As long as the snow is only on the ground, and not falling on our tender ear-lobes, we continue to work on the house.

Some recent beautiful days have allowed us to get the metal roofing onto the lower roof. This roof section, covered in "Berry" Pro-Panel, is now officially the first totally finished surface on the exterior of the house.

In this picture you can also see the beginnings of the polyurethane foam spray on the quonset. Eventually, when Christina can successfully convince the very lazy spray-foam contractor to come out to our place again, the whole quonset will be covered in that ugly yellow mush.

It'll keep us warm and dry, though.


Look, how pretty!!

(The house doesn't look half-bad, either....)

Oh boy, lots has happened since way back when I posted last.

First, I went to San Francisco to pick up all the robots on their return trip from Zagreb. We were supposed to do a show in SF, but that fell apart, and, unsurprisingly, I don't have any good pictures from that debacle!

When I picked up my little bro Cles in Albuquerque on my return trip, the winter holiday season began! My mom came a few days later. (I think the theme of this post might be... Winter)

Cles and I went snowboarding.... (I Photoshopped us together from two separate pix for this one...)

We also went shooting.... (I'm pretty sure my brother isn't a homicidal maniac, but looking at this picture I'm no longer certain)

Christina and I didn't let the cold weather stop us from working on the house. We installed the large south-facing windows. Even though he's not in the picture, Cles also helped. This was a big step, because it meant that the outer shell of the house is now done.... we are enclosed! No more wind blowing through the house!

We also had the septic system installed. That big concrete bunker being lowered into the ground is our own private sewer!

Here we are standing on the septic tank. Thank god we'll never have to see it again! And hopefully we won't smell it either! You can see that there's not too much snow on the ground.... yet.

We installed the 4 x 6 joists which will form the ceiling of my room and the floor of our bedroom above.

And then it snowed. A lot. If Christina had stood still for much longer I would have lost her under the snow.

After my brother and my mom left Christina and I had a whole second wave of visitors... friends of both of us from all over the country. To entertain them, and ourselves, we played with robots in the snow. That was fun.

One night six of us rented snowshoes and snowshoed up to Williams Lake in the nearby mountains in the middle of the night. It was a full moon and the combination of the moon and the snow on the ground was amazing. It was like daytime. This photo was taken with my camera-phone. We were at about 9500 feet above sea-level, and we were really cold, in case you can't tell.

A nice pic to end the post. That's the Rio Grande gorge behind us, and the bridge.

Happy winter!