Walls are being framed up

I've been building walls on the garage cement apron and Fred has been helping me carry them over and set them in place.  Hope to get the last wall up before taking the trip to New Hampshire Friday to take the Subaru to Daniel.  Today was rainy so the back wall had to be built in the garage out of the rain.

Cement blocks have been added

And now thanks to Fred, we have cement blocks to build the walls on.

Timothy Photos

He's a little over a week old and we've decided to keep him so here are some photos of baby Timothy.  

Less than one day old

Happy parents

Happy siblings

Timothy in the hat Ella made for him

One week old

A foundation is laid in Muskegon

I had help from Fred and Dan Fitt to put in a cement pad for my shed.  This is what it looks like only a few hours old.

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Cutting a Tree Down

I fell my first tree! I'm officially a lumberjack. 

The Naughty Audi Rides Again

Here's hoping she's good for a cross-country return to Minneapolis.

A House in Minneapolis Gets a New Roof

Well, to be strictly accurate, many houses in Minneapolis have gotten new roofs this past summer. But if I were being completely honest, I don't care about the vast majority of those houses. I care most about one little house—mine.

Here are a couple photos of the new-roof-putting-on process (I believe that's what professional roof installer technicians call this kind of project).

Every good new-roof-putting-on project calls for the right materials.

Dad starts to remove the old roof.

And this is what it looks like after the old rubber roof has been removed.

We added these 2x2s to the roof deck to provide clearance so the new roof could be ventilated. This should clear up some of my problems with icicles and ice dams.

On top of the 2x2s we installed a new roof deck of OSB.

Daniel demonstrates the strength that made him an award-winning member of the Wheaton Thunder football team. He's holding on his back a 200+ lb. roll of rubber roofing. I'm honestly not sure how we would have gotten this onto the roof without him.

And here's the new rubber roof being glued down to the new roof deck.

Now for the other side. This plane of the roof is pitched so it'll get shingles (after we add the new roof deck). Note the new OSB sheeting toward the bottom of the roof. That was a repair I made a few years back when I discovered that several years of ice dams had almost completely rotted away the roof boards and rafters.

After the new deck was installed, we started putting on the new shingles.

This fun little project is the side porch, and was supposed to be a quick part of the roof project. Instead, the existing roof was so rotted away that we had to remove it completely and rebuild the roof. I'm pleased to say that it's probably the most solid part of my entire house.

As you can see, I had excellent, dedicated help. These two were tireless on the project.

Here I am, trying to look impressive and rooferly.

"Build a little fire," I told Daniel. "Make sure it doesn't get out of control," I told him. "Don't take your eyes off it." I'm not sure why, but something about Daniel and fire makes me a little uneasy...

Now, I know what you're all thinking at this point. "Why didn't I get a chance to work on Ben's roof?" And never fear, there's more than enough roof to go around. I'll be working on the front roof (the side that faces the street) and the back roof (over the kitchen) this fall. I'm sure I'll need to establish a lottery system to deal with the intense clamor of wannabe professional roof installer technicians showing up at my door to work on this new-roof-putting-on project.

Caption This!

Let's bring back the photo caption posts, and kick it off with this one. Add your caption in the comments and the winning entry (judged by a very stringent, independent governing body) will be added to the post.

Four campers thinking this thought: "I've made the fire almost every time so far, I'm sick of making the fire. But I'm not saying a word about it. I'm just going to sit here and wait for one of the other three to make that fire even if it takes all day."

Congratulations to Dad for the winning caption here. I think that captures the look of extreme laziness and resignation on all our faces.

Runners-up were Lisa and Anonymous! Where's Edmund when you need him most? 

Kids Carpool

Levi - "There's no more room!"

Muskegon History

Found this and thought it was pretty cool. It's a history of Muskegon with a lot of pictures from when mom and dad were little kids growing up here, and even before. Check it out.

I was in the newspaper!

I forgot to tell anyone about this, but they ran an article in the Wheaton Record (school newspaper) that they quoted me in. Check it out!

Here it is

Finally, a house

After a lot of sweat and uncertainty, we were finally able to close on our house late last week! 

Conveniently, I had to head down to Atlanta this week for work, but I've been closely supervising the packing from afar. Andy has come out to do some painting, and he and Amber already have a bedroom painted.

