A couple of trenches... on the rocks, please

It seems that Monday was a rather frustrating day. A day of a lot of measuring, and not nearly enough time on the big toys. Sam, Nathan, and Dale worked on figuring out, and marking out, exactly where the new house parts should go. This involved a lot of measuring...



... a lot of holding of tape measures and triangulating distances...



... a lot of checking and double checking...









...and not nearly enough playing on Big Toys! There was a little bit of that, though. Big Toys are fun for other things besides breaking up and moving heavy concrete. Digging big holes, for instance. Sam started a very deep hole at the back of the backyard where we plan on planting an orange tree. We found out why our tomatoes hadn't done so well, in previous years: after just 1/2 a foot of topsoil, that part of our yard (indeed, most of our yard) is pure, hard, unbreakable sand-stone. That made for some slow-going, when Sam was digging this:



Nathan continued making that hole deeper- enjoying the power of the Big Toy:



Sam is also digging a deep trench along the length of what will be the new patio to ensure that our 'new' house doesn't have the flooding problem that our current house does. Here is Sioux checking out trench, Part I:



As a result of all this digging, Michelle has a LOT of dirt:



Over the past couple of days, there has been more measuring (not terribly exciting to photograph, that), and more digging. The drainage trench has gotten longer, and deeper. Here is trench, Part II:





So those are the trenches, so far. I promised you trenches on the rocks, though. Here they are.



Enjoy!

BIG TOYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now the real fun begins! The garage door was given to some guy from Craigs List, the rest of the garage came down, and the toys were delivered! I think this machine weighs in the neighborhood of 17,000 pounds, but Sam knows for sure. It is BIG.

Sam took to this back-hoe thing like a fish to water. In two days the garage foundation, the workshop floor, the driveway, the back patio- gone. All gone. There is a huge (hydraulic?) jack-hammer-like attachment, 5 inches in diameter, that goes (boom!boom!boom!boom!boom!) right through the concrete as if it were a sharp knife on a tomato. Then, like a horse nuzzling an apple on the ground, it just tosses aside these chunks of concrete that I couldn't make budge with my bare hands... and Sam could make budge only with some grunting effort!











You can see our 'half-house' here. DH came by to admire Sam's technique...





... but must've disctracted Sam a wee bit: after avoiding hitting the house at ALL, Sam hit a water line. You can just see the insta-fountain here. Unlike the machine itself, the insta-fountain made a beautiful, soothing sound...


...and a big puddle in the trench that had been dug for the gas meter! (that's the shadow of your intrepid reporter on the left there.)


Michelle came over to play with the toys, too. She loves power tools, so this was a dream come true!






The cats just sat on the trailer across the street, cool as can be, watching the proceedings and waiting for dinner-time...


The concrete got piled into four 10-ton low-boy containers and hauled away, and then we (notice how I keep using that "we", even though Sam did all the work, and I just photo-documented the thing?)... we started digging up dirt. Nathan directed. More dirt for Michelle's back yard!


So, as I left for work this morning, this is what our half-house looked like, from the back yard. (It's hard to get a good photo from the front because of the construction fence).




Today the plan was to dig deep trenches. More to follow soon! (Things are happening amazingly quickly, so I'm going to have to step up the pace in the blogging department!)

We lose a garage. ooops.

So then one day I come home from work and Sam and his brother are hanging out on top of the garage...


Or rather, hanging out on top of what was left of the garage...




A decent-size pile of debris was piling up in the yard, but Sioux took it all in stride...


And we had a big container delivered to put all the debris in...




After two days of Sam and Nathan working REALLY hard, all that was left was the part of the garage that held up the garage door...


So Sam relaxed and had a beer... (a la Steve Martin in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels")



And burned his work clothes!


Michelle and I helped with clean-up... I vacuumed all the plaster chunks off our neighbor's lawn!


Amazingly, our stray cats (Bold Cat & Scaredy Cat) are unfazed- they are showing up morning and evening for their food!

