The same family has lived on this place for over 40 years. it was beautiful.

fresh eggs

This evening, just before dark my door bell rang.

I opened the door to find my neighbor Daniel standing there grinning and holding a big egg carton. Daniel is 7 or 8 and was born the week his family moved in next door. We are on speaking terms. Often after school, if I am outside he stops and we visit a bit.

Once when I was talking to Daniel's father I said that Daniel, when he comes to visit me, has such good manners. David looked at me and said: "You mean MY Daniel!" Yes, I meant your Daniel.

When I took the egg carton from Daniel I opened it up and there was a dozen beautiful hen eggs. All colors including a blue one. Wonderful fresh eggs. I was full of gratitude and told Daniel so.

I don't know if it is perfectly legal to have chickens in our small house sub-division, and I don't too much care. I sure won't complain, even when I hear the roosters crow at daylight.

Usually, I am up by then anyway, and thanks again Daniel.

Ok, so it is a toy. But it almost looks like it could plow the back 40, if I had one!

house plumbing

Plumbing is a study in evolution. 

Few things in the building business have changed as much as plumbing. 

This week I added some new red and white plumbing pipe to replace some broken copper lines, from the house being empty last winter when it was quite cold. 

I remember when all fresh water ran in galvanized steel pipe, each piece cut to exact dimension and threaded on site. Drain pipes were all cast iron and were chinked with a thing called “oakum” and then hot led was poured in to seal the joint. 

When I was a kid our pastor built himself a new house and he plumbed the whole drain system in Copper! I looked with awe at those 4” Tees and Weys all in gleaming copper. Copper never caught on for drain. 

Along the way someone invented ABS plastic pipe, and you GLUED the stuff together. No hot lead, no solder, just a can of stinky sticky  black glue. 

Copper replaced galvanized steel pipe for fresh water a long time ago. There were a few steel pipe houses being built when I plumbed my house 37 years ago, but not many. Now copper has given way to a  new system that is another type of plastic, for BOTH hot and cold water. Cast iron was Black, ABS still is black, but this new stuff comes in half a dozen wild colors. 

For no real reason (I am not sure which line is hot and which is cold) I decided on red and white tubing for this project. It just seemed a waste not to use some of that Red pipe! I ran two lengths of pipe/tubing across the top of my cabinets, down the wall, then behind the cabinets to the location of the sink. All in ONE piece of bent tubing/pipe.

To join the new pipe you slip the end into a fitting, slide a copper ring on top of the joint and then with a tool that looks like a fair sized bolt cutter, you crimp the copper ring and there is a joint. It can swivel but it won’t leak. Wow. It is fast and it works.

To make it all even nuttier, there are fittings that are called Shark fittings. Just clean the mud off the end of the pipe and slip the fitting on. That is all. No glue even. I had a plumber agree with me that you can tell by looking that it won’t work, but it does and works very well.

The icing on the pipe is that you can remove  those shark fittings and use them again if you choose.
Amazing stuff

When I think of how things like the simple piping in a house has changed in my lifetime I really feel like an old guy!

Not my mail box! Mine is not quite so interesting!

this old Idaho house

I began building this house in 1976. 

It can be argued that it never was really finished. And that is ok.

It is a small house 1080 square feet in it’s original form. With three daughters still at home (the oldest was off to college and would get married the next year), it had to have two bathrooms, though they are small there are two. One upstairs between the girl’s bedrooms and one downstairs off the master bedroom.

In the front of the house was a 6 by 32 foot area that was designed to be a greenhouse and hopefully to provide some solar heat in the winter. The city thought it was rather dumb idea and did not "charge me for it."

Last year the flood (though I must be careful using that term--floods are generally not covered by home owners insurance!) gutted the building. It was a mass of wet and awful.

A company that specializes in such things came in, pumped the water out, removed and inventoried the contents before thoroughly drying the interior and treating to make sure mold was not a problem later.

I had a licensed electrician make sure the wires and outlets that had been under water were good and then I hired a friend to install the sheetrock. I know how, but I sure did not want to do that job. 

Basically that is how it was when I arrived the 2nd week of July.
More later.

The top picture was taken during an outdoor church. I wasn't paying attention to the sermon, it seems.

lonely

This is a new kind of loneliness for me.

