Sweet Home Alabama!!

We drove to Alabama for a baptism and visit our friend on March 29. Their daughter was baptized on her birthday. We had lunch and cake at their house.

After the baptism....hmm JA is very tall

A beautiful Lemon Cake with Raspberries

Leaning Tower of Florence

Spring Has Sprung

I love flowers blooming in my yard and trees full of blooms and leaves. With this lovely season is the dreadful allergies.


It is also TORNADO season.

And it's soccer time.... JP is a soccer referee and earning some $$.

More downhill after 40

What is your worst fear?

One of mine is a couple of hours at the dentist office. I gag extremely easily and even the simply act of having x-rays taken of my teeth usually causes me to dry vomit because of this reflex. Over the years I have avoided going to the dentist.

Last week, this caught up with me in a big way. Starting Friday, one of my teeth became incapacitatingly painful. Unfortunately, my dentist office was closed on Friday, and Tylenol and ibuprofen did little to dull the pain. Orajel did provide some relief. I kept thinking of the scene in Tom Hank's Castaway where he uses the old skate to remove his tooth and contemplated this option. I resolved not to eat again because every time I did, it would be an hour before I could do anything else but crawl up in a ball. (I finally found that pudding was a better option.) Oddly, by Sunday the pain started to be bearable.

Early Monday morning, I saw my dentist and he confirmed that I needed a root canal, but told me I would have to wait until Wednesday morning so that the antibiotics he prescribed had some time to work.

Early Wednesday morning, I submitted myself to the torture chamber. I had come down with a cold Tuesday, so the advice to "breath through my nose" was tragicomical. I must say that the dentist did an admirable job of putting up with my struggles, and because they used this little screen device to isolate the work area from the rest of my mouth, it was actually less of a struggle to avoid drowning in my own saliva than usual. But there were two times when for whatever reason, a large amount of fluid came streaming over the screen and the technician didn't suction this out before I gagged on it. At one point in time, my mouth actually began to shiver out of control for some reason. But finally, about an hour and a half later, they were finished. And we were quite a bit poorer.

The only upside of this rather painful episode is that I'm down to 217 lbs because of the lack of eating for the past week! Pudding diet anyone?

Windy City!!!

JP and I (AM) went to Evanston and Chicago, Illinois for the Science trip during Spring Break, March 17 - 20. JP was one of twelve local kids chosen for all expense paid trip. As you can see on the picture, Southwest Airlines provided for the free round trip. I celebrated my birthday in the Windy City. El train and lots of walking were our main transportation in Chicago. We were able to have campus tour of Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Chicago and Northwestern University.

Leaving for the Windy City

Arrived in Midway Airport

Illinois Institute of Technology.....we saw a lot of this recycling container all over campus

University of Chicago

Millenium Park



Northwestern University

Engineering Lab

Deep Dish Pizza

MYX Performance Juggling Group at Evanston Ecology Center

Juggling Group consisted of families that are Filipinos

Northwestern University Library

Catching the el train to Midway Airport...heading back home

On Top of Ole Smoky

While AM and JP went to the Windy City, ME, SD, and JA went to the Smokies to visit Aunt and Uncle RS2. Aunt Bee picked up the girls Monday and then I drove down Wednesday morning. They had rented a cabin near Pigeon Forge overlooking the National Park. (I mean literally overlooking, we were way high up on a mountain side.) I opened all the shutters at night so that I awakened to a beautiful sunrise of mountains sticky out of the clouds (where the smokies get their name.)

Some highlights:
Wednesday:





Laurel Falls hike. This is a popular day hike on a paved trail to these falls. It was way too crowded for my taste, but the falls were okay, and climbing down below the falls allowed us to get away from the crowds a little bit. I can't imagine being here in the summer time.




Chimney Tops Picnic Area. This is a great little place with an awesome river view and massive boulders to climb on.

Wednesday ended with a Billards Tournament finally won by SD and Aunt Bee after Uncle RS and JA had trouble keeping the 8 ball out of the pockets.

Thursday:

Roaring River Auto Tour-excellent sight seeing, way better than Cades Cove for scenery (but no bears.)

Stop 1 for us was Ogle's Place. This was an awesome little nature trail on the old farmland of Mr. Ogle. Why anyone would choose to farm here is beyond me, but as a summer cabin, the place would be second to none. The bouldering was excellent as well, with Uncle RS pioneering the straight up the face route.

Stop 2 was Grotto Falls.





