Four Part Harmony

Howdy folks.
Here’s a couple quick photos and a rundown of our past week.
Last Saturday, the day after we rolled back in to town, we went down to a big 30/40/50 birthday party at our friend Rick (the Stick)’s place down outside of St. Paul, OR.
Rick’s turning 50 this year.
Another friend, Russel, is turning 40.
I already turned 30 this year, but somehow I managed to get another birthday party out of the whole deal.
It was a whole lot of fun.
We had the band down there, set up in the barn.
Now, the very worst part about playing in a band is that it almost never sounds like it should to the people up on stage. You always get too spread out, can’t hear the fiddle, someone’s guitar is too loud, can’t hear the vocal…
Well, somehow the acoustics in that barn were just right because everything sounded great, therefore we could relax and just have fun. It was cold and rainy, but everyone bundled up, embraced the rain, and had a good old time.

There were quite a few kids running around earlier in the evening. Anna wasn’t too into running around and playing with everyone, until she caught sight of Bodie’s little four wheeler. She got a pretty big kick out watching Bodie cruise around on it, and then he was gracious enough to give Anna a chance to ride on it too. She was grinning ear to ear, cruising up and down the driveway.

I’m going to try to put up this quick little video of me showing Anna the little noisemaker/throttle for the 4-wheeler. She got a big kick out of it. We’ll see if it works…

Of course, the biggest news is that we now have two chickens laying eggs. The first egg-layer was positively identified as Kim-chee, when we caught her coming out of the nest box. But we didn’t see a second egg until early last week. We were pretty sure it had to be Rosie, and sure enough Anna and I caught her sitting on the nest box and refusing to come out of the coop. Kim-chee and Sol were squawking at her and making such a general racket that Anna and I went outside and let them out of the coop. Rosie wouldn’t come out though, which was highly unusual. After 10 or 15 minutes though, Rosie began to cluck loudly, and when we looked in the nest box there was a tiny freshly laid egg in there.
Now Sol is the last holdout. It’s hard to say when she might lay. She’s the biggest of the three by far, but still not looking mature. With winter coming on, supposedly egg production should drop off some, so I wonder what happens if she finally gets ready to lay in December? Not exactly prime egg laying season I don’t think. Then again I’m not a chicken.

Also, here’s a quick side note. I started building a guitar. This is a picture of the full scale plan sheet laid out on our living room floor. This is something I’ve been talking about doing, reading about, dreaming about for a long time and it always seemed sort of impractical and impossible. Well, I said to hell with all that and decided to just go ahead and go for it. Nicki, as always, is super supportive which has made the whole thing all the more enjoyable. I’m lacking the fine woodworking skills, the proper workspace, the proper tools etc., but I hope to make up for it with determination and the tortoise mindset. If it takes 10 years to finish, that’s fine by me…Maybe Anna will need a guitar by then.

Oh. I also started a blog (go figure) where I hope to post updates on the process (So I guess I have two new projects…). There’s not much in the way of stuff over there yet, but I did put a few pictures up there last night.

So long for now. -Dan