Rome wasn't built in a weekend.

Neither was our floor.

The last row of floor joists didn't go quite as smoothly as the first three, so it didn't get finished until today, which set us behind our idealized schedule. I didn't help much with the build today. While my brother Mike and his father-in-law came out to help today, I cooked up a nice, big pot of white chicken chili. Yum.

Foul

A week or so ago, we heard some scritch-scratching from inside the wall behind the stove. Chris set out some sticky traps in a cabinet only to find the next morning that a mouse had gotten stuck, then managed to pull itself free. Chris rearranged the traps to ensure a mouse wandering through had no choice but to step on one, but it must have learned a lesson from its encounter with the traps.

A day or two later, I heard the mouse further down inside the wall. I went out and bought some trusty snap traps. The trap I set up never caught a mouse, and I never heard another sound from the wall.

I was beginning to think the mouse had decided life was better in the big outdoors, until a foul odor started coming from the pantry-slash-laundry room a couple days ago. I found and disposed of a rotten potato, but yesterday, there was still a foul smell. Chris peeked behind the dryer last night, and noticed some left-from-the-previous-owner mouse poison. Great.

Why anyone uses that stuff is beyond me. The last thing I want is a dead mouce stuck somewhere I can't get to stinking up my home...

Scene at the house this morning:

Z (in living room): two, twee, heah I come!

(stomp-runs to their room where Joe is hiding)

Z: boo!

(giggles, laughter)

(Z runs back to living room)

Z: twee, foe, fie, heah I come!

etc.

Floor Joists, Day 2

Today, we had help from our neighbor, Terry. He is a rock star, as far as neighbors go. With his ingenuity and experience, we were able to fix a few iffy spots on the work we did yesterday, then lay another row and a half. Thanks also to Nana and Papa who helped keep an eye on the kids for several hours today while we worked. (And thanks to GrandDad and Great Grandma who entertained the kids yesterday.)

Floor Joists

It took us a while to get moving today. By two o'clock, we had about 1/3 of the first row of floor joists down.

But by five o'clock, the first row was done. Only three more to go, then we can start laying the subfloor. Not too bad for three of us who didn't have the clearest idea how to do this. (Thanks again, big bro, for lending a hand.)

I was a little worried that my late plantings of tomotoes would yield nothing. And now, as the season comes to a close, there are scores of green lumps hanging from the vines. I can hear them taunting, as, daily, I check to see if any of them are showing a blush. For the past several days, I have glimpsed one or two flashed of deep red buried in the thick foliage, and dive in only to find a tomato half eaten by some critter, and one tomato that is almost, almost perfectly ripe. As I throw the ruined tomato over the fence for the chickens, I stand there in debate with myself. Should I leave the good one on the vine one more day in order to let the tomato mature to it fullest and best flavor? Or will some unknown in the night ruin it somehow...

And usually, I harvest, slicing my one tomato for a toasted sandwich, slathered with mayonaise. And as the almost perfectly delicious juice trickles down my chin as I eat, I decide I made the right decision.

Lumber

Our lumber was delivered this morning.

Since Chris had the day off, we took the opportunity to do some work on the house. We slapped that mud sill down like we knew what we were doing.


Joe helped tighten the nuts that bolted the mud sill to the foundation. If the big bad wolf comes along and blows the house off the foundation, it will all be his fault. ;)

How Great Thou Art

I must have been five or six at the time. It is all a little hazy, but I remember sitting in children's church in the basement of the church we attended. They had books and props to use as visual aids for the songs that we would sing... For example, pictures of the same drawing of a child, each colored differently, were glued to popsicle sticks to use for the song 'Jesus Loves the Little Children'. It you had the honor of holding one, you thrust it upward as your appropriate color was sung: red, brown, yellow, black and white. It took concentration and good reflexes to hit it just right.

Most Sunday mornings, they took requests. While other little kids chose songs like the aforementioned and 'Jesus Loves Me', I inevitably would choose 'How Great Thou Art'. To this day, I can't quite figure out why they even had a flip-book with such a somber-sounding, old hymn in it for children's church... but they did.

Thinking back when I was older, I have to admit, I was a little embarrassed at my odd choice in song. I had the feeling that the adults and other kids got tired of me choosing that song every week.

It had been years since I had really heard (much less sung) that hymn, then one Sunday, a little over a year ago, it was sung for worship at the church we were attending at the time.

O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder

Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,

I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,

Thy power throughout the universe displayed;

Then sings my soul...

It hit me. Even back when I was little, I loved nature. Soaking in his creation was communion with him. Nature was the base from which he began to build a relationship with me. No wonder I like this hymn.

When through the woods and forest glades I wander,

I hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees;

When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur

And hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze;

Then sings my soul...

Sometimes the things in the past are little love letters he gave us that he knew we wouldn't be able to read for a long time.

Our neighbor stopped by on his way to hunt some deer with his crossbow. After he had wandered off into the woods, Finley immediately set to work making a dummy deer for him to shoot instead of the real thing.
She made sure to find some sticks that looked like antlers, because she thought that was the reason he wanted to kill a deer. I told her he was more interested in killing the deer for its meat. I think she's okay with that.