What Rainy Day?

Hi, Blogosphere. This is Pam blogging tonight. There is Red Velvet Cake with chocolate ganache and strawberries for dessert tonight, so I was the only one willing to blog during that wonderful dessert. (On the subject of food, Adam says, "Send waffle mix!" He has been spoiled by Belgian waffles each morning to date, and so was sad that their run was over. Only spending the day working in incredible heat and humidity re-perked him up.)

When Cindy last wrote, it was a dark and stormy morning. Justin, our local contact, predicted that it would clear at 10:00 but rain again at 2:00. So our group headed out to the Kitten House with great faith in his prediction. We were able to set up our workspace and do some indoor work before the sun poked its face through the clouds at-yup-10:00. So all groups did get to sites this morning after all (storms go through quickly here it seems).With the weather ruling out outdoor painting there was some shuffling of personnel at sites to make the best use of resources. Bryan, Lynnette, and Cindy Shupp became intimate friends working in a bathroom/sweatshop and were joined after lunch by Jeff and Liza. We hear that they were a fabulous team and accomplished a lot. The crew at the Trailer finished the back porch. Daryl, the owner, was moving chairs onto the deck as the crew drove away. He told them he felt like the little boy in A Christmas Carol and said "God Bless you, everyone!" His trailer must have been oven-like today so an outside porch is a cool(er) escape. The high front porch has almost-stairs (Dave cut the stringers, and they are nailed in place) so just need treads and risers. Adam and Alison (the Decksperts) have a good start on the railing for the high deck. (They said it was like Twister with construction tools trying to hold each baluster in place while screwing them in.) Faith, we hear, started the day by slipping into the large mud pond that covers much of the back deck work area but carried on in a particularly chipper way despite her lower extremity mud mask. It was a good plan, though, as we all learned today in this amazingly hot and humid and sunny day that mud and grime have an SPF of 35! Garry and Julie, along with Faith and Kayley, continue to plug along with the trailer skirting project which is more difficult and, dare I say it, tedious than anyone would have thought. Somehow they just laugh while describing their task.

So it didn't rain at 2:00 after all, so those of us who swallowed that prediction and worked through lunch, assuming that we only had until 2-ish, discovered that an air-conditioned break in the middle of the day is pretty much crucial. We finished laying out the decking on the back (high) deck with enough screws to secure them; finished the windows and doors completely, stripped all of the decking off the front porch and reinstalled almost half of it. Matt and Thomas have discovered their calling as decking demolishers--who wouldn't want to have at it with hammers and pry bars?

We arrived home to discover we could swim at a local pool club and rushed right up there, only to hear thunder and see roiling indigo-colored clouds. Sadly we called Giles to come get us to avoid walking home amid the winds, thunder and lightning. Peg and Jed, who kindly changed dinner time to 7:30 to accommodate the swimmers once again rearranged dinner time, and we feasted on a meal including fresh corn on the cob from the garden of a gentleman who works at the local lumberyard that Beth frequents daily.

And that brings us back to the Red Velvet Cake with chocolate ganache and strawberries, a fine place to end.