Wyoming! Or bust?

Big time bust.  This weekend probably was one of the weirdest in Wyoming-ing history for us.  Nothing seemed to go quite right from the start.

Late Friday night, the wife got an order on her Etsy site that started a flurry of emailing and order-prep. The actual tizzy-inducing-ness isn't important, except that it kept us up later than was good for a 4:30 departure the next morning. Needless to say, she didn't sleep well.

Saturday morning, we overslept - and checked email, one of which made the busy-ness and sleeplessness of the night before completely unnecessary.  Blarg!

The drive up was a construction-filled, slow speed, 5 hour long-haul. Ugh.

Good news tho, while Rawlins and the Great Divide Basin have been receiving record rainfall this year, the Domestead hasn't flooded at all.  Yay!  This made for easy access and no mudbogging in the tiny Fit.  That would NOT have ended well.

Saturday's project:  tear down the Qbert wall and rebuild it flush with the rest of the perimeter wall.  Something's been living behind the bricks and slowly excavating the dirt out from behind it, making it unstable. We've already lost a few smaller bricks out of it.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Turns out, there was a lot more dirt back there than we thought. Oh well, since the bricks were down, we changed the plan and decided to only remove some of the remaining dirt and create a bench seat as part of the wall.  

This is where things got weird. Up until now, the weather had been sort of cooperating. It was sunny and warm, though hella windy.  The sand was doing a mini-sandstorm impression for most of the morning.  All of a sudden, there was thunder and clouds and - oh crap - lightening too close for comfort. Then the rain started.  We mad-dashed for the car and spend 20 minutes or so reading and resting and re-hydrating.

Once the storm passed and the sun was back out (tho it was still super windy and now kind of damp and chilly), we started laying out the front part of the bench seat.  Aluminum cans and ferro-cement for the win! Here are the first couple of rows:

 

We were planning on bringing the can row up to seat height, then gently tamping down some of the dirt behind the cans.  After that, maybe add some more fill dirt and walk away until next year, letting Mother Nature pack and settle the fill for us.  We had a couple other projects on deck for the weekend that were waiting in the wings.

It didn't work out that way.

Instead, right after we took these photos, the rain started again.  We hid, again. The rain stopped. We got out of the car and got back to making cement and adding rows.  We were almost through the final row and the last bit of cement when the wind REALLY kicked up and ice-cold rain started pelting us.  We were so close to done that we sucked it up, got soaked and finished the row.  

Sitting in the car after stripping off our cement covered gloves we were Wet. Cold. Grouchy. Frustrated. As we sat there, we realized that the rain wasn't stopping this time and the ground was getting soggy. Not Good. Mudbogging in a tiny car without 4WD is not a good idea. Last year we'd almost gotten the van stuck.  We weren't about to risk the same thing in the little car, especially since, while we have AAA, we don't have cellphone service in the Basin.  We'd be walking 6 miles in the rain to get to the highway to get help.

With that thought, we booked it off the property and back into Rawlins. Where it was warm, sunny and not very windy, of course. We'd been at the Domestead for all of 5 hours.

That evening, we sat and planned what we'd tackle on Sunday since the Qbert wall was more or less taken care of. The wife wanted to add some coverage to her kickwall and the husband was tinkering with an idea to build a dome corral from some of the spare lumber lying around.

That night, we were woken up by an amazing thunder storm that raged all night, with lightening strikes in the hills all around the campground and winds that howled and rocked our little log cabin.
The next morning, we ventured out to find big puddles and a semi-deflated tire on the Fit.  After reviving the wife with coffee, the husband dealt with the tire. 

After a brief discussion involving speculation about mudbogging, progress and Mr. Murphy, we said "screw it" and went home. (The drive took 6 hours due to stupid drivers, invisible construction and 40+ gusts of wind.)

So, lots of driving, not much work done and lots more rain etc.  We may take another trip later in the year to drop stuff off, but probably not to get any work done until next May or so. : P

Ganbate!

