April 21 Update

We're back--Sort of.  First a recap of what we've accomplished since January.  To begin with, we had a really hard winter.  Don would go out to work on the cabin and spend half of his working time shoveling snow so he could get into the cabin.

One night, Eureka was covered with fog.  The next day, hoar frost covered all the trees.  It was quite beautiful.

All of the insulation for the upstairs.

Here is a gap.  There will be vents going up to wind turbines on the roof to extract the heat in the summer time.

The orange buckets in the windows contain trees the Arbor Foundation sent because of a donation Barbara made.  The trees, Norwegian Spruces and two lilac bushes, were supposed to arrive at the correct planting time.  They arrived just before our hard freeze so we tried to keep them alive in buckets in the window.

The plastic over the gap below is the wind turbine hole.

Installing the soffits under the eaves.

Don's Christmas present to Barbara saying the name of the cabin.  You enter on the east side of the house and have an aisle through which to see the scenic view on the west. Say it fast and it sounds like "I love you."  The Oh Deer foot mat was one of Barbara's gifts to Don.

Next series of pictures shows how to install a heavy piece of Drywall on the ceiling by oneself.

One Saturday in March, two of our daughters from the Salt Lake area, our bishop, and a neighbor came and spent the day either assisting Don in installing dry wall in the bedroom or taping and mudding.  The main floor is almost completely dry walled and the bulk of it taped. We failed to get any pictures of the bishop or one of the daughters but their help was tremendous.

People keep asking us when the cabin will be done.  Wish we knew.  Hopefully, by the end of June we have water running to it.  We have to dig up a section of the water pipe.  At one point a pipe was installed in the underground water system that didn't end up being connected to the pipes going into the house as we had to redirect it.  Don thinks the external tank is connected to that pipe so that has to be checked out.  However, once it is done, the house isn't quite ready to receive water.  We still have some greenboard that has to go up in the bathroom and it has to be taped, mudded, and painted.  Also, the final flooring has to be installed.  Some of that spells money and all of it spells time.

Also, by the end of June, we hope to have the stove working.  That requires having an electrician move the plug for the stove as it is not on the wall where Barbara wants it.  We have to get a propane tank filled with propane and get the gas plumbing into the house.  The stove has been purchased, but again, some time and quite a bit of money.

We are still working to stay ahead of the 0 interest credit cards we obtained when our savings ran out.  Barbara is teaching Head Start in Provo.  She never thought she would want to do this at her age.  She is quite enjoying it, but it is taxing.  Don had a job at a call center in Lindon.  It required using 29 different computer programs.  He felt that the training was not adequate and that he could not serve the customers in a good way so he quit the job.  He is currently working as a substitute in the schools and applying for other jobs.  He continues working as a security guard at the LDS motion studios in Elberta two nights a week.  We wintered in Eureka, renting a room from some friends.  When Don started working in town, we were driving two cars one hour each way five days a week.  We finally decided to take an apartment in Provo.

Barbara's job will end for this year at the middle of May and Don's substituting by June.  Then, we will have time (Barbara's scheduled to help with a new grandchild in Spokane, Washington in June and we have a family reunion with Barbara's siblings and our and their grandchildren at the end of June.)  We may end up taking a home equity loan to give us the funds we need to get through the cabin work this summer until our paying work resumes in the fall.

Right now, we are coming out to Mammoth on Saturdays (unless it is the second and third Saturday of every month when we serve in the temple.)  We are kind of camping in the cabin until we can make it livable.

Barbara will be doing the second coat of mudding in the walk-in closet next week.  It is her first time ever to do this kind of work.  She's done quite well but failed to get instruction on how to make square corners so they are rounded corners in the closet--that is why she started in the closet.  It's hardly going to matter.

 We took a couple of grandchildren out and transferred the Arbor Day trees to the outside and built a fence hopefully to keep the deer out until the trees  could  be put into the ground.  They all died.  The lilac bush never put out anything.  Huge disappointment.

Saturday, April 20 as we came out to work, we saw several wild prong-horn antelope in an alfalfa field east of Elberta.  We had never seen wild prong-horns before.

 Our apricot tree very few blossoms when we arrived in the morning. By afternoon, it was covered with plossoms, literally popping out blossoms like popcorn.  Then we had a good rainstorm.

We will probably only be posting once a month now as not enough happens day to day for a weekly post to say much.