The house story begins...

Well, these posts are long overdue, but life has been hectic, as you'll see! We are now well on our way with the house addition- although most of what we've done so far (well, most of what SAM has done so far) has been demolition and house removal! What I don't have any pictures of is all the prep-work Sam did, cleaning out EVERYTHING (and there were a lot of things!) from the garage. He built overhead storage for two of our neighbors, and moved a bunch of our stuff there. He moved a lot more stuff to a garage we're renting from a friend. He took apart his workbench, put some surf-board storage in the living-room, unhooked the washer and dryer (come to think of it I don't even know where those are!), took down the cabinets in the garage... in other words did a whole lot of work before the actual 'work' even began. You'll just have to take my word for that part!

Then, he started "small", taking out the part of the path to the back where the gas meter needed to be moved....

We donated all that concrete to help fill Michelle's 'pool':


Sam dug a huge trench so that the SDG&E guys could mosey on in and do their job (let's just say that it didn't seem like they did $800 dollars worth of work- and that they didn't make it easy to give them their $800 dollars... don't get us started on THAT story!).

But, the happy ending was that we have a new gas meter, located in the proper place! (Oh, yeah, Sam tore out that bush, too!)


Meanwhile, it all started very innocently with a delicate little hole in the drywall right above the door that leads from the garage to the kitchen...



Then things got more serious as Sam took a sledgehammer to the wall between the garage and the house.





Then, suddenly, walls were being torn out of the inside of the garage and workshop...

...as well as the outside...



The stucco walls were really remarkable- once Sam sledgehammered the stucco, they just swayed like very heavy fabric on the chicken-wire. I sledgehammered a teeny tiny bit, mostly so I could say that I had. Gallantly, Sam said I was "very helpful". Hah!

another type of milestone

how about the ass-kicking gold has taken since I wrote that last note, eh? i swear, i can't leave for a week without the world going to hell in a handbasket.

and leave I did, to scorpion bay with my friend cheryl for a week of 300-yard rides...

To get to the point, i got my first official inspector approval for moving the gas meter at the house. This was the next step on the road to demolition, and it's now complete. Just have to wait for SDGE to more the meter, and then let the smashing of stuff begin. Actually have alreayd begun that in parts, but there will be more shortly.

I thought it was a big deal. :)

Metals Milestones

Been awhile since anyone posted. Kim , are you out there? :) Much has happened, not that i'm going to go into everything right now. But I thought i would post a thought that i had, that deals with the recent run-up in metals like gold silver and palladium. Particularly gold, since for 4000 years it has been the money of last resort among failing fiats.

The neat thing is that people being what they are, they are emotional and subject to superstition and are susceptible to overemphasizing certain price point or milestones. For instance, $500 gold was a milestone, as will be $850 (the old high from the 80s) and $1000, the first four-digit price in dollars. $539.30 is not an emotional milestone, nor is $682.

Now that we are all living in a pure-fiat world, people in each of the 13 major currencies will hit each miletone particular to that nation at usually different times, and each will bring a new rush of buying to the metal at different times, thus propelling the value of the metal forward in all currencies, with some currencies being forced on to their own, next milestones.

Today, dollar gold is gaining, having passed $700. It's actually now at 708.50. We're just over 900 in Australian dollars, and just over 550 in Euros. That's three nice big groups of people all seeing milestones in their respective currencies. We're also over 850 swiss francs, at 863 actually. Another strong performer. The strength of buying post-milestone is pushing us towards 1500 Brazilian reals, 400 british pounds, and 800 Canadian dollars. We're closing on 20,000 russian rubles and 80,000 Japanese yen. About the only currencies not near a significant milestone are the Chinese renminbi, at 5667, the mexican peso at 7689 and the south african rand at 4299. But these currencies should be positioned to take their turn in pushing things higher, once the Russians and especially the Japanese (big savers, those Japs, with plenty of yen to spend on money that isn't someone elses' debt) hit their milestones.

That's the way i see it, anyway.