In the last post I said I'd put up a pic of a very cool thing I got at the scrapyard in Albuquerque. Well, for all you gearhead dorks like me, here it is! It's an old piece of earth-moving equipment called a "clamshell." One of the guys at the scrapyard said he thought it probably came from one of the mines here in New Mexico. Maybe it's radioactive!


AAAAAAGHH!!!! TARANTULA!!!! Actually, they're really pretty harmless. And, starting a few weeks before Halloween every year, they come out in the thousands and make a mass pilgrimage to the Rio Grande to mate. If you're into bizarre and violent means for reproduction, google: "tarantula wasp."



With the Rastra walls in place and filled with concrete, it was time to put up the I-Beam. The forklift was surprisingly handy for this task! Eventually there will be quite a lot of weight on this beam, so the plans called for a support pillar somewhere near the middle of the beam's span. We found, again at Coronado, a really beautiful and very old steel beam for the job. Here, I'm welding it into place. In these pics you can tell it's starting to get cold....



The day after we put up the I-Beam we got.... the first snow of the year!!! It was beautiful! And the house looked pretty good in the early morning light, too.


This pic was taken at the end of a very long day. Christina and I and a crew of four other guys worked all day long to put up the first four ribs of the quonset hut. The learning curve was steep. But finally it's starting to seem like we might really have a home sometime soon.... an indoor kitchen and a shower sound pretty good right around now.