January 21-23

Well, there was happy news on this last trip! My sister-in-law Kerri and our friend Gary are tying the knot! Both of them accompanied us out to Midian for a brief visit of a couple of days, which involved a good deal of relaxation: eating, movie viewing, and general canoodling by the newly engaged couple. Well, ok, there was not as much relaxation for me. I was busy repairing the Warehouse’s footings using premixed cement and sealing its roof with this crap; which, for all of its severe tar-like nastiness, actually works extremely well. Hopefully I have sealed off the Warehouses minor leaks, of which there appear to by many… although in retrospect what I take for leaks may actually be the sort condensation endemic to metal buildings. There's not much I can do about that.

We gave Kerri a brief shooting lesson (small caliber rifle and pistol only). She showed a fair amount of enthusiasm for the rifle but didn’t care very much for the pistol, which is comparatively loud and difficult to control. Tina is, of course, still a crack shot with nearly any small caliber rifle; a fact she demonstrated admirably by shooting three bottles in a row at fifty feet. I have taught her well.

After the happy couple departed, T. and I at long last got busy assembling and mounting the pipes for our wood burning stove. This proved far less of a challenge than I anticipated, although once again I was forced to spend a fair amount of time sealing the new stovepipe’s exterior flashing with the above mentioned nasty stuff. When we were done we crammed the most smoke producing crap we could find into the stove and fired it up. Although there is a tiny amount of smoke that seeps through the various cooking plates of the stove itself, our freshly installed pipes leak not even a little! Success! Now we can heat our house with wood (cheap and everywhere) as opposed to propane (comparatively expensive)