Dad with Colin and his little brother Liam last summer
This Tuesday noon, the little Subaru Forester and I will aim west on US 50, headed for my brother’s house in Olympia, Washington, 1,444 miles away, to spend the weekend with the extended Tweit clan. I’m going to celebrate two birthdays: Colin Roland, one of my great-nephews, who will be 4 years old, and Bob Tweit, my dad, who turns 85.
Before I head off what will be seven days of driving (three and a half days each way) and two days of family (and probably no blogging), here’s a bit of an update on the projects that fill my days.
Bless the Birds: The rough draft totaled 135,000 words at the beginning of last week; now it’s just over 126,000. I have to cut out at least 35,000 more words. It’s a memoir in two voices (the other one being the smiling guy in the photo below), and that makes editing tricky since he’s not around anymore to comment. (Dammit.)
Richard Cabe, my late love, 1950-2011
I know the story will emerge from my careful work leaner and stronger, more compelling. Too much detail in a story is like food that’s too rich. It may taste good for a while, but it slows everything down until the story, like a digestive system, becomes tapada. (Tapada translates literally as “covered,” but in southern New Mexico, where I learned the word, it also means “stopped-up.”)
Be a Habitat Hero: What started out as a modest pilot project to inspire gardeners and birders in Colorado and Wyoming to landscape in a way that offers a habitat life-line for songbirds and other pollinators is quickly morphing into something bigger.
The project is a partnership between Audubon Rockies and the Terra Foundation, along with Colorado State University’s Plant Select program. High Country Gardens, the major online retailer of regionally adapted plants for the western and plains states, has just signed on. Check out the project’s blog and website, written by yours truly. Let me know what you think!
Creek House and Treehouse (the studio, named for its lofty vantage point) with house wrap on and siding going up.
Creek House: The siding is going up on the exterior of the house and the drywall is textured. While I’m away, the roof will go on and the interior of the house will be painted. The garage and second-story studio are several weeks behind the house, but the wiring and plumbing are in. Both spaces feel good already.
Terraphilia Complex: Tony and Maggie came over tonight and helped me cut and bend a long strip of copper to flash the cap on the half-wall between the shower/tub enclosure in the master bath. I worried about doing the cutting and shaping myself because the copper sheet I’m using is one Richard bought. I don’t want to mess up his materials.
The half-wall dividing the custom tub/shower enclosure from the rest of the master bath.
There are still more details to be worked out in this most complex part of the project I’ve tackled in finishing this house, but it’s inching along toward completion.
You can see that long piece of copper flashing where it catches the light in the photo to the right, just below the ash sill that tops the half-wall. In the right background is the door leading out to the master suite’s private patio.
And one last note: After weeks and weeks of hot and frustratingly dry weather, we had our first real summer rain tonight. We’ve had whiffs of rain since late June, but never enough to actually moisten more than the surface of the soil.
This evening, a thunderstorm rumbled its way down the valley, bringing a gentle rain that began falling at 5:42 pm and lasted almost three hours. It’s tough to read my rain gauge in the dark, but it looks like we may have gotten almost half an inch. That may not sound impressive, but here where our total precipitation so far this year just barely topped 3.5 inches (in over seven months), it’s huge. And welcome.
I’ll check back in next week after I return home, 11 days and 3,000 miles from now….