December

Things have been busy out here  building a building and a new community of people. We've made it through two holidays, a hog roast with 50 people we didn't know and a six year old  bouncy house birthday party at a tap house. I also attended a neighborhood ladies night where I listened to some lady tell me the medicinal uses of crystals and some other woo woo shit about sound waves and carcinogenic effects of light pollution. Being the new kid on the block really has really been enlightening. 

Lucikly for us, Annabelle continues to make all our friends and is really slaying it at school. We started out the school year by walking a mile each way to the bus stop wondering why everyone else was driving. When the weather hit 23 degrees we started driving too.  She is learning to read and is starting to write pretty amazing stories like, " I see a dog. The dog pooped". If she keeps it up she might be ready to take on the responsibility of my blog soon. 

We've been eating lunch with Annabelle at school once a week. It entails tracking down multiple pairs of lost mittens with supplied descriptions such as " they are black " while opening a dozen milk cartons for all Annabelle's friends. You also get to help kids out of snow pants because they have to potty real bad which is like trying to pull an Octopus out of a  burlap sack. Then you leave the lunch room with a pile of trash in your pockets wondering how anybody can eat lunch in 20 minutes. 

Along with building a community we also have to build this house before the snow starts to stick around. I had it written down in my notepad that siding a house takes five days. If you change the unit to weeks I was nuts on. We cut and trimmed the first piece of metal siding around Halloween and finished shortly after we came back from Thanksgiving break after digging the last few panels out of the snow.   In the end I'm Thankful I didn't dump Brandon out of the excavator basket or drive the excavator through the building. I think he's happy about that too. 

After installing and fabricating a bunch of other stuff we  passed final inspection and got our permit signed off. 

The ski trail are just starting to open up and the weather is flirting between dumping snow, dumping rain and dumping drywall dust. We rallied with three other families to get a pack of kids out skiing and are looking forward to more of that soon. 

Here are some more pictures.