Snow and Holes in the Wall

For my friends and family who grew up with me in Arizona, can you believe this is where I live?! It's interesting how the 30s feel almost warm if it's sunny. Never having lived in a place with an actual change of seasons, I thought winter would feel much colder than it does. Instead, it feels like this is how it's supposed to work somehow. I guess by that I mean that each season is long and so when you move from one into the next you're ready for it. I am feeling ready for spring though, just a little. My kids told me it was 60˚ in Seattle and I was a little jealous. You certainly do deserve the nice weather though after the multitude of rain you've had this winter. I'm not missing the rain, just the people. 

On to the holes - Jodi's brother Jeff came to Poughkeepsie this weekend with the sole purpose of helping us with a project that has had our work on this house at a stand-still. Since we're opening everything up and replacing walls with post & beam construction we needed to build specially designed footings that were the brainchild of our architects. Instead of pouring footings in our concrete slab and putting posts in the middle of our room, we're essentially building footings into the existing brick walls, fondly referred to as bearing blocks. Ingenious, but a little scary as Jodi and I have stood many times staring up at the walls and talking through this project that will ultimately carry the weight of this house. Each time we've dressed in work clothes, made our way to the basement, plans in hand, and then talked ourselves out of doing it. Each block posed it's own set of unique problems and there are six in all. Jeff spent a day pouring over the plans and then we dug in, quite literally. By the end of the weekend we poured concrete in our first block and removed the bricks from our second. We hope to pour the next one by the end of the week and then after the blocks cure we will hang our first beautiful beam. Jeff is safely back in Illinois tonight and we thank him from the bottom of our hearts. Now we can proceed with confidence. After these blocks are completed, the rest of the rebuild can move forward more quickly.

 Hole #1

We poured the concrete through a hole in the floor above. 

This perplexes the little white dog.

  

Art Show

 (click to read)

Alas, we've been naughty again and not blogging. Our excuse is a good one: Alicia's solo show in Poughkeepsie. 

 

 

  

 

 

We spent Tuesday to Saturday painting, repairing, marking, drilling (oh, those 1201 holes!), hanging, shopping, etc. Phew -- a busy week. And worth every minute.

 

 

 

The show looks fantastic in the gallery space and the opening was very well-attended (huge even!). Alicia almost lost her voice from talking to lots of interesting people. Everyone seemed truly engaged by her work. Cool, huh?

An after-party at Alicia's studio offered much fun for all. Best of all: Mary Lake and Dorn drove all the way from Maine to see the show. An all-to-brief visit, but lovely, nonetheless.

The Reverend's Message

There's a church that stands on a prominent corner in Poughkeepsie. Some time ago I started to take notice of the changing message board. The minister is a woman and she's got some good ones. I started calling Jodi and as soon as she would say hello, I would say something like, "If god seems far away, who moved?" Our favorite so far is:

 "Education without faith makes clever devils".   I know a lot of those!

We tried to take a photo of that one for the blog and it mysteriously wouldn't download to the computer...very Twilight Zone. That message wasn't up long enough to try again, but this time we were able to get a photo of this very disturbing decree.  Can we get in trouble for this????  I better photoshop her name out. Be right back...