I have been pretty slow updating the blog lately due to lack of motivation...

In the last eight weeks or so since my last post I have been busy with traveling and projects and haven't felt much like writing. My mom has been hounding me for a new post for awhile now, so here it is.

I had six weeks off of work in June and July, and boy did it go fast! The first two weeks we worked on getting the barn ready for the SIP (stress skin panels) walls and picked them up from Anchorage last week but they are just in a pile in the yard. I'm also adding a cupola to the top of the barn, so I have been working to finish cutting it because it has two 24' 8x8's in it I have to use a crane to put it on top of the barn. Since I have to have a crane to install my SIP's I wanted to be ready with the cupola at the same time. The way that life seems to work though, I haven't been able to focus only on the things I want to work on. We continued with one of our fencing projects which took three days, went camping and halibut fishing in Homer, and we also took a two week trip to New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. I did manage to get a few days of kayaking in though.

My dad's family had a family reunion in Las Cruces and out of about 118 family members I think there were about 114 of us there. I haven't seen some of them in twenty plus years so it was really nice to spend a few days catching up. The 100+ F weather was also very nice since we have had a summer that has only broke into the 70's three times all year. We made a couple trips to White Sands National Park while we were there. The dunes weren't nearly as big as the ones I was climbing in Algeria but the sand was really pretty and we took sleds so the kids all got to go sledding in the sand.
After the reunion we headed north to make Sandi's Grandpa Jim's 90th birthday in Cheyene Wyoming the next week. We drove through Durango, Silverton, Uray, Montrose, Gunnison (spent two days), Crested Butte, Salida, and then back north to Cheyenne. I've been to Durango and Silverton when I was younger but have never been to the Gunnison area. I really enjoyed the drive but the 10,000 ft altitude almost did me in. We didn't curtail our driving when we got to Wyoming either; after Jim's birthday party we drove the five plus hours up to Lander to see Tim, Stefani, and their brand new baby. Unfortunately due to our short schedule we only stayed one night before heading back to Cheyenne. After two weeks we managed to put 3500 miles on the rental car.

On the day we flew out of Denver we met with the Geothermal Consultant that we met in April at the Timberframers Conference. I wanted to discuss all of our options for trying to lower our heating costs and see what we could get done before winter. I am now questioning my desire to get something implemented before winter. Not because I don't think it will work, but because my last two weeks at home were swamped with the additional planning to get ready for the geothermal as well as working on all of my ongoing projects. I also don't think I'll have a free day until at least the first part of October.

I am now the proud owner of 9000' of tubing for the geo system but I now have to dig trenches to put it in. That means I'll be spending almost a week digging trenches and laying tubing in August to get ready for a September installation of the Water Furnace ( www.waterfurnace.com )and the rest of the system.

So that in a nutshell is why I haven't posted in a while. I hope to post pictures of the whole geothermal installation process as well as the cupola and SIP installation. I'll try to post some pictures from the last few weeks as well.