A sense of accomplishment, a sunburn and .....

 ...another frozen cat.  We had an unexpected loss last week, the husband's cat went into the closet for a nap and didn't wake up. So, just a few weeks after relocating the wife's kittah from the freezer to Wyoming, we had another cat who took her place in the deep freeze until we could relocate her as well.  At least she didn't stay long: 7 day vs 8 months.

So, there we were at 4:30 in the morning on the 4th of July, flying up I-25 and, hoping to get to the property before the cat defrosted. Again.  

Neko (a.k.a. The Kitten): safely interred next to her sister.

Then, tired already and a bit sad, we got down to business. We had a list, but as worn out and kind of listless as we were before we even started, we despaired of finishing more than one project, let alone the 4 that we'd hoped to.

They were, optimistically:

1. Bury the kittah - non-negotiable - but done.
2. Finish skinning the dome.  This looked doable, but seemed at first blush like it was going to take both workdays and all of the resources that we'd brought for the whole weekend.
3. Add a couple of rows to the bathroom wall and use up all of the beer bottles that have been collecting since last fall.  Not super important, except in the "making order from chaos sort of way".  The bottles were just piled everywhere and the mess was bugging the wife.
4. Start what the wife's been calling the "kickwall" - basically a low wall that will encircle the entire one acre Domestead - using wine bottles and trash cans. Again, making the chaos useful and orderly.
5. Straighten up the courtyard again and finish cleaning up/tearing down the mega-hexacorral by moving all of the materials from that into the courtyard. This was more of the husband's bugaboo.

We didn't think we could do it all. Looking at the dome and the limited amount of water we had and the sheer amount of aggregate that needed to be soaked and ground up, we were pretty discouraged. But, we dug in and did what we do best - TEAMWORK.

We put every piece of aggregate to soak, then started grinding and prepping the crete.  Once the first batch of crete was ready, the wife climbed up into the top of the dome and started adding the bottles and skinning the last few rows.  The husband kept on grinding and prepping so that in about 5 hours, the dome was FINISHED! By then, his hands and forearms were cramping.  We were also super dehydrated, crabby, tired, starving and absolutely filthy.  But we were DONE (at least with the outside)!

Heading into town, we saw one of the local wild mustang herds. Unfortunately, they were blocking the road and showing no signs of moving. Honking the horn got their attention and a couple of them moved off the road. It did nothing for the yearling, who was staying close to his mother. His very pregnant and kind of pissed off mother. At the beep, she turned around, stamped her hooves and gave us a look that pretty much said: "I'm hot, tired, uncomfortable and pregnant. This is MY road. Buzz off." We sat there until she got sick of staring at us and wandered off.

KOA. Shower. Food. Sleep. Wake up!

Day two dawned hot and sunny. It was 80+ at 8am. Picking up 25 gallons of water and 250 pounds of cement, we headed back out to the Basin. The wife's focus was on her wall. The husband's was on disassembling the mega-hexacorral and moving the contents to the courtyard. Both of those went out the window when the wife and the car got swarmed by a - errr - swarm - of tiny little bug things. She was skeeved out and the husband had to spray her down with rubbing alcohol.

Bugs vanquished, it was back to work, except that focus has never been our strong point. We ended up working on the bathroom walls for about 1.5 hours before heading off to our original projects. Then we found a plastic dinosaur that we'd nicknamed "The Guardian".  We've been finding and losing him for 4 years, so we had to stop and stick him somewhere:

 He's on the wall by the chill dome. The bathroom is in the background.