We have been apart before, sometimes for a fairly long time (not Viet Nam kind of long time though). But this is the first time I can't call her and talk on the phone.

I woke up from a nap the other day and there she was beside me in the bed. Then I blinked my eyes and she went away.

This sounds a lot more maudlin than it should. Nearly all of the time I am ok, but there are a times here and there.

So, don't feel sorry for me for more than a few seconds. As the father on "Everybody Loves Raymond" would say: "Buck up Nancy."

Ouch!

James and friend, from the Party Monday, and grandpa's garden.

should I visit?

I went to see Miriam last night. Not sure it was a good idea.

When I got in town yesterday I went straight to the IOOF home where Miriam lives. She was not angry to see me, nor particularly happy either.

She was sitting in a big recliner watching the pictures on TV (she cannot follow any plot anymore). I had them put her in her wheel chair. We visited and I took her outside for a walk. It was OK, though she slept through most of it.

Last evening I went back. It was about 6:30 and they had her in bed already. As I walked in the room she was hollering "Arline." "Arline." "Arline." etc. (Arline is our oldest daughter and her #1 caregiver the last two years.)

"What do  you want Arline for?" "I don't know."

I might have settled her down and I might not have. I had a friend with me, and we did not stay long.

We did not do anything that made me happy and I don't think we did anything that made her happy either. When I asked her about her dinner, she said they did have food in the home, and when I said that NO, they feed her 3 times a day, she was not convinced.

So I come back and ask? Why do I visit? Not for her really and not really for my bank of memories of my dear one.

I do it because I should I guess. I am not sure how often driving 500 miles to do that ritual is worth it for either of us.

Daughter took the best pictures of the kids. I did food and stuff. 

party time

 I went to a birthday party yesterday.

The guest of honor was James, age 4. His sister Maddy was there as well as 4 of their friends, three girls and three boys.

The party was the 2nd party for James. This one was a setup with all sorts of neat little paper goodies for my daughter's blog: liagriffith.com.

But it was a blast (and a lot of work). It is like doing a wedding where we furnish the preacher, take the pictures, cater the food, decorate the church and the reception site. Nothing to it - except a lot of work. And, like our pretend wedding, we did not provide the guests of honor, who were wonderful.

In this case it did not hurt that James grandfather was a prominent landscape architect and that this home and garden are his handy work, nor that James grandmother works about full time keeping the place looking like Better Homes and Gardens would arrive any time now.

To top off all of that perfection, the kids were fabulous and there were three very capable mothers hovering and helping (but off camera).

It was a long day but it was great. 6 year old Maddy invited me to her party in November!

Can't beat that!

I haven't done much photography of late. Construction photographs are almost always best after the project is completed, along the way they can be pretty dull.
This is from a shoot earlier in Portland. It is the outside of an old theatre.

Em and Bri

Tuesday I got a hair cut, picked up my little car from the repair shop and drove to Walla Walla. When I arrived I went straight to the IOOF home where Miriam lives. We visited and then daughter came by and she and I went for a sandwich.

I slept in my tiny house but it was a fitfully sleep in the small bed. I was sure ants were crawling on my back(they were not I am sure). The next morning I had breakfast with my high school friend Charlie, then visited Miriam. About noon I left for Portland to see Daughter 4 and the middle two granddaughters, Emily and Brianna.

Emily has recently completed her CNA (Certified Nurses Assistant) training and is working in a nursing home, taking care of people much like her grandmother. She is not totally sure she wants to pursue a career as a nurse, but this will give her a chance to find out how it is at the bottom of the care giving work chain.

She says she is enjoying it. Emily has always been some thing of a prissy, so for her to become a CNA was amazing to me. I am proud of her carefully figured decision. 

Brianna is about three quarters of the way through the first year of a 2 year course in Culinary School and is doing fine.

I am proud of each of them.

Emily for being so level headed and Brianna for her tenacity! The list is longer than that, but that is a good start!

They are good girls and their grandfather is exceedingly proud of them. 

Daughter 3 sent me this picture of her first born Josh and Miriam, taken some years ago. Josh is now a Junior at USC.

Yes, it has been a while!