May 2023 – turtle + mole

More demolition

Oh, and in between the rain storms, we did continue working on the foundation project. More destruction first:

Oh, this was painful:

A view from below as things were coming apart. I was thinking I’d try to save the tile above because it was still in such good condition – but it would have been difficult to get the waterproofing right, and the slopes. Plus I’d have to support it while working under it.

Here you can see straight into the garage.

Mole is taking out the concrete anchors that were at the bottom of the steps. You can see the steps all piled up on the right.

As it started getting dark, we were still working to get a temporary wall and roof in place to close off the garage.

Here we have the temporary roof, supported off the wall on the left, and you can see the marks of the steps on our neighbors wall on the right. The paint was in really bad shape, and some of the wood quite rotten.

I spent a weekend stripping the old paint off their wall so I could repaint it. This will get permanently hidden behind a new wall, so at least it should have a decent coat of paint.

That bottom row of siding will need to be replaced. They poured concrete against the side of the house, so the wood just rotted away behind it. Even thousand-year-old redwood cannot withstand that.

I sanded and filled all the holes. Ready for paint:

You can see the finished paint on the wall. The photo below I took on a Saturday afternoon, right after I’d removed the concrete and hurt my back. I spent a week barely able to walk. After this, the project sat for a month while my back recovered.

… time goes by …

Mole helped me finish excavating down the soil. I think I’m going to need to hire some people to help me on this.

But there is something I _can_ do: Repair the damaged floor joists. Who would do this to a floor joist?

Feeling much better after getting some reinforcing in. It’s pretty slow going, because it’s hard to get the joist in there over all the conduit and wires.

Bella wanted to say “hi”:

Running, rain, hike

Two weeks before CIM (California International Marathon in Sacramento) in December, Aja texted me saying that she and Misha were sick. Misha tested positive for Covid. We’d all been training hard for this marathon, and Misha had missed it last year due to injury, after multiple missed Boston marathons due to the Covid pandemic. So this was supposed to be the comback, but it was not to be. We all cancelled. “Besides”, I told myself, “it’s forecast to rain on the morning of the marathon”. (It did not rain, and I continued training through the rainiest winter I remember in California.)

Instead, we ran the Mesa marathon. For me, while I did not run as fast as I’d hoped I would, I did get to run with Misha for the first half. If anyone had suggested, ten years ago, that I would run even a mile in a marathon with Misha, I’d have laughed at their ignorance. Yet, here I was running alongside my athletically far superior sibling. Most of this was due to Misha’s misfortune at catching Covid right before CIM.

Here we are the day before, posing in front of the only growing thing in Phoenix. The rest is concrete and asphalt.

That the US has made the utterly ridiculous transportation pattern of Phoenix the dominant one in the whole country speaks to the power of money in this country. Here we are, stuck in traffic trying to get to a running race. Madness. But at least we were smiling.

We started in the dark, so the photos were not great, but here it is: Evidence. I ran with Misha! Yes, and every photo of Misha shows them floating in the air:

I managed to keep a grin on my face to the end, even though it was a hard marathon for me. It got so much hotter than I thought it would, and I just felt like I could barely move at the end.