Remember that second pair of boots I was supposed to be making with the bootmaker over in Manton? You may not because I started them three or four years ago and haven’t done a thing with them since. Up until now that is. I’ve skipped straight past all that cumbersome cutting and skiving and stitching and gone straight on to strutting around in them. How, you say? Well, the bootmaker finished them for me in trade for help with a how-to DVD he’s making. Isn’t bartering cool?

Check it out: I have walls!

Things are moving right along with the house. They finished the sub-floor yesterday. We passed another inspection, too. On Monday, they’ll put in the radiant heat, and then it’s on to the walls. Hooray!

A lot of exciting things have happened since we last chatted. Over the weekend, Frew and my new fast friend Tim drove up to attend the Fortuna Rodeo with me. Besides baking in the grandstands, we ate an inordinate amount of meat, drank beer, and bullshitted with a bunch of smelly cowboys (yay!). Tim also brought his photography equipment and snapped some great portraits of my friends and neighbors.

In other news, the concrete trucks came streaming in yesterday and dumped more than 40 yards of the stuff within the forms Brandon, Josh, and Cliff built last week. Brandon tells me they’ll start in with the hammers and nails next week. So exciting!

A couple weekends ago, I went four-wheeling down on the Chalk Mountain Ranch with a gal pal from elementary school. I took this picture of her little dog, Squirt, on Burr Creek.

If there was any disputing it before, we have now officially broken ground.  Concrete trucks will be arriving next week, and then the actual sawing and hammering will be underway. Yay!

So, after about a month of waiting around, I finally got word that my building permit is ready. We’ll start the foundation early next week, but in the meantime, I’ve been putting in a spectacular water system with the help of the Rock Hound and the Diesel Mechanic (I shudder to think where I’d be at this point without the help of the Diesel Mechanic). I’ve currently got 5,000 gallons of my own water stored, and by the end of summer I should have 10,000.  We ran two-inch pipe from the tanks, so the pressure is actually pretty good considering we have a short drop (it’s all gravity fed). The Rock Hound knows all about fire fighting, too, so he set me up with my own fire hydrant by the house. We’re going to put another one in by the trailer.  Very cool!

Unfortunately, we accidentally cut the town water while we were digging a trench to lay the pipe. It was easily remedied, though, and no one ever seemed to notice (or at least they didn’t say anything if they did). Nevertheless, it made for an exciting half hour around here.

A few weeks ago, I did some house sitting for the Worm Lady and her husband, the Rock Hound. I spent most of my time trying to keep this maniacal bummer named Flash from hopping and peeing alll over the furniture. I captured him here all wild-eyed as he ran up and down the stairs.

Remember Joetta and Bob? From my trip with the Surveyor back to Kansas and Montana? Well, they came to visit us this week along with Joetta’s cousin, Bill, and his wife Shirley. Accompanied by some local historians, they toured all H. P. Larrabee’s old haunts from Larrabee Valley to Blocksburg to Indian Island in hopes of learning more about their great-grandfather and maybe helping our county heal some very old wounds. We had a wonderful and kind of old-timey luncheon up at the Murphy Ranch, and I finally got to meet Virginia Sparks, who has written articles for the paper and historical society for years. It was a real treat to discover she also has a wicked sense of humor. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s about to become my new best friend.