In Spring of 2019 , my wife and I finished making preparations to build our dream home. Dream home is almost a cliché at this point, a real estate agent's catch phrase to get someone to buy into a neighborhood with white picket fences and an HOA. In our case, we'd spent three years designing the house from the ground up, paying off what we owed on the land itself and hammering out all the fine little details. Initially, we expected the project to take us about twelve months, as we were going to do the majority of the work ourselves. With us throughout the entire experience was my father, whose expertise in building construction made the entire thing possible. Along the way we received help from friends, my brothers, and various good people who did honest, quality work. I've decided to do a sort of post-mortem for the whole house build. It was absolutely a unique experience, full of satisfaction and frustration. Now, as I sit in the study we built with our own hands I remai...
Concrete 2 Revenge of the Crete Vampire Wire and other torture devices July 2019 was a good month to pour concrete. Not so much because of the weather, which was surface-of-the-sun hot, but because we finally passed the first plumbing inspection. Still, there were a few things to sort out before we got around to playing in the mud. The first and most important was to fill and compact all the trenches that wouldn't end up full of concrete. Plumbing finished? Well, close enough for government work. Part of the foundation plan called for a few interior footers to help bear the load of the second story and the interior stairs, so these needed to be dug out, beveled off, and readied for concrete. Like everything else we did, these footers were both wider, deeper, and more reinforced than the blueprints required. Anything worth doing is worth doing right, as they say. You can see the main interior footer in the middle of the flab. Also pictured: the shower framing. One of those all imp...
Apocalyptic Stories One of my favorite genres is fiction involving the end of the world. A macabre fascination about how individuals, societies, and entire nations behave in their death throes, as well as their rise from the ashes, drives me to seek out these types of novels. Here, I’ve included my favorites, but honestly it was a hard time paring them down to just ten. 1. On the Beach – Nevile Shute Top of the list for the sheer emotional reaction it forced upon me. On the Beach, set in a world where the nuclear war has already killed everyone north of the equator, follows the survivors of Australia and a handful of American naval personnel as they prepare for the inevitable. Unlike most of the other stories on this list, On the Beach doesn’t have much in the way of antagonists, action, adventure, or hope. What it does have is a very clear message about the horrors of modern wars, the legacy of power struggles, and what it means to die with dignity. I will never read this book a...
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