  |
|
Uncle Dave's Music Web Page - Buy the CD
Visit from Niomi and Ivey 4-10-05
Hot Tub & Deck Project Updated 6-23-05
Pumphouse Remodel Updated 3-7-07.
Wildwood News Archives Jul 2007- Jan
2008
|
8-26-08. Not much news to report at Wildwood. I'm still working on getting the cruise pictures ready for a DVD set for everyone who went on the trip. I took the time to make a set of Greg's pictures into another 3D image. The glacier turned out really well with this.
8-3-08. One more day of fun! Here's Jen rolling a giant ball down the hill.
Lauren, Jen and Matthew tried their hand at splitting logs.
Jen and Jess made a chocolate cake. They got to lick the frosting bowl clean.
Tammy brought up a fun craft, painting wood boxes.
And that worked nicely until they started painting themselves with "tattoos."
Matthew getting tattoos from 2 girls.
Showing them all off.
Lauren and Jen had a fun twist on a game of hide-and-seek. One person hides, the rest seek, and when a seeker finds the hider, they hide with them. The last seeker to find them is the next hider. It was played at night, outside, and we played 'till 11pm. Everyone had a blast with this game. We even had walkie-talkies to let the hider communicate their readiness to the seekers waiting inside the house. People seemed to follow me around though. Thought I had better finding skills or something? This reminded me a lot of my younger days when we got groups of people together to play Kick the Can.
8-2-08. We had a picnic today with most of the
family. Here's Matthew and Lauren helping with the setup.
The kids played around with zapping bugs (and themselves) and generally had a rambunctious time.
Here's Matthew and Lauren playing with fire and water, cleaning up after the BBQ.
Ivey making a face.
8-1-08. Today was Boardwalk day, and I have to say at the end of it that it was a pretty fun day for everyone. 4 of the 5 kids on the ride, Jen was the wild rider, her car is way up in the air while everyone else's was calm.
Waiting to get sick.
Not waiting any more...
Ah, a calm ride.
We went in the arcade for a bit. All the games give tickets which you can redeem for prizes. Jen played this game which drops a ball in a hole and gives X tickets based on which hole it goes in. She got the jackpot of 500 tickets...TWICE! I got a video the second time, the ball in dropping into the yellow jackpot hole.
And 500 tickets later... Jen was very generous with her tickets, got Jessica a large stuffed elephant to be a buddy with her stuffed cow, gave Ivey a bunch of leftover tickets. Then she had the brilliant idea of redeeming some leftover tickets we weren't going to use into tokens, and got to play some more games for everybody. She got some more huge ticket wins as well, probably over 2000 in all. Way to go Jen!
7-31-08.Another relaxing day playing around with the kids. We were waiting for the arrival of Ivey and started off with some archery practice.
There were puzzles to do...
And later Ivey arrived. Yay! Playing more games...
7-30-08. It's here! The start of Camp Wildwood. Tammy brought 4 kids here on Tuesday, but I still had to work today, so I came to Wildwood after work and got to play with the kids for a bit. Here's a couple pics from a hike we took.
Here's Matthew and Lauren climbing the slide area and creating avalances.
7-26-08. This weekend I'm still getting images sorted out from the cruise. I've gotten images from Clif and Dave. Greg's 3000 pictures will be here shortly. I have a few shots like the ones below, a cheap 3D trick. Cross your eyes until the 2 black dots overlap, then the rest of the picture should be in focus and in 3D.
7-16-08. Back from the Alaska Cruise! It was a blast. Everyone had a great time. I've put the pictures on a separate page since there's so many. I took over 1000 pictures and videos. And other people took more than that. Here's the group at College Fjord near Whittier. Glaciers galore.
7-5-08. Not much to report on the past few weeks. Been taking it easy. I've been taking my new camera with me on my forest walks and found a few interesting things today. Here's a screech owl (identified by Sari & Peter) I saw 3 of these on a short walk out the back door, but could only find this one after I disturbed them and they flew away.
