Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  It was a busy day at the compound here yesterday!  So much so that I never did sit down at my computer – missed a day of blogging.

In the morning, and in between other projects, I worked on Debbie's office.  Her beautiful new office furniture really shouldn't be festooned with electronic infrastructure gear (router, switch, etc.) and a bazillion cables.  So I'm in the process of mounting all that gear up underneath her furniture, out of sight altogether.  Only the gear she actually needs to touch and see will be visible on her desk, and nearly all the cables will be hidden from view.  I'm about halfway done with that now.  The challenging mechanical part of that project was mounting the gear, and I've finished that.  I did it by fabricating brackets out of aluminum bar stock, and screwing them into the bottom of the slabs that make her table and desk top.  It worked great!

Around noon a truck pulled up on the highway – our new kennel had arrived!  This is a really nicely made kennel, Lucky Dog brand, that went on sale at Tractor Supply Company last week.  I ordered two 10' by 10' kennels.  We've got one of these kennels (a much smaller model!) in our cattery, so I was already familiar with how they worked.  It's basically a bunch of 5' wide panels, each made of welded steel tubing and then powder-coated.  There is a simple pair of clamp connectors between adjacent panels – and here's the part I was counting on: you can adjust those to any angle you want.  So the two kennels I ordered had a total of 16 5' wide panels.  I arranged them as a 16-sided polygon, which provides roughly 500 square feet of enclosed area for the puppies to play in.  That arrangement is way better than the 200 square feet those kennels would nominally enclose!  The shipment weighed 660 pounds, well within the capability of my little Kubota tractor.  So I just forked it off the tractor-trailer, hauled it into our yard, set it down, and went to work setting it up.  It took me about three hours all together, and I didn't need any help.  Not bad at all!  The puppies are cavorting inside of it as I write this.  :)

Also yesterday, our builder showed up and started framing the mud room roof (photos as of last night below).  They're already here this morning to finish the job, and our roofer should be here later to put waterproofing on the top (the standing seam steel will come later).  I'm going to staple some clear plastic up on the window and door holes this afternoon – there's 2.5" of rain in our forecast, starting this evening and continuing through Saturday.  If I don't button that up a bit, we're going to have a swimming pool in there!  Last night I could begin to see, for the first time, how the mud room will change the appearance of our house...