Over the past couple of weeks I've received lots of parental and spousal support to push the wall past the halfway point. From now on there are more courses behind us than ahead. Yay! I left the walls uncovered during the week and the seventh course dried up quite nicely. My drier mix caused the corners to be a bit crumbly. The eight course is another dead man layer so I spent a while cutting up scrap wood for assembly We're going to start our bottle block window on course ten so my Dad got to work making some bottle blocks with the diamond wet saw. First cut was a success Those aren't all mine. I swear Dead men assembled I put a few bottle blocks in the eighth course to experiment. We'll have to figure out how to make them longer. Jean and the parents hard at work on the eight course The parentals having a date night With the eighth course complete the time has come to trim those limbs hanging over the work site

Friday morning I had to pick up our car from the shop. Jean offered to give me a ride but it was such a nice day I decided to cycle. Plans are in the works to build a pedestrian/bike bridge up above but until then... Fording Barton Creek It's been a couple of weeks since I last worked on the building. The forms slid off pretty easily. The straw seems to be holding the blocks together quite nicely. No cracking! The original T-block forms I made have evolved some. They all have full length legs now and I have some specialty forms. From left to right there are: 12X12 Corner form, 12X12 Standard Form, 18X18 Corner Form, 18X12 End cap form (for doors and windows). I also have as 12X12 End cap form. Seventh course complete. Just over three feet. These indentations will help meld this layer to the next. It's kind of like working with inverted legos. Buffy inspects the work.

Pandemic Legacy is a board game in which players take on the role of a team of disease fighting specialists attempting to contain and cure outbreaks of several contagions. Characters travel to cities around the world to fight infection and/or share information with other characters in an attempt to find a cure. Pandemic Legacy is based on the game Pandemic. In Pandemic players square off against four diseases. They rush around the the world trying to stop infections from spreading whilst researching cures. Outbreaks occur and the diseases spill over into nearby cities. After around an hour and a half the game ends and the players have either found the cures to all the diseases and won or they've run out of time and the diseases have spread out of control. Pandemic Legacy introduces an episodic narrative element to the mechanics of Pandemic as well a perpetuity to the game state. Legacy plays out over 12-24 game sessions/episodes (Each session represents a month of game time)

The weather wasn't too inclement New Year's Eve so Jean and I cycled to Auditorium Shores for some live music and fireworks. We caught the last act of the night, Grupo Fantasmo before the fireworks began New Year's Day I was back at it Sixth course and part of the seventh course completed