We already had the inaugural house problems. With all the rain lately, we had some water starting to seep into the basement. We're planning to dig a giant trench around the house to alleviate the drainage issues. I've bought a spade shovel and I'm just waiting for Dad to pass back through the area. He's got a lot of practice hand-digging giant holes, I believe.

Hopefully we'll be mostly moved in by late July and will be ready to have some visitors!

Mountain Climber Jr.

Levi gets a brief lesson in climbing walls and mountains. One of the things he likes to do is stand up and hold himself on the backyard fence, watching cars go by. I fashioned a harness for him out of my belt, and he told me that he's planning on scaling Mt. Everest next weekend.

A Sampling of Colorado

I traveled out to Colorado after the Chicago to New York cycling trip to attend my good friend Hunter's wedding. He and his wife Lindsay had a beautiful ceremony and reception up on Keystone Mountain that we had to take three different gondolas up the mountain to get to, where the ceremony was around 10 or 11 thousand feet. These pictures are from the day of the wedding, during which Sam and I had some time to do some exploring, when Sam and I traveled up an old road to a mining town that was abandoned and did some hiking and sightseeing. 

A note about the moose: I didn't know they were dangerous and tried walking up to it. Luckily it was really docile, but even then they can charge without any warning. I got within probably 10-15 feet and it looked up at me and started walking toward me slowly, while I instinctively raised my hands making myself bigger and backed away. The moose stopped walking after that and turned away. But now I know...don't get close to mooses. 

The end of the road map

Added the last leg of the journey to the kitchen wall map

WE MADE IT

Day Twelve, Day's End

Day Twelve, Day's End: a great one. We made it 20 miles through some of the most beautiful hills I've ever seen through northern New Jersey to @princekahleeb's neck of the woods. Huge thank you to @_christianmingles family for so warmly welcoming us and taking us in last night, it was truly wonderful. Looking forward to some really fun times with the Demoss family, seems like were already fitting in just fine with GaGa ball, hanging out, and having a blast old school style. Tomorrow or Monday Reece and I will ride the last 40 miles into the great city that never slept herself, New York. Total mileage as of today: 800 miles.

Day 12

It's been an incredible and eventful past couple of days. A good friend from Wheaton of mine once said "you don't walk into heaven, you're carried in on a stretcher". That sort of sums up how yesterday's riding felt. We started outside the town of Catskill, NY and continued on little mountain roads through small towns that wound their ways through the foothills of gigantic mountain ranges. There were many, many hills to climb, which is good at this point in the trip because we're the strongest and best in shape we've been thus far, but it was still pretty tough. With a steady headwind and well over 100 miles to cover for the day, we rode long and hard for over seven hours to finally reach the town of Sparta, where my housemate from last year at Wheaton-Christian-lives. My phone with the GPS directions died as we rolled into town, so we called Christian from Reece's phone and he offered to come the four miles to pick us up because we were both pretty dead. Lucky we are that he did...little did we know all the rolling hills we had climbed would completely pale in comparison to this last four miles to his house, which was all uphill and would've been extremely difficult to manage traversing. Here's a picture of the elevation to give an idea, and keep in mind everything before the very end of the map was already really hard riding even though it looks almost negligible:

So we were very blessed to get a ride back with him and his dad the last four miles to his house. They have a beautiful home in one of the highest points around New Jersey, and we ate like kings as they made an awesome steak dinner for us. So that was last night. We're resting up today and then at some point riding 15-20 more miles to our other friend Caleb's house that we were originally going to stay with in NJ, but wasn't ready to have us until Saturday night. 

Here are some pictures from the last couple days-the riding yesterday through New York and New Jersey was some of the most beautiful landscape and countryside I've ever seen:

So yeah, that's been the last couple of days. Riding out of Buffalo, I met a Vietnam vet that was drafted in '69 who fixed my broken spoke. We've met so many interesting people like that, it's really fascinating. I think on these kind of journeys that's a large part of the experience, and it's certainly been that for us. 

Day 10

Good day. Took the train from Rochester to Albany to avoid mountains, which are apparently huge in New York. Made about 30 miles after the train ride and are camping out for the night. Will ride 105 miles to our buddies house in New Jersey. No picture for today, but the country is beautiful here!

Progress shown after the cheating train ride

The dotted line shows the cheating train ride.  I'll let others make the judgement call on this, I will not judge.