And here's another first, bones of a forest animal, found just after I saw the owl. I'm pretty sure it's a deer, but in all my forest walks over the years, I've never seen a whole skeleton like this, and so close to the house.
6-7-08. We got a few things done at the Pumphouse this weekend. Pa's been working on installing electrical outlets and lights, and I've been using some expanding foam to seal up cracks in the roofline and other places.
The rest of the weekend was relaxing. I finished another book while taking a break.
Ma and Pa were enjoying the weather as well. Nice day at Wildwood when there's no projects going on.
5-29-08. I saw 4 skunks in a group today. I had just bought a new camera so I got a video of them as well. In the video, the skunks came right up to me and sniffed my shoes. They were just curious but ran away after a few seconds. No I didn't get sprayed. I kept very still!
5-17-08. Pumphouse window projects are the continuing topic. This weekend we got the last window in. This will be the window with the kitchen sink underneath it. It replaces part of the door, so the door needs to be demolished and a hole cut to put the window in.
The last window turned out pretty well. Pa and I found replacement boards for the exterior wall to cover up the door area, probably 60 years old, but they're heart redwood and still in good condition. We even got the studs to be 48 inches apart so we have something to nail the sheetrock to.
Here's a few pictures from the outside.
The door we took out here was put in maybe 30 years ago? No one seems to remember, but it wasn't the greatest construction job. Pa is taking off a 3 inch section of boards hidden behind the doorframe that was patched on to the existing panels.
I bought some patch material so we can cover up any gaps in the wood (you can see I got a start here), so it should look pretty seamless when it's all primed and painted. I've also been sealing up the windows and walls both outside and inside to keep the critters out.
5-11-08. More pictures of the Pumphouse. Here we're starting demo of the second window. It's single paned and in the wrong location, so out it goes. We cut a new hole for the new window closer to the corner of the room.
And here it is finished, with the outside panels replaced. Another afternoon down.
5-10-08. Another project at Wildwood we've been neglecting is Niomi's Pumphouse. It's been quite a few years since we started on it and it's been hard to get back into it, but I found a half-off deal with windows at Home Depot, and snatched them up. Now it's time to start putting them in. I had some 2x4 and 2x6 boards brought up a while ago for this project, and this weekend we got the first and easiest window installed. (The one with the panes.) It took most of an afternoon, and I got to use my favorite tool, the sawzall.
5-3-08. We got the stump out! It took most of the day working on it, but we did it. Here it is on it's last roots...
And here it is defeated!
4-28-08. Several project went on this week. One thing that I've been doing the past 6 weeks or so has been stopping at Home Depot every Friday to pick up 6 bricks (at 50 lbs each.) Pa has been wanting to replace some wood steps with brick. Finally all the bricks have been assembled.
And during the past week, Pa took out the wood steps and produced this! There was a bit of room on each side of the steps, so Pa decided he wanted some nice red bricks to finish it off. I used my tile cutter to cut some of the bricks in half. If you look real close you may be able to spot the large bricks that I accidentally got in a different color.
And the finished steps...
And here's an update of the stump project. I couldn't do to much because I had too much pain in my hands from blisters. I was using a sawzall to try and get the roots cut, but the blade kept getting stuck. The wood was so hard and would compress back against the blade, which made the sawzall go back and forth in my hands. Sometimes it shook my whole body. Eventually we used a chainsaw, but even that was hard going.
4-21-08. Now that the wood from the Pine tree is split up, we can relax! Well, no. There's always a project or two at Wildwood. Ma was cleaning up around the stump and I asked her if she wanted it taken out, to which she quickly said yes, that would be great. So begins several long weekends digging, getting blisters, and being dirty. Here's the progress after weekend 1. 4-12-08. This is the second weekend of splitting wood from the tree. The first weekend Pa and I got 4 pickup truck loads of wood split and stacked. This weekend we finished up with 3 truckloads. I had to raise the splitter up just a bit because it was killing my back to bend over the wood, holding it up as it was being split.
Here's one pic of the woodpile we've been working on the past few years. This is only part of the new stuff, lying on the remains of our ping-pong table.
And here's the other half of the stuff we just cut.
And this pic shows the 3 rows of wood hiding behind what you see in the picture above.
And just so you get the whole picture of the woodpile...
3-29-08. Matthew and Jessica are visiting this weekend. We have been having a lot of fun. Here's a picture of Jessica trying to hit me. Caught in the act! oww she's hitting me nowwwww! go away!!!
We tried to tell Matthew he's at a work camp. We gave him an axe and told him not to cut any of his limbs off.
Then we went on a hike to see the slide.
Spidermatt!
Jessica wanted in on the act.
And lastly a pic of Matthew moments before some action. (Not telling you what the action was, for fear his parents would never let him come to Wildwood again.)
3-26-08. Ma and Pa hired some people to cut down a tree by the front porch today. they took some great pictures and even video'd the event. This is the start.
The tree in the middle is the one being cut, the guy is about in the middle of the tree (follow his rope). This fir tree has 2 tops, which can get dangerous later, since it's so close to the house.
Lots of wood to split! They did a good job.
2-15-08. I got some arrows for Christmas from Dave, Suzy, Matthew and Jessica. So I had to make a target. I didn't want to buy one for $40 so I made this out of styrofoam glued together.
Here I am trying to shoot a bow after, what, at least 15 years. I did all right, good groupings from about 100 feet away.
1-27-08. With a saturated ground from the rains on Friday we had howling winds overnight Saturday. I kept wondering if the power would go out, but it didn't. We did have 1 tree that uprooted overnight. It got caught up in an oak tree before it fell over fully. What fun.
As for the slide, by 4:30 Sunday it looked like this. Yes it's drivable now.
Here's a shot looking the other way. Still work to be done, the backhoe guy will be at it tomorrow as well.
And here's a nice "fog through the trees" picture I took on the walk down to the slide.
1-26-08. Finally some newsworthy items. We've had quite a bit of rain yesterday. About 8PM there was a mudslide at "refrigerator corner" along our road going to Wildwood. About a dozen redwoods came down and piles of mud. No power went out, since power lines follows the water pipes and not this part of the road. I heard about it when a neighbor couldn't get home and called us at 11:30 last night trying to find out another way to get through. In the morning about 9:15 another neighbor from the other road called saying they had a guy with a backhoe that was going to come in and would our community be willing to split the costs? Since I didn't want to dig it out myself, I agreed it would be a good idea. Then Pa and I walked down to see the damage (about a quarter mile away from the house?) This first picture is on our side of the road. There's about 25 homes blocked because of this, but no homes damaged or even nearby.
Here's Pa (middle of pic) walking across the back side of the slide. The guy to the right is on the road. People had chainsaws going already. It was quite the community event. Chainsaws, shovels, backhoes. Sari and Peter were helping by attaching chains to some of the cut redwood logs so another neighbor could winch them out of the way using his truck.
A taller shot showing the back of the slide, and you can see part of the road. It came within 4 or 5 feet of the upper road's edge. That's going to need some work to shore up.
Here's a view from the other road at the top of the slide. A drainage ditch looks like it got clogged up and the water went over this edge instead of into a gulley.
Hard to see any details, but there is a road down there somewhere.
This pic is from later in the day, about 4:30. The neighbors had their backhoe guy there removing the debris. Actually there were 3 backhoes there. Only 1 could be used at a time.
Here's the other side where all the work was being done.
Still a long way to go, but about halfway through. May be able to get out by Monday. Darn! But another storm coming in tonight. Wait and see what happens next in this exciting new saga!
e-mail me: TJFredrick@aol.com |
