And now watch as our home magically springs from the soil...well, almost!

This is the day we have been waiting for. The foundation for our new house was poured today! This post will contain mainly media.

Here is the concrete pumping machine. It is very impressive.

The concrete pours into a hopper on the back of the pumper.

The forms await filling.

The pumper operator has a wireless remote control that hangs around his neck. With it he precisely moves the boom to the proper location for pouring the concrete.

Now the fun begins!

Alberto begins the pour of the footings.





Pouring the center footing.





Duane vibrates the concrete to compact it.





Screeding off the top of the wall to make it flat and level. The mud sill will be bolted on here, and the walls will be built on top of them.

This high tech piece of construction equipment serves the vital function of preventing concrete from going down the electrical conduit, through which the cables from the street will bring electricity to the house.

Tomorrow, the forms will be stripped off and the placement of the joists will commence. Also, Jill will return from Denver, so she can see the progress.

At long last, progress

OK. We're making progress now. I stopped by the lot today with Patrick. We found that the forms for the foundation were almost complete.


And here is the view of Mt. Hood from our front porch!

The big day has arrived

Today we moved the last of our possessions out of the house in Clackamas. Yesterday, we moved ourselves to Independence, OR in the motor home, but we couldn't quite fit all the rest and residue of our stuff into the two cars. So, we made a trip to Clackamas (59.4 miles!) and retrieved the remainder.

We returned to Independence/Monmouth where we deposited said items with others at Pat and Katie's house. They are very kind and gracious to have lent us garage space until our new home is complete.

After unloading, we decided to head for Dallas and see the progress on the new house. Much to our delight, the contractor and a helper were on site and have formed the foundation footings. Actual progress has been made; something that hasn't happened for three weeks while the monsoons have continued unabated.

We also stopped at our mailbox and collected our first delivery of mail at the new address. This in itself was an achievement. Yesterday, I received a phone call from the post office. The woman said that they would be unable to deliver our mail, because we haven't a house. (Now I know how TRULY homeless people feel.) I explained that we had gone to the post office with the intent of renting a post office box, but the man behind the desk said that he would instead give us a key to the community style mailbox which will be ours when the house is built. He said we could just have our mail delivered there. The woman said she would see about that!

Today, she called back, and in a rather apologetic tone (Imagine! A government worker with an apologetic tone!), she said that she had checked; we can actually receive mail in this manner. That was wonderful news, because it saves us another address change. So, many thanks to Ben Franklin and his marvelous mystery machine, the United States Postal Service.

Once we retrieved the mail, it dawned on us that we all were hungry. Patrick suggested that we try a restaurant that none of us had tried before. We settled on "Bert's Family Restaurant." Now Bert's has a beautifully landscaped lot and a nice looking building. On the inside, the decor is, shall we say, less than opulent. The food, however, was quite well cooked and very tasty. Friday is "all you can eat fish and chips" day, so of course, that's what Patrick and I ordered. We will return; oh, yes! We will return.

After dinner, we returned to Pat and Katie's home for some gaming. We played a board game called "Ra." It is quite simple, but very challenging. Katie made some shrewd maneuvers and came away the winner. We all agreed that periodic and regular meetings for gaming will be in our future.

Once the game was over, Jill and I returned to our little home at Ash Creek RV Park, where we are quite comfy. I will post some pix in the near future.

Our peas in two P.O.D.S.

This post is long overdue. It has been a busy time as we prepare to move from our home of 8 years into our 31' motor home, Sadie, as interim housing while our new home in Dallas is built.

The process has been less than onerous, and we are actually enjoying it and looking forward to the adventure. On Thursday, P.O.D.S. (Personal On Demand Storage) delivered the first of two 16' boxes, into which we moved about half of our household goods. Today, the storage company came and carted it away.

Alas, they left another POD for us to fill. This time we had help from the young man whom I am mentoring and a couple of his friends. We are currently about 97% packed up, with two whole days left to complete all our tasks. Among those are cleaning up the house, a final mowing of the lawn, loading the one bed that remains for our snoozing needs and the last two chairs.

Signing for the final closing of the sale of our home is scheduled for Thursday. We have three dinner dates in the next four days. We will be living aboard Sadie beginning on Tuesday.

If you have never seen the P.O.D.S. storage system in action, click the photo for a slide show of the delivery of our first P.O.D.S. unit. The removal, of course is the same process in reverse order.

The young man in the photo is Keith, our go-to guy at P.O.D.S. Today, we were scheduled to have our first unit removed and the second one delivered. When we received an automated confirmation call, we were disappointed to learn that, instead of 9:00 AM, when our helpers were scheduled to arrive, the unit wouldn't arrive until 2:00 PM. (Bugle playing "Charge") Keith to the rescue!!

At 11:00 AM, Keith showed up and said that he had received a message that we wanted the unit earlier. He removed the first unit and returned in about 20 minutes with the second. In the meantime, I had called our helpers, and bless their hearts, they juggled their schedules to come and help. We have nothing but praise for Keith and his personal care. Well, that is not exactly true; we had a maple bar for him, too... And our loaders were a Godsend.

We are feeling quite like this whole caper will come off as planned. The only glitches in our plan so far have been 1) the weather has been atrocious, so the builder has been unable to make any progress (because the ground is too wet for a geo-tech survey), and 2) our buyer's buyers, who are eminently qualified for financing, have been told that the loan for which they qualified is under review. The reason is that, although they don't need for their home to sell in order to qualify, the banks are running scared in this economy, and they routinely double check loan papers for people who own one property and are buying a second. The result? We will get the proceeds of our sale one week later than originally planned. Domino effect, you know.

Our realtor is not worried, so we are not worried. Pogo, on the other hand, is worried.