Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  I'm writing this in my office, which is at a lovely 70°F, while right outside my office door it's 107°F.  This is because Ryan Osborne and his crew from Leading Edge came out today and installed my new split-system air conditioner.  It's a Pioneer model I chose for the combination of good reviews and quiet operation.  It works great, easily cooling my office to the desired temperature.  The photo at right shows the inside part of the split system; the other part is about twice this size and is hanging on the outside wall, out of sight.  I can scarcely believe how quiet it is, too – the inside unit is just barely audible if everything else in my office is silent, and the outside unit I can't hear at all.  Woo hoo!

Meanwhile, Jim Johnson and the crew from Cache Homes were busy doing the demolition work that is the first phase of our current construction project.  At right you can see one of them at work with a jackhammer, trying to reduce our former front porch to manageable chunks.  We all got surprised by what a solid job was done on that porch – about 5 yards of concrete poured as a single giant piece.  Someone wasn't scrimping on concrete :)

A little later, excavation work started for the foundation of our sun room.  Late yesterday afternoon, this same area started flooding with water after the loader drover over it.  We figured out that there was a 2" PVC line feeding an old (and defunct) irrigation system.  The loader's weight split the line.  Jim dug it out in an area beyond any excavation he was planning, and early this morning I capped it off.  This afternoon, the excavation began in earnest, as you can see at left.  The first bit of work is to clear around the basement casements, because the old steel casements are being replaced with larger concrete boxes.  One of these will be used to let our cats move between the sun room and their current home in our basement.

The Flag...

The Flag...  A few years ago, mom undertook one of her last big crafts projects: making a Revolutionary War flag from an old section of picket fence.  That flag is now installed on our shed, as you can see at right (click to embiggen).

At left is a reproduction of an authentic Revolutionary War flag.  You can see that she did a good job of duplicating it!

When I received the flag, it was in perfect condition.  My sister Holly and her husband Warren packed it into the POD full of my mom's stuff they shipped out here.  There were two eye hooks screwed into the back, near the top of it.  I'm guessing it was hung like a picture, on a wire from a single nail or screw.  I didn't dare do something as simple as that, as we frequently get fairly strong winds.  So I screwed two more eye hooks into the bottom, and then put four “L” hooks into the side of the shed, so that each would engage an eye hook.  That took some careful measuring!  It all worked on the first try, though – I just sat the flag's eye hooks down onto the “L” hooks, and now it's not going anywhere.

I'll remember mom every time I walk out to my shed now...