I suppose the suspense of waiting to find out more about this project does require a few posts just to keep it going. Unfortunately, when there’s been nothing to report, I can report nothing. It’s “spring” in the desert and I don’t have an enclosed work space for the wood projects. The wind has ground most projects to a complete halt.

Since our work is done in the garage or on the patio, anything requiring paint, stain or urethane is stacked up waiting for the wind to stop blowing half a ton of desert dirt and debris over everything. I have spent most days looking like one of the sand people from Star Wars, with my face mask, safety goggles, protective clothing and my iPod plugged into my ears and that’s just to feed hay to the ponies. The incessant roaring and buffeting of the wind blocked my ability to think of anything except the incessant roaring and buffeting of the wind, and made it impossible for us to do the thinking required to solve the problems we’ve faced on this project.

The wind has calmed, temporarily, for the past two days. Just long enough for me to figure out what we need to do to move ahead on the project again, get the materials, and get to work on Plan C.  Plan A had to be scrapped thanks to some less than professional work by the 12 pack a day builder. Plan B was scrapped because I couldn’t have lived with that alternative. Plan C., however, will not only solve the problems faced with the previous plans, but it has the added bonus of checking off another of the things on Billiam’s To-Do List.

Plan C. required digging through the hard packed, dry, rock filled desert dirt. Yesterday was our first 100 degree day of the year. We’re also pretty busy trying to get the house and property spruced up for an upcoming interview regarding my TankChair, Sherman. John was at work on the project while I ran around picking up everything blown about by the winds last week, pulled more weeds, and cleaned the swimming pool (in time for more winds to arrive this afternoon). We couldn’t use a post hole digger or even the pick axe to dig these holes because this area is home to the pipes for the leach field of the septic system.

We’d hoped to get an early start on the project yesterday morning. We were at Home Depot at 9:00am and thought we’d be home and working by 10.  Everything that could impede progress at the store, impeded our progress. A new pallet of the wood we needed had to be retrieved from the uppermost shelves, the fork lift ran out of gas before the driver was able to finish loading the wood stack onto the empty shelves and the tanks had to be switched out, a manager from another department came past, noticed the fork lift loaded with wood sitting there and felt compelled to harrass the fork lift driver for something clearly beyond his control (before I lost my cool and asked her to please get out of his butt long enough for me to get my wood and go home because I’d been waiting almost an hour already), and a line 6 customers deep in the lumber section that stayed 6 customers deep for 10 minutes before another line was opened. Our “quick trip” to Home Depot that should have taken 30 minutes, took three times that. I really must rant in another section about being in a manual wheelchair at Home Depot, or any crowded business, on a Saturday in another section, but suffice to say, those issues contributed to some pretty severe frustration by the time we were finally on our way to load the pickup, and were partly to blame for me losing my cool in the above mentioned event.

Here are the materials we will be using to execute Plan C.

I will be doing more house and yard chores in preparation for the TankChair interview, but hopefully we’ll get a little more done this evening and tomorrow to show. Once the interview has passed, and the next bout of winds have abated we’ll be able to pick up the pace again and get this thing completed!