ince we're not on this rock very long (and I'll even mark off another trip around the sun in a few days), it's crucial to make interesting memories while you're here. This naturally leads to buying into the lies sold by various Do-It-Yourself TV shows, and seeking to make memories through the construction of a humble abode. I'm pretty sure none of those shows do episodes about the dumb homeowner who tries sandblasting inside their home... while they're living in it.

With the inability of our smaller air compressor to keep up with the blasting, we graduated to a bigger compressor and a bigger sand "pot" as mentioned a few days ago. Today I uploaded some photos of my new favorite pastime. Truth be told, we'll be done with the blasting soon. The hard part was the upstairs with the gabled end walls that rise some 21 feet at their peak. That required scaffolding and lots of strange signals to work together. In the end things get so difficult to see that you almost hope for equipment failure just to take a break outside and breath without a respirator.

In the next few days we'll try to finish the lower portion of the sanctuary and blow off the dust that's settled on the "clean" brick. Then we start the sweeping and vacuuming. Perhaps it will be the last and messiest cleanup for the rest of this project. Here's to hoping, because I'm tired of sleeping in paper coveralls and breathing equipment. See a few more dirty pictures here.

Some other photos found their way into this update. In church-related efforts we worked on removing the signposts and rock "garden" surrounding the posts in our front yard.
There was a deceptive amount of rock to move, and it took a lot of full wheel-barrow loads. I tried to convince Sally we needed a Bobcat, or a backhoe to "do it right," but she liked playing in the dirt manually. We ended the party by burning lots of the wooden detritus in the rotted core of the tree stump that's a large eyesore in our yard.

The rest of our yard hijinks are here.

Finally a few photos taken for some personal education and testing of a new piece of equipment - the Lensbaby 3G. This lens operates a bit like the older bellows-style cameras (popularly shown in westerns along with the smoky flash bulbs). It's very manual, and very much colors the type of photo you take. It adds an element of randomness and error to the focus, which nets you a lot of bad photos, but some very interesting effects when it works. I tested it on a lousy cat. There are a few more artsy (blurry) shots here.