Round Top 4th of July Parade

Some More Foundation Progress

We went up to the land today (July 9th) to see what has been done in the last two days. Not as much progress as we had hope, but at least a lot of new fill had been delivered.



We hope that we can get the rough-in plumbing and steel laid within a couple of weeks, so we can begin the concrete pour. Ohhhhhh! We have waited so long!

But time marches on...

Foundation Update

Work continues with the tall, back wall of forms being more strongly reinforced and braced. They still have more bracing to do, as seven and a half feet of concrete is pretty heavy.

This week hordes of workers came in to begin laying the inside portion of the wall forms. This is done by placing thick-mil plastic down, packing it with fill and then rolling it back away from the outside form so that it acts as a "brick" that is held in place by more fill. This way the inside part of the form becomes a part of the fill and does not have to be removed.
We are amazed at the amount of fill that has been removed from our driveway, and yet we still have such a long way to go to complete the forms.

Continuing the Retirement Celebration

We went to Austin yesterday for a day of pure fun. We went to a matinee musical, "Altar Boyz" which stars the five apostles of Pop: Matthew, Mark, Luke, Juan, and Abraham (he's Jewish). They raised our spirits with their spectacular music, irreverent humor, incredible dance moves, and fantastic 5-part harmony -- it was clever, original, entertaining, lively and thought-provoking; we thoroughly enjoyed it!

We then spent a couple of hours doing one of our favorite things; wandering through Williams-Sonoma and Central Market.

To finish out this fund, relaxing day we met friends for dinner at Flemings restaurant where we had a fabulous, celebratory dinner.

A perfect day. . .

A Technological Situation

Saturday started out to be such a wonderful day: we ate breakfast at IHOP (I need my Harvest Nut Grain pancake fix at least once a month!) and did some fun running around. We got home about 2:00 p.m. and things continued to go well for several more hours -- Carl doing some IBM work and playing with his new deck design software; me reading my book. Then a situation occurred -- a technological situation. We lost our internet connection! By using his finely-honed trouble-shooting skills, Carl determined the problem was our wireless router -- a very fixable problem.

We headed to Office Depot (a 30-minute drive) and realized when we got there that neither of us had brought any money! So 1 1/2 hours later we are back at the RV with our new wireless router. Of course, as is true with any technology, it did not install easily and Carl's patience was wearing quite thin.

This story has a very happy ending -- we have a working router and Carl is back to his very happy self; however, it is sad to me that a technology problem can cause so much stress and put a downer on such a wonderful day. What a crazy world!

Retirement Party

Well, Carl's retirement date is coming really soon!
He recently went on an IBM business trip to visit a software company IBM just acquired and several neat things happened:
1. The manager from the newly-acquired company presented Carl with a very nice bottle of champagne, along with their congratulations.
2. He met, for the first time, several people he has worked with for a long time, including his manager Robin Edstrom. (The wonders of the modern business construct of remote workers.)
3. His manager and her manager, Michelle Ginther, held a dinner in his honor for retirement. It was pretty special. He was presented a bound album of letters from IBM teammates, past and present. Included was a page of Carl's epigrams that he has at the bottom of his emails, collected over time. Example: "What's another word for thesaurus?" Last but not least, there were bowls of personalized M&Ms on the table in blue and white. They were labeled "Retiring.. Not!" and "Congrats Carl."


And it goes on and on. Carl's going to stretch this retirement for all it's worth. Although June 30th is his retirement date, he figures he can get at least another couple of months out of it.
Last night's party was just between Carl and Linda. Since he is retiring from "Big Blue" his present from Linda was wrapped just right.


An iPod Touch! How cool!

More Foundation Progress

Our visit on June 24th found more height added to the forms. In these two pictures, it may look as if we are erecting a skyscraper.

We learned that in order to have a reasonable slope driving up into the attached garage, we are going to have to lower the garage foundation about two feet. Not a big deal, but our original plan was to have everything on the same level. Oh well, it is what it is.

JJ and Grover spent a little time with the workers at lunch today, begging for scraps of tortillas.