First I must say "Happy Birthday" to Chris and Kyle (in the order in which they arrived.) We are so glad you are part of our family and that all of our girls found awesome guys.
Happy Birthday, Kyle. Remember Growing old is mandatory, growing up is optional.
And in a few day, Chris will be a year older as well. Here's wishing you smooth flying on your birthday and beyond.
One of my students works at a tree farm and a tree top broke off from a larger tree and was destined for goat food. Yes, I said goat food. Said student takes home truck loads of broken and trimmed branches for his goats to eat. Since there isn't much other greenery available this time of year this is nice symbiotic relationship. Anyway, I stray. The end result was that we now have a nice little Christmas tree in our classroom that was lovingly decorated with clip art cars and Monster cans hand-torn into knife-sharp strips. Check out the "Redneck tree stand". It's made from a piece of foam-core poster board and a plastic cup. I guess they do these at the tree lot all the time and they work fine and, amazingly, don't leak!
Meanwhile Bob decorated our own tree while I unwrapped and reminisced over each ornament before he got impatient and hung them up. This was followed closely behind by Nitro trying to unhang them. We hang sleigh bells on the bottom branches of the tree so we can hear if the tree is being breached by a furry invader. This is the first cat I've had that can outsmart the bells and climb the tree without the bells making any noise. You can see the huge gaps in the branches that he bent down last year.
I've actually been quite busy this week but, to preserve the Christmas surprises, I am not going to post pictures of all I've accomplished. I finally got that Jaguar book done so I could move on to other projects that needed to get done...and done a lot earlier! Now you can lie awake at night in fear that you might be on the receiving end of one of my projects.
Bob's shop heater died a lingering death before it finally gave it's final squeal. Bob found another on Craig's List so we went out into the dark of the night after the previous owner had returned from a Boy Scout meeting to collect it. Now that we had it home we had to figure out how two old people with bad backs were going to get that old heater off the ceiling and replace it with the newer, heavier heater we just brought home.
The first attempt failed because the rigging didn't allow it to get close enough to the ceiling even with my expert guide rope skills.
We tried a new rigging method, and it was better, but still not able to get close enough to the ceiling to attach it.
We regrouped and totally changed up the style at the fulcrum and gave it another heave-ho...
...and we landed the heater in the sweet spot. Heater: 0, Old People:1! Bob had screwed the electric winch to the bolt holes that he drilled for his new car lift and we let it do the heavy lifting. It was just a matter of rigging the heater to get it where we wanted it to go.
Have a good week everyone!
Thinking that maybe you should blog about your projects the week before you do them so that in case no one hears from you guys for a few days we know where to look--under the huge heater in the garage!
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