Grotto Falls-this is a beautiful family hike, (which could be continued into a really advanced backpacking trip by continuing on to the top of Mt. LeConte). Moss covered rocks everywhere, nice uphill climb next to a river most of the way, and the falls area is spectacular. JP and I will definitely want to use this as an awesome descent from Mt. LeConte after ascending from the Rainbow Falls side. ME and I took it very slow, which was good because JA started out really whiny but once she got ahead and didn't have a parent to complain to, she really started to enjoy it. The falls has a bit of a grotto behind it, and really is a series of falls that were just really cool. Because it took ME and I so long to get there, everyone else was ready to go once we arrived, but we still got to do a little playing around the falls. It started to rain as we were descending and we made it back to the parking lot just as it started to pour.

Thursday night finished off with some March Madness.

Roofing Project

JP, JA, and EM picking up shingles early in the morning

EM trying to push the wheel barrow

Monday morning the long awaited re-roofing project began. We had had lots of people lined up either as volunteers or paid labor for Friday and Saturday, but of course it poured rain and snow on those days, so we had to wait until Monday when we would have at least 72 hours of clear weather.

The goal for Monday was to complete tear-off and start felting. Two of us started the tear-off at 7 am with the temperature around 21 degrees, hoping the neighbors wouldn't mind too much (although tear-off doesn't make that much noise compared to pneumatic nailing guns and compressors!). An hour and a half in, I thought I was going to die from exhaustion (cold was no longer an issue!). CK, who was helping me, was a professional roofer, and he probably cleared twice the area I did in the same time. I kept on eye on his technique and by the end was making much better progress for the same energy expended, but still was struggling to keep up. Fortunately at that time, backup in the form of CP, CK, BH, and the E family began to arrive and things began to progress even more quickly. By noon all the old shingles and felt had been cleared off the roof and were sitting on the ground.

With the shingles gone, some other problems with the roof, not related to the tree falling down became apparent. For instance the wood sheathing below the two dormer vents in the back were beginning to rot, as was the area near the chimney. Both of these areas had been improperly flashed when the roof was built forty years ago. After about one minute of discussion, I decided to just tear out the dormers, as I always thought they kind of looked ugly, they were a major source of potential leaks to a roof, and they were providing essentially no ventilation flow, which was their only reason for existing. After tearing out the dormers, we needed to replace the rotted areas and the small ventilation holes in the main decking. We also cut the peak of the roof to install a ridge vent.

At this time I had to go into work to interview someone for a position that had been scheduled weeks before. Fortunately, CP, CK, BH, and the E family continued working while I was gone. Unfortunately, they found that the rolls of felt we had purchased had a major problem, with edges sticking as they were being rolled out and tearing. We thought this was because of cold temperatures, so decided to call it a day at 5 pm, bring the rolls of felt into the house to get them warmed up, and start again the next day.
I had high hopes that we would complete the roof by the end of Tuesday.

Tuesday we started at 8 am. Unfortunately, we found that the felt was still tearing as it was rolled. The rolling went slowly, mostly because it took a while for me to get the hang of what CK needed me to do to make the felt lay tight against the roof. It also became problematic that our roof has so many valleys and ridges, all which require more care and present problems for getting tight fits of the felt. I also found that I had a hard time walking or standing on the already laid felt in a way that wouldn't cause signficant bubbling. I had to leave to go into the lab by 11 am, and from the report I got back from my foreman, CP, progress was slow the entire day and I admit I was deeply discouraged. Less than half the roof had been felted, and only 1/4 of the roof shingled. So much for finishing in two days.

Wednesday we began work at 7:30 am, but I had to leave by 10 am. Felting continued to go slowly but with CK working on it, we had at least completed 2/3rd of it before I left, as well as having shingled close to half the roof. CP, CK, BH, and the E. family continued work throughout the day. By the end of the day, felt had been laid down on all but the peak areas of the roof, and shingles on 3/4 the of the roof.

Because I was staying in late at the lab each day to try to make up for the time I was spending on the roof, by Thursday morning I was dreading another day and hoping that this was finally the day we finished. We began work again at 7:30 am, but I absolutely had to stop at 9 am because I had a talk I had to give that morning. By the time I had left, we had finished shingling all but the ridge areas which we had kept until last so we had a place to put shingles, tools, and such. By the end of the day CP called to say that they had finished. Thank goodness. It rained a little bit Friday night and Saturday night. I haven't had a chance to get up in the attic during a rain storm to make sure there are no leaks, but I feel pretty confident we actually have a stronger and better ventilated roof without any leaks.

Would I do it again this way? Probably not, but give me a few months to recover and maybe I would consider it.