flying by? In one week it will be the 1st of May! The 1st of May!! 114 days into the new year and exactly 35 weeks until Christmas, which BTW, I already have some gifts for. :p While it seems the days are just flying off the calender, there is also a part of me that feels like time is just crawling along. It is a weird feeling, to know the year is moving right along but at the same time some things in life have their own timetable and all you can do is be patient and wait.

Take our house, granted, we only work on it a couple hours a day when it is not pouring rain (something that has been quite common recently) and the work ethic of some class members leaves sometime to be desired, but taking that all into consideration it is still mildly irritating that construction has been so slow, but at least if I get too frustrated there are usually plenty of things handy that need a good hammer. :p And like I said in January, while there are a lot of things I want to happen or get accomplished you just have to be patient and trust the Lord's timing even for something as minor as building a house.

One recent element of construction that I thought was great fun was dragging trusses for our roof. We had them all dropped at one end and we had to space them evenly across the top of the framework. This involved balancing on the 2x4 top-plate and walking trapeze style 48 feet to the other end of the house which is actually really easy. We were going to have three people move each truss just to get the job done faster except almost everyone chickened out of getting up there! So the few individuals, myself included who were not scared to death of a little 15' drop balanced ourselves on the 2x4, gripped the truss in the center and dragged them individually to the other end of the house.

The first time I have to admit I shuffled my way across the length of the house, this was mainly due to my feet being the size they are and the fact that I kept kicking myself in my heels. After that first run though, I was good and we got them spaced out relatively quickly considering most of the class was on the ground. Once we got the sheeting down on the roof, most of the class was a little more willing to get on the roof to put down the tar paper and shingles but that could be a post all of it's own.

Remember the I mentioned sunburn in the Earth day post a few days ago? Well, I did not follow my own advice and I actually got rather red, though not severely when we were working on getting the trusses set up and the sheeting on the roof. Since that day I have religiously been putting on sunscreen, I have vowed not to revisit lobster land!

Anyone remember the furniture I was going to build? :p Well it seems like free time we have in the shop is few and far between but I have almost finished the bookcase. I just need to stain it and put it back together. I will post pictures whenever it is fully completed.

Today is Earth day....

And in celebration of such a glorious day as well as Arbor day this Friday I present the following picture from the "Sarah and William crazy picture archive"

Note, our faces are turned away from the camera so it would not appear like this was a publicity stunt. Today and Friday are days in which we should be celebrating nature and we wanted our true feelings for both Earth and Arbor day to be conveyed through the power of the photography without a distraction which might arise from seeing our smiling visages.....

Ok enough of that gobbledygook! (yes it's a real word) Since it seems spring is upon us, how about some helpful advice on avoiding potentially painful experiences which can arise between now and the fall.

So it is getting warmer, the sun is shinning, the flowers are starting to bloom, bees are flying from flower to said flower, though none of them are mine since my hives died, the pollen is turning my car a nasty yellowish green, and people are starting to wear shorts. If you happen to not believe in wearing shorts, let me be the first of the season to tell you that you are a smart person, though probably a very hot one as the weather continues to heat up. Why are you a very smart person for not wearing shorts? For the simple reason that by wearing shorts you present the lower half of your legs to serious injury.

Case in point:

As you can see, exposed legs seem to attract hard pointy objects as well as possess a strange, almost magnetic pull towards any hard surface, especially that of concrete. Yes shorts are MUCH cooler in warm weather, but are they worth it? I leave it up to the readership to decide for themselves.

Something even worse and much more serious than injuries to the lower extremities comes from our always shining source of light, the sun. I am talking about sunburn! Now maybe some people don't have this problem, count yourself blessed if you don't, but the sun really likes shining it's bright rays onto my skin and toasting it a nice shade of reddish orange. Maybe toast is too light a word, fry would probably be more like it. The times I have had to deal with skin peeling off in quarter sized pieces is sadly too numerous to count.

Fortunately there is a solution to both injuries to your legs and sunburn, stay indoors! :D (This is not a very feasible option however) A better approach is to wear sunblock to prevent sunburn, yes, it is a slight pain to put on but you are saving your skin. As to bloody injuies on your knees and legs, if you can't wear long pants, at least always have band-aids handy to keep the blood at bay and maybe Neosporin to prevent infection.....Oh and avoid mulch piles in the dark ;)

The weather is messed up

What to blog about.....Not much has happened to me in the last week, sure we had some old friends come over last Monday, then a family from church on Tuesday but nothing really blog-worthy. Well we did learn this funny game from our friends but it would be hard to describe it on here. ;) So for this past week I have mainly read books from my never ending pile...I could go into more detail about the books I finished except I know that if I start typing about the books, the post will end up being my thoughts about the subjects the books talked about rather than the books themselves and I feel slightly lazy ATM and my brain does not want to think about all I feel I could type up so I am not going to do it!

