well, who knows?

Greetings! We are back to being able to upload pictures, which is a great relief. A blog without pictures is a dull thing indeed. A picture may paint a thousand words, but the words in my blog aren't as good as seeing the real thing, especially as I may be using jargon inappropriately at times! In any case, the pictures are back to uploading, for no apparent reason, so we assume it was a glitch in the blogger system which is now repaired, by wizards or muggles, we know not.

Here it is! The joists are done! All square, and lined up exactly 16" on center. We put in our bridging today - which are metal cross braces, essentially, that you nail in between the joists. The end result is further stability and a prevention of bouncing in the floors. They worked nicely. We have a few more to do on the other side of the house tomorrow and then we are done with them until we start the next floor. So, the house is quite quite square! This delighted us to no end, and made Shawn feel great for all of the measuring and re-measuring he did. We put two rows of plywood up to make sure all was well, and so far, so good. It's exciting to be working on the next floor! Our work for tomorrow involves completing the last row of bridging and then we hope to finish all the plywood. This week, we will be raising the walls of the first floor. Tomorrow marks our two week anniversary of working on the house, though we did take a couple of days off in there. This morning, the skies were dumping incredible quantities of water everywhere, and I heard the longest peal of thunder I've ever heard. It started as a groaning grumble, and then gradually worked up to a mighty cracking with such intense reverberation that it truly sounded as though the heavens were opening. Quite a disturbing thought. Two nights ago we had a crazy lightning storm with lots of thunder and then a lightning blast that travelled up our cable box (for the computer) and zapped the ethernet card in the computer. The computer we unplug at the first sound of lightning, but we realize what an error we made in neglecting to disconnect the cord connecting the cable box to the computer itself! Ah, wouldn't we all love to tap into the wisdom of hindsight ahead of time...In any case, the computer is on extended warranty, though I don't know when we'll go up to Bangor to get it worked on. We can also call the renter's insurance company and see what wisdom they have to offer. Though when you compare the wisdom of hindsight and the wisdom of the insurance company, it isn't hard to see what you'd be more inclined to go with. Anyway, it's obvious from this dialogue (or monologue, rather) that it's well past my bedtime these days! All I meant to say was that despite crazy wet weather this morning, by later in the day, as you can see, the sky was blue and lovely. Weather systems move so incredibly fast in this area, it's quite exciting to see what can happen. It was a blustery, cool day. Hints of autumn. Wow! Makes me want to hammer!