Gavin's Woodworking Project

One of the lost arts, I still believe, is woodworking and craftsmanship for kids to learn in middle school.  We are so thankful that our middle school has the last remaining wood shop and class in the entire district.  The final project of the year is this pool table that they have to make completely from scratch.  The end product is probably 24" by 36" and fully works with a nice smooth felt surface.  Great work by Gavin!  Now we just need to figure out where to store this thing...

Peanut

Peanut has been quite the survivor over the years.  Gavin sometimes takes him outside of his cage and lets him roam around.  Here he is up on Gavin's hand doing some exploring.

Occasionally, Gage even is allowed to handle Peanut and here he is crawling down his arms.  I am not sure if Gage is nervous or scared or just trying to be as still as possible, so he doesn't scare Peanut.

Happy Easter!

We aren't so good about getting formal family pictures.  This year we celebrated easter at the Ascent church in Louisville and they had this nice background set up for families to take pictures.  This is the four of us all together in our somewhat-Sunday-finest.

A New Bird Feeder

Inspired by our trip to Washington and seeing all of the birds frequenting the bird feeders on my mom's back porch, we ordered our own bird feeder.  We hung it just outside the back sliding door from the cherry tree and hopefully set it up in a way that the squirrels couldn't get in and raid it.  It only took an hour or two and several small finches showed up to get a feeding in at the new stop.  I am not sure how the recognize a new food source so fast, but it was great to see the feeding frenzy start.

The Summer Deck Project Begins

After years of neglect, or just lack of consistent maintenance, we decided to replace our back deck.  We got several bids from different companies that varied in price (mostly along skill lines) to do the work, but in the end our friend and neighbor (Taylor) who has the summers off as a teacher offered to do the work and we started moving forward.  We offered to add some labor to the mix and the first task was pulling up the old decking to see what the underlying structure looked like.  Who knew we had a concrete pad under the deck??

We slowly worked across the old deck pulling up boards and removing all of the nails that remained in the support beams.  This turned out to be fairly difficult between the rotting wood and the rusted-out screws holding it all together.  We also wanted to preserve the joists as much as possible because we wanted to reuse them for the new decking.  At least it was nice to be working outside to do a big project.