Paul Alton MBA

Dominion Day - Wascana Park

After church we attended the Canada Day / Dominion Day celebrations on the mighty Wascana in front of the SK Legislature building. There were booths promoting things and booths with food and mobile food vendors and music and more.

An interesting part of the "more" was the plywood boat building competition among a number of teams (seemed to be about twenty teams). Each team was given the same tools (hammer, handsaw, yard stick, tape measure and not much else) and materials (two or three sheets of plywood, an 8 foot 2x2, a roll of duct tape and a bag of nails)  and had a fixed time (90 minutes?) to construct a craft that one or two of them would paddle across the Wascana and back at the appointed time.

The rest of the month

I had given notice that July 7th would be my last day doing instrumentation work at the refinery this year, but reconsidered and asked if they would be open to me taking five weeks off from that date and then returning to work for another five weeks or so. They said yes. So on July 7th I finished work at noon and we started driving northward. I was driving the truck, pulling the fifth wheel trailer with Juanita following in the car. We came in from the RV park and got on the ring road. Before we reached our exit a truck came alongside and yelled that the trailer was "missing a hub cap". I pulled over and discovered that a bearing grease cap had disappeared.

So we drove to the weigh station on the highway to Saskatoon and I left Juanita and the rig there and drove back to Regina looking for a bearing cap. Princess Auto was sold out of the right style so I bought an "almost" and checked an RV dealer. They had nothing big enough but gave me the address of a couple of axle places that "might" be open Saturdays. I had left my cell phone in the truck and the RV dealer wasn't interested in letting me use their phone. This had already taken too much time and rather than drive around checking for parts I elected to return to the trailer. After some judicious pounding the cap went in.

When we stopped at Davidson the cap was no longer on the wheel. I took the car and went to the local dealer and bought a package of two bearing caps. The first one stayed on. I now have a spare for next time.

We made it to Meadow Lake and got set up by dark. The hitch was a challenge to uncouple with the truck's front wheel sunk into the low spot from the power line trench, but we used the trick from the bad old days before we had a levelling hitch and unclipped the deck and raised it with the trailer and drove out from under it and took it off by hand a couple of days later.

We are here for five weeks.

At this point we are two weeks in and the drywall mudding is almost done. Next week sometime we should be able to paint at least the kitchen and start installing wall cabinets. Also done is the grading and filling in of all the settled spots from the septic tank and outfall trenching. The root balls of all of last year's pushed down trees are cut off and moved into their permanent resting spot.

I'll get back to you on the rest of activities.

My partner at my "spring/summer" job says that he hates some things "with a passion". I'm a little more phlegmatic, but I am starting to get passionate about hating drywall finishing.

I have more experience than I care to remember, and found some helpful tips at Drywallschool.com and still started hating and dreading each day. But I ate the frog and soldiered on. Not without whining, of course.

Last year, in November, in the dark and the beginnings of a snow storm I cut a hole in the siding and the wall and installed a window on the ground floor. Not a major project since the walls are all framed for future windows and for doors for expansion. However, the weather was colder than I wanted it to be for working with vinyl siding so the proper trim around the window had to wait for this July.

The pictures show me removing what looks like a lot of siding. Believe me - that was the minimum that needed removing to do the job! It was a pleasant afternoon's work while waiting for mud to dry. It was nice to be outside for a change and not breathing any dust.