here's life

The drive down was uneventful. After leaving the presentation on SolidWorks 2007 (amazingly cooler than 2006) I got on I-35 and headed south. Saw gas prices fall and then rise again, and it reminded me of a Google Maps application---chart out current gas prices along your route, so you know which town to stop in.  Saves the consumer money, or, makes price fixing that much easier.
We hung out at Bubble's place for a couple hours, didn't really feel like getting on the road again.  Finally as our destination time slipped later into the night, we started out.  We wanted to eat something first--just a quick bite--so we pulled into a drive through. Fifteen seconds later, we determined that we were waiting too long for the single car ahead of us, so we headed for Longview instead.
We got to Andrew's place and went over the Lists of tasks for the marrow.  We weren't very hungry, so we ate some crackers and cheese. There were four basic areas: Painting, Construction, Landscape and Wiring.  Aduma took the first two, and I took the others. Bubbles was just going to float, since he knew general information people would need.

Saturday morning we got up and finished preparing---setting things out, getting the paint ready, and getting tools together. Duncey arrived, so we gave him Construction. Then they arrived. About 50 people poured out of the 11 cars, and we introduced our tasks and divided people up. I took some people for making retaining walls, and gathering gravel.
I handed my Wiring List to Spork, and gave him a 60 second overview of what it meant.  People began painting the house while we scraped gravel away from it. Others started leveling off for one retaining wall, while several began pulling up concrete flats and carrying them around back.  The shed got painted, some trim out in the yard got primed, and then painted. A set of doors got three coats on one side...and none on the other. I found some guys who were helping Duncey---they had gloves on, so I had them move a big slab of concrete from near the A/C unit to in front of the shop. Nobody shredded their finger. In fact, it seems that there were no injuries all day! I just sort of wandered from place to place, working for a few minutes on something, and then getting some people started on something else.  The first course of the wall was a big task, but I had a few dedicated people who went at it with a level, and made it flat.  The next courses went on very quickly; we had a "brick brigade" handing bricks from the pallet to wall, and they stacked up like hotcakes. I didn't have them take the bricks from the pallets that had been put nearby---no, we took the ones that were near the other wall, tomorrow we'd have to carry them farther.
The crowd started to dwindle, but many people stayed for lunch, and continued to hook up downspouts into an invisible buried pipe, to finish off the ends of the retaining wall, to touch up trim around the roof, to hook up wires in the sweltering attic.
I spend a good part of the afternoon washing out paint rollers.  There were so many, but they were pretty much dried, so I just tried to wash them out, having fun making them spin at incredible speeds using a sharp stream of water from the hose sprayer.
Eventually it was night, and so the few that were still around watch How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. It was rather enlightening, for being a chick-flick.  I'll stay on the alert for girls who are trying to be as annoying as possible. 
It's not everyday that you get to be a part of 60 people working on a house.  Can't always find people who not only know what they are doing, but are willing to struggle in the hot texan sun, moving dirt and concrete, painting and building. It was  a success.  Some Photos, curtesy of Luddie.

Sunday we got to sunday school in time to eat doughnuts and sit on bean bags. Baker did a good job of leading it, and I drew a rubber duckie on the attendance sheet.  I knew only a handful of people there. 
Church was good, but there weren't any hymns on the agenda.  This is a surprisingly global-minded church. Rather refreshing to see people bent on bringing the rest of the world to Christ.  After church, we were some of the last to leave, as usual, and then we went to Bodacious for lunch.  But first we stopped by Pier 1 to help some of our newly married friends pick up a chair.  There wasn't much room in Bubbles's car, so we had to pawn off a box of maternity clothes on them...they didn't realize the gravity of it until it came up during lunch.

We spent the afternoon building a second retaining wall. This one had multiple curves, and we tried several different multi-degree functions before we got a shape we liked.  Tip: when making stepping retaining walls, start at the bottom--it is a lot easier to get level when you are stepping up instead of down. We ended up being about an hour late to the Burger Burn at the pastor's house, but there was still burgers, and corn, and soda and stuff. We sat and talked, and had a good time.  As it was getting dark, the conversation drifted to Baker's backyard, and he mentioned that he had a cord running across it, that kept getting chopped in the mower. "You need to bury it, then you won't hit it!" "Well, yeah, but I just haven't gotten to it yet.." "It would take like fifteen minutes to do!" We still only had our craziness-meter at about 326 for the weekend, so we volunteered to go out and bury the cable for him. They said we would need some electrical tape to fix the wire.  Aduma has a roll in his pocket, of course.  Borrowed a shovel from the pastor, and left.  When Baker got there with his family, we had a trench across the yard, and were starting to lay the wire.  We about had it covered up, when the local annoying armadillos came out.  Bakers normal procedure was to shoot them with a bb-gun, but that proved futile, due in part to their impenetrable armor.  So, Bubbles and I took some sticks and an old mower blade, and beat around in the bushes after the critters.  We found one, and cornered him behind a tomato cage, and then I poked him out, and Bubble got off a solid hit with the sharp edge of the mower blade.  It bounced off harmlessly.  We chased them around the woods, but it was dark and briery, and we got our first wounds of the weekend, some minor scratches.
After finishing up the trench and checking out the cool job of tile in the dining room, we headed to campus to drop off the chair.  We were going to try to forget the maternity clothes, but they remembered to bring them out.  We stood and ate cookies in what once was Shroud and Bev's apartment, and then we headed for Dallas.

I took Aduma over to visit a local branch of his company in the morning.  Dropped him off, went to Walmart, got a pump, which broke as my tire reached it's correct level, so I returned it, and drove back, arriving as Aduma and his former  coworker emerged from the security envelope.  After packing up, we went to the airport and I dropped off Aduma, and headed for Wichita.  The ending bracket on the weekend was tryouts for acting in the Road to Bethlehem at church at 7:00.  My clock read 6:59 as I pulled into the parking lot, having driven from Dallas.