I have now typed out a paragraph that has really nothing to do with the title...The title has to do with the weather, the weather where I live to be exact. To put it simply, something has happened to it! I know readers in colder states may read about our weather and think to themselves (in a Napoleon Dynamite voice) "Lucky!" I personally do not feel this way I am actually quite vexed about our weather. Why you may ask? I will tell you why, it is currently 71F with a slight SW wind of 9 mph. Yes 71 on the 7th of January!!!!! I am serious when I say it is a little depressing, I am a happy person, not much really gets me down to any great extent but 71 in January is just wrong, we don't live in FL! I can remember January 7ths in the past where not only was it cold, we actually had snow yes, snow! Ok, I just felt like getting that off my chest, sorry if the post was a bit disjointed, maybe it is the heat affecting my brain.....

The weather!!

As I type this the weather is as follows:

92°F
Mostly Cloudy
Wind: S at 6 mph
Humidity: 38%

A little on the warm side but nothing you would not expect from a hot, muggy, summer day in the south.....But wait a just cotton pickin minute, summer is supposed to be long gone, we are a few days into the SECOND WEEK of October!!!!! Why on earth is it 90+ degrees outside???? We currently are the warmest place in the USA, warmer than Florida, warmer than Texas, California is down right chilly compared to us:

There is something rather off about having temperatures 20+ degrees higher than usual for this time of year.....Where has our cold weather gone??? :(

The sun, heat and sticky humidity

In honor of my recent skin peeling sun burn, I am going to rant a bit on the sun and heat in general. This will probably be the first of many rants from me as I tend to get things stuck in my head and until I get them out they just keep going around and around. Anyway on the subject of the sun and heat, I HATE 'EM!

Ok, well I guess I don't really hate the sun, but I hate the heat which comes from the sun so it is not without some blame. I like cold weather, I like snow, I like waking up in the morning and seeing your breath in front of you as you walk on a ice cube of a wooden floor. I don't like heat. Ok, well I actually don't mind heat if I am swimming because then I am in nice cool water - not freezing water, freezing water bugs me but still not as much as hot water which gets hot from what? Our rant topic: HEAT (Off topic for a sec, there is a film called Heat, that has a great shoot out scene in I think downtown L.A. rest of the movie is meh but the shoot out is outstanding)

Anyway I do not like heat or hot sticky humid weather, I live with it and work in it but that does not mean it does not bug me or drive me up a wall, a concrete wall that happens to be in direct sunlight and 130 degrees to the touch. When I get in my car to head home from work, I don't like having a branding iron for a steering wheel for the first 5 minutes even though I parked in the modest shade of some little tree. When it is hot outside and you are sweating there really is nothing you can do alone to cool yourself down. Sure you can go swimming but that takes water, you could stay indoors all the time but then you are relying on the air conditioning to keep you cool. This is probably the main reason why I don't like heat, I like being outdoors and when you are outside and it is 105 and the humidity is @ 60% or some other awful percentage it is just uncomfortable plain and simple.

In cold weather, while it might be chilly to just stand around outside it is only a matter of being active and you will warm yourself right up, if you are working in the cold, say chopping wood, then after a while the physical act of chopping the wood is going to keep your body at a comfortable temperature. What happens if you chop wood in 105 degree weather? You sweat more! If it is cold outside, what is the first thing you are going to do before heading out? Depending on the temperature outdoors maybe put another layer or two on, maybe some gloves or a hat and you can keep yourself nice and cozy. If it is hot outside, what do you do? Put on shorts, maybe flip-flops, if you are a guy depending on what you are doing you could go sans shirt. But after that it is not like you can take off more layers to keep cool, you are destined to a sweaty outdoor experience depending on the outdoor temp of course.

The other day there was this magazine I saw called vacation homes or something, anyway I start flipping through it and they have this huge article on how great Arizona is for a retirement or vacation home. What on earth? There is now this huge market of people who want to retire in Arizona! I think maybe these older people who want to go spend the rest of their lives in a desert have already had a little too much heat to their brains! Granted there is probably less humidity than here on the east cost but still, year after year of constant 85-100+ degree weather ugh! One last note, in a weird irony I actually like spicy and hot foods, but when it comes to the heat outdoors I can't stand it!