The wife's wall turned out to be more of a project than anticipated - being resource intensive in both bottles, crete and time. She got about 7 feet of trash cans laid out, the main post settled and filled, and the first row of crete and bottles down in about an hour.  Whew!  Then it was time for more aggregate grinding and crete mixing.  The husband's hands were still trashed from the day before, so he toted dirt and organized. Five hours, 50 bottles and 4 loads of crete later, this is what we had from the back:

 

From the front:

In relation to the driveway and the chill dome:

The wife would have kept plugging along, except for two things: we ran out of water and the husband was STARVING. So we took a few photos and headed back to Rawlins for showers, food and sleep. What we found when we got there was the fact that both of us were sunburned - in spite of lots of reapplications of sunscreen.  The wife even burnt the backs of her ears bad enough for them to blister.  (Italian sunbaby that she is, this was
a first - and a shock. The redhead in the crowd wasn't impressed. Blisters don't count unless they're on your face, apparently ;)

And finally, a perspective photo from in front of the Domestead, facing North(-ish).

Next trip, maybe August, definitely Labor Day weekend.  Lots more to do, including extending the kickwall.  Husband is already planning and designing more domes.  This time we know how to be efficient and get any new structures up quickly.  We learn a little more each time we go up, so no matter what, it's worth it.

A rental truck, 300 pounds of cement, 60 gallons of water and a frozen cat

That pretty much sums up our first build of the year.

Since the end of the 2013 building season, we've been pretty busy in our regular lives.  We both now having jobs that we really like and Mr. Murphy putting in regular appearances at our house to mess with our vehicles and appliances. (New stove. New Fridge. New car. Yep. Crap comes in threes.)

He also stole the wife's cat right before her birthday. *@$#! Murphy. So..... we've had a frozen dead cat in our freezer since last winter.  (It was too cold to bring her up to Wyoming and bury her then, the ground was already frozen. The freezer was the logical place to stash her.)

Friday night, we rented a 10' box truck, loaded it up with the contents of the garage, crap room and spare bedroom. Bought a bunch of cement and added it to the truck. Saturday, we loaded the cat in her cooler and headed north.

She was a good kittah.           

The first order of business was to get the poor little kittah buried - before she defrosted.  We made her a cairn that ought to be critter-proof, and then we personalized it:

Then we stopped and looked around at how the domestead fared - or didn't - over the winter.  It had been about 8 months since our last visit.  In fact, both of us were sure that we were going to come back to vagrants living in the dome or the place vandelized or something. Actually, it wasn't bad.  It didn't look like anyone had been there recently. There was some weather damage - the pentacorral was half collapsed and the woodpile was pretty scattered - and there also was evidence that the whole main domestead area has been massively flooded again. So, basically - good news!

After the inspection, it was on to the hard work. Unloading the truck, mixing cement, organizing and finishing the outside shell of the dome.  We thought that with the supplies on had (cement, water, aggregate, bottles) that we could finish the top third of the dome.  We worked like mad and made a great dent - until we ran out of cement, water and prepped aggregate. So we had to stop working on the dome with just a little bit more to go.  

We finished the front completely. The back and side aren't quite as complete. You can see a little of the unfinished part at the top right of the dome here:

The wife took the last of the cement and added a few feet to the front wall that she started last year.  Mostly this was to hide the straight line that the original wall ended in since it didn't blend into the landscape at all. (There are very few straight lines in nature out there in the Basin.)

 

Then we tackled the mess that used to be the pentacorral. Three sides of the enclosure had blown down, the tarps were shredded, a bunch of glass bottles were smashed and there was plenty of evidence that critters of several sizes had been living in the wreckage. Jeff found most of a rabbit skeleton and it smelled like there was something else dead somewhere in the piles. We didn't look for it. Ewww. 

 These are the after pictures.  You don't want to see what it looked like before.

Then we organized the outside and inside of the courtyard - again. 

Here's the 200+ office trash cans that will eventually become the base of 

the perimeter wall for the rest of the domestead.

The view from Shay's cairn at the end of the long weekend of building. 

Some progress. Not a lot of order - yet.

 

Next time:

1. finish the dome!
2. dump run with a rental truck to clear out the unusable cardboard and broken glass.
3. add some rows to the bathroom walls.
4. start building the perimeter wall to the right of the dome?