So why did we expect it to be flawless?

The Occupancy Certificate is now scheduled for Tuesday. Our last day at the KOA is Tuesday. Do you think we are cutting it a bit fine?

The pictures are a series. They are mostly of the house and some of you have been asking for more so here you go! The first one is looking down the portal. The second is coming down the driveway. The third is of Kathy looking down on the house from the high point in the road. The fourth is what Kathy is looking at.

Tomorrow we are scheduled to get phone and a DSL line which may mean I'll have more time to add to the blog. Furniture arrives on Thursday so some interior shots will follow. We both are really looking forward to sitting down with a glass of wine and enjoying all that is coming together.

We finally have a exterior stucco shot

There will be a railing on my left installed on Wednesday. This is the corner of the portal (in the east we call this a covered deck). The mountains in the background are the Sandia. They are near Albuquerque (I think I spelled it right this time, Oh My!) about 60 miles away.

The second picture is from the same spot but pointing up to see the beam structure above my head. Pretty cool! Although the beams look brown, they are actually more gray (see the next shot). Also, the vertical wood doesn't exist. Those are actually shadows on the stucco. I guess the camera made them up as it tried to make sense of the photo. It couldn't cope with blue sky, tan stucco and gray ceiling.

The third shot is in the small "Great Room" (would that make it a "Good Room"?) again pointed up to see the beams that support the roof.

We are still hoping for a Certificate of Occupancy on Friday -- it will be tight. The final construction clean up is scheduled for Tuesday of next week and the furniture arrives on Wednesday the 26th. Right now the site looks like an anthill with everyone working on their own thing totally ignoring everyone else (including the owners who are much more of a bother than a help) and somehow the whole thing is going to come together by Friday. We can't wait to move in. Life in the trailer is getting a bit old. Jackson seems to be getting bigger. Kathy is getting FOCUSED! And Craig is getting claustrophobic.

More later,

Jackson the Helper Dog

Kathy and I are busy like crazy but the house is coming together nicely. They will put the final stucco on tomorrow (hopefully). The plumber is around today (we may have nicer place to pee once that is complete). The KOA is nice enough but it (the trailer) is a bit small for two adults and a rather largish black dog.
Speaking of Jackson -- he is the star where ever we go. Santa Fe is a very dog friendly town It's amazing how many shops leave out water bowls! But, the big chains are sometimes an issue. Yesterday we were "downtown" and needed to get something at the local REI store. Kathy asked if they allowed dogs because it was way too hot to leave him in the car.

The clerk said, "No, it's company policy unless he's a helper dog. Is he a helper dog?"
Kathy looked at him and said, "Well, he could be."
The guy said, "Might he be a helper dog in training?"
Kathy, "Yes, he might be!"

And so we got him in the door. Once in we slunk along deserted aisles trying to keep a low profile. It was all going rather smoothly until we were checking out at the register. Jack was being held by Kathy in an aisle near the check out but sort of out of visual line of sight of the clerk. Then an extended family with many children descended on Jackson with much squealing and yelling to older sisters and mom. At one point he was surrounded with kids and a five year old with some plastic toy he wanted to buy jumped into the fray, waving the plastic thing up and down about two inches from Jackson's face and Jack didn't even flinch. At that point the grandfather decided he needed to find Jackson's breeder because he'd been looking for a dog like him for seven years so he's asking for Jeannie Walcot's phone number which we are trying to look up on our cell phone. While all of this is going on, Jack is just standing there being petted by six or seven sticky hands and the check out clerk is trying to look the other way and I'm saying to the clerk, "It's all part of the helper dog training -- they need to be able to tolerate children!"

What a circus! So, today's photo is of Jackson, on the bed in the trailer. He loves the trailer because it's so small that we can't keep him off the bed and still have room to move around. Hmmm! I hope this doesn't translate into a newly learned behavior.

The Road Less Traveled

This is Double Arrow Road South -- our road. This also may explain why the homeowners were so excited when the road was closed for two days while a team layed asphalt over about one mile of the steepest and twistiest part of the road. This part, however, will remain dirt.

The second picture is a shot from that same point in the road, but I walked through some Pinyon trees to just above the point where the house was cut into the hillside. The final stucco coat is scheduled for mid-week next week. And the board leading to the roof will be sacrafice also.

We arrived in SF last night. Other than major rain storms, two separate Interstate closings due to accidents, 110 degree heat from Indiana to eastern New Mexico, and a couple of rather iffy RV camp grounds that forced us to keep moving longer than we would have liked -- other than those issues it was a lovely trip!



The photo to your left is a national grassland refuge (who knew that grass was endangered?) in Texas. It surrounds a lovely lake and was a huge relief when we found it. The iffy places had ranged from scary to desolate and we got a tip at a gas station from a very nice woman with two kids (around 8 and 13) both wearing cowboy hats bigger than our SUV pulled down so the tops of their ears stuck out like Dumbo wings. The older boy was wearing spurs that Roy Rogers would have loved although I doubt the horses shared Roy's enthusiasm. Anyway, she told us about this "Refuge" and we got off on a road that could only be described as narrow, hilly (hard to believe in Texas) and windy (that is both in the twisty sense and in the 45 knot cross wind that had been blowing in our face since Oklahoma sense). The speed limit was posted at 70. Kathy suggested 35. I split the difference. When we arrived, there was an honor system with an envelope for money and a slot to put it in. We were with four other trailers, all owned by Texas Tech University. They are grad students who are studying the area for regrowth since a major fire rolled through three years ago. We found no evidence of fire. It is a bottomland lake system and it regrew incredily fast. If it hadn't been for the "Watch for Snakes!" signs posted everywhere it might have ranked as our favorite site.



By the way, in the morning Kathy spotted our first western bird -- about 250 roosting Black Vultures. Could this have been a message? On the way back to the Interstate we took this -- it cannot do justice to the sweep of the horizon. It is just so BIG!



The house looks awesome. A few issues (they used the wrong tile in each of the two guest room bathrooms) remain but generally we are very pleased. By the time we got to Santa Fe the temps had dropped to low nineties and by the time we were on our mountain they were low eighties. The high desert is amazing. By 6 PM we had turned off the AC and by 9 we were under two blankets.



I was going to have some pic's the house today but they are paving the road so we had 15 minutes to look around and then run for it. Once they began paving the road was closed until after 5 PM. I'll try get some shots for tomorrow.

Camping by a Lake

This was taken last night. The second picture is from tonight's campsight.

Tonight will be spent in southern Illinois with a lake behind the trailer, Chickadas chirping like crazy, internet WiFi, cable TV, clothes in the washer on the way to the dryer, mediocre wine and chicken on the grill. Our first day on the road we nearly floated toward Santa Fe as the skies open up. Day two we landed at a wonderful campground that nobody seems to know about yet and we had an entire wooded back road to ourselves.

As usual, we are the youngest people in the area. But tonight we are surrounded by huge rigs -- very fancy -- kind of intimidating. But, none of them could have backed into this little site right on the lake.