Dad’s Weekly Report

Hey it is kind of lonesome and quiet around here. Brent went to Pullman to visit Allen and looked for a job there. He found one that he like and got an interview. I think that he did pretty good and should hear within a week or so. So he left to go live there a while. I don’t think that it will be hard to get used to living, just the two of us. Here are some things that happened in the last couple of weeks.

Allen came home for Spring break. It was a great week for Ruth came over several times and so we had three of our kids home. We had some nice times together. It was the Easter family gathering a week early. We had a nice Easter. Sandy got me a big bag of candy and I took it to work and am gradually eating it. I had an awfully hard time finding my Easter basket. Sandy took all the sugar out of the sugar can and put it in there. I should have guessed because I while I was looking I stuck my hand into a bowl in the cupboard and felt sugar. But no, I had to have her help me. I, on the other hand, was nice to her and hid her basket in the front room tree where it was easy to see. At the end of sacrament meeting I didn’t have hardly any voice left. Besides the opening and closing and sacrament songs we had two congregational hymns and two choir numbers and one men’s chorus. It was a great meeting despite all of my singing. We had the Graham’s come over after church to dinner.

We have had a lot of action on our house selling. However no success yet. We had one offer come in but it was $30,000 .lower than our asking price. One family came in and really liked it but the wife started to get ill downstairs near our food storage closet. I know that there is a section of wall board that has some mold there and that we sometimes get water there. So I have been working to remedy it. First I took a knife and cut out the molding wall board and cleaned it. There is a cement, outside wall behind the sheet rock. I noticed some water on the floor there after we had a pretty strong rain. Right above there is our front porch and a rain gutter downspout goes into a pipe down through the porch. So my theory is that the drain pipe is broken under the porch and the water is running down on the outside foundation wall and puddling up around the foundation. So yesterday I finished re-routing the drain spout. Now I have it coming down off the house and going into a splash block. This downspout drains just a small area of the roof so I don’t’ think that there will be much water. Now I need to wait for a big down pour to test my theory. Or I just might put a hose in the old hole and see if water comes in. I finished the project yesterday in a hail and rain storm and so was not able to paint the down spout. That will be my project this week.

There were not too many visitors at the fort yesterday because of the unsettled weather. The poll-axe that I was working on split and so went into the scrap bin and I spent most of the day making some light chain. This chain is supposed to be for my beaver trap, however even though it is light it is probably to heavy for the trap. I really should make it out of even thinner stock. I tried using very thin rod but is really hard to weld. It gets hot too fast in the forge and then cools too fast when you pull it out. I will have to ask for some instruction. One fun thing that we did a couple of weeks ago. A fellow came out from Virginia to study Fort Vancouver’s collection of old axes and pieces and parts of axes. He spent 2 days studying the pieces then on Saturday and Sunday went into the shop and tried to forge them using what he had learned. He let us also come in and help. We got to make parts of the axes while I was there on Saturday morning. I got to forge some of the steel pieces that go into the front of the axe to form the edge. I used some blister steel that he had brought. Blister steel is an old type of steel that is made by taking bars of wrought iron and soaking it in charcoal in a seal box at high temperatures for several days. The carbon in the charcoal will defuse into the iron. I also got to watch him make a poleax. If you make an axe in the old way you discover things that you can’t tell by just studying them.

Some of you have seen the picture books that we have made recently at my work. In the same room they have some slide/negative scanners hooked up the computers. Over the last few weeks I took all my old mission slides and scanned them. So now I have the pictures on a disk and I made a picture book of them. So I will include two of the pictures from my mission. One is a picture showing me and my companion, Elder Mathews visiting Kamakura with an investigator family. The other is a sacred bridge at Nikko which is a place that has a very famous temple in Japan. It was fun to look at the old pictures again and remember the great time that I had on my mission. I know that it was also hard, but I don’t remember the hard times as much, probably because I didn’t take pictures of them.

Well that is all for this week. I hope that all is well for you.