June 2004

Gary and Arthur Arrive

Gary and Arthur relocated to the Carriage House in Bozeman June 13, leaving Pauline and Kendal in the newly rented apartment in Mountain View. Pauline, her son, Kendal and her boyfriend will drive a truck out with the house contents at the end of June. They will return to the Bay Area in July; Pauline to resume her job and Kendal to take courses at Stanford. Kendal is off to the University of Washington in September and Pauline will relocate to Bozeman at the end of October. Arthur will spend the summer helping with the house construction and will attend Bozeman High School starting in fall.

Gary and Arthur's trip out was uneventful. There was some concern because the van was overloaded. We already had too much to carry in the van when Gary discovered 5 cases of wine he had forgotten about while packing up the house for the moving truck.

Listening for this trip was Tears of the Giraffe, which is a continuation of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Taken together, these give an entertaining insight into Botswanan culture.

Reading for the trip is Bear Attacks - Their Causes and Avoidance, since we think we have a black bear living on the property.

Since construction of the Main House has begun, we will start a Main House Progress page so everyone can see the record of how it develops.

On arrival, Neko jumped out of the car and was ecstatic to find herself once again (perhaps once and for ever) in Montana. After unpacking the wine, we went up to the Main House site to see what had been done. Little progress was made in the past two weeks because there has been a lot of (much needed) rain lately. The weather had just cleared and was quite pleasant. In this picture, Arthur stands looking into the imaginary door of his bedroom to be.

We found many moose tracks around, and later saw some deer grazing just across the creek.

On Monday, workmen arrived to continue setting up forms for the footings. Gary and Arthur headed off to town to pick up things needed to set up for life at the Carriage House. On the way back, we followed a slow moving concrete truck out of town, up the canyon and right into our driveway. At the Main House site we found three concrete trucks emptying their loads into a concrete pumper to fill in the footings. More trucks arrived later.

We expect better weather in the coming weeks, so the rate of progress should improve.