What's going on?

As you may have seen from our holiday card we are in the midst of a reconstruction effort. The reason for the card design is that if we have no time and inspiration for an attractive, sentimental card we might as well produce the most annoying photo that captures some of our daily realities.

So that's us, dressed in jeans and gum boots standing inside a hole next to our house. Soon that whole will be filled with a concrete retaining wall and slab, expertly engineered to withstand 8.0 earthquake directly underneath. In which case the house will be a pile of rubble but the wall will stand as a testament to our desire to do any construction "the right way". As our engineer puts it: When in doubt, build it stout.

The small drawback is that both Nicole and I are great at swinging the sledge hammer, breaking slab and digging holes. Unfortunately we are less talented in filling those holes and constructing something new. So our backyard is covered with not so neat piles of rubble, soil and old lumber. But we will change that and slowly and steadily make positive improvements starting with the concrete wall mentioned above.

So stay tuned, some before and after pictures should start appearing soon.