Hiking to Zilker Park through the green belt Barton Creek is still flowing well Seconds after the lighting of the tree Our friend Karl was playing trumpet in the Orchestra Jean basks in the glow of the Christmas tree

If you can't image molten lava cake, it looks like this While it was overcast and kind of gloomy most of the weekend it didn't rain which awesome. I was able to work on the the shed most of Friday and Sunday afternoon. The blocks I made last week looked really good. No slumping! My parents easily removed the forms a few days after I put them and they looked like perfectly formed 12"X12"X5.5" brownies. Success! Hurrah! It's great news but leaving the forms on overnight is slightly inconvenient in that it severely limits the number of blocks I can do in a day. On the bright side, the inconvenience should be short-lived. For the first four courses (~approximately 2ft) I'm stabilizing the soil with lime. To mix the lime evenly in the soil I have to get it fairly wet. To get an idea of the consistency, close your eyes and imagine a Chili's molten lava cake. The soil is gelatinous and flows slowly out of a large brownie capped with ice cream. Rather th...

Karl and Michelle invited us to go hiking with them at Enchanted Rock this weekend. Lately there's been a pattern of beautiful week turning into a stormy weekend. The weather forecaster's predicted the rains would hit late Thursday/early Friday morning. Rain would start again early Saturday morning and clear out midday. Apart from a light sprinkle it didn't rain Friday so we figured Saturday would probably be okay. So if the the meteorologist is wrong half the time I guess that means he/she is right half the time. This is good British hiking weather so we continued on. Arriving at Enchanted Rock we found that is was still raining and most of the trails closed. So, we drove back into Fredericksburg and went to the National Museum of the Pacific War. The museum is an out growth of the Nimitz Museum. Admiral Chester Nimitz was commander-in-chief of the United State Pacific Fleet during World War II and a local Fredericksburg boy before that.  The museum was r...

The Buda area got somewhere in the vicinity of 20 inches of rain in the past two weeks. Buda gets on average 37 inches of rain per a year. So, I was anxious/excited to see what kind of damage the flood had done to our little construction project. My Mom had looked under the tarp earlier in the week and reported that one of the blocks had melted. Yikes! The melted block was the one my Dad added the day after we did most of the rest of first course. It appears like there wasn't quite enough lime in the mix. A closer look. The block on the right is the first one we did. Apart from a bit of weathering on top it is holding up pretty well. I noticed that the blocks we did later on the first course didn't hold up as well as the first ones we made. With the later ones I was trying to get a drier mixture so we could remove the forms faster. Perhaps the lime didn't mix in as evenly with the drier mixture. I think the solution will be to stay with a wetter mix, make more for...