Here we go Again!

Here we go again, just when we thought we were going to take it easy for a few weeks we come up with another project. Just a little project, nothing too big or time consuming. Just a 24x48 garage to put our junk in. 

To think, just a few years ago, all our worldly possessions fit in a 40' 5th wheel. Now we have a house garage and shed that seem to be bursting at the seams. It's really Kevin's fault. We had been thinking about a garage in a few years and I mentioned it to him. He then said he was remodeling a garage that required different trusses and we could have the old ones. That is how this mess started. So, Barb and I went over there, loaded up the old trusses, brought them home and have them stacked and waiting for us to start building. 

We won't get it done by the time we leave for Alaska, but I do hope to get the dirt work done. We started by scraping all the topsoil off and setting it aside. 

Once that was done it was time to set grade and level out the site. But here's the deal, there is not much level on our property. This spot requires 2' of fill in one corner, 1' in two other corners and nothing in the 4th corner. Rather than pay for all that fill, I went down to the pond and scraped a few loads of loose dirt around the edge and loaded into Neighbor Jim's dump trailer.

Once I got all that I could take from that area it was off to the local quarry for road base gravel. 4 loads so far and it looks like I will need about 6 more. Once it is all leveled out, we will let the rain and weather compact it over the summer and carry on with this project in the fall.

Several of you commented on the map program we used to document our travels. The program we use is Travellerspoint. We looked at several, but this is the one we settled on. Travellerspoint gives you a variety of options for mapping your route. We've tried several and prefer the Curved Line.

This screenshot shows the "Drive" and Straight Line" options.

The website also has other features including a Blog feature, but we have never tried them.  Speaking of blogs, Blogger has been giving me trouble lately. Not as much as it has given other people, but I spent an hour or so putting a couple dozen blogs in the "Our Favorite Blogs" section. This is how we keep track of the blogs we read and it tells us when one of them posts a new post. They were all there initially, then some, randomly, started disappearing. Not enough that you would notice but eventually I would say to myself "XXX has not posted for a while". I would go to their blog and sure enough, they had been posting but had disappeared from our sidebar. Very frustrating!

We, along with Kevin and Cheryl, went over to Dan and Bonnie's for salmon supper one evening. It turned into quite the crazy night. There may or may not have been a video taken of Kevin near the end of the night showing him shirtless, flexing his muscles. I was traumatized seeing it in person and since many of you are probably eating breakfast as you read this, I will save you from having to view said video.

We did play a couple of dice games. I don't know if they do this in other states, but in Wisconsin almost every bar has something called Shake-a-day where everyone puts in a dollar and with 6 dice you have 3 shakes to get 6 of a kind. If you do, you get 1/2 the pot. If no one gets it, the pot carries on until eventually someone gets it another day. You can only play one time a day. 

We also played Sh#tbox which is what you see in the picture below. It is really called Shut the Box, it seems to have taken on this new name. Everyone putting in a dollar. The winner with the lowest total wins the pot. Here are the rules if you are unfamiliar with it. Of course we do not use real money for either of these games, that would be illegal!  

Last Sunday, we spent the day over at Kevin's helping him cut shiplap boards out of rough cut for their bunkhouse. I cut the boards to length, Kevin dado'ed the shiplap groove into each side of the boards, finally, Barb and Cheryl sanded them. We headed over there today (Sunday) again to continue to help them get the bunkhouse ready for renting this summer. 

Let's see, what else have we been doing? Oh! we made three Bluebird houses! We have plenty of scrap wood around the garage so we thought we would put it to good use. 

We've had a few checking them out, but so far, no one has taken up residence. 

We went for a couple of walks looking for sheds. The elk and deer have started dropping their antlers. You see a lot of interesting things out in the forest. I did find this pile of chocolate covered peanuts in the middle of the woods.

They were a little fibrous and earthy, but otherwise they tasted okay. We knew we were in the right area but have yet to find anything. There are bearing trees scattered throughout the forest. The geological service uses them instead of permanent markers. We also found numerous elk rubs like the one on the right below. 

Lastly, the weather has finally warmed up enough for us to enjoy the gazebo. We put the TV back out there, restocked the bar and hung two signs we picked up on our travels